Building Fear

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The architecture common to horror stories, whether novels, short stories, or movies, is conducive to the evocation of fear. Although this statement may seem something of a truism, it may be less obvious that it seems. What, precisely, makes a building evoke fear? By using the Aristotelian approach—that is, by analyzing mages of haunted buildings—we can identify the exact mechanisms of this evocation.

Size matters.

Size matters. Large spaces, especially when they appear labyrinthine, disorient us, confuse us, frustrate us. When we're not sure where we are, we don't know what places—what rooms, for example—are safe or in which direction our escape lies. Therefore, our ability to fight or to take flight is hampered. Spacious buildings of uncertain layout are frightening because, well, they could be the death of us.

Probably the best-known example of “size matters” is Stephen King's Overlook Hotel (The Shining [1977]), the mansion in his Rose Red, or the house in the Spierig Brothers' 2018 movie Winchester. (Full disclosure: the house in Winchester and the house in Craig R. Baxley's 2002 television miniseries Rose Red, written by King, were both inspired by the Winchester Mystery Mansion in San Jose, California.)

Books in print, including The Shining; Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959); and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), an early Gothic novel that, when it comes to haunted houses, was one of the prototypes that started it all, are first-rate examples of the principle that size matters.

Darkness matters.

Darkness matters. When it's dark, we can't see; we are blinded. We rely most heavily on our ability to see. When we cannot see, we are handicapped; our ability to observe, to conduct visual surveillance, to reconnoiter, is impeded. What we can't see could be dangerous, even deadly. We could be attacked. We could run into a wall or fall down stairs. We could lose our way.

Many horror stories are shot mostly in the dark, including Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 film, The Others; Victor Zarcoff's 2016 movie, 13 Cameras; and Wes Craven's 1991 film, The People Under the Stairs, to name but a few.

Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot (1975), Dan Simmons's novel Summer of Night (1991), Bram Stoker's short story, “The Judge's House” (1891), H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” (1896) are excellent examples of printed works that take place largely in the dark.

Isolation matters.

Isolation matters. When alone, we are cut off. There are no emergency medical personnel, no firefighters, no police, no military. We do not have access to stores, utilities, or repairers. Our society is sophisticated and complex. None of us knows enough to be entirely self-sufficient. We rely on experts. We're helpless without them. When no one's home but us (and the monster), we're in a whole world full of hurt. Here, King scores again with The Shining. Other stories in which out-of-the-way buildings evoke fear include The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Psycho (1961), Wrong Turn (2003), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012).

For in-print stories of horror in isolated settings, try Stephen King's novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) or his Despeation (1996), James Rollins's novel Subterranean (1999), and Denise Lehane's novel Shutter Island (2003). Sir Winston Churchill's short story “Man Overboard” (1899), H. G. Wells's short story “The Cone” (1895), Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Masque of the Red Death” (1845), and Charles Dickens's short story “The Signal-man” (1866) are superb examples of the isolated horror story as well.

Neglect matters.

Neglect matters. If someone cannot (or will not) look after his or her own home, he or she probably won't look after us, either, should we need help. Neglectful people are usually careless people. Think about that for a moment: careless people = people who care less; in fact, they may not care at all. People who don't give a damn are not survival assets; quite the contrary, their negligence could get us killed.

Of course, a building, especially a house, in a state of neglect, suggests a negligent resident or owner. Do we really want to trust our lives to such an individual. The answer is simple, and it isn't no; it's hell no! The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (1997) is an example of what can happen as the result of neglect, as is the movie Hide and Seek (2005).

Neglect also happens in Stephen King's novels Carrie (1974) and in Bentley Little's novel The Ignored (1997).

Disrepair matters.

Disrepair matters. Disrepair may be caused by neglect, but it goes well beyond the effects of inattention and laziness. It suggests unsoundness verging upon collapse. Symbolically, a building in a state of disrepair suggests madness. A house in such a state implies that its resident or owner may also be unsound, verging upon mental collapse. Certainly, that's the case in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and a host of other haunted house horror stories.

Location matters.

Location matters. We've already mentioned how isolation can evoke feelings of helplessness. A house on a hill can dwarf us. Looking up at something implies that we are smaller (and lesser) than it, that we are inferior to it. That's why judges and legislators sit on high, to impress us with their superior status, to help us remember our place, our subordinate positions in society. Elevation confers status and authority, weheras the lower the station, the less importance and standing one has. The house in Psycho (1961) suggests its de facto owner, Norman Bates's “mother,” rules the roost; Norman, her caretaker, works for her, much of the time in the motel on the grounds below.

Personification matters.

Personification matters. Most of the buildings we've considered are frightening, each in its own way. More frightening than most—perhaps all—others, however, is the house with a personality of its own. A house to which human attributes (in the case of horror, horrible ones) have been assigned are more than just creepy; they can think, feel, and, worst of all, accomplish their will through action. They can injure, maim, or commit premeditated murder. The house in The Amityville Horror (2005), we can tell by the “eyelike windows,” to borrow a phrase from Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher,” indicate there's a twisted, maniacal madness to the place. It's a house with a personality. It even has curb appeal. To enter, though, is tantamount to suicide.

As the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House indicates, her haunted house is also personified:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 

 

In a later post (maybe the next one), we'll take a look at the interior of buildings built to evoke fear.

Stanley Kubrick on Maintaining the Tension between the Natural and the Supernatural

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In an interview with Michel Ciment, Stanley Kubrick discusses his film adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. Although the book “is by no means a serious literary work,” it is well-plotted, Kubrick says, and it was this aspect of the novel that he found intriguing, which “for a film . . . is often all that really matters.” The tension King maintains between possible natural (psychological) and supernatural interpretations of the story's bizarre incidents intrigued Kubrick, the director says: “It's not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural.”


While realistic storytelling may be a superior way “to dramatize argument and ideas,” Kubrick contends, “fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious.” He also believes ghosts may suggest the reality of an afterlife for those who are frightened by ghost stories, arguing that, if the audience did not believe in the possibility of ghosts, as the surviving souls of the dead, they would not find them frightening.

In adapting the novel to the screen, Kubrick developed the characters differently than King had, and used “misdirection” to maintain the tension between possible natural and supernatural explanations of the story's incidents. As the interviewer points out, these techniques include “altitude, claustrophobia, solitude, [and] lack of booze. Finding the novel's ending “hackneyed” and predictable, Kubrick also changed it: “I wanted an ending which the audience could not anticipate. In the film, they think Hallorann is going to save Wendy and Danny. When he is killed, they fear the worst. Surely, they fear, there is no way now for Wendy and Danny to escape.”

The sets of the interiors of the hotel in which much of the action takes place are based on photographs of a variety of American hotels. The goal in creating the sets, Kubrick says, was to use a “realistic” approach to make “the hotel . . . look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel.” Realism complements the fantastic, he suggests, citing the style of Franz Kafka who uses a “simple and straightforward” style that is “almost journalistic” to tell “stories [that] are fantastic and allegorical.” The same is true of the behavior of the characters; it must seem true to life, especially in fantastic drama (or fiction): “People should behave in the mundane way they normally do.”


Kubrick also remarks on the planning required to produce a good movie, comparing the design aspects of filmmaking to the military planning that great commanders—he uses Napoleon as his example—undertake to ensure battles are executed as well as possible.

House of Horrors

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror stories are like houses. In constructing a domicile, builders lay a foundation and, then, according to the blueprints designed by the architect, with the needs and desires of its future residents in mind, the construction crew builds the residence.

 

After the family moves into the house, they must furnish it and maintain it, repairing fixtures and appliances, repainting the interior and the exterior, landscaping the yard. They may also improve the property, adding rooms or, perhaps, a backyard swimming pool or tennis court.

 

Some houses--bungalows, perhaps--are short stories; others, such as mansions, are novels. In any case, particular rooms are provided for specific needs and purposes: a living room for socializing, a dining room for enjoying meals, a kitchen for preparing the meals to be enjoyed, bedrooms for sleeping, one or more bathrooms for bathing, an attic for storage, and so forth. The narrative equivalent to the room is the scene, just as its counterpart to the yard is the setting.

 

The family, of course, corresponds to the narrative’s characters. As any television sitcom shows, conflicts arise from the interactions of the family members. Consider the horror stories which take place in a house (or, for that matter, a castle or a hotel): The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House, The Castle of Otranto.

 

Of course, a community is an extension of a family, in which case, the rooms, as it were, of the house, are not chambers but other buildings: the library, stores, the police station, the fire station, the hospital, the high school or college campus, the dentist’s office, the community swimming pool, the movie theater.

 

The characters are the townspeople, and the setting is the landscape both in and around the town. As Stephen King’s novels show, a story becomes more complicated and more sophisticated when it takes a village to tell a story. Most horror writers have written one or more short stories or novels set in small towns or even big cities. Rather than the personal or the familial, such stories typically deal with the social aspects of human existence.

 

If houses and families can be expanded into villages and communities, small towns and their residents can be extended into nations and nationalities or, for that matter, into the entire world and its global community, the human race. Think Stephen King’s The Stand, Robert McCammon’s Swan’s Song, or H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

 

The concerns of such narratives expand accordingly: instead of rooms, cities; instead of yards or landscapes, nations; instead of a family, humanity itself. The theme of such stories is typically scientific (whether in the biological or sociological sense), for these narratives are often about the survival of the species itself.

 

Whether it is housed in a single-family residence, a small town, a nation, or the planet itself, horror is primarily a family affair. It’s just that the concept of family changes at each level, from mom, dad, and the kids to the townspeople to one’s fellow citizens to humanity itself. At every level, problems arise, helping writers to define and to redefine what it means to be a human being living in a world of menaces and malevolence. Hank Ketchum never had it so good.

Quick Tip: Setting as Character

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Our surroundings, to a large extent, reflect who we are. After all, when one has reached the point that he or she can choose décor and furnishings that he or she prefers rather than can afford, a homeowner is apt to select items that he or she likes. For example, according to an article in USA Today, writer “Dean Koontz’s home office is filled with things he treasures.”

What might an author who has written in such genres as horror, science fiction, and action-adventure thrillers “treasure”? Koontz is reported to appreciate and enjoy not only “family photos,” but also “Japanese scroll paintings, a collection of art-deco Bakelite radios,” and, of course, “a dog bed in the corner for his [latest] golden retriever.” His “24,000-square foot” residence, which was “inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, is “notched into a hillside” overlooking Newport Beach, California, where it exudes a “Zen-like atmosphere,” despite Koontz’s own Roman Catholic faith.

According to the USA Today article, Koontz’s home “includes numerous. . . rooms of vast proportions including a 20-seat movie theater; a wine cellar that can hold 2,000 bottles; an elevator; a state-of-the-art gym; two pools; [and] a custom-designed library.” Oh, yes, it also has three bedrooms.

Koontz admits that his house is a “horrible indulgence,” one which derives, he believes, from the poverty and deprivation of his childhood, which resulted from “his cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, who physically and emotionally abused Koontz and his mother.”

Beneath the immaculate beauty and serenity of Koontz’s dream house--foundational to it, one might say--is the ugliness and brutality of his youth. However, Koontz has made much of the wealth that has financed his mansion by reprising the role of “his cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father” in the guise of the many villainous psychopaths and sociopaths who serve as his novels’ antagonists. It may not be a house which is built upon blood money, but it is a residence--and a very comfortable one, at that--which is built upon Koontz’s own childhood trauma and suffering.

One’s home may or may not be a castle or even a mansion, but even the “shack” in which Koontz says he grew up (“a shabby four-room house,” USA Today tells us, which “did not have a bathroom until he was 12”) may suggest a good deal about the person who lives there. Just as the house that Koontz built as an adult exhibits his success, both as a writer and as a man, so does the “shack” in which he lived as a boy suggest the squalor and misery of his life, then, as the child of the “cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, who physically and emotionally abused Koontz and his mother.”

It also suggests the environmental forces which, along with one’s genetic inheritance, helps to shape and mold the child, who, as William Wordsworth tells us, “is the father of the man.” In Koontz’s case, his deplorable childhood catapulted him to fame and fortune, rather than to infamy and poverty and to love, rather than hatred, for his fellow man (and, of course, golden retrievers). Koontz’s success is a testament to the greatness of his heart.

Among Ed Gein's "treasures"

Such is not always the case, of course. Ed Gein, the basis for such characters as Psycho’s Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, is a case in point. Gein’s mother was a stern, disapproving religious fanatic who could have been (but was not) the model that Stephen King used for Carrie White’s mother. While she was yet alive, to physically and emotionally abuse her son, the farmhouse in which Ed lived, with her and (until their deaths), his father (who was, like Koontz’s father, a “cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, who physically and emotionally abused” Gein “and his mother”) was fairly neat and orderly. However, Gein’s father died, and then Gein, it is believed, murdered his elder brother, leaving him alone with his mother in the remote farmhouse near Plainfield, Wisconsin, where whatever was festering inside Gein developed into a full-blown psychosis characterized by schizophrenia.

Following the death of Gein’s mother, the farmhouse became a horrific parody of its former self, with Gein decorating the walls with masks cut from the faces of the dead bodies he exhumed. He used human skulls for soup bowls. He upholstered chairs with human skin. He adorned the posts of his bed with his victims’ skulls. There were other horrors, too: noses, pieces of human bone, human heads, salted labia, refrigerated organs, lips on a string.

A grave robber, Gein, who was also both a transvestite and an aspiring transsexual, dressed in a vest that sported a female cadaver’s breasts, leggings of flesh, and a mask that had once been the face of one of the 40 dead women he’d exhumed from local cemeteries between 1947 and 1952.

The “house of horrors,” as Gein’s residence became known, was not the only site on the farm that displayed the horrors of its resident’s madness. The shed out back contained a decapitated female corpse that, split down the abdomen, from throat to pubes, was “dressed out” like a “deer, as John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker observe in their 1988 study, Obsession: The FBI's Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back (367–368).

One of the differences between Koontz and Gein was certainly their mothers. According to Koontz, his mother sought to protect him from his father, often taking the brunt of his physical abuse to protect her son from her husband’s drunken violence, and she showed her son the love that his father denied him. An uncle was also a father figure in Koontz’s life, providing an example, Koontz confesses, of how a man should act.

Gein’s mother was not protective or loving. Instead, she herself was cruel and abusive, and there was no man in Gein’s life from whom he could learn the lessons in manhood that Koontz learned from his uncle. Sadly, the community didn’t pay Gein much mind, except when his neighbors had use for a handyman or Gein was purchasing supplies from one of their stores. Another difference between Koontz and Gein, of course, lies in the temperaments and characters of the men, Koontz and Gein, themselves--in their genetics, yes, but, also, it seems, in their souls.

Ed Gein's "House of Horrors"

This difference, perhaps the critical one, is mysterious and, it may be, inexplicable. Nevertheless, such mysteries themselves can inspire tales of terror, as Koontz points out in How to Write Best-Selling Fiction (1981). Explaining to readers how his ideas for stories are sometimes teased out by his writing a series of narrative hooks (“gripping opening” paragraphs or sentences), Koontz cites the following as the one that inspired him to write A Voice in the Night:

“You ever killed anything?” Roy asked.

He let his imagination play with the sentence, and, Koontz says, “for reasons I can’t explain, I decided that Roy was a boy of about fourteen,” and, before long, he’d roughed out a two-page outline of his novel, after which, he says, “within minutes I knew I was writing a novel about the frightening duality of human nature, about the capacity for good and the capacity for evil, both of which exist in every man and woman” (66-68). His was a familiar storyline, for it was one he’d seen played out before him by his virtuous mother and sadistic father every day of his childhood.

Even when a home is not a house, but a hotel, for instance, as the Overlook Hotel becomes for Jack Torrance and his family, wife Wendy and son Danny. Like Koontz’s father and many of his novels’ own antagonists (and like Gein’s father), Torrance is also a sadistic alcoholic failure. In fact, it is violent temper that has cost him his previous position as a teacher at a preparatory school and the reason that he must accept the job of becoming the Overlook Hotel’s winter caretaker that is offered to him at the outset of the novel. The fact that his behavior has resulted in his family’s displacement from their home and their relocation to a hotel seems to symbolize the spiritual homelessness to which Torrance has subjected not only himself but his wife and child as well and the tenuousness of their lives, both as individuals and as a family. Of course, things deteriorate even more, going from bad to worse in short order, as, no doubt, King’s own childhood did when his father abandoned him, his older brother, and his mother to poverty and hardship when King was two years old.

In Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, Tony Williams argues that The Exorcist’s Regan MacNeil “misses her absent father” and “resents” her mother’s “involvement with. . . Burke Dennings,” whose “foul-mouthed, sexually explicit nature influences her” (107). The family’s Georgetown townhouse suggests that Regan’s mother, Chris, an actress, seeks the good life, as it is defined by the materialistic, rather predatory society in which she lives, even at the expense of her daughter’s welfare and happiness, making Regan ripe pickings for the devil who will soon possess her, causing the preadolescent girl to act out some of the “sexually explicit” behavior about which Dennings speaks. In this case, the affluent, well-appointed townhouse of the up-and-coming actress contrasts sharply with the cost of such affluence which is born by the homeowner’s daughter.

Likewise, “Flowers in the Attic depicts family misfortunes following [the] father’s death and their arrival at Foxworth Hall, the domain of their maternal grandparents,” Williams observes: “Speaking of Foxworth Hall as ‘grandfather’s house,’ she [Cathy Dollanganger] recounts the domain’s effect on her, ‘I always remember even my first impression was one of fear and wonder. . . lost childhood, innocence shattered and all our dreams destroyed by what we would find,’” and her older brother Corey “immediately recognizes” the house “as a domain of witches and monsters.” The children are right, for they are soon imprisoned in the attic, where their only source of light is “sunshine through a barred window” (264-265).

Marion Crane, of Psycho, wants the domestic bliss of simple everydayness, as represented, in her dreams, by her own “house with my mother’s picture on the wall and my sister helping me to broil a big steak for the three of us”; instead, she gets Norman Bates, dressed up like his dead mother, dead animals stuffed and mounted on the wall of the Bates Motel office, and a knife in her shower. The harsh reality of her life (lived on the lam after absconding with her employer’s money to finance a life with her married boyfriend) is far removed from the one of her dreams, a point which is hard to miss, with her blood swirling down the drain in her shabby room at the dilapidated Bates Motel.

The absence of the father or the presence of a cruel and abusive father are only some of the themes that may result from childhood, and, as the example of Ed Gein (and Carrie White) indicate, the mother can be as culpable as the father in abusing his or her parental responsibilities. Whatever the theme, however, setting has, in the form of residences, often mirrored, and, indeed, has sometimes symbolized, the state of residents’ minds. It has done so since Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (and before), and it is likely to be a handy convention for implying the same sort of abusive pasts, madness, and mayhem that continues to produce unsettling, even horrifying, effects in the present.

Your own character, whether he or she is the story’s protagonist or antagonist, may not live in the “shack” in which Koontz grew up or the “house of horrors” that Gein’s residence became, but it should be distinctive and, more importantly, it should mirror, or even symbolize, his or her past or present mental state and, perhaps, suggest the forces that helped, for better or for worse, shape the man or woman he or she is today. So, next time you’re considering your story’s setting, ask yourself where your characters live and what their houses look like, inside and out. Make sure that setting reflects character, the way it often does in everyday life.

What’s So Scary About. . . .

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Too often, writers write the way people too often speak: without thinking or, more specifically, without planning. They hope for inspiration as they put pen to paper or (more typically fingertips to keyboard). However, a bit of forethought could go a long way, in horror writing or in the writing of any other genre of fiction. By brainstorming as to what’s so scary about a potential or chosen setting, the horror writer is better able to capitalize upon features of the locale that are uniquely or especially eerie, frightening, or repulsive. Here are a few key settings for horror stories. The aspiring horror writer can add more of his or her own and update the list as new elements of the horrible and the terrible occur to him or her concerning such places.

Attic

It is seldom visited, and its contents, to some extent, are apt to be forgotten; therefore, the attic is more or less unfamiliar and may house dangers, such as bats, rats, spiders, rabid squirrels, or human intruders.

It is unlit or dimly lit and full of shadows in which dangers may lurk or be concealed.

Its contents may be old or unused and may, therefore, represent mementos of death.

It is not spacious, and it lacks headroom, making one feel trapped.

Depending upon the weather, it could be hot, humid, musty, or damp.

It could smell of mold decay (if the body of an animal that has died in the attic’s walls or elsewhere has begun to rot).

Because of the boxes, crates, and other containers it often contains, the attic features many potential hiding places from which one may be ambushed.

It may lack continuous flooring, which impedes movement and escape.

Its being little visited and kept locked suggests that the attic is a “forbidden” place.

It seems unnaturally quiet.

Noises, lights, and smells, in a closed or locked attic suggests that something is amiss (i. e., that the attic is occupied by an animal, a human intruder, or a ghost, perhaps).

The ladder or the narrow, steep flight of steps leading to the attic suggests the unusual character of the attic.

It is isolated from the rest of the house and, therefore, from the rest of the family.

Its floorboards and hinges may creak.

It is likely to be unfurnished, undecorated, and unadorned; it may be unfinished as well, suggesting a place that has been abandoned and lacks the typical comforts of home.

Note: Flowers in the Attic is set, in large part, in an attic.

Basement

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

The knowledge that, in descending a ladder or a flight of steps, one is going underground (where things are often buried) enhances the uneasiness one may feel
in entering a basement.

Its windows, if any, are apt to be small, perhaps mere vertical slits, which obscures one’s vision to the outside world and makes escape impossible.

It may contain a furnace, the fiery grate or interior of which, in the otherwise relative darkness, may appear eerie or even hellish.

Its cupboards, if any, may contain unusual odds and ends or “secrets” that are better left unknown.

Its walls may be stained or discolored or in disrepair.

Note: The movie The People Under the Stairs is set mostly in a family’s basement.

Crawlspace

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

It is even more cramped and inspires claustrophobia even more than an attic or a
basement, reducing movement to a slow, even potentially painful, crawl.

It is dirty and may be stuffy or musty.

Its pipes, joists, beams, and other obstructions impede movement and/or escape.

Animal carcasses could be present or their bones may be scattered inside the crawlspace. (John Wayne Gacy buried the bodies of many of his victims in his house’s crawlspace, and a lesbian stalker lived in her victim’s crawlspace.)

Tunnels from the crawlspace could lead elsewhere.

Note: As its title implies, the movie Crawlspace featured this setting.

Hotel

It is large, both in space and in the number of rooms, allowing multiple possibilities of ambush, for being trapped, or for having one’s escape cut off.

It is full of strangers, some or all of whom may be hostile or untrustworthy.

As a guest, one is in a dependent role.

Others have keys to one’s room or suite.

It could be haunted.

It operates on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week basis, even while one is asleep and, therefore, vulnerable).

One could get stuck in an elevator, between floors.

Who knows what extra ingredients could be added to a drink in the hotel’s cocktail lounge or to a meal served in the hotel’s restaurant or delivered by room service?

One or more of its employees could be replaced by imposters.

Any weakness in its security could be exploited.

Its surveillance cameras are watching guests all the time, everywhere.

It could be isolated; even when it is not, it is a self-contained and relatively self-sufficient world unto itself (a total institution) of great resources.

It can feature fountains or statues in its lobby and courtyards or grounds.

It can harbor strange sights and sounds (and smells).

Its floor plans could be like a mazes, and, behind each door, a possible threat could wait to ambush a guest.

Power may fail.

Fog or other atmospheric or meteorological effects may occur.

Insects, animals, or humans may intrude.

Note: Stephen King’s short story “1408” takes place in a hotel, as does the movie, 1408, based upon it; King’s novel (and the movie based upon it), The Shining also takes place in a hotel.

Mansion

Many of the eerie elements associated with a hotel are also associated with a mansion, making a mansion scary for the same reasons that a hotel may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a mansion:

Things look different in the dark than they do in the light.

It is isolated behind walls and iron gates, obscured by trees and other vegetation.

Its ornamentation and decoration may be odd (demon doorknockers, gargoyles,
bizarre statues or portraits).

It is associated with an ancestry and heirs (in other words, the house has a past, as it were, which may be filled with guilty secrets).

Its library may contain forbidden books.

“What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?” What, indeed!

It may have an evil-looking façade or aura (as does the House of Usher, the
Amityville house, and Ed Gein’s house).

Its grounds may contain the family’s private cemetery.

It can be personified (“if these walls could only talk!”).

Almost by definition, abandoned houses are scary (they suggest the fragility of life, or relationships, of stability, and a person, too, as a former resident, may be fragile, unstable, or abandoned.)

It could be really haunted or it could become “haunted” (e. g., as a Halloween fund-raiser), attracting real ghosts or demons.

Its various rooms symbolize various aspects of the personality, as dream dictionaries indicate.

An ascent can become a descent.

What was left behind in an abandoned mansion (a mirror, a birdcage, a cabinet, an organ) could be demonic.

Abandoned and in a state of disrepair, it is apt to be unsafe because of weak floors or stairs or crumbling ceilings or walls.

Note: Many horror stories, both in print and on film, including The Amityville Horror, Rose Red, ‘Salem’s Lot, Psycho, and The Haunting of Hill House being but a few of the better known among them, are set, in full or in large part, in mansions.

Island

It is remote and inaccessible.

It may be inhabited by “savages” and/or strange and dangerous plants and animals.

It is at the “mercy” of the sea.

It may contain caverns, mountains, or forests that are habitats for unusual, or even bizarre, and threatening menaces of a vegetative, animal, or human nature.

It may have an odd shape (Skull Island) that is frightening in itself.

It may have been used for nefarious purposes.

It may be volcanic.

It may suggest an alternative evolutionary origin.

Note: The Island of Dr. Moreau, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and many other novels and movies take place upon islands.

How to Haunt a House: Part I

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Ed Gein's house, a haunted residence if ever there was one!

Think of the haunted house stories and novels you’ve read and of the haunted house movies you’ve seen. Most have specific elements in common. In considering how to haunt the house in your story, novel, or movie script, you’ll want to learn from your predecessors as to what they (and their readers or viewers) found particularly effective. Then, you’ll want to emulate them, but by adding to, rather than simply copying, the conventions they employed.

Even a nodding familiarity with the haunted house as a horror story setting suggests that such a domicile needs to be spacious--the roomier, the better. In Gothic horror, from which contemporary horror fiction in large part originates, the original haunted house was a castle or a manor house. Often, it was of several stories, including an attic and a basement.

When castles and palaces became untenable in horror fiction (which, today, anyway, is written, after all, for the masses, not for the fortunate few), authors employed mansions and--in the case, at least, of Stephen King, hotels (The Shining, “1408”)--and, in the case of Bentley Little, both mansions (The House) and a resort (The Resort) (2004). King (and others) has even haunted entire towns, albeit not necessarily with ghosts per se: in Desperation (1996) and its companion volume, The Regulators (1996), the demon Tak haunts a Nevada mining town and a suburban community, respectively, and, in ‘Salem’s Lot, a vampire is the culprit who disturbs residents and brings down property values, whereas, in It, the haunt is a protean shape shifter.

The point is (and, yes, there is a point) that haunted houses must be big, spacious dwellings. Cottages and bungalows need not apply, nor should efficiencies, garden apartments, or small condos.

The Psycho house

Houses have to be palatial for a couple of reasons. First, if the ghost pops up in the same location all the time, he, she, or it soon becomes predictable, and a ghost whose actions are predictable isn’t all that scary. In addition, it’s pretty easily avoided unless, perhaps, it’s haunting the domicile’s one and only bathroom’s commode (an unlikely point of interest for even ghosts, it would seem). A ghost that has the run of the house--especially a palatial abode--can pop up unexpectedly, since he, she, or it is not restricted to one or two rooms. The resident is as likely to see the ghost in the basement as in the attic, in a closet, in a mirror at the end of the entrance hall, or on the staircase between floors.

Various rooms also allow it to do various things, all of which could (and should) be fairly horrific. In It, after building suspense for beaucoup pages, King lets his readers walk downstairs with one of his characters, and, entering the dark and clammy subterranean chamber to feed the furnace, the character, and readers along with him, sees, in its flooded interior, the bloated corpse of the character’s brother as it floats past among other debris when there’s no way in hell that the boy’s body (or the debris) should be there. The result? Readers, like the character in the scene, are horrified--and terrified. This scene wouldn’t play out as well in the pantry, the linen closet, or the attic.

Likewise butcher’s knives and meat cleavers, available in the kitchen, make frightful props for ghosts (especially poltergeists) to wield, and a bedroom pillow makes a handy smothering device in hostile ghostly hands. Foods in pantries can include nasty surprises--maggots are only one of the many things that squirm to mind. Anything can crawl out from under a bed or spring from a closet, and God only knows what sights may be seen in hallway mirrors. A drowned person’s ghost may appear in the shower (An American Haunting) or in the bathtub (The Shining).

A spacious house has space enough to house many rooms, and each room, as a good (or even a not-so-good) dream dictionary makes clear, is often symbolic of a particular aspect of the self. As Dream Moods’ “Online Guide to Dream Interpretation” points out:

To see a house in your dream, [sic] represents your own soul and self. Specific rooms in the house indicate a specific aspect of your psyche. In general, the attic represents your intellect, the basement represents the unconscious. . . .

To ascertain what each room represents in the iconography of dreamland, simply look up each room; “Online Guide to Dream Interpretation” will offer specific suggestions, and, as a writer, you make the connections between the character’s inner emotional or mental state and the room (and the condition of the room):

To dream that you are in a basement, [sic] symbolizes your unconscious mind and intuition. The appearance of the basement is an indication of your unconscious state of mind and level of satisfaction.

To dream that the basement is in disarray and messy, [sic] signifies. . . confusion . . . which you need to sort out. It may also represent your perceived faults and shortcomings.

Dream Moods’ dictionary indicates that various parts of the house and the condition in which these parts appear also represent aspects of the dreamer’s (or the haunted character’s) self:

To see a roof in your dream, [sic] symbolizes a barrier between two states of consciousness. It represents a protection of your consciousness, mentality, and beliefs. It is an overview of how you see yourself and who you think you are.

To dream that you are on a roof, [sic] symbolizes boundless success. If you fall off the roof, [sic] suggests that you do not have a firm grip and solid foundation on your advanced position.

To dream that the roof is leaking, [sic] represents distractions, annoyances, and unwanted influences in your life. It may also indicate that new information will dawn on you. Alternatively, it may suggest that something is finally getting through to you.

Perhaps someone is imposing and intruding their thoughts and opinions on you.

To dream that the roof is falling in, [sic] indicates that you high ideals are crashing down on you. Perhaps you are unable to live up to your own high expectations.

There are plenty of other entries (and punctuation errors) in the dictionary that suggest ways in which the rooms of a haunted house may be used to symbolize the haunted character’s (or other characters’) states of mind. Make a list of the rooms, the parts of a house, and even the furniture and other accoutrements of a residence, and look them up in this or another dream dictionary or a dictionary of symbols to see what such places and things have tended to suggest and symbolize concerning human minds and behavior. Your fiction can capitalize on such leads by using appropriate rooms to suggest specific characteristics and states of mind with respect to your characters, including the ghosts themselves.

Another source worth checking out is Fantasy and Science Fiction's Dictionary of Symbolism, which offers this entry concerning “house”:

Just like the city, the TEMPLE, the palace, and the MOUNTAIN, the house is one of the centers of the world. It is a sacred place, and it is an image of the universe. It parallels the sheltering aspect of the Great Mother, and it is the center of civilization. In Jungian psychology, what happens inside a house happens inside ourselves. Freudian psychology associates the house with the WOMAN, in a sexual sense; a house is undoubtedly a feminine symbol. Shelter and security are words commonly used surrounding house. [It] has a correspondence with the universe, [with] the roof as heaven, the windows as deities and the body as the earth. [It is] the repository of all wisdom.

One is also advised to study Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful use of a house, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), to represent the emotional and mental states of his protagonist, Roderick Usher.

Other haunted house stories (listed chronologically) you’ll want to read are:

• Castle of Otranto, The (1764), by Horace Walpole: Conrad Manfred’s decision to divorce and remarry causes horrifying events to occur within his family’s castle.
• Mysteries of Udolpho, The (1794), by Ann Radcliffe: After the death of her father, Emily St. Aubert moves in with her aunt, who marries Montoni; the women go to Udolpho to live, and Emily is separated from her suitor, Valancourt, as Montoni seeks to force Emily’s aunt to sign over the estate which Emily would otherwise inherit.
• Haunted and the Haunters, The (1857), by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Mesmerism and magnetism combine with alchemy and Rosicrucian mysticism as the protagonist seeks immortality.
• “Red Room, The” (1894), by H. G. Wells: A skeptic discovers that an allegedly haunted room really is haunted, but not by ghosts.
• Turn of the Screw, The (1898), by Henry James: Is the governess seeing ghosts or is something even more horrible happening to her (and the children in her charge)?
• House on the Borderland, The (1908), by William Hope Hodgson: Two men investigate a house that seems linked to an identical dwelling in the very pit of hell.
• “Rats in the Walls, The” (1924), by H. P. Lovecraft: Investigating the sound of rats in the walls of his ancestral estate, the protagonist discovers that his family lived in a subterranean city, feeding upon their fellow humans.
• Stir of Echoes, A (1958), by Richard Matheson: This novel inspired the movie of the same title.
• Haunting of Hill House, The (1959), by Shirley Jackson: Psychics investigate an allegedly haunted house, and one of them, Eleanor, is possessed by the supernatural entity they encounter there.
• Hell House (1971), by Richard Matheson: A millionaire hires psychics to explore the possibility of life after death.
• Shining, The (1977), by Stephen King: An alcoholic writer’s descent into madness ends on a bad note when he takes on the duties of caretaker during a hotel’s off season.
• “1408” (1999) by Stephen King: A skeptical writer learns the errors of his ways after he stays in a hotel room that is supposedly haunted.
• House, The (1997), by Bentley Little: Five strangers discover they all grew up in an identical house situated on the gateway between this world and another, far darker place.

These movies, featuring haunted houses, are also worth a peek, preferably between one’s fingers:

• Uninvited, The (1944): A couple buys a haunted house.
• Ghost Ship (1952, 2002): A salvage crew, towing a lost passenger ship to harbor, finds it is haunted.
• House on Haunted Hill, The (1958, 1999): Partygoers will receive a cash reward, if they can survive a night in a haunted house.
• House That Dripped Blood, The (1970): A Scotland yard investigator investigates mysterious disappearances related to a vacant house.
• Amityville Horror, The (1979, 2005): In this movie, based upon an actual hoax, newlyweds move into a house in which a murder was committed.
• Changeling, The (1980): A man’s isolated country estate is haunted by a ghost.
• Shining, The (1980): An alcoholic writer’s descent into madness ends on a bad note when he takes on the duties of caretaker during a hotel’s off season.
• Poltergeist (1982): Ghosts haunt a family in their new house.
• Sixth Sense, The (1999): Cole, a boy who sees ghosts, helps a depressed child psychologist, Malcolm Crowe. Coincidence?
• Stir of Echoes, A (1999): A hypnotized skeptic, Tom Witzky, begins to see a ghost, which leads to the solution to a murder.
• What Lies Beneath (2000): A woman starts seeing things--and hearing things--or does she?
• Others, The (2001): The residents of a house turn out to be the ghosts who haunt the residence.
• Rose Red (2002): Psychics investigate an allegedly haunted house.
• Grudge, The (2004): A ghost, born of a grudge, haunts a nurse who cares for a housebound invalid.
• Skeleton Key, The (2005): A hospice worker decides to risk it all on what lies behind a locked attic door.
• American Haunting, An (2006): A girl’s father has a split personality, one of which she mistakes for an evil ghost.
• 1408 (2007): A skeptical writer learns the errors of his ways after he stays in a hotel room that is supposedly haunted.

In this post, we learned two rules about how to haunt a house. The first rule in haunting a house is to make the residence a big house (but not necessarily a prison). The second rule is to make sure that your haunted house houses many rooms, or, as many writers would say, chambers, each of which is an appropriate and handy opportunity to present a different ghost or a different aspect of the same ghost (or the protagonist’s own inner ghosts).

In our next post, before going outside, we’ll examine another rule or two concerning how to haunt a house.

Total Institutions As Horror Story Settings

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A total institution is a world unto itself. It is more or less self-contained and can function pretty much independently, without the need for an inordinate amount of outside assistance or support. These are examples of such institutions, many of which, for reasons we will consider in just a moment, are excellent as settings for horror stories:

• Boarding schools
• Colonies
• Circuses and carnivals
• Dude ranches
• Labor and logging camps
• Hospitals, medical and psychiatric
• Hotels
• Managed-care facilities and nursing homes
• Military and certain other government installations
• Monasteries and nunneries
• Museums and art galleries
• Prisons and reform schools
• Religious cult facilities
• Religious retreats
• Resorts
• Ships and submarines
• Spaceships or space stations
• Summer camps
• Universities

These locations supply much of their own casts of characters. A boarding school will be populated by administrators, students, support staff, and teachers. They may be visited, occasionally, by parents. Dude ranches will feature administrators, guests, riding instructors, and support staff. Hotels will include managers, desk clerks, bellhops and other support staff, including cooks and bartenders, and, of course, guests. Managed-care facilities and nursing homes will be peopled with an activities director, nurses, orderlies, managers, and patients. Family members, doctors, and government officials may visit such facilities on occasion. Military installations will include officers and enlisted personnel and some civilian support staff and may be visited on occasion by other military and civilian personnel, such as government officials, media personnel, and scientists or other experts. Prisons include guards, prisoners, support staff (such as a doctor and nurses), and wardens. Resorts include many of the same personnel as are featured at such other total institutions as hotels and dude ranches. Summer camps feature administrators, camp counselors, support staff, and campers. Parents may visit the camps as well, usually at the beginning and the end of the season. Universities are populated by administrators, professors, students, and a variety of support personnel such as secretaries, cooks, custodians, maintenance personnel, landscapers, and security and police forces. Such personnel can become characters in a horror story that takes place in a total institution.

A total institution can be remote from the rest of civilization. Even those that are in or near cities are, by their very nature as total institutions, set off from the larger community. In most cases, their isolation cuts them--and their residents and workers--off from the organizations and systems of the larger world, such as large-scale medical support, firefighting capabilities, law enforcement and military forces, educational institutions, power companies, repair services, grocery stores, gasoline supplies, and so forth, making them, over time, vulnerable on many levels. These institutions also cut off their residents and workers from the cultural belief system that supports daily life. Over a long period of time, the people in such places could revert to a primitive state or set up a society of their own that is based on values and beliefs that are alien to those of the larger world. Such institutions can also lead to the brainwashing of their residents and workers, especially when their isolation cuts them off from other views and perspectives against which to measure the ideas and statements of the institution’s leaders, creating an “us against them” mentality. Isolated total institutions can be vulnerable from both within and without.

Finally, the use of a total institution as a setting makes escape difficult or impossible once the horrors begin and puts the courage and resources of the characters to the ultimate test, the penalty for the failing of which is death, and the reward for passing is survival.

A few of the many stories (novels and movies) in which the action takes place in a total institution are:

• Alien (movie, by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, et. al.): The crew of the spaceship Nostromo investigates a signal from the moon of a nearby planet. On the moon, they discover a ruined and abandoned spaceship populated with monstrous aliens, one of which implants a fetus inside a Nostromo crew member, which is born aboard the crew’s vessel, where it rapidly attains adulthood. Total institution = spaceships.



• The Butterfly Revolution (novel, by William Butler): Winston Weyn maintains a diary in which he recounts the experiences he has at High Pines, a summer camp. The boys rebel against the camp leader, Mr. Warren, when he insists that they undertake a butterfly hunt. Taking over, they then also take over Low Pines, the nearby girls’ summer camp. Totalitarianism, serious crimes, and brutality ensue. Total institution = tropical island



• The Green Mile (novel, by Stephen King): A healer is convicted of sexually assaulting and killing two young girls whom he’d tried to cure and is sentenced to death. In the prison, he is tormented by a sadistic guard who ensures that the healer experiences a hideous death in the electric chair. Total institution = prison (and, later, a nursing home).



• It, the Terror From Beyond Space (movie, by Jerome Bixby): In rescuing the sole survivor from an expedition to Mars, a ship picks up a stowaway--the monstrous alien that killed the explorers. Now, it attacks the rescuers, picking them off one by one. Total institution: spaceship.



• Jurassic Park (novel, by Michael Crichton): Scientists use DNA recovered from the blood inside a mosquito preserved in amber to create dinosaurs, which they install in an island resort, but things go hideously wrong. Total institution = island resort.



• The Lord of the Flies (novel, by William Golding): Boys being evacuated during a war are stranded on a tropical island after the airplane that is transporting them is shot down. In an effort to institute order, a conflict arises that causes death and destruction among the boys. Total institution: tropical island. (Note: Stephen King often speaks of how he admires this novel and wishes he had written it.)



• The Relic (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child): A scientist undergoes a horrific transformation as a result of eating a strange jungle plant and terrorizes the employees and guests of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Total institution = museum.



• The Resort (Bentley Little): A haunted resort offers more fear and horror than fun in the sun for a vacationing family. Total institution = resort.



• The Shining (novel, by Stephen King) and 1048 (movie based on a short story by Stephen King): Hotels are the scenes for ghostly and demonic terror in this novel and this short story, respectively. Total institution = hotels.



• Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel, by Ray Bradbury): What’s coming is a carnival of horrible secrets and dark powers. Total institution = carnival



• Taps (movie, by Devery Freeman, Robert Mark Kamen, James Lineberger, and Darryl Ponicsan): Rather than allow their military school to be razed and replaced by condominiums, a team of cadets takes over the academy, fighting for their alma mater and its leader’s honor. Total institution = military boarding school.



• The Terror (novel, by Dan Simmons): A pair of ships become icebound in the Atlantic and are harassed by a strange creature that lives among the icebergs. Total institution: ships.

• University (novel, by Bentley Little): A Grecian god returns, wrecking havoc at an American university campus. Total institution = university.

• The Thing from Another World (movie, by Charles Lederer, based on a novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.): An alien shape shifter is discovered in a block of arctic ice; thawed out by scientists, it attacks and kills the staff of a remote research station. Total instution: arctic research station.