Sleeping with the Lights On

by Jones, Darryl

  Nor is this phenomenon confined to film. In Paul Tremblay’s startlingly metafictional novel A Head Full of Ghosts (2016), the family of Marjorie, an adolescent girl whose behaviour suggests she may be possessed by a demon, agree to take part in a reality TV show. Totally immersed within horror culture, the novel succeeds in being more than the sum of its many intertexts—The Amityville Horror, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Lovecraft, The Exorcist, and much else besides, including Paranormal Activity itself—because of its solid grounding in the lived reality of post-crash economic life. Marjorie’s father, Josh Barrett, has recently been made unemployed:

  The family’s financial situation, like so many other folks, was in the shitter, shall we say. Barrett had worked for the toy manufacturer Barter Brothers for nineteen years but was laid off after Hasbro bought out the company and closed down an eighty-year-old factory in Salem….There was only so much stretching the Barretts could do to maintain two daughters and a big house and a real estate tax bill and all the hope and promise that comes with the middle-class lifestyle.

  Set against the background of ‘DC politicians, angry Occupy Wall Street protestors, Tea-Party rallies, unemployment charts and graphs’, the Barretts’ is a ‘new and all-too-familiar American economic tragedy’. In order to support their precarious middle-class status, the family invites the TV cameras in.

  If one strain of contemporary American political horror is economic, then understandably another is ecological. President Donald Trump’s decision in 2017 to withdraw America from the Paris Agreement on climate change action followed a sustained campaign of climate change denial by the American right, which brought together the economic interests of certain parts of corporate America with the cultural anti-modernity of the Evangelical religious right. Unusually, horror’s response to this denial has been virtually univocal: climate change is real; the earth is warming; this is a man-made disaster; our survival is under severe threat. Thus, for example, in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), plants begin to release toxins which are deadly to humanity. Construction worker Curtis (Michael Shannon) begins to have apocalyptic visions of a coming storm which will devastate humanity in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011). The film closes with drops of black rain (oil?) falling from the sky. Steroid-laden excrement dumped into Chesapeake Bay from an industrial chicken-rearing plant creates a mutated strain of flesh-eating parasites in Barry Levinson’s genuinely disturbing The Bay (2012). The film is an extrapolation of real-life environmental concerns that manure run-off from intensive poultry farms was contributing to a number of ecological ‘dead zones’ in Chesapeake Bay. In Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014), a team of scientists investigates the mysterious Area X, a sealed-off area of unknowable nature. VanderMeer’s novel has been compared to the work of the great American philosophical ruralist Henry David Thoreau, whose 1851 book Walden is the great American literary meditation on the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

  Given widespread anxieties about the melting of the polar ice caps, it is not surprising that the twenty-first century has produced a good deal of Arctic and Antarctic horror. Polar Gothic is a recurring subgenre of horror. Drawing on the long-unexplored and thus fundamentally imaginary geography of the polar regions, a number of works of horror (and also of fantasy) have been set in the far northern or southern latitudes. The narration of Frankenstein takes place on board the ship of the polar explorer Robert Walton. At the close of the novel, Victor Frankenstein heads out on the ice, towards the North Pole, in pursuit of his Monster. Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, follows its protagonist on his inexorable journey south, towards its Antarctic climax. Fresh out of medical school, Arthur Conan Doyle served for a time as a doctor on a Greenland whaling ship; his story ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ is an imaginative response to this voyage. Heavily influenced by Poe, Lovecraft’s great novella At the Mountains of Madness charts the terrifying discoveries of an Antarctic expedition. All three film versions of The Thing (1951, 1982, 2011), based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, are set in polar latitudes (Antarctica in 1938, 1982, and 2011, Northern Alaska in 1951).

  Polar horror, then, is not a new phenomenon, but it has gained exponentially in intensity in the last decades. Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) opens in the Antarctic, where a slice of the ice shelf ‘the size of Rhode Island’ breaks off due to global warming, a harbinger of the climatic disaster to follow, in which the northern USA becomes uninhabitable, and Mexico gives shelter to American refugees. This was the film which spurred former Vice President Al Gore to make his own influential climate change documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). In 2017, a slice of the Antarctic Larsen C ice shelf did break off: it was larger than Delaware, which itself is half as large again as Rhode Island. In Larry Fessenden’s film The Last Winter (2006), an ecohorror reimagining of Algernon Blackwood’s classic work of Canadian horror ‘The Wendigo’, the melting of the permafrost releases supernatural entities, first into a remote oil-drilling camp on the Northern Slope of Alaska, and then, it is implied, worldwide. When Abby (Connie Sellers), the camp’s only survivor, wakes up in hospital, she hears news reports about a widespread disaster; a doctor in the room next door has hanged himself. Stepping outside, she walks through puddles of water: the snow has melted.

  The hospital in which Abby wakes is presumably in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost city in the US. Barrow’s isolation, cut off from the world for long periods, is what makes it vulnerable to a vampire attack in 30 Days of Night (2007). The Last Winter’s trope of the melting polar ice releasing forces inimical to humanity recurs in The Thaw (2009)—with Val Kilmer as a climate scientist—and the TV series Fortitude (2015–17). Fortitude was set in the Svalbard archipelago, the northernmost inhabited place in the world. Svalbard is also the setting for parts of Philip Pullman’s young adult fantasy Northern Lights (1995), and for Michelle Paver’s remarkable retro ghost story, Dark Matter (2010). In Game of Thrones (broadcast from 2011), the Night King and his zombie army sweep down from the frozen north, laying waste to the ice wall that has kept them at bay for millennia, and threatening to wipe out humanity.

  America’s racial divisions have also begun to find expression in post-millennial horror. The African American writer Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) is a rewriting of H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, one of the most racist stories by a writer whose racism was notoriously toxic. Recasting Lovecraft’s tale as the story of a Harlem musician, Tommy Tester, who gets drawn into an occult world, LaValle’s work records his own ambivalence towards Lovecraft—the dedication reads ‘For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.’ Robert Suydam, the protagonist of ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, confronts Tester in characteristically racist Lovecraftian terms: ‘Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It’s all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence….Policemen despair of order and see rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion’. Tester dismisses this: ‘You talking about Harlem?…I’m trying to understand what in the hell place you’re talking about. It doesn’t sound like anywhere I’ve ever lived.’

  Initially, the premise of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) resembles that of Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play a wealthy, liberal San Francisco couple, the Draytons, forced to confront their own prejudices when their daughter brings home an African American fiancé (Sidney Poitier). The first half of Get Out plays like an awkward comedy of manners, in which Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris endures the embarrassing but apparently well-meaning attentions of his girlfriend’s wealthy, liberal parents, the Armitages (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener). As well as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Get Out has also been compared to the socially aware 1960s and 1970s horror of Ira Levin, most particularly The Stepford Wives (1972
), which stands alongside Stephen King’s Carrie (1974) as an uneasy, ambivalent male response to the women’s liberation movement. In Get Out, the seemingly tolerant wealthy whites are still exploiting black America—both the Draytons in 1967 and the Armitages in 2017 have African American domestic workers. Whitford’s Dean Armitage is a neurosurgeon who has literally devised a means of turning black people into white people. The film uses this plot device simultaneously to examine American racial and class divisions, the unconscious racism of liberal, white America, and the consequences of African American suburbanization and embourgeoisement.

  The fifty-year symbolism of 1967 and 2017 is also exploited in Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit (2017). Though not ostensibly a horror film, Detroit borrows heavily from the home invasion/torture porn subgenre in its account of the imprisonment, torture, and murder of innocent African Americans at the hands of racist white cops during the 1967 Detroit riots (the film’s recounting of the events of 25 July 1967 is based on fact, as are most of its characters). Bigelow certainly has a provenance as a director of horror: she made her reputation with the vampire film Near Dark (1987), and then cast Halloween’s ‘scream queen’ Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role in the psycho thriller Blue Steel (1989). Bigelow is also skilled at combining genres in her films: Detroit is a political drama and a horror film, as Near Dark is a vampire film and a road movie, and Blue Steel a psycho film and a police procedural (and Point Break is a kind of existential surfing crime thriller). The violence, brutality, and injustice of Detroit’s middle act, set in the Algiers Hotel, are truly horrifying, almost unbearable. Detroit is a film which speaks very clearly to the current state of America. The film’s point is that law and justice in America is institutionally racist, and no contemporary viewer can watch this film without thinking of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or of Trayvon Martin, Antonio Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, or numerous other young black men in the 2010s at the hands of the police. Detroit is as much a film about Trump’s America as it is about Lyndon B. Johnson’s.

  Outside the US, post-millennial British horror has been examining its own national identities, part of a historical-political trend that began with the Northern Irish peace process and the Scottish and Welsh devolution referenda in the 1990s, and progressed through to the Brexit referendum of 2016. Folk horror, a subgenre rooted in the land, its folklore, superstitions, and pagan past, often inflected with a heavy dose of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is the major post-millennial manifestation of this, as well as partaking in some of the ecohorror concerns we have been discussing.

  Folk horror is fundamentally antagonistic to urban technological modernity, and has its contemporary origins in the ruralist and localist countercultural movements of the 1960s. The original iteration of folk horror in the 1960s and 1970s, though certainly not recognized as any kind of coherent artistic movement at the time, included, for example, the novels of Alan Garner, whose often very disturbing young adult ruralist works included the neo-Arthurian The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), the extraordinarily folkloric The Moon of Gomrath (1963), and two works with their origins in Welsh mythology, Elidor (1965) and The Owl Service (1967). It would also include, emphatically, films such as Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973), as well as a number of television plays and series, from Granada TV’s very weird adaptation of The Owl Service (1969), to Robin Redbreast (1970), The Exorcism (1972), Penda’s Fen (1974), and the terrifying Children of the Stones (1977), and the various adaptations of M. R. James broadcast under the A Ghost Story for Christmas banner across the 1970s. All of this seemed to be a response to post-war modernization, and as such did not survive into the neoliberal era ushered in by the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

  Post-millennium, British popular culture has revisited the possibilities of folk horror, often with a strong awareness of what Robert Macfarlane has called, in an essay of the same title, ‘The eeriness of the English countryside’. Sometimes very strikingly, the films of Ben Wheatley have incorporated folk horror. Kill List (2011) begins as a political thriller about a pair of hitmen, and ends as a Wicker Man-style exercise in pagan horror. Sightseers (2012) reimagines Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May (1976) as a tale of a pair of caravanning serial killers. The indescribable A Field in England (2013) self-consciously revisits the English seventeenth century of Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and James’s ‘The Ash Tree’ (broadcast as a Ghost Story for Christmas in 1975). In Elliott Gardner’s frightening The Borderlands (2014), a pair of Catholic priests investigate apparent paranormal events in a remote Devon church, only to discover that the land itself contains (or is) a powerful pre-Christian entity. Beginning with the Welsh nationalist horror novel Candlenight (1991), Phil Rickman has written a highly knowledgeable series of folk horror novels, many of them set on the English-Welsh border and featuring the Anglican exorcist Merrily Watkins. On television, the relationship between the cosy and the menacing was explored in The League of Gentlemen (1999–2002), whose fictional northern village of Royston Vasey was the setting for stories that were funny and frightening in precisely equal measure. A Ghost Story for Christmas returned in 2005, with adaptations of the James stories ‘A View From a Hill’ (2005), ‘Number 13’ (2006), ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (2010), and ‘The Tractate Middoth’ (2013).

  The revived interest in M. R. James is part of a more general British resurrection of old-school horror. Michelle Paver’s arctic ghost story Dark Matter (2010) is a reminder of how genuinely frightening the uncanny can be. Neil Spring’s The Ghost Hunters (2013) retells the story of Harry Price’s investigation into Borley Rectory, ‘England’s Most Haunted House’. Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2015) is as haunted by its Lancashire landscape as James’s work was by East Anglia.

  Much of the most inventive and influential horror of the last generation, certainly in the cinema, has been non-Anglophone. Asian horror has become particularly important, beginning with a series of startlingly original and effective Japanese horrors, leading to the classification of the so-called J-horror (Japanese) and K-horror (Korean) subgenres.

  Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998) may be the single most influential horror film of contemporary times. The film established an influential modern paradigm of a malevolent, unappeasable female ghost (white nightdress, long black hair covering her face) (Figure 10) in a film which combined the traditional ghost story and the curse narrative (a familiar trope in horror, from The King in Yellow to ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ to Night of the Demon to Candyman) with an ingenious use of (then-)modern technology, the VHS tape which spells death to all who watch. Ring was adapted from a novel by Koji Suzuki, whose work also provided the source material for Nakata’s Dark Water (2002), another female ghost story, set in a leaking apartment building. Audition (1999), Takashi Miike’s psycho horror, contains an acupuncture scene so horrifying that when I saw it in the cinema, the entire row in front of me all got up and left at the same time. Takashi Shimuzu’s Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) is another tale of a vengeful female ghost, again using the familiar iconography of Japanese horror (the hair, the white shift, the disjointed movement). The commercial and critical success of these films created a market in the West for Asian horror cinema more generally, as well as for the inevitable Hollywood remakes. Ring, Dark Water, and The Grudge were all adapted for an American audience, as was the lauded Korean ghost story, A Tale of Two Sisters, remade in 2009 as The Uninvited. Contemporary Hollywood’s attempt to incorporate these Asian visions into itself in this series of remakes was invariably underpowered and disappointing.

  Figure 10. Sadako, the unappeasable ghost of Ring (1998).

  Rather different from the main tendency of contemporary Asian horror, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) is a work of dystopian horror. An economic crash precipitates a regime of severe population control, one aspect of which is that a class of high-school students are transported to an island and made to fight to the death.
This is a recurring trope in horror, dating at least from Leslie Banks’s man-hunting exiled Russian aristocrat Count Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game (1932); Battle Royale’s premise also clearly anticipates the Hunger Games series of books and films. The film is in equal measures voyeuristic, fascistic, and critical of that voyeurism and fascism, and, with its subject matter of murderous adolescents, was itself the subject of a minor moral panic. It was banned in several countries, and, while never formally banned in the US, was not officially released there until 2012.

  There have also been important works of Hispanic horror. The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro made his reputation in the 90s with the stylish and original vampire film Cronos (1993), before moving to Hollywood to direct the entomological horror Mimic (1997). But it was with two Spanish-language films set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and its Francoist aftermath that del Toro really made his reputation: the ghost story The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and the uncategorizable Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which was placed at or near the top of many critics’ lists of best films of its year. Pan’s Labyrinth very self-consciously recalls classics of weird fiction, most particularly Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and Algernon Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden, as well as one of the landmark works of Spanish cinema, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), whose child protagonist, Ana, uses James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) as a means of understanding the political reality of early Francoism, just as Pan’s Labyrinth’s child protagonist, Ofelia, uses the film’s fantastic underworld as a means of understanding the same context.