Sapient House
Marge: Hi Ultrahouse!
Ultrahouse: Greeting acknowledged.—The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror XII: House of Whacks"
When a house is alive and has a mind of its own, and can think and act independently. The reasons for this can vary from the house being haunted, to the house being robotic. The house may try to kill its owners or may be very helpful with chores. It's usually able to speak, but it doesn't have to.
If it's robotic it may have been made to serve its tenants and will make its owners breakfast and dinner and open doors for them. It can also go horribly wrong. Which it does a lot.
Different from Smart House in that it must be completely sapient and it doesn't have to be AI that makes the house sapient.
In the case that the house is haunted, whatever is haunting the house must be one with the house. They cannot simply inhabit the house.
Compare with Sapient Ship. Subtrope of Genius Loci. AI examples may overlap with Smart House.
Anime
- The Puppetmon arc of Digimon Adventure ends with Puppetmon using his powers to bring his mansion to life as a fighting machine. Kind of a wooden Humongous Mecha.
Film
- Monster House is a perfect haunted house example of this.
- There exists a film in which a dilapidated house kills people in order to acquire the energy necessary to repair itself.
Mythology
- Baba Yaga's chicken legged house.
Literature
- Nina Kiriki Hoffman's novels A Stir of Bones, A Red Heart of Memories, and Past the Size of Dreaming feature a magical (and benevolent) sapient house. It's haunted, but the ghost is an entirely separate entity from the intelligence of the house itself.
- The Amityville Horror house is sometimes interpreted as this. The below Simpsons example is based on it.
- In The Neverending Story, the House of Change is as instrumental in Bastian's recovery as Madam Eloya and Yor.
- The Shivers novel The Haunting House deals with one of these.
- The Wizard Tower in Septimus Heap is described as a quasi-living object.
Live Action TV
- Taliking houses in The Muppet Show. Seen here
- The Addams Family's house appears to be this, at times.
- Rose Red.
- In The X-Files episode "Ghost in the Machine", an office building (or arguably just its security system) has developed malevolent sentience.
- Eureka has Jack's house S.A.R.A.H. which has an AI with a mind of its own.
Tabletop Games
- In the original 1E AD&D module, "I6: Ravenloft", one of the towers in Strahd's castle is alive and will try to knock heroes off its stairs or strike them with the halberds mounted along its walls.
Video Games
- In The Eleventh Hour, sequel to The 7th Guest, the Stauf Manor was retconned into being both sapient and evil.
- RuneScape has the Dominion Tower.
Web Comics
- Castle Heterodyne in Girl Genius is an example.
- In Kevin and Kell, Lindesfarne and Fenton's tree house.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons:
- The original "Treehouse of Horror" episode has a segment in which the Simpsons go to live in a haunted house which can talk.
- "Treehouse of Horror XII" has a segment, "House of Whacks", featuring a Smart House and parodying 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- In Invader Zim, this happens when GIR gets his mind fused with the house's computer and goes on a rampage through town (with the house transformed into a dog-like mecha) for TACOS. Otherwise, the house computer is an AI itself.
- In one episode of Ugly Americans, the wizard Leonard is assigned to talk down a haunted house into calming its emotional, tenant-killing behavior.