ABSTRACT
In his pioneering history of horror cinema, Denis Gifford claimed that an element of fantasy is essential to the true horror films. The vampire, the werewolf, the walking dead and the man-made monster, these are the heroes of horror films, not the Lodgers and the Rippers and the Hooded Terrors. Maurice Elvey's remake of The Lodger in 1932 retains the narrational ambiguity as to the stranger's potential guilt, but achieves it more through direct address than by cinematographic suggestion. The Lodger was implicitly identified by Denis Gifford as the progenitor of the mundane human monster in horror cinema. A paradoxical corollary of privatization is the universality of strangerhood: the mode of 'being a stranger' is experienced to a varying degree by all and every member of contemporary society. Strangeness has become a reciprocal relationship the domestic environment is already and always destabilized and the 'evil houseguest in the spare room' merely exposes the anxieties that already exist.
