Is the house really haunted? Or do you just think it is?

So, to expand in a rather untimely manner on Dylan's post about "Fear, Itself", I'd like to talk a little bit about Gothic settings. I recently started thinking a lot more about the settings of the texts we've encountered this semester, and I think the haunted frat house in this episode is particularly interesting. It's a much more contained setting than most of the other texts we've read, to the extent that Giles has to cut a door into the house with a chainsaw. Similarly, The Castle of Otranto is mostly contained to the castle and the connected-by-secret-passageways church. This setting does not contain the story in quite as restrictive of a way as does the house in "Fear, Itself", as a scene also occurs in nearby caves, but nevertheless the focus on these Gothic structures (the house and the castle) seems significant. As The Castle of Otranto was one of the founding texts of the Gothic, the scary castle trope seems to stem from this. It's probable that the idea of a house of horrors that Joss Whedon turns on its head is directly descended from Walpole's castle.

Even more interesting than just having the location of the action (mostly) restricted to a particular building, in both texts the characters' Gothic horrors are directly connected to said buildings. In "Fear, Itself", Gachnar's symbol is drawn on the floor of the house, and his sphere of influence seems to be restricted to the house. In The Castle of Otranto, the curse on Manfred's lineage is due to him taking over the castle which was not rightly his, not to mention the fact that this curse manifests itself in large legs walking around and helmets falling from the sky. Despite this correlation between the structures and the horrors, the character's true problems come from within themselves. It's already been discussed at length how the Scoobies' fears manifest themselves in the house and create the horrors they encounter there, but likewise, as I commented on Dylan's post, Manfred causes one of his own worst horrors when he accidentally kills his daughter after mistaking her for Isabella. His insane fear that his lineage will not survive causes him to kill his own offspring.