Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Why do you think there are so many haunted or scary houses in gothic literature? Which stories come to mind when you think of spooky houses or buildings where unnatural things happen? What is it about houses that scare us so badly?

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt relates to the theme Line Between Reality and Fiction. It may help to cite popular examples of gothic stories with haunted houses such as The Haunting of Hill House, Beetlejuice, or “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  You may want to discuss how the house in each example either affects or reflects a character’s Mental Health.

• “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe and a foundational gothic text with a sinister house at its center. The Shining alludes to Poe several times—Jack Torrance calls him “The Great American Hack”—and both the House of Usher and the mansion in “The Masque of the Red Death” are precursors of the Overlook Hotel.
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