Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Ewers began his publishing career in 1898 with the poem “Mutter” (“Mother”). His debut short story collection, Das Grauen (The Grey) was published in 1907, and its contents reflected many of his personal experiences from both travel and his deepening interest in Spiritualism (he was reportedly a gifted medium). In 1908, Die Besessenen (The Possessed) featured Ewers’s most reprinted story, “The Spider,” in which a medical student falls under the sinister spell of a hotel room where a chain of suicides have occurred. “The Spider” featured a morbidly erotic femme fatale–type character, which Ewers considered a manifestation of “the Eternal Feminine.” This was to become a recurrent theme in his fiction.

  He penned a trilogy of novels featuring the character of Frank Braun, a scholar, occultist, traveler, and Nietzschean soul (one aspiring to superhuman greatness of the type written about by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche); in other words, a thinly veiled idealization of Ewers himself. Alraune (1911), a gory, sexual riff on both Frankenstein and the mandrake myth, became the author’s most successful book.

  Ewers continued to write and travel until the First World War. In America, his propagation of German Nationalist literature around New York aroused the attention of the U.S. Secret Service, and in 1918 Ewers was arrested as an enemy agent. He remained imprisoned until the summer of 1920.

  The Germany he returned to was embroiled in political and social turmoil. Ewers’s innate nationalism seemed to flourish through the 1920s as he began to make contacts within the burgeoning Nazi Party. While these affiliations very likely saved his life, eventually Ewers’s philosemitism (respect for Jews and Judaism), along with his morbidly decadent imagination and hedonistic views of sex and intoxicants (he had been using and praising hashish and alcohol since 1893), led him to being declared an unperson by the Third Reich. His books were ordered to be burned. He lived until June 12, 1943, when tuberculosis and heart failure claimed him.

  In the wake of World War II, Ewers’s legacy disintegrated. However, new English translations began to appear at the dawn of the twenty-first century, sparking a resurgence of interest in his grisly, passionate, and singular fiction.

  Richard Gavin

  See also: Alraune; Meyrink, Gustav; Spiritualism.

  Further Reading

  Ewers, Hanns Heinz. 2012. Brevier. Edited by Arthur Gersel and Rolf Bongs. Newcastle: Side Real Press.

  “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Koger, Grove. 2007. “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works 1. Salem, MA: Salem Press.

  THE EXORCIST

  The 1971 publication of American author William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist signaled a radical change in supernatural horror fiction. Exploiting a deep-seated and practically universal human anxiety about the loss of self, autonomy, and identity to invading, invisible forces, the novel presents readers with a vividly detailed depiction of the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl named Regan MacNeil. Written in the third person, the novel reveals the progress of Regan’s possession primarily through the eyes of her mother, actress Chris MacNeil, and Catholic priest and psychiatrist Damien Karras. Attempting to liberate Regan from her possessed state, Karras enlists the aid of an experienced exorcist, Jesuit priest and archaeologist Lankester Merrin, whose character is loosely based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. The novel is among the most iconic works of twentieth-century horror fiction and remains the most influential fictional account of demonic possession ever written.

  Though The Exorcist was Blatty’s fifth novel, it was both his first foray into supernatural horror and his first major popular success. While its sales were initially slow and critical response was mixed, Blatty’s appearance on The Dick Cavett Show helped bring the novel, and the phenomenon it treated, into the spotlight. The Exorcist went on to spend more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list, its popularity further boosted by the 1973 release of a film adaptation, scripted by Blatty and directed by William Friedkin. The film broke a number of box office records and was an unprecedented commercial success, spawning dozens of imitations in the following decades and irrevocably establishing demonic possession as among the most popular tropes of horror film. It shocked and traumatized many filmgoers, inspiring religious revivalism, moral panic, and eventually the creation of a clinical psychiatric category, “cinematic possession neurosis,” to describe those who became convinced they were demonically possessed after viewing the film.

  The World’s Scariest Christian Novel?

  The fact that The Exorcist has generally been remembered as one of the most frightening horror novels ever published—something intimately linked to the parallel reputation of its legendary film adaptation as “the scariest movie ever made”—both fulfills and, to an extent, obscures Blatty’s stated purpose in writing it. What has been lost in general public awareness of the book is that, in its aftermath, Blatty said he had intended it as a Christian novel. By his own account, he was deeply disturbed by the rising nihilism of secularized Western culture in the mid-twentieth century, and his driving ambition in writing The Exorcist was to convey to a jaded, despairing, and disillusioned modern public a sense of the horror of demonic evil, in the hope that this would automatically convey an accompanying emotional sense of the obverse: the existence of angels and God and eternal life, and what these would entail.

  Matt Cardin

  The Exorcist draws on a long history of writings about demonic possession, from those that appear in the Gospels and early Patristic writings to modern literary treatments. While not a staple of either early or Victorian Gothic fiction, demonic possession had been obliquely treated by Dark Romantic writers including E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, who linked it most often to mesmerism as much as traditional theology. Aldous Huxley wrote about the phenomenon in The Devils of Loudun (1952), a lightly fictionalized treatment of a historical case that Blatty’s novel makes repeated reference to. Huxley’s book in turn served as the source for Ken Russell’s cinematic extravaganza The Devils, released contemporaneously with Blatty’s novel in 1971. However, where Huxley and Russell focused on the dangers of sexual repression and religious irrationalism, Blatty took an entirely different approach, producing a fast-paced thriller that fused anxieties about social change, Catholic theology, and visceral horror into an original and powerful compound.

  The Exorcist was written during a period of radical social change in the United States. The civil rights movement, feminist activism, and anti–Vietnam War peace protests formed its backdrop and are implicated in the plot, as Regan’s actress mother is playing the lead role in a film about student activism on the campus of Georgetown University when Regan’s possession occurs. The novel also reflects conservative and Christian anxieties about the rising popularity of “New Age” and occult spiritual beliefs and practices, causally implicated as Regan is shown innocently experimenting with a Ouija board prior to her possession. Both novel and film suggestively link this experimentation to Regan’s adolescent sexuality; it is her playing (Ouija) with herself that seems to trigger her possession.

  Blatty, a practicing Catholic, has stated that the novel was partially inspired by his own crisis of faith, a crisis given its most acute expression through Karras, who wrestles with despair and disbelief throughout the novel. Blatty drew some of the details of the exorcism from a case he had read about while a student at Georgetown University, in which a young boy was supposedly successfully exorcised by Jesuit priest and educator William S. Bowdern. Blatty’s decision to make the possessed child female both reflects the majority of reported cases of possession and plays into the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking, in which it is most often the body of a threatened woman that bears the viewer’s gaze and is used to generate dramatic tension.

  While Blatty’s novel of satanic supernatural horror came in the wake of the popular success of Ira Levin’s best-seller Rosemary’s Baby (1967)
and Roman Polanski’s even more successful film of the same title (1968), the two novels are radically different creatures. Levin’s is urbane, often sardonic, and satirical of, among other things, religious irrationalism and middle-class materialism. Blatty eschews liberal irony in favor of emotional immediacy, spiritual intensity, and an emphasis on visceral body horror, anticipating much of what would come during the mass market “horror boom” that followed in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The Exorcist’s popularity influenced the creation of numerous horror novels focused on spirit possession, from “horror boom” titles including Frank di Felitta’s Audrey Rose (1975), Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Christine (1983), and James Herbert’s Shrine (1983) to more contemporary reinventions including Sara Gran’s Come Closer (2003), Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist (2013), and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015).

  Sean Moreland

  See also: Devils and Demons; Possession and Exorcism; Rosemary’s Baby.

  Further Reading

  Ballon, Bruce, and Molyn Leszcz. 2007. “Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma?” American Journal of Psychotherapy 61, no. 2: 211–230.

  Clover, Carol J. 1992. “Opening Up.” In Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 65–113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Mäyrä, Frans Ilkka.1999. “The Inarticulate Body: Demonic Conflicts in The Exorcist.” In Demonic Texts and Textual Demons, 143–168. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press.

  Morgan, Chris R. 2016. “Archetypes of Exorcism.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life 263(May): 63–64. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/04/archetypes-of-exorcism.

  Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2008. American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Winter, Douglas E. 1996. “Casting Out Demons: The Horror Fiction of William P. Blatty.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale, 84–96. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

  F

  “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”

  Originally published in 1839, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories. It is a quintessential Gothic story, written at a time when the traditional Gothic novel had run its course, so that Poe’s use of stock Gothic materials is turning in a new direction. Rather than merely tell of crypts and haunted castles, Poe made such elements symbolic of his characters’ mental states, so that inner madness becomes physically manifest.

  An unnamed narrator arrives at the crumbling mansion of his old school friend, Roderick Usher, whom he has not seen in years. He remarks at some length on how the mere sight of the place fills his soul with depressive gloom, and he observes a crack in the overall structure of the house. Roderick Usher had asked him to come, hoping that the presence of a friend would help dispel his own depression. Usher is the last of his line, suffering from a mysterious malady that has heightened all his senses. He cannot bear strong light, or any but the blandest foods, or any but certain musical notes. Meanwhile, Roderick’s sister Madeleine, with whom he has a strange, possibly incestuous relationship, is dying of a wasting illness of her own. She apparently dies, and the narrator and Roderick carry her coffin down into a crypt to leave it there for a fortnight before final burial. If this is a precaution against premature burial, it is an odd one, because they screw the coffin lid shut and close the heavy metal door to the vault. In the next few days, Roderick begins to behave strangely, and even the narrator is certain he is hearing noises from below. He tries to calm his friend by reading aloud from a chivalric romance, but even as the knight in the story strikes a gate with his mace, the two men hear a crash. As a dragon shrieks, they hear a cry. Roderick, with his heightened senses, has been aware for days that Madeleine is alive within her coffin. Now she has broken out and stands outside his chamber. When he opens it, she falls dying into his arms, and he dies too. The narrator escapes just in time, as a whirlwind crashes the entire structure into the surrounding tarn (lake).

  Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Haunted Palace”

  After publishing “The Haunted Palace” in a magazine in 1839, Poe incorporated it into “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where it is presented as having been written by Roderick Usher himself.

  In the greenest of our valleys

  By good angels tenanted,

  Once a fair and stately palace—

  Radiant palace—reared its head.

  In the monarch Thought’s dominion—

  It stood there!

  Never seraph spread a pinion

  Over fabric half so fair!

  Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

  On its roof did float and flow

  (This—all this—was in the olden

  Time long ago)

  And every gentle air that dallied,

  In that sweet day,

  Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

  A wingéd odor went away.

  Wanderers in that happy valley,

  Through two luminous windows, saw

  Spirits moving musically

  To a lute’s well-tunéd law,

  Round about a throne where, sitting,

  Porphyrogene

  In state his glory well befitting,

  The ruler of the realm was seen.

  And all with pearl and ruby glowing

  Was the fair palace door,

  Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,

  And sparkling evermore,

  A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty

  Was but to sing,

  In voices of surpassing beauty,

  The wit and wisdom of their king.

  But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

  Assailed the monarch’s high estate.

  (Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow

  Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

  And round about his home the glory

  That blushed and bloomed

  Is but a dim-remembered story

  Of the old time entombed.

  And travellers, now, within that valley,

  Through the encrimsoned windows see

  Vast forms that move fantastically

  To a discordant melody,

  While, like a ghastly rapid river,

  Through the pale door

  A hideous throng rush out forever,

  And laugh—but smile no more.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 1914. Vol. 10. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 32–33.

  Critics have made much of all this, citing numerous symbolic aspects, notably parallels between the disintegrating house and Roderick Usher’s disintegrating mind. This is brought out even more explicitly in the poem “The Haunted Palace,” which is given in the story as the composition of Roderick Usher. Poe scholar Thomas Olive Mabbott credited H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” for a solution to the central mystery: that Roderick, Madeleine, and the house share the same soul, and so all perish at the same instant. The story has been filmed many times, most memorably by Roger Corman in 1960.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Bailey, James O. 1964. “What Happens in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’?” American Literature 35, no. 4 (January): 445–466.

  Cook, Jonathan A. 2012. “Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ Papers on Language & Literature 48, no. 2: 3–44.

  Gargano, James W. 1982. “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: An Apocalyptic Vision.” University of Mississippi Studies in English 3: 53–63.

  Kendall, Lyle H., Jr. 1963. “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ College English 24, no. 4 (March): 450–453.

  Ma
bbott, Thomas Ollive. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1978. In The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches 1843–1849, 392–422. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

  Moss, William. 2014. “The Fall of the House, from Poe to Percy: The Evolution of an Enduring Gothic Convention.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crowe, 177–188. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

  Timmerman, John H. 2003. “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ Papers on Language & Literature 39, no. 3 (Summer): 227–244.

  FARRIS, JOHN (1936–)

  John Lee Farris, born in Jefferson City, Missouri, is an American writer best known for his psychic horror novel The Fury (1976), which was made into a successful film directed by Brian De Palma in 1978. A true artistic polymath, Farris has written screenplays—most notably, the script for The Fury—plays, and poetry, and he even directed a film, Dear Dead Delilah (1973). He is, however, best known for his work in horror prose. Although substantially less popular than some of his contemporaries, especially Stephen King, alongside whom he would appear in the second volume of Transgressions in 2006 as one of two New York Times best sellers, Farris’s oeuvre is vast and thematically varied.

  After a first period in which he concentrated on thrillers and noirs, sometimes publishing under the pen name Steve Brackeen, Farris started to combine the successful Harrison High School series (1959–1974) with a string of horror novels. Following the television adaptation of When Michael Calls (1967) in 1972, Farris began working in the horror genre in earnest, which he sometimes combined with the psychological thriller and serial killer genres in novels such as Sharp Practice (1974), Shatter (1980), and Nightfall (1987).

  The success of the telekinetic terrors of The Fury would lead Farris to mine more obviously occult and supernatural areas in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, and to become a full-time horror writer. His work during this, his “peak” period shows an understanding of the publishing market; the demonic Son of the Endless Night (1984), for instance, draws on the success of The Exorcist (1971) and The Omen (1976). But his very personal literary vision—which resorts to anything from Aztec rites in Sacrifice (1994) to Nordic folklore in Fiends (1990), voodoo cults in All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977), or vanished magical civilizations in Catacombs (1981)—prevails.