your airbnb is...where?

on gentrification, class anxiety, & "barbarian"

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**The following contains spoilers for the 2022 movie, “Barbarian.” If you plan to watch the film, you may want to come back to this one later.**

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“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.” - Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

Many years ago, a friend and I rented an Airbnb in Bywater, New Orleans. We planned to be there for four days. Neither of us had ever visited New Orleans, and we knew next to nothing about it. We were two white women from the Northeast unaware of where exactly we were staying.

When we arrived, the rental itself was cute: half a little shotgun house where the owners lived on the other side. The place was freshly renovated and painted, and just around the corner from one of those particularly eerie Louisiana cemeteries where all the bodies are buried above ground.

But what we did not know before we arrived was that Bywater was a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina (when we visited, it had not yet been a decade since the disaster hit the city).

The Airbnb was in a historically black neighborhood being bought up rapidly by white, young, wealthy people looking for fixer-uppers amongst the wreckage of the storm. I didn’t feel unsafe, per se, but I did feel the tension. It put us on edge in the sense that we knew we’d stumbled into a place undergoing painful change, change we had naively not realized we were contributing to when renting in the neighborhood.

I know this isn’t a unique experience. Airbnb has, for good reason, faced backlash in recent years. Reports of sketchy owners, dangerous conditions, and outlandish cleaning/related service fees have given rise to the hotel once again. Airbnb has also ruined real estate and rental markets, contributing to housing crises in New York City and elsewhere.

But Airbnb and the idea of the fun little house getaway also play into the trope of the haunted house. After all, slave quarters were once allowed on the site as “rentals.” Houses are, as Machado says above, always a setting for something. And, as horror movies and the news tells us all the time, when we ignore the history of a setting, it tends to eventually bite us in the ass.

So the fact that 2022 horror film, Barbarian, takes place in an Airbnb feels very much in keeping with the zeitgeist. A brief, spoiler-free summary: A woman named Tess visits Detroit for what the viewer learns is a job interview. She has rented an adorable little house on Airbnb for a few nights, but when Tess shows up on a dark and stormy night, she finds the place has been double-booked. A Skarsgård brother has also reserved the house. Tess decides, tentatively, to accept his invitation to share the space at least for the night. Despite her friendly and flirtatious exchange with her fellow guest, she has a somewhat off-putting first night. When she awakens the next day, she realizes that the neighborhood, once obscured by the darkness, is mostly abandoned and in ruins.

Undeterred, she aces her interview the next morning. The interview ends, however, with Tess’s future boss reacting in horror when she learns where in the city Tess is staying, telling her it isn’t safe for her to return. Tess ignores her warning and heads back to the Airbnb. But it turns out the house harbors many horrific secrets, ones neither guest had bargained for.

The property, it turns out, contains an underground maze of tunnels and rooms, including a dungeon, which Tess discovers. Viewers learn that the former owner was a serial rapist and murderer, who utilized the basement for his unthinkable crimes. His progeny, born from the women he imprisoned, roams the streets at night, searching for a baby of her own. The current owner of the house is a Detroit-born celebrity embroiled in a #MeToo scandal (played by perpetual doofus Justin Long) who invested in the property, which he now wants to sell to liquidate his assets.

If this all sounds kinda batshit, that is because it is. As we’ve discussed here before, horror always plays on our own social anxieties. And Barbarian is a complex story, one that seems to hinge entirely on class anxiety and gentrification, situated within the unease that comes when visiting somewhere new.

Like my friend and I when we headed down to New Orleans, we didn’t fully understand the full contours of the past and present at that time. These moments crystallized for me when we passed Katrina cross sculptures and iconography outside of newly fixed up houses in rapidly gentrified neighborhoods. We were somewhere where people had been left to die due to extreme negligence and incompetence on the part of our government. We were staying in a place that was abandoned after the storm. We were walking around as the city was trying to find a way forward, that still had empty houses sitting abandoned, husks of their former selves. But those ways forward oftentimes meant ignoring, or reframing, or just straight up forgetting those who used to live there. After all, the people of color who used to live there typically weren’t the ones pumping wealth back into these properties.