Realtors Are the True Agents of Horror

When a house with a history of death and/or the supernatural is up for sale, someone has to try to sell it. Sure, ghosts and monsters are scary, but there is something very sinister about someone who helps families (usually with small children) or couples move onto a dangerous property. It’s a character trope in the horror genre that can be a scene-stealer, an instigator, or both: Realtors. They may have a genuine or artificial friendly demeanor, and they often ignore the place’s morbid history, either on purpose or out of disbelief. In the horror genre, this trope goes back to the silent era with Nosferatu (1922) and reaches the modern day, where Jennifer Coolidge is up to no good in The Watcher. When homes tend to be where the horror resides, realtors have a hand in the terror that soon follows.

A home can be found in many shapes or sizes, as long as it’s believed to be a haven. In the case of Night Swim (2023), the Wallers couldn’t care less about the new house they moved into, it’s the underground swimming pool they cherish. It brings everyone together, a father who uses it to ease symptoms from his degenerative illness and his family who join for carefree dips. Night Swim is also the most recent entry in horror where a realtor has a small but important role, played by a bubbly Nancy Lenehan, who talks too much until she gives off-handed comments. She means well as a quirky presence but hesitates to reveal a child’s drowning from the pool in the past, fearful it would ruin the Waller’s happiness. To rephrase the iconic line in Insidious — it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s the swimming pool, and had Lenehan’s character been open from the start, the Wallers would have never come into contact with this killer pool. (But then, we wouldn’t have gotten our film.) However, other portrayals of the realtor trope have darker intentions.

Night Swim

Feature length version of the 2014 short film about a woman swimming in her pool at night terrorized by an evil spirit.

Release Date

January 5, 2024

Director

Bryce McGuire

Runtime

118 minutes

Writers

Rod Blackhurst , Bryce McGuire

‘Nosferatu’ Has the Earliest Version of a Horror Movie Realtor

Rewinding way back, the silent horror classic, Nosferatu (1922) features the real estate boss, Herr Knock (Alexander Granach), who receives a letter from Count Orlok (Max Schreck) with occult symbols written inside. Reading it puts Knock under Orlok’s spell, turning him into the vampire’s minion. He sends his employee Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) to finalize a contract with Orlok’s plans to travel overseas to live in Knock and Hutter’s fictional German city of Wisborg. In doing so, Knock is instrumental in the “terrible epidemic” the opening prologue warns of. Alexander Granach already looks unhinged before he gets under Orlok’s control, with wild hair and a grin that could make The Joker proud.

Knock is overly exuberant on tasking Hutter with helping the grotesque vampire, telling the young man, “Young as you are, what matter if it costs you some pain…or even a little blood?” Knock then becomes fascinated with spiders and human blood, and to say the real estate deal is a pact made with the devil is not an understatement, as Orlok’s arrival brings disease-spreading rats and citizens preyed upon by the vampire. While there is not the usual haunted house this realtor character gets involved with, he is responsible for sending Hutter to a spooky, gothic castle. Decades later, in the 1970s, there would be another realtor, but this time, he got his hands dirty.

The Killings in Mario Bava’s ‘A Bay of Blood’ All Come Down to Inheritence

Before Jason Voorhees at Camp Crystal Lake, Mario Bava directed A Bay of Blood (1971), which was highly influential on the slasher genre. There are multiple killers, without masks but with plenty of weapons, beginning with Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda), the matriarch of her family, living in a bay-side mansion, where she is fatally attacked one night. The culprit is her husband, who is then killed by someone else from the family. The following deaths occur to seek control over the estate and Frank Ventura (Chris Avram) is the vicious real estate agent, an outsider, who orchestrates them before they get out of his control.

Frank and his lover manipulate the Countess’ husband, then her son, into literally cutting relatives from the will. Ventura is a schemer, who treats murder like any other slimy real estate ploy. “Inheriting isn’t always so easy,” a character says, and that’s a hard-hitting truth. While Ventura picks up an axe to try to get his plan back on track, he fails in the end. Despite the time gap between 1922 and 1971, Knock and Ventura both share how they set in motion a reign of terror that brings about their downfall, Knock was under a vampire’s spell while Ventura was gripped by greed. A horror classic in the 1980s then links Nosferatu’s supernatural threat and A Bay of Blood’s human greed to create a new monster in real estate.

‘Poltergeist’s Horror Comes From Real Estate Greed

11 years after Mario Bava’s film, Poltergeist (1982) settled viewers into the massive cookie-cutter neighborhood of Cuestsa Verde. Down-to-earth Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) is a family man and a successful real estate agent for Cuesta Verde, unaware of what is lying under everyone’s feet. Before the haunting begins, a fade-in between scenes transitions the Freeling house to one of the homes up for sale that Steve brings clients to, making it clear how every home is the same. “You know what they say, the grass grows greener on every side,” he tells them with a wink. He’s easygoing, plus clients can take his good word as he lives in the community. But the Cuesta Verde homes don’t just share a layout, they share a sin thanks to Steve’s greedy boss, Lewis Teague (James Karen).

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In the early development of Cuesta Verde, Teague built over a cemetery, moving the bodies to another area. “It’s not ancient tribal burial ground. It’s just…people,” Teague says to Steve with a shrug. This real estate boss may be different from Herr Knock and Frank Ventura, but there is still blood on Teague’s hands. He’s a scumbag who figured out how to put a price tag on a graveyard, and who is lucky he didn’t get sucked into the ghostly realm; instead, he is left shocked at Steve’s rage (“You only moved the headstones!”) and the evidence of his scheme with coffins popping out of the ground. Jumping ahead to 2011, there is a blend of these realtor personalities with a new spin when it came time for American Horror Story.

‘American Horror Story’ Tries to Sell Us the Murder House

A tour bus parks in front of a beautiful mansion, declaring, “One of the most famous houses of horrors in the City of Angels, better known as the Murder House!” The ghosts behind the elegant walls and windows are from different eras, but share their confinement to the grounds. Marcy (Christine Estabrook) may not be a trapped spirit, but she is just as stuck with the house when none of the homeowners she sells it to can stay alive. She is a desperate, miserable realtor, who sells the Harmon family the Murder House, disclosing the deaths from the past three years while keeping mum on the numerous others that have marked this place as a purgatory. Estabrook is very catty in the role, a trademark of characters played by veteran actresses on Ryan Murphy’s shows, and she becomes a recurring character in Season 1.

She charms up the house, with its “real Tiffany fixtures,” but unlike the kind-hearted Steve Freeling, she’s a bigot and racist. She also manipulates one family who is unsure about purchasing the haunted place, telling them, “I’d be happy to show you another house. But no matter where you go, you’ll be moving into somebody’s history, only this one can be had for $200,000 less than the last time I sold it.” Marcy turns into a legacy character who gets involved with the legal transfer of the Hotel Cortez, and ultimately dies and gets stuck there as a ghost. At least she finds contentment with a quiet room and erotica novels. For all their bad intentions, Marcy and these other real estate agents or realtors are less horrendous than the strange man who lures a couple into a sci-fi nightmare they cannot escape.

‘Vivarium’ Has an Alien for a Bad Realtor

In Vivarium (2019), couple Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) want to find a house for themselves, without hard plans for their future. They head inside a real estate agency, with the only worker being the creepy Martin (Jonathan Aris), whose grin is too big and frigid, and who awkwardly inserts himself so much that the couple feels they have to go to visit Yonder, a new housing community. Martin leaves the couple at number 9, and as hard as they try, Gemma and Tom cannot leave. They are stuck, with supplies left for them, including vacuum-packed food, and then a baby the couple is forced to take care of.

The baby is alien-like, appearing as a human but growing rapidly, eventually maturing into a young man who will become Martin in the form of brood parasitism, where this alien species forces humans to take care of their young for what seems to be a neverending cycle. The many versions of Martin will doom others to it with no end in sight. Any domestic aspirations Tom and Gemma might have had are put into turmoil, and they become hateful and fearful of the once quaint “dream” of buying a home and starting a family.

Jennifer Coolidge’s Karen Wants ‘The Watcher’ House for Herself

Vivarium can be frustrating because of the grim ending for Gemma and Tom, but The Watcher is a frustrating watch for a lack of answers but a surplus of creative liberties. Yet, it also has a campy dark turn by Jennifer Coolidge. She’s the real estate agent Karen Calhoun, seemingly a friend to Nora Brannock (Naomi Watts), who goes on to take advantage of the creepy letters sent to Nora’s family in their new gorgeous home. Everything is over-the-top with Karen, who loves pink fur and pink marble, and quickly demands Nora to sell her new home to escape the Watcher, repeating “sell, sell, sell” with a dramatic flair. Karen goes on to buy the house at a lower price when the Brannocks flee the Watcher. But Karen’s only night at the residence ends with her fearful escape. Aside from Nosferatu to The Watcher, this character trope doesn’t always have to involve real estate dealings, because just like how not every haunted place is a typical house, an off-branch to this trope includes a character who is still responsible for bringing people into danger.

‘The Shining’ and ‘His House’ Give Us Non-Realtor Agents of Horror

In The Shining (1980), there is an early, disconcerting interaction between Mr. Ullman (Barry Nelson) and Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson). Ullman’s unassuming tone doesn’t stray when talking about caretaker duties or the Grady murders; this quieter personality matches the slow dread of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation. Ullman explains the grisly family murders, not with concern to avoid another, but with a feeling of embarrassment. Authority figures are further careless in His House (2020), where the British government and caseworker Mark (Matt Smith) restrict a refugee couple to a rundown home. Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) have escaped war-ravaged South Sudan and are granted probational asylum by overseeing government officers, who look bored. The couple is assigned a “home” with peeling walls, a bug infestation, and racist neighbors before a recent trauma manifests into a malevolent spirit. The government doesn’t care, and that trickles down to the employees and the crappy, rotting place. Bol and Rial can’t leave their haunted house, facing deportation if they do.

This trope can easily be a plot device to get characters into a “bad place,” expediting the plot developments and the scares. In these horror entries, these characters can make for a vital, memorable performance where they either conceal a dark truth or are unaware of their role in putting others in harm’s way, be it real estate agents, or the instigating character that brings families or couples to a property they will surely regret. Ghosts, aliens, and other monsters don’t get new victims out of thin air — there’s an open house, a fancy job promotion, a winter caretaker position, or a government promise of a dream that turns into a nightmare.

His House is available to watch on Netflix

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