The Nightmare Factory (2 page)

So after a devoted horror fan is stuffed to the gills, thoroughly sated and consequently bored—what does he (the he’s traditionally out-number the she’s here) do next? Haunt the emergency rooms of hospitals or the local morgues? Keep an eye out for bloody mishaps on the freeway? Become a war correspondent? But now the issue has been blatantly shifted to a completely different plane—from movies to life—and clearly it doesn’t belong there.

The one remedy for the horror addict’s problem seems this: that if the old measure of medicine is just not strong enough—increase the dosage! (This pharmaceutical parallel is ancient but apt.) And thus we have the well-known and very crude basis for the horror film’s history of ever-escalating scare tactics. Have you already seen such old classics as
Werewolf of London
too many times? Sample one of its gore-enriched, yet infinitely inferior versions of the early 1980s. Of course the relief is only temporary; one’s tolerance to the drug tends to increase. And looking down that long open road there appears to be no ultimate drugstore in sight, no final pharmacy where the horror hunger can be glutted on a sufficiently enormous dose, where the once insatiable addict may, at last, be laden with all the demonic dope there is, collapse with sated obesity into the shadows, and quietly gasp: “enough.”

The empty pit of boredom is ever renewing itself, while horror films become less tantalizing to the marginally sadistic movie-goer.

And what is the
common
rationale for justifying what would otherwise be considered a just barely frustrated case of sadomasochism? Now we remember: to present us with horrors inside the theater (or the books, let’s not forget those) and thereby help us to assimilate the horrors on the outside, and also to ready us for the Big One. This does sound reasonable, it sounds right and rational. But none of this has anything to do with these three R’s. We are in the great forest of fear, where you can’t fight real experiences of the worst with fake ones (no matter how well synchronized a symbolic correspondence they may have). When is the last time you heard of someone screaming himself awake from a nightmare, only to shrug it off with: “Yeah, but I’ve seen worse at the movies” (or read worse in the books; we’ll get to them)? Nothing is worse than that which happens personally to a person. And though a bad dream may momentarily register quite high on the fright meter, it is, realistically speaking, one of the less enduring, smaller time terrors a person is up against. Try drawing solace from your half-dozen viewings of the
Texas Chain-Saw Massacre
when they’re prepping you for brain surgery.

In all truth, frequenters of horror films are a jumpier, more casually hysterical class of person than most. We need the most reassurance that we can take it as well as anyone, and we tend to be the most complacent in thinking that seventeen straight nights of supernatural-psycho films is good for the nerves and will give us a special power which non-horror-fanatics don’t have. After all, this is supposed to be a major psychological selling point of the horror racket, the first among its consolations.

It is undoubtedly the first consolation, but it’s also a false one.

Interlude: so long, consolations of mayhem

Perhaps it was a mistake selecting
Night of the Living Dead
to illustrate the consolations of horror. As a delegate from Horror-land this film is admirably incorruptible, oozing integrity. It hasn’t sold out to the kindergarten moral codes of most “modern horror” movies and it has no particular message to deliver: its only news is nightmare. For pure brain-chomping, nerve-chewing, sight-cursing insanity, this is a very effective work, at least the first couple of times or so. It neither tries nor pretends to be anything beyond that. (And as we have already found, nothing exists beyond that anyway, except more and more of
that
.) But the big trouble is that sometimes we forget how much more can be done in horror movies (books too!) than that. We sometimes forget that supernatural stories—and this is a very good time to boot nonsupernatural ones right off the train: psycho, suspense, and the like—are capable of all the functions and feelings of
real
stories. For the supernatural can serve as a trusty vehicle for careening into realms where the Strange and the Familiar charge each other with the opposing poles of their passion.

The Haunting
, for example. Besides being the greatest haunted house film ever made, it is also a great haunted human one. In it the ancient spirit of mortal tragedy passes easily through walls dividing the mysteries of the mundane world from those of the extra-mundane. And this supertragic specter never comes to rest in either one of these worlds; it never lingers long enough to give us forbidden knowledge of either the stars or ourselves, or anything else for that matter. To what extent may the “derangement of Hill House” (Dr. Markway’s diagnosis) be blamed on the derangement of the people who were, are, and probably will be in it? And vice versa of course. Is there something wrong with that spiral staircase in the library or just with the clumsy persons who try to climb it? The only safe bet is that something is wrong, wherever the wrongness lies…and lies and lies. Our poor quartet of spook-chasers—Dr. Markway, Theo, Luke, and Eleanor—are not only helpless to untie themselves from entangling puppet strings; they can’t even find the knots!

The ghosts at Hill House always remain unseen, except in their effects: savagely pummeling enormous oak doors, bending them like cardboard; writing assonant messages on walls (“Help Eleanor come home”) with an unspecified substance (“Chalk,” says Luke. “Or something
like
chalk,” corrects Markway); and in general giving the place a very bad feeling. We’re not even sure who the ghosts are, or rather were. The pious and demented Hugh Crane, who built Hill House? His spinster daughter Abigail, who wasted away in Hill House? Her neglectful companion, who hung herself in Hill House? None of them emerges as a discrete, clearly definable haunter of the old mansion. Instead we have an undefined presence which seems a sort of melting pot of deranged forces from the past, an anti-America where the very poorest in spirit settle and stagnate and lose themselves in a massive and insane spectral body.

Easier to identify are the personal specters of the living, at least for the viewer. But the characters in the film are too busy with outside things to look inside one another’s houses, or even their own. Dr. Markway doesn’t acknowledge Eleanor’s spooks. (She loves him, hopelessly.) Eleanor can’t see Theo’s spooks (she’s lesbian) and Theo avoids dwelling on her own. (“And what are you afraid of, Theo?” asks Eleanor. “Of knowing what I really want,” she replies, somewhat uncandidly.) Best of all, though, is Luke, who doesn’t think there even are any spooks, until near the end of the film when this affable fun-seeker gains an excruciating sense of the alienation, perversity, and strangeness of the world around him. “It should be burned to the ground,” he says of the high-priced house he is to inherit, “and the earth sown with salt.” This quasi-biblical quote indicates that more than a few doors have been kicked down in Luke’s private passageways. He
knows
now! Poor Eleanor, of course, has been claimed by the house as one of its lonely, faceless citizens of eternity. It is her voice that gets to deliver the reverberant last lines of the film: “Hill House has stood for eighty years and will probably stand for eighty more…and we who walk there, walk alone.” With these words the viewer glimpses a realm of unimaginable pain and horror, an unfathomable region of aching Gothic turmoil, a weird nevermoresville.

The experience is extremely disconsoling but nonetheless exhilarating.

But for a movie to convey such intense feeling for the supernatural is rare. (This one of course is a scrupulously faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s unarguably excellent novel.) The thing that is quite common, especially with fiction, is the phenomenon that produced the single-sentence paragraph above; in other words—the horror story’s paradox of entertainment. The thumping heart of the question, though, is what really entertains us? In opposition, that is, to what we only imagine entertains us. Entertainment, whatever we imagine its real source, is rightly regarded as its own justification, and this seems to be one of the unassailable consolations of horror.

But is it? (This won’t take long.)

Another test case

We are reading—in a quiet, cozy room, it goes without saying—one of M.R. James’ powerful ghost stories. It is “Count Magnus,” in which a curious scholar gains knowledge he didn’t even know was forbidden and suffers the resultant doom at the hands of the count and his betentacled companion. The story actually ends before we have a chance to witness its fabulous coup de grace, but we know that a sucked-off face is in store for our scholar. Meanwhile we sit on the sidelines (sipping a warm drink, probably) as the doomed academic meets a fate worse than any we’ll ever know. At least we think it’s worse, we hope it is…deep, deep in the subcellars of our minds we pray: “Please don’t let anything even
like
that happen to me! Not to
me
. Let it always be the other guy and I’ll read about him, even tremble for him a little. Besides, I’m having so much fun, it can’t be all that terrible. For him, that is. For me it would be unbearable. See how shaky and excitable I get just
reading
about it. So please let it always be the other guy.”

But it can’t always be the other guy, for in the long run we’re all, each of us, the other guy.

Of course in the short run it’s one of life’s minor ecstasies—an undoubted entertainment—to read about a world in which the very worst doom takes place in a restricted area we would never ever wander into and befalls somebody else. And this is the run in which all stories are read, as well as written. (If something with eyes like two runny eggs were after your carcass, would you sit down and write a story about it?) It’s another world, the short run; it’s a world where horror really is a true consolation. But it’s no compliment to Dr. James or to ourselves as readers to put too much stock in ghost stories as a consolation for our mortality, our vulnerability to real-life terrors. As consolations go, this happens to be a pretty low-grade one—demented complacency posing as beatitude.

So our second consolation lives on borrowed time at best. And in the long-run—where no mere tale can do you much good—is delusory.

(Perhaps the stories of H.P. Lovecraft offer a more threatening and admirable role to those of us devoted to doom. In Lovecraft’s work doom is not restricted to eccentric characters in eccentric situations. It begins there but ultimately expands to violate the safety zone of the reader (and the non-reader for that matter, though the latter remains innocent of Lovecraft’s forbidden knowledge). M.R. James’ are cautionary tales, lessons in how to stay out of spectral trouble and how nice and safe it feels to do so. But within the cosmic boundaries of Lovecraft’s universe, which many would call the universe itself, we are already in trouble, and feeling safe is out of the question for anyone with some brains and chance access to the manuscripts of Albert Wilmarth, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, or Prof. Angell’s nephew. These isolated narrators take us with them into their doom, which is the world’s. (No one ever gives a hoot what happens to Lovecraft’s characters as individuals.) If we knew what they know about the world and about our alarmingly tentative place in it, our brains would indeed reel with revelation. And if we found out what Arthur Jermyn found out about ourselves and our humble origins in a mere madness of biology, we would do as he did with a few gallons of gasoline and a merciful match. Of course Lovecraft insists on telling us things it does no good to know: things that can’t help us or protect us or even prepare us for the awful and inevitable apocalypse to come. The only comfort is to accept it, live in it, and sigh yourself into the balm of living oblivion. If you can only maintain this constant sense of doom, you may be spared the pain of foolish hopes and their impending demolishment.

But we can’t maintain it; only a saint of doom could. Hope leaks into our lives by way of spreading cracks we always meant to repair but never did. (Oddly enough, when the cracks yawn their widest, and the promised deluge comes at last, it is not hope at all that finally breaks through and drowns us.)

Interlude: see you later, consolations of doom

So when a fictional state of absolute doom no longer offers us possibilities of comfort—what’s left? Well, another stock role casts one not as the victim of a horror story but as its villain. That is, we get to be the monster for a change. To a certain extent this is supposed to happen when we walk onto those resounding floorboards behind the Gothic footlights. It’s traditional to identify with and feel sorry for the vampire or the werewolf in their ultimate moment of weakness, a time when they’re most human. Sometimes, though, it seems as if there’s more fun to be had playing a vampire or werewolf at the height of their monstrous, people-maiming power. To play them in our hearts, I mean. After all, it would be kind of great to wake up at dusk every day and cruise around in the shadows and fly on batwings through the night, stare strangers in the eye and have them under your power. Not bad for someone who’s supposed to be dead. Or rather, for someone who can’t die and whose soul is not his own; for someone who—no matter how seemingly suave—is doomed to ride eternity with a single and highly embarrassing obsession, the most debased junkie immortalized.

But maybe you could make it as a werewolf. For most of a given month you’re just like anybody else. Then for a few days you can take a vacation from your puny human self and spill the blood of puny human others. And once you return to your original clothes size, no one is any the wiser…until next month rolls around and you’ve got to do the whole thing again, month after month, over and over. Still, the werewolf’s lifestyle might not be so bad, as long as you don’t get caught ripping out someone’s throat. Of course, there might be some guilt involved and, yes, bad dreams.