What better way to spend Christmas than curled up in a nice cozy house, maybe with a roaring fire, surrounded by your loved ones? Unless of course the house is inhabited by the undead. In that case, you find yourself smack bang in the middle of one of the most common horror movie tropes – the monster in the house narrative.

As illustrated in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, this premise is simple – the monster is there to threaten the characters, the house is there to contain the threat and give them no place to run. The house doesn’t even have to be a house, it could be a spaceship (Alien), or a secluded jungle (Predator).

But if we are strictly talking houses, one of my favourite games when watching the average American ‘monster in the house’ style horror movie is to play ‘spot the basement.’ In the opening scenes the house comes into focus, then there will be ten to twenty minutes of exposition, but all the while I’m hanging out for the first sign or mention of the basement. Basically, you know that once the presence of a basement is established that the people inhabiting the house in question are screwed. It’s the architectural equivalent of the teenagers in a slasher movie who indulge in pre-marital sex. It’s a no-no. You will die.

Hence, when I saw the first promos for The Conjuring, where the dad and kids are playing a game in the old house they just leased and dad stumbles against a wall panel, breaks through it exclaims, ‘Hey kids, it looks like we have a basement’, that was the moment when I thought, aha, well you’re doomed then, aren’t you! Cue creepy music.

Evil Dead, The Cabin in the Woods, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, The Gate, Alligator (okay, that one is down in the sewer, but still subterranean) and Annabelle are a few more which come to mind. There are even films with ‘basement’ in the title (The Basement, Don’t Look in the Basement). It works with attics too (Sinister), but basements are more fun because they’re subterranean, darker, creepier and just a little closer to Hell. There’s also this:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyBasement

So clearly it’s not just me.

What really interests me about this trope as an Australian horror writer is the absence of the basement in the average Australian house. To me the basement evokes old European or colonial American architecture. Australia is just too new to fall into the basement trap, and basements do not really figure in our architectural history.

Personally, I like to imagine this is really due the inherent Aussie bullshit detector. I picture a real estate agent showing an Australian couple around an old house. She takes them down into the basement and tries to sell it to them:

‘This is a great space for a teenager’s bedroom or even a games room. Remote enough from the rest of the house so as not to afford any disturbing loud noises.’

‘Uh huh. So what’s that weird spinning vortex over on the back wall, underneath the inverted cross that looks like it was daubed in blood?’

‘Oh that. That’s just the gateway to Hell, don’t worry about it.’

‘Woh woh woh! Back up a second. The gateway to what?’

Horror 101 – never go down to the basement.

Australians don’t do basements for good reason.