haunted houses, devouring mothers, body horror, and the insidious encroachment of fascism
Roberta Williams has pointed to several influences over the years, including the movie House on Haunted Hill (1959) and the novel Haunting of Hill House (also 1959), which are very easy to conflate.
When I'm emotionally invested I tend to show up for interviews overprepared, with the understanding that 75% of my questions will be time-wasters, false starts, or otherwise duds. (It often isn't until the second interview that things really get rolling.) One of my early questions for Williams, from a very long list of preliminary questions, was this:
In the text of Haunting of Hill House, Luke Sanderson refers to Hill House as "a mother house": oppressive, claustrophobic, suffocating, but also velvety, plush, and welcoming. When Eleanor (Nell) is introduced, we learn that she was her own mother's caregiver for 11 years; in that time, Nell's mother has 'eaten her up,' chipping away at Nell's confidence, her life's opportunities and possibilities, and Nell's own sense of self, which has left her vulnerable to the house's psychic attacks. Interestingly, in Phantasmagoria, it's not Adrienne who's drawn to the Carnovasch Estate but, rather, her husband Don, who appears to prioritize his career over his wife's well-being long before he is possessed. I couldn't help but wonder if the Carnovasch House could be read as a "husband house"—to borrow Shirley Jackson's own language—subtly domineering and stifling Adrienne's agency. What do you think?
Super-spoilers follow for all works cited.
Most haunted house stories are patterned after Bluebeard. In more contemporary stories like Phantasmagoria (1995), The Shining (1977), and The Amityville Horror (1977), it's as if the ghosts of Bluebeards past are feeding and stoking resentments in the house's latest tenant: usually, some sort of increasingly irritable husband or father figure. (The events chronicled in Amityville contain probable confabulation, but one uncontested detail is that the real-life house had, just a year prior, been the site of a gruesome family annihilation.)
One of the best haunted house stories ever written is Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House. In it, a paranormal researcher extends invitations to two women, Eleanor and Theodora, to stay at Hill House for observation. Up until this particular adventure Eleanor has served as sole caregiver to her own mother, whose control and demands have had a progressive, corrosive effect on Eleanor's sense of agency and autonomy. It's very Grey Gardens. (Shirley Jackson had well-documented mom issues.)
The four characters, including Eleanor, ascribe qualities to Hill House that mirror Eleanor's enmeshment with, or engulfment by, her own mother:
"The sense was that it wanted to consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house, maybe—oh, dear. I thought I knew what I was saying, but I’m doing it very badly."
Once inside the house, Eleanor's tenuous grasp on her identity begins to "slip":
"Look. There’s only one of me, and it’s all I’ve got. I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it, but I know I’m not really going to be hurt and yet time is so long and even a second goes on and on and I could stand any of it if I could only surrender—"
"Surrender?" said the doctor sharply, and Eleanor stared.
"Surrender?" Luke repeated.
the mother house
Luke Sanderson, who is accompanying Eleanor and Theodora out of sheer boredom, is a wealthy playboy and Hill House's youngest heir:
"A mother house," Luke said, as they came down the steps from the veranda to the lawn, "a housemother, a headmistress, a housemistress."
And, in chapter VIII,
"It's all so motherly," Luke said. "Everything so soft. Everything so padded. Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down, and reject you at once—"
By novel's end, Eleanor has decided that she will effectively 'join' with the house, for no other reason than that it "wants her." To Eleanor's mind, it's the first time she has ever been wanted somewhere ("I've never been wanted anywhere").
In her introductory essay to the Penguin edition of Hill House, Laura Miller writes,
When Eleanor finally agrees to surrender to Hill House, to bury herself in its "folds of velvet and tassels and purple plush," it is her mother she goes chasing ("You're here somewhere") through the dark halls and up the treacherous library ladder. The "lovers meeting" she has spent the whole novel humming about materializes as a return to the womb that is also a grave. To anyone who has, like Jackson, labored mightily to transcend her parents' mistakes and shortcomings, the horror underlying Eleanor's full-circle journey is real as well as ghostly. It is the recognition that the harder you try to escape the emotional dynamics of your family of origin, the more likely you are to duplicate them. It feels like fate, like doom, but is it?
Is Eleanor the victim of Hill House or of herself? She would certainly call it the former, but self-knowledge is not her forte.
Unable to imagine a fairer future for herself, Eleanor "surrenders," ceding her own spirit to the toxic structure—that is to say, to the house itself—whereby her spirit will become incorporated with it. (In actuality, the character drives her car at high speed into a nearby tree; Eleanor's dying thought, in a too-late flash of clarity, is "Why don't they stop me?")
This could be an analogy for the way many people, in service of an -archy—cozying up to authority to ensure their own safety, perhaps even their survival—allow their identities to be subsumed and co-opted. They become a part of the toxic structure and, in so doing, become distortions of themselves over time. This is essentially body horror.
This distortion of Self is also generational, its own type of trauma. (It needn't be gendered, but the interpersonal violence of "I got mine" so often is.)
In video games, other examples of the "mother house" flavor of haunted mansion might include the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, ruled by GLaDOS, and Planet Zebes, with the first appearance of Mother Brain in the Metroid series. In the case of GLaDOS, there is an actual core 'spirit' or base personality of a human woman, "Caroline," upon whom the runaway A.I. is built. In both cases, the extant 'soul' or 'ghost' has become incorporated with the architecture of the hostile environment itself, such that the identity and qualities of the monstrous feminine can be neither distinguished nor disentangled from the setting.
I have already described the mother wound in a previous blog post:
Our anxious, beleaguered mothers are often the ones put in charge of readying us for a cruel world, what with its own caste system in the shape of an MLM. In other words, they're often our first exposure to patriarchal rules and structures: moms tend to be shunted into the role of the family cop.
Mother Brain and GLaDOS are very literal examples of the 'devouring mother', a Jungian shadow of its opposite archetype, the nurturing mother. Each terrorizes a sort of daughter figure—Samus Aran and Chell, respectively—to 'teach her the rules of the game'. The protagonists, in turn, run-and-gun through the gauntlet in order to earn their freedom and self-sovereignty.
But what if escape is impossible?
body horror: becoming set dressing
In conversation, writer Cara Ellison points out that Alien (1979) is a haunted-house story set in space and that the Nostromo's onboard computer is quite literally called MU/TH/UR ("Mother"). In the movie, crewmembers enter the soft, warmly-lit, womblike command room—imparting a sense of safety and security that is ultimately proven illusory—to plead with an A.I. that, in fact, does not care whether the crew lives or dies.
While the crew itself may function well enough like a healthy family, it must answer to a megacorporation that is poisoning the mission from the top down. As such, "Mother"—an invention that merely reflects Weyland-Yutani's corporate agenda—cannot be reprogrammed or reasoned with, and, for economic reasons, the Nostromo's crew is considered acceptable collateral damage.
In the Director's Cut of Alien, living humans, half-awake, are eventually entombed in a sort of organic exoskeleton that has invasively taken over the environment by seductive, coercive force. This new structure follows the soft curves of the original environment, but it is its own thing, a techno-organic landscape made of Giger's vertebrae and ribcages.
The literary progenitor is Lovecraft: An ancient polytheistic Evil tries, again and again, to emerge from the murky depths (of the ocean or of space, or thawing beneath the ice, or from the collective unconscious, or from somewhere throbbing behind the frontal lobe of the human brain), and it whispers to people and seeds in their bodies and brains etc., and there's mind control and hypnogogia and undulating and I struggle with how sexy it all is. Sorry, the devil wrote that.
Anyway, this corrupting, engulfing force wants nothing less than to propagate and perpetuate itself at the expense of humanity—our total destruction, basically. Then pretty soon your friends are acting weird, and later you find out that guy you previously defended online is an MRA now, or worse. It's easier to parse that degree of ideological betrayal as a type of 'bodysnatching', even though it's an emotional oversimplification and that guy always had the potential to become that guy, but you've always been so keyed into finding common ground that you constantly miss the non-negotiables until it's extremely too late.
Looking back, it's apparent why I've always had a fear of fish and zombies, as well as sprouting potatoes and other plant overgrowth. That reminds me, I need to find and unpack my gardening shears.
nihilism gives way to fascism
Speaking of zombie fish, the work of beloved author/illustrator and cat fancier Junji Ito serves almost as a correction to the nihilism of Lovecraft. Ito also deals in cosmic horrors and primal/primordial fears, and his stories' outcomes are no less predestined and fatalistic.
But in the face of a looming, impassive cosmic horror, there's "well, we at least have to believe one another, we have to stick together, and we have to at least try." Humankind might be a cosmological loser either way, but Ito's work is grounded in idealism and, subsequently, in the deep abiding grief of helplessness and loss. Which is a much more uncomfortable feeling for the reader, but it also contains a certain logos, or meaningfulness. Lovecraft's characters, in stark comparison, are unable to make sense of a senseless universe and just existentially nope out. ("This is fascist!" I exclaimed while reading Lovecraft's Complete Works in our home library, momentarily more distressed by the explicit desolation than by the implicit xenophobia.)
Still another advantage of Ito's work is his keen illustrative use of physical ailment as manifestation of spiritual sickness. So when a character's face and body are covered in seeping boils, for instance, the image itself might have shock value, but the real horror isn't the degree and severity of the infection so much as it is the question of "how long has this been going on?" This question is its own revelation; it turns out we are able to ignore grievous ills in one another until the corpus is entirely overtaken and the issue can no longer be ignored—or denied, or contained.
solution ("easy path")
By the end of Alien, crewmember Ellen Ripley is now seemingly alone—but for a single companion, an orange tabby cat, whose parallel instincts for self-preservation have saved him—and, before entering hypersleep for however-long, she assiduously completes the logs, putting down a record of what has passed.
However, in the penultimate scene of Alien, Ripley encounters a stowaway. Panicking, she suits up one last time: "You are my lucky star," she sings to herself in a trembling voice. "Lucky, lucky, lucky...." No one is coming to rescue her. She has to be her own lucky star.
What the character is demonstrating in this scene is something I like to call "kinship with one's own survivorship." It's the opposite of survivor guilt and is a trait that, for many of us, must be conscientiously cultivated.
Nuke it from orbit. Or use a grappling hook and thruster, or whatever else you might have at your disposal. Burn it away. You may be outgunned, but—if you're in a James Cameron movie, anyway—at least you have a flamethrower. Game over, man! Game over!
solution ("hard path"/complete)
Great! We won! We can certainly tell ourselves that we've torched the architecture and disconnected fully from the complicated intergenerational systems of conditioning that birthed us. I totally get that impulse; a lot of my family was a bad vibe, and I've spent most of my life resolute that I'll be different, that I'm already different. I won't be roleplaying in your fucked-up game!
Some might call that "running away." It's hopping into an escape pod and attempting to launch ourselves away from Mother. Even this is reactionary: in a sense, Mother is still running the show, except now we're just doing the opposite of whatever she tells us to do. Unfortunately, the Xenomorph is still hiding onboard, unnoticed, waiting in a slim crevice along the ship's wall.
In the original script for Alien, Ripley attempts her escape. However, just as the movie reaches its fever pitch—in the final confrontation, Ripley will always deploy a grappling hook, propelling the Xenomorph toward the shuttle's open hatch—the Xenomorph instead grabs onto the cord between them, as if this tether were a sort of umbilicus, and it swiftly clambers toward Ripley and pounces, killing her.
Then the shadowy figure actually pilots the ship toward Earth and, in a horrifying conclusion, does a perfect imitation of Tom Skerritt as it dictates the final voice memo. (Yeah, OK, the studio was right: people would not go for a talking Xenomorph.)
At this point my Jungian metaphor is starting to fall apart because, when the shadow embraces you, it also eats you—especially if it is a xenomorph. I don't even have time to talk about Samus Aran and baby metroids.
For all I know, time might flow in both directions—a notion that first occurred to me a few years ago, when I was thinking about the Catholic inclination to light candles for those who have already passed. Around the same time, I decided to reconsider, reconcile, the role my family had played in my life.
"I am healing the tree," I eventually told my therapist. I couldn't shake the feeling that all these ghosts were accompanying me to therapy appointments. By growing up and healing, I supposed, whatever was tied to me might be forced to heal, too. I decided I would try to be compassionate but fair. "Heal the tree," I kept repeating, a mantra.
Now I am ever tending to the garden of myself: pulling weeds, tilling soil, muttering "keep it tidy" under my breath. I am less afraid of pruning shears these days.