Apartment Complex of Horrors

Just a regular day in an apartment building.

Rosemary: Awful things happen in every apartment house.
Hutch: This house happens to have a high incidence of unpleasant happenings.

—Rosemary's Baby

In the old days, ghosts were limited to a Haunted House. But, as urban living became more prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries, apartment buildings became more of a normalized place to live, and they too have been plagued by problems.

On one hand, they're associated with urban deprivation (especially in more modern examples). So there's usually a greater understanding that the characters are unable to leave for financial reasons, which might be part of a Kill the Poor situation. The characters often don't own their space, which means they are at the mercy of an at best Cranky Landlord, and more likely an actively evil or unpleasant one, if not of their neighbors. There are also more specific problems that do not apply to houses, but which apply across the board, such as having to share your physical space (and the house itself) with strangers; being more common and/or placed more centrally in unpleasant or dangerous cities; being at the mercy of a cranky or evil homeowner.

There are two specific forms of this trope:

1. The Mundane. Apartment buildings are awful places to live because the character lives close to strangers. Their neighbors range from the cranky and simply annoying to the violent and psychopathic. The infrastructure tends to be failing, leaving the inhabitants in darkness or with a Dripping Disturbance, and the landlord or lady is useless at best. The neighbor problem tends to mean that even apparently nice buildings can be nightmarish.

2. The Supernatural. The apartment building will usually have a boatload of mundane issues, but tops it all off by being a literal Hellgate or some other supernatural Wretched Hive. Apartment buildings in general tend to have shorter leases than houses, causing people to move in and out in the middle of the night. If poverty prohibits you from moving, you're stuck in a confined space with a form of supernatural horror. There's also a correlation between the idea of the apartment building as a place for many people and multiple families, and it also housing...other things.

It has a lot in common with the Hell Hotel, except you can never leave. Contrast Sleek High Rise Apartment.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Raccoon-San Mansion is a Kemono Friends doujin set in an anomalous apartment complex ("mansion" is closer in meaning to "condominium" in Japanese) that wouldn't look out of place in the SCP Foundation. Various unnamed characters die horrible deaths or suffer even worse fates, while some continuously explore the condo and manage to leave warnings to others, and some characters are completely oblivious to the horror.

Asian Animation

• The Haunted House: The Secret of the Ghost Ball: The series takes place in a new apartment that a family moves into an apartment, which turns out to be filled with ghosts, monsters, and...heroic goblins?

Comic Books

• The Boys: When Hughie moves to New York, he lives in a run-down tenement to save money, despite Billy Butcher's warning about the kind of horrors he'd face. His very first night there, Billy's warning comes to pass when someone's pool of blood-flecked semen oozes under his apartment door. Billy was actually paying the building superintendent to masturbate in front of Hughie's door to incentivize him into moving out.

Film — Animated

• Coraline: Coraline's family moves to a boring, run-down place known as The Pink Palace Apartments (actually a house), with neighbours that look creepy, but the true source of horrors is a small door in her apartment. During the day it has only a brick wall behind it, but in her dreams, it takes her to another world with idealized versions of her parents and neighbours that only want to make her happy. It is a trap: the other world is governed by the creature Coraline calls the Other Mother, who lures children into consenting her to replace their eyes with buttons, so she'll eat them. One of her victims was the twin sister of the now-old owner of the apartments.

Film — Live-Action

• 1BR: The movie is about a woman named Sarah moving into a seemingly perfect apartment building where all the tenants behave like a Close-Knit Community, always doing everything together and enjoying each other's company. Then we find out that they value that closeness to the point they won't let anyone leave, and effectively brainwash all new tenants into becoming new members.
• Beau Is Afraid: As part of the Crapsack World, Beau lives in a crappy apartment building where he's repeatedly accused of Loud of War, which causes his neighbor to bang on his wall and keep him awake. He then oversleeps, nearly misses his flight, and goes outside with his luggage, where he's met by a guy who screams at him that "you're fucked". It gets stolen from the hallway, he can't find his key, so he has to leave it open, and when he goes outside, a lot of homeless people flood his apartment and take it over. When he gets back in, it's been trashed.
• Candyman: Cabrini Green is a decrepit housing project where gangs run amok and terrify residents, as well as being the site of Candyman's torture and death and where he prefers to hole up in between killing people. In the sequel/requel Candyman (2021), although now much less decrepit, the all-white gentrified apartments of Cabrini Green still bear the hallmarks of Candyman's presence, and it eventually returns to ensnare Anthony thirty years later.
• La Comunidad: The main character is an opportunistic real estate agent who discovers a huge money prize left by a deceased man in the upper floor, but she also discovers that the neighbors were awaiting his death to get the money for themselves and quickly become Ax-Crazy towards her.
• Dark Water: The apartment building is haunted by the ghost of a girl who fell into the water tank and drowned due to Parental Neglect, and she ultimately imprisons both Dahlia and Yoshimi in the building for all time, forced to act as her mother. This is exaggerated in the 2005 remake, where the building supervisor knew about Natasha and he and her parents colluded in allowing her body to pollute the water supply. It's also given an extra coda in the original, where the apartment building stays the same a decade later.
• Delicatessen: After some vague apocalyptic event, Louison the clown finds a job as a handyman in a small apartment building where troubles range from the mundane (kids playing pranks), to the surreal (a tenant who makes numerous unsuccessful suicide attempts, a man living in a sealed off apartment with his pet frogs), to the potentially deadly (the tenants are mostly cannibals, and the butcher who owns the place plans to put Louison on the menu).
• Evil Dead Rise: The Deadite action moves into an apartment complex in Los Angeles rather than the cabin in the woods or other isolated settings. Seemingly all of the remaining inhabitants of the apartment building are gruesomely possessed and/or killed when the Book of the Dead unleashes its horrors, especially as the protagonists are already trapped inside by an earthquake that destroyed the staircase and rendered the elevator inoperable.
• Ghostbusters (1984): Dana Barrett and Louis Tully's apartment building is revealed to have been built by Gozer cultist Ivo Shandor, who designed the building specifically for rituals to bring about the end of the world. This causes the hauntings in Dana's apartment and turns out to be the central reason for all of the hauntings in the first film, with the climax taking place on the building's roof.
  Ray: (to Venkman) Your girlfriend lives in the corner penthouse of spook central.
• The Grudge: In The Grudge 2 (one of the segments) and The Grudge 3, the curse is carried over from a Japanese house to a Chicago apartment complex, and begins to affect its residents.
• Havenhurst: The titular apartment building is for people recovering from various addictions and problems to stay while they better their lives. The main rule is that anyone who falls back into their vice is evicted. Eviction turns out to be a Deadly Euphamism, as tenants who fall off the wagon are ejected from their rooms into the apartment's Creepy Basement to be tortured to death by Jed, one of the sons of Eleanore Mudgett, the landlady, who happens to be descended from a Serial Killer who used the apartment as a front to lure in his victims.
• No One Gets Out Alive: The apartment building Amber is staying in is run by two brothers named Red and Becker. During her stay there, she finds she's being visited by ghostly apparitions, and hearing things inside the building. She eventually learns that Red and Becker have been sacrificing the tenants of the building to a creature in a box in their basement in exchange for good health for Becker.
• [REC]: The apartment building falls prey to a Plague Zombie outbreak which causes its inhabitants to become violent killers, and it gets quarantined with everyone altogether (sick and healthy alike). The top apartment belongs to a possibly possessed Patient Zero.
• Quarantine (2008) has an entire apartment complex fall to a mutated strain of rabies that effectively causes a zombie outbreak. They also get quarantined in the apartment building in the middle of the city and all left to die.
• In The Sentinel (1977), the protagonist, who moved to a new apartment, is introduced to a host of quirky neighbours, including two lesbian women, an eccentric old man with a parrot and a cat, and a blind priest. It later turns out that there are no tenants in the apartment except her and the priest; all the other neighbours are actually damned souls guilty of homicide, and the apartment itself is a portal to Hell.
• Shivers (1975) has an entire apartment complex succumb to a sexually transmitted parasite that causes the infected to become permanently aroused fiends who will attack anyone sexually, regardless of age or orientation.
• Sliver has an apartment complex run by a voyeur who has installed remote hidden cameras in every apartment so that he can watch everyone at any time he wants, to the point where he can confirm to the film's heroine, played by Sharon Stone, that a stepfather is attempting to molest his stepdaughter, to moments of intimacy, to watching Stone's character masturbate in the shower.
• Troll (1986): The movie takes place in an apartment where the Potter family had moved in. The apartment has a troll and a gateway to a dimension full of monsters.
• Watcher: Julia lives in an apartment block in Bucharest, where she's lonely, isolated, and surrounded by unfriendly people who seem to have no interest in even talking to her (though the language barrier doesn't help). She's also being stalked by a serial killer who lives in the apartment building across the street, who sneaks in, squats in her apartment, and murders her Only Friend, Irina.

Literature

• In 14, the Kavach Building certainly leans this way. Architecture that seems non-Euclidean, infested by shiny green cockroaches that all have an extra leg, a very carefully locked room that, after the tenants figure out how to open it opens directly into DEEP SPACE, and more fun surprises. In the end, it subverts the trope, sort of, as it turns out to be the only thing preventing a horrendous race of Great Old Ones from coming to Earth and eating almost all living things.
• The Garden of Sinners: In the fifth chapter/movie, "Paradox Spiral", a murder investigation leads Shiki to a bizarre apartment complex where the supposed victims are actually alive. It is revealed that the building was actually designed as part of a very elaborate Magecraft ritual where all the residents experience death over and over again, and the basement hosts equipment to reanimate or create copies of their corpses.
• Pact: The Tenements are a manifestation of the Abyss taking the form of an apartment complex filled with hostile bogeymen, including one who specializes in pushing people out of windows.
• In both the book and film of Rosemary's Baby, the Dakota in New York is revealed to be the operating grounds of a Satanic cult and has been since at least the turn of the century. Rosemary and Guy's neighbors, the Castavets and their Satanists use a hidden door between the two apartments to go backwards and forwards to facilitate Rosemary's demonic rape and the faked death of the newborn Adrian.

Live-Action TV

• The one-season horror drama series, 666 Park Avenue was about a young woman discovering weird sights and happenings inside the new luxury apartment building she and her husband have just moved into. She began to develop paranoia by the season's end.
• MacGyver (1985): The episode "Off The Wall" revolves around an example of the mundane variety, with a Corrupt Corporate Executive running a Real Estate Scam by buying apartment buildings, assigning his most vile goons as landlords, and letting the buildings become Horrible Housing so the tenants will leave. When the family of MacGyver's kid friend of the week refuse to abandon their apartment come hell or high water and recruit Mac to help them file a lawsuit for the poor condition of the building, death threats and murder attempts soon follow.
• Only Murders in the Building: Downplayed. The Arconia is a gorgeous, cozy building full of (mostly) rich people. However, sometimes for Mystery Magnet reasons (as all the sleuths live there), there's a high number of murders and other horrible things going on. Mabel's close friend Zoe was pushed off the roof on New Year's Eve when they were teenagers by then-inhabitant, Theo Dimas and fell to her death. Theo's mobster father Teddy, also an Arconia inhabitant, is a grave robber who launders a huge amount of dirty money through jewelry sales, and threatened Tim Kono upon finding out that he witnessed Zoe's death. Tim was then murdered by Jan, another Arconia resident, who is an insane Serial Killer who tries to kill her then-boyfriend Charles and burn down the Arconia. The other residents of the Arconia are shown to be jerks or jerks with hearts of gold at best. For example, nobody cares about Tim's death and is more saddened by the death of Evelyn the cat. The building manager, Bunny, is a despot who's constantly threatening to evict Oliver before she is murdered at the end of Season 1. Her death reveals another web of annoyance and intrigue among building management of the Arconia, though she was ultimately murdered by Becky Butler, in search of another story for her podcast and spicing up the story of Rose Cooper, an abused artist who used to live in the Arconia.

Video Games

• Dead Space 2: The Cassini Towers apartment complex was one of the residential areas on Titan Station. It was here that untold numbers of Unitologists committed suicide upon learning of the Necromorph outbreak on the Sprawl, many of them in front of the nearby Church of Unitology or inside the apartment building itself.
• In Leftovers, a mother asks her young son to deliver some leftovers to their neighbours in the levels below. Some of their neighbours are creepy; a little girl bullies the player character and hides the foodbox from another neighbour. The player character meets his (unseen) father's mistress; she phones to boy's mother, enters her apartment, then comes out with a knife and chases the boy upstair looking like a homicidal maniac.
• My House: Features a parallel universe commonly called the "Brutalist House". It's a version of the titular House that is inexplicably made entirely out of bland concrete, baren of furniture and amenities and surrounded by a super structure with windows into apartment-like dwellings. There's also a giant version of this location where a giant Hell Hound of sorts can fought or ignored.
• Night Delivery:The game is about a delivery person making their final deliveries of the day to an apartment building. Said apartment building is populated entirely by Jerkasses who may have bullied and killed a tenant named Kohei. Oh, and there's also a red alternate world of the apartment building.
• >OBSERVER_ takes place in a dystopian sci fi version, among other things there's a killer AI loose in the building network, the main character has brain implants that cause nightmarish hallucinations, the residents are either disturbing, have hobbies that involve misusing technology in illegal, disturbing ways or both, with the one relevant to the story is a Serial Killer who used cybernetic and genetic manipulation to turn himself into essentially a sci fi werewolf, and the local birds may or may not be surveillance drones for the Chiron Corporation.
• The Room (RPG Maker) takes place in an apartment the protagonist bought for cheap, which turns out to be haunted by the spirit of a dead Satanist and child killer who seeks to possess the protagonist.
• In Silent Hill 4, the focus of the supernatural manifestations is apartment 302, where protagonist Henry Townsend lives. During a section of the game, Henry visits an otherworldly version of the apartment building, and scattered notes reveal the chaotic routine of its occupants.
• Stigmatized Property: The game takes place in/around the apartment building where a classmate of the Player Character moved to. The object of the game is to search the apartment and try to find the missing classmate, collecting pages of their diary to find out what had happened.

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