The horror, the horror
Texas, coronavirus, and the limits of our spooky stories
Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
A young couple and their fresh-faced youngsters move into a grand old Edwardian home. It’s a fixer-upper, but the crown molding, mahogany staircase, view of the nearby lake, and drawing room furniture are to die for, as was the market price. A Google search prior to moving in revealed vague rumors that some kind of cult had conducted bizarre rituals there during the late 19th century, but nothing was ever proved, and who doesn’t like a spooky story to thrill the guests over candlelit dinner? The whistling, howling sounds at night—wind playing over the lake, surely—only enhance the deliciously Gothic ambience, which the whole family is certain to remember whenever they move out (in a year, according to the ebullient patriarch’s plans). When the girls start talking about the “magic friends” they’ve been playing with in the basement, though, Mr. and Mrs. Jones start to realize that this particular mansion’s Gothic ambience may not have been worth the bargain . . .
OK, so I’m not a paperback marketing copyeditor. But you might recognize this tune, even if it doesn’t top your “recently played” list on Spotify. Now see if you know this one:
A group of friends—maybe college-age, maybe high school—embark on a Spring Break road trip, to celebrate whatever stage of education they’re about to complete. In their excess of youthful naivete, they forget their maps at home. Inevitably losing their way, they steer their minivan into a deserted-looking town in the middle of . . . what state are they in again? It isn’t clear, and the awful rain made it hard to see the road signs. Expecting to stay only twenty minutes while they fill up on gas and look for directions, they pile out of the car and wander around the eerily quiet hamlet, in which all sign of stormy weather has suddenly vanished. Octegenarian shopkeepers peer out the windows. Cracking jokes about how everyone under the age of seventy must have been murdered in their sleep, the friends collapse onto a bench in the town square. One of the more observant of them notices a series of runic symbols—Gaelic? Sumerian?—circling the town square’s central fountain. Another quips nervously that the water suddenly spurting from the fountain is a little rusty-looking. No, wait. It’s the color of blood . . .
The DNA of contemporary horror encases (houses?) some version of the stock settings and characters above. The rambling mansion, the young couple with a few skeletons in the proverbial closet, the kids blessed with preternatural intelligence, the beings From Beyond; the small town that’s just a little too quiet, the group of blissfully ignorant youths on a joyride, the evil lurking beneath the vaguely pleasant exterior of mid-20th-century Americana. In The Haunting of Hill House (inspiration for the uneven Netflix series of the same name), Shirley Jackson probably offers the pre-eminent literary example of the first scenario, which one could trace back to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” if not earlier. The second scenario strikes me as one that incubated mostly on screens large and small, less the fruit of Victorian literature than of The Twilight Zone’s surreally sinister burghs.
I’ve been thinking about the strengths and limitations of these scenarios as real-world horrors cascade down the length of our feeds, our streams, our screeds. I’ve been thinking about what they reveal and what they obscure, in other words.
What’s revealed is the intuition that places have secrets, secrets that no amount of ingenuity or access to funds can banish. On one hand, the mechanism that forces the family in the first scenario to stumble on the mansion’s secret is capitalist calculation: this house is a steal, even if it steals our sanity. The catalyzing mechanism in the second scenario, on the other hand, is heedless exploration: it’s precisely the lack of calculation, the sense that one can wander without a map and basically come out OK at the other end, that dooms at least a few of our adolescent or post-adolescent friends. Whether it’s a fiction of the free market or a fiction of untrammeled exploration, though, both are exposed as lies by the Satanic cult/fish people/Satanic fish people, whose entertainingly evil machinations constitute each potboiler’s raison d’etre.
You might see where I’m going with this. In horror, the subterranean secrets of a place often expose the pleasant lie that the size of one’s bank account, or the tenacity of one’s pilgrim spirit, holds the power to remold space to one’s exact specifications. These scenarios, in other words, hold the power to loosen the grip that all-American metanarratives, like the ones that failed so abominably in Texas this week, have on the collective psyche.
Buying power, vaunted by right wing ideologues as equal in might to divine emanations from the Ark of the Covenant itself, reaped a crisis in which the state generating the most electricity in America doomed poor people to subarctic conditions. The pilgrim spirit of America’s eternally youthful self-conception didn’t stop wealthy gerontocrats from profiting off 11-year-olds freezing to death.
This week, Texas was the haunted mansion, the weird small town run by ancient creeps devouring all jouissance in their filthy maws. Given that just 9 of America’s 55,000 electrical substations could cause a coast-to-coast blackout if they gave up the mechanical ghost, all of America could be living this Gothic nightmare in the blink of an eye.
The limitation of these scenarios, though, consists of their requiring our innocent protagonists to move into the haunted space at the start of the story, to introduce themselves, for the first time, to a site that is already haunted. Stumbling onto a locale with which they were previously unfamiliar provides the inciting incident for these kinds of plots. What I find limiting about this aspect of the genre is that it obscures the extent to which real-life horror often hinges on living for a long time in a place with terrible, open secrets—as open as they are terrible, in fact. In those terms, the inciting incident wouldn’t involve wandering into a new space, but being forced to reacquaint oneself with the awful nature of the space one already inhabits, the space whose obscenities one has learned to take for granted.
(To her credit, Shirley Jackson partially circumvents this fixture of the genre in Haunting of Hill House, implying that perhaps the titular haunting extends from the tortured past of one psychically gifted guest.)
Note, too, how both scenarios depend on seclusion for scares: the remote mansion by the lake, the village off the beaten track. We like the idea that horror is somewhere out there in a place where no one can hear you scream. This has its benefits when it comes to sparking the frisson that, in the best horror, warrants the price of admission. But it also safely contains the bad vibes out there, in the wilderness.
The idea of horror simply being embedded in the quotidian features of the contemporary world-system we all co-constitute is a lot more elusive, a lot harder for the genre to capture. Yet as we observe the coronavirus death toll in America surpassing half a million, as we watch the still-unfolding catastrophe in Texas, it sure seems like the inability to imagine this kind of horror represents a major defect in our cultural memory. Seems to me that humans really, really don’t like facing the possibility that horror is a matter of perspective, that what should appear horrific to anyone with a conscience mostly appears as habit, routine, ordinary indignity, until its grim and nasty contours become undeniable in a moment of extreme cataclysm.
Maybe what we need is a lot more storytelling that takes seriously the extent to which horror underpins the busy surface of life before the move to the mansion, before the ill-fated Spring Break trip.
For example, imagine this scenario instead:
A group of pragmatic, responsible citizens, in an unnamed modern city, decides to found a co-op in a marvelous apartment building right out of the Silent Film era. Not only would they all save costs on living, they have grand plans to lift the building from its state of shabby despondency, making it a local attraction akin to Manhattan’s Dakota Building. There’s just one problem: the apartment is currently occupied by people, the descendants of those who built the building. These difficult people simply refuse to be bought out. They don’t want to leave. They don’t want to invest in the repairs that, in the eyes of the collective, are obviously necessary. Moreover, this pragmatic co-op collective doesn’t wish to absorb these people into their board. They’ve done such a terrible job of taking care of the building, the collective reasons, why give them another chance?
In conjunction with city government—which, coincidentally, boasts several members of this co-op in its ranks—they do what any right thinking and forward-thinking citizens’ group would do. They summon demons from the underworld who enter the building gradually, driving the tenants mad, moving them to kill each other and themselves. There’s a loophole in municipal law that allows for demon-summoning to clear out a premise that poses an “unreasonable risk to the health and safety of the surrounding vicinity.” Decreeing that the recalcitrant inhabitants pose just such a risk, the co-op board breaks out the Book of the Dead.
The ensuing possession happens over the course of months, maybe even years. A strangling here, a drowning there, covered on p. A8. Journalists from the local paper make sure they cover both sides of the controversy, interviewing residents who would prefer not to have their bodies invaded by Azazoth, as well as co-op owners/necromancers frustrated that the inhabitants didn’t see reason and leave of their own free will in the first place. What other choice did the co-op have?
At last, the apartment building is finally cleansed of its original tenants. Relieved that they can finally take over the building, the co-op performs an obligatory exorcism and sends the demons back to hell. Or so they think.
The pragmatic and levelheaded adults, who after all have ensured that this historic landmark is finally in responsible hands, set about remodeling, refurbishing, fixing the elevator, polishing the brass. They raise their children within its walls. When the children ask how their parents came to possess the building, the parents vaguely allude to the fact that the previous tenants didn’t take proper precautions to guard against the demons, which inevitably end up churning through apartment buildings from time to time, and wasn’t it wonderful that Mommy and Daddy performed an exorcism to make sure this building was hellhound-free before you grew up here? Don’t ask too many questions, honey, eat your ravioli.
As they get older, though, the children start to ask more questions. They hear rumors in the walls sometimes, whispers in a language they don’t understand, about what their parents did. They have dreams of the building’s previous denizens collapsing in the stairwell, keeling over their gas stoves. They wonder whether they can really trust their parents with their well-being. Yet when they ask their parents about the voices, they’re told angrily that they should be grateful, that everything the grownup have done is for their own benefit, that life isn’t always about holding hands and singing “Kumbaya,” that maybe the kids should find their OWN building and found their OWN co-op if they hate this one so much?
The kids protest. The parents lock them in the closet. The voices speak to them between the folds of Mom and Dad’s winter jackets. The kids emerge from the closets sullen but silent. They resort to communicating with each other by hand signal, relaying to one another what the voices have been telling them. They pool knowledge, unsure of what to do with it.
Then, just as a tentative peace has formed, our inciting incident takes place. A blackout strands the building in darkness, in the middle of winter. The blackout is an accidental response to a power shortage; the city’s Energy Council intended to withhold power from another building, one whose board members don’t also govern municipal affairs, but a clerical error means that this building was targeted instead. Calamitous winter conditions ensure that the mistake can’t be easily reversed, either. Onsite generators are only temporary. They’ll last for about a week or so. Whether or not the power will be restored by then remains unclear.
There’s only so much power. It’s cold. The kids have been whiny and annoying and don’t appreciate anything the adults have done for them. The grownups cast a baleful gaze at their children. The children offer sidelong glances in response, careful not to make eye contact.
The board of directors hold a furtive meeting in one of the penthouse apartments. After much circling of the meeting’s purpose, one of the directors pulls out his Book of the Dead. There is a spell, he says, that’s only been performed once. It will render the children immobile, mute. In that state of paralysis, they will have only minimal need of food, drink, and warmth. The adults could share resources among themselves, and reverse the spell when the crisis is over.
Other members of the board are uneasy. Is it really so simple as reversing the spell? What happened the last time the spell was performed? The member who proposed the idea clears his throat. It was last performed on a group of about thirty children, he reports; two of them died, and another three remained under the spell even after the adults performed the reversing incantation.
As the adults mull this disclosure, their rational faculties privately explaining to them that the chance of their particular kid dying or remaining paralyzed for life is really very small, they don’t notice a faint rustling at the door. The kids have been eavesdropping. They stare at one another in horror. Some of them insist that their parents would never do anything so cruel. Others propose that maybe the spell isn’t that bad, or maybe the kids who died bit the dust for reasons that had nothing to do with the spell, or maybe the parents are making up the whole scenario because they know their kids are listening and they want to impose a little discipline through fear.
Then one of the children reaches into her knapsack and pulls out a thick, musty-smelling tome bound in leather. It’s her own parents’ copy of the Book of the Dead. And it has a spell for adults whose old habits die hard . . .
Where the story goes from there is anyone’s guess. Maybe the kids try to harness the same awful power their parents wielded and get everyone killed. Maybe the kids decide against it but have no real alternative, so they’re all paralyzed or murdered. Maybe the adults descend into backbiting and destroy each other with the spirits of the damned, who can’t or won’t be tamed. And maybe it all ends with the apartment vacant, empty of everything but whispers.
Or maybe there’s a happy ending where the parents confess their sins, and sacrifice themselves to save the kids, and the kids take over the building, and burn the books of necromancy, and the sun comes out, and the power comes back on, and the next generation keeps living in the building, but now the building’s redeemed and the whispers kind of die away because Good People live there now.
I don’t know. I don’t know how it ends. Guess I’ll have to keep listening to the voices in the closet to find out.