Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Shakespearean Horrors in the Modern World

  Such is Shakespeare’s influence and importance, there have been many attempts to adapt his plays into every imaginable media form. Notable examples within horror literature and film include:

  •Theatre of Blood (1973): Possibly the greatest work of Shakespearean-influenced horror, this delightful movie stars Vincent Price as Edward Lionheart, an actor who takes vengeance on his scornful critics through elaborate devices taken straight from Shakespeare’s plays.

  •Titus (1999): Julie Taymor’s film version of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play combines arthouse and horror techniques to provide a stunning and spectacular adaptation. Extra horror associations are achieved by the casting of Anthony Hopkins as Titus following his performance as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and its sequels, particularly given the cannibalistic ending.

  •Romeo and Juliet vs. the Living Dead (2009): Low-budget and enthusiastic movie mash-up of Shakespeare’s classic tale of doomed love and the ubiquitous zombie.

  •Shakespeare Undead (2010): Along the lines of many horror mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this novel recasts William Shakespeare as an immortal vampire with powers of necromancy, handily explaining the breadth of his knowledge and experience. While the first novel is equal parts Twilight and Shakespeare in Love, the sequel, Zombie Island, retells the story of The Tempest through a period version of the Romero-esque zombie movie.

  While Titus Andronicus may be the clearest and most visceral of Shakespearean horrors, it is certainly not his only dalliance with darkness. The social and religious upheaval of the early modern era in which he was writing meant that there was a wealth of Gothic horror tropes on which he could draw. Not surprisingly, these moments of horror found expression predominantly, although not exclusively, in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Ghosts populate his history plays, and the fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream are not necessarily the innocent Victorian sprites of contemporary understanding. The transformation of Bottom in the same play also has potential for a much more horrific portrayal of the closeness between human and animal than its usual slapstick performance. However, it is the tragedies that represent the most developed and engaged examples of Shakespearean horrors.

  Julius Caesar (1600) can be seen as a precursor of the more surreal moments of Giallo movies, with its horrific portents, highly choreographed stabbing, and musically driven ghost scene. Although far less overtly horror-based than Shakespeare’s earlier Roman play, the supernatural and gory elements drive the play’s narrative and drama, with the focus on Caesar’s bloodied robe in particular bringing the audience face-to-face with the violent result of ambition. Such a use of horror elements is continued in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1600–1601). Shakespeare’s most celebrated play is dramatically dominated by the Freudian/supernatural presence of the former king’s ghost. The repeated calls for Hamlet to “Remember” his father set the tone for centuries of hauntings, and productions on stage and screen have continually been heavily influenced by contemporary horror techniques in their representations of this spectral figure.

  The claustrophobic tragedy of Othello (1604) contains a vein of problematic racist representations of the titular Moor. The play itself is more nuanced but does depict an early modern idea of the black soldier as monstrous and inhuman. This representation is a development from that of the villainous Aaron in Titus—a character who takes great relish in his role as villain. Instead, the horror of Othello is in the readiness of civilized society to dehumanize an individual labeled as “other.” This effect is achieved in part through reference to contemporary ideas of truly monstrous races that were popular in travel literature of the time: “And of the Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (Shakespeare 1997, Act 1, Scene 3, Lines 142–144). The introduction of such creatures leads to a spectrum of humanity that Iago exploits in horrific terms of proto–white supremacy. The eventual death of Desdemona is a prototypical foreshadowing of the enraged and murderous madman that would become a staple of sensationalist horror literature.

  If Othello is claustrophobic and enclosed geographically, then King Lear (1606) takes the horror inside and relocates it into the mental degeneration of the eponymous ruler. While most famously providing a chilling examination of the effects of alienation and senility, the play also makes use of early modern traditions of demons and fairies throughout Lear’s isolation on the heath. The liberal use of Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) relocates the satirical listing of demons into a pagan, primitive version of folk horror in which individuals feel threatened by forces lurking just outside of their understanding. Of course, Lear also infamously features perhaps Shakespeare’s most vivid use of “splatter” as the Duke of Gloucester’s eyes are savagely removed onstage and then stamped on.

  Macbeth (1607) can be seen as the culmination of Shakespeare’s various uses of horror imagery and motifs, containing as it does a veritable “best of” with gore, ghosts, witches, and supernatural omens. Often considered to be capitalizing on contemporary concerns with witchcraft (James VI and I having written a book on the subject), its repeated use of motifs such as the omens and hauntings from Julius Caesar suggest that Shakespeare was providing his paying audience with what they were demanding. This popular aspect of Shakespeare as a writer further undermines the traditional split between him as high culture and horror; in many ways he was working within a tradition similar to that of the sensationalist writers of later periods.

  In Macbeth the horror elements are crucial in developing and furthering the plot, resulting in the play being more clearly identifiable as a horror text than any other of Shakespeare’s works, apart perhaps from the body horror of Titus Andronicus. The dark setting, full of supernatural and folkloric aspects, creates an oppressive world that serves as a combination of the claustrophobia of Othello and the pagan outdoors of Lear. Aside from this atmosphere of dread, Macbeth contains a number of key iconic moments of stage horror. The uncanny appearance of the bearded witches, Banquo’s bloody ghost, and gory visions emanating from the witches’ cauldron are all powerful moments of horror that have been memorably depicted on both stage and screen. The associations with horror are perhaps most clearly shown by the borrowings form horror cinema in movie versions of Macbeth, ranging from Roman Polanski’s 1971 version to the most recent one directed by Justin Kurzel (2015). The latter’s use of ideas of post-traumatic stress disorder is a particularly effective marriage of old and new to update the horrific elements of Shakespeare’s text.

  Macbeth and horror are connected outside of the realms of the text, however, as can be seen in long-standing theatrical superstition. Actors traditionally refuse to utter the name of the “Scottish play” outside of performance for fear that it will lead to a horrific accident. It is surely no coincidence that this superstitious belief applies to the most developed horror text of Shakespeare’s canon. The dark and malevolent atmosphere of Macbeth leaks from the world of the play and into its wider cultural reception. While Macbeth is the culmination of Shakespeare’s use of tragic horror, it is not his last exploration of horror in drama.

  Shakespeare’s late plays have often proved difficult to categorize, representing a departure from the traditional genres of comedy and tragedy, and variously labeled as romances, tragicomedies, or simply “late plays.” Some of this generic confusion can be attributed to their use of horror—moments that often seem particularly out of place with the general mood of these plays. Cymbeline features a decapitated corpse during one particularly horrific scene when the play’s heroine, Imogen (or Innogen depending on the edition), marks her face with its blood under the false belief that it is her fiancé, Posthumous. This visceral set piece shows the tragicomic turn in these plays, as it simultaneously provides a moment of stage horror and the potential for a comic ending as the audience knows the body is in fact that of the villainous Cloten. The Winter
’s Tale takes place in an atmosphere of pagan belief and suspected witchcraft, seemingly concluding with the magical transformation of a statue into a living person. The play also includes the most famous stage direction in theater—Exit, pursued by a bear—a nod to the shared performance space and a precursor of the creature feature genre that would rise to prominence in twentieth-century horror.

  Shakespeare’s The Tempest is often considered one of his most modern plays, being understood as an exploration of colonialism and Western exploitation. The incursion onto the island by the shipwrecked Italians plays out like a prototype for King Kong with the monstrous ape represented by the problematic figure of Caliban, variously described as a fish and a monster. The drunkard Trinculo’s first reaction is to consider the potential rewards for exhibiting the islander at shows in England. Of course, more modern approaches to the play reposition Caliban as the colonized victim and Prospero as the oppressive monster.

  Shakespearean horrors, therefore, cover a wide range of the areas that subsequent horror writers would go on to use, cementing his role as an important influence on—and participant in—the literature of fear. The centrality of his works in culture and education mean that Shakespeare’s use of horror creates and works within a shared cultural space in which his poetry and horror sit side by side.

  Stephen Curtis

  See also: Ghost Stories; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Three, Reference Entries: Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Aebischer, Pascale. 2004. Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Desmet, Christy, and Anne Williams, eds. 2009. Shakespearean Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

  Drakakis, John, and Dale Townsend, eds. 2008. Gothic Shakespeares. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

  Pridham, Matthew. 2012. “Razors to the Heart: William Shakespeare and Horror Fiction.” Weird Fiction Review, April 10. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/04/razors-to-the-heart-william-shakespeare-and-horror-fiction.

  Shakespeare, William. [1604] 1997. Othello. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 2091–2174. New York and London: Norton.

  Theatre of Blood. [1973] 2002. DVD. Directed by Douglas Hickox. Twentieth-Century Fox.

  Yeo, Colin. “‘Supp’d full with horrors’: 400 years of Shakespearean Supernaturalism.” The Conversation, April 20, 2016. http://theconversation.com/suppd-full-with-horrors-400-years-of-shakespearean-supernaturalism-57129.

  SMALL PRESS, SPECIALTY, AND ONLINE HORROR

  Since the beginning of the twentieth century, horror fiction has found a comfortable home within small presses, specialty presses, and “alternative” outlets. These venues have functioned as markets for less commercial works and as proving grounds for authors developing their skills. The small press market has been traditionally dependent on both the technologies that support cheap production and the trends popularized by mainstream publishers. Yet small presses have often flourished in those periods of history when mainstream horror publishing has been declining, as popular and midlist writers have sought out new or niche venues for their works.

  The early history of these venues centered upon the works of H. P. Lovecraft, an amateur press enthusiast whose work was first published in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. He and his circle—Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and a few others—frequently shared materials. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, a prominent member of this circle, August Derleth, joined with Donald Wandrei to establish Arkham House in Sauk City, Wisconsin, to release a memorial collection of Lovecraft’s short stories, The Outsider and Others (1939). After the end of World War II a number of other small presses such as Prime Press (established by Oswald Train in 1947) similarly made it their mission to rescue material that had once been published in the pulp magazines.

  The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of paperback and trade publishing of horror books. Consequently, the small presses that had flourished in the postwar period began to decline, although Arkham House continued to publish a small but steady list under pressure from trade publishers and science fiction small presses. During this period, it was in comics, such as EC Comics’ The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and The Crypt of Terror, where horror remained most popular until the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953 caused many horror comics to fold. A few high-quality magazines such as Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook (1968) and Stuart Schiff’s Whispers (1970) began to pick up the slack in the tail end of the decade.

  In the 1970s the public interest in horror surged, driven by the mainstream successes of works such as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and the early novels of Stephen King, including Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977), many of which were popularized by film adaptations. The small press market fed off these successes, spawning magazines such as The Horror Show, Grue, Pulphouse, and Cemetery Dance and presses such as Necronomicon Press, which continued alongside the stalwart Arkham House. Throughout the late seventies, a number of important writers got their start in the small presses, including Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja, and Poppy Z. Brite. Other commercially successful writers such as Joe R. Lansdale, Lucius Shepard, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Stephen King published in both large and small venues, depending on the nature of their work.

  The importance of small presses was consolidated in the 1980s as Cemetery Dance Publications, Dark Harvest, Borderlands Press, and Dark Regions, among others, began their operations. These presses produced a range of titles from high-quality hardcover releases to limited editions for collectors to trade paperbacks. In 1988, John Gregory Betancourt, Darrell Schweitzer, and George H. Scithers revived Weird Tales, the magazine famous for publishing many of Lovecraft’s original works, which had ceased operations in 1954. It saw success initially with authors such as Ligotti, Tanith Lee, and Brian Lumley.

  A Selective Timeline of Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror

  1923

  H. P. Lovecraft publishes “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” in the second issue of Weird Tales.

  1939

  Arkham House is founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to produce a memorial volume of Lovecraft’s fiction.

  1954

  Estes Kefauver leads the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, causing many horror comic publishers to censor or cancel their series.

  1974

  The hardcover edition of Stephen King’s Carrie is released by Doubleday, marking the beginning of the horror boom.

  1986

  Tor begins the first dedicated horror line from a major press.

  1988

  Weird Tales is revived by George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer.

  1996

  Zebra Press, the flagship imprint of Kensington Publishing and one of the last remaining major publishers of horror, is discontinued.

  1997

  Sponsored by Leisure Books, ChiZine.com is founded as an online magazine.

  1998

  Darren McKeeman conceives of connecting a worldwide community of horror lovers through www.Gothic.net.

  2009

  The global recession initiates a substantial decline in the traditional publishing industry.

  2010

  Leisure Books announces that Dan D’Auria will no longer edit its horror line, and all print publications are slated to continue as eBooks.

  2012

  John Joseph Adams successfully crowdfunds the launch of Nightmare Magazine.

  But by the second half of the decade the genre had begun to stagnate as the market became saturated. In 1990, Tor, the first company to begin a dedicated horror line, shifted from genre to mainstream, and by 1996 Zebra was discontinued, sounding the death knell for the last of the major American horror lines. Leisure Books, an imprint of the mid-sized company Dorchester Publish
ing, continued to publish horror alongside Westerns and thrillers, but it was one of the few remaining publishers with industry heft. While the main market was faltering, small presses picked up some of the slack. By 1993, they were responsible for publishing almost 25 percent of all new horror novels, anthologies, and collections. Three influential editors of anthologies came to prominence within this period: Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, and Paula Guran.

  A number of important new presses entered the field as the end of the 1990s approached. Of these, two of the most important were, arguably, the San Francisco–based Night Shade Books and Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing in Hornsea, established in 1997 and 1999, respectively. PS Publishing continues to be one of the most successful small presses in Britain. Other presses of this period included Sarob Press, which produced collectors’ editions of new and old fiction; Subterranean Press, which produced a quarterly magazine alongside novels collections and chapbooks; Ash-Tree Press in Canada, which rescued forgotten works in the ghost story tradition by writers such as M. R. James; Necronomicon Press, devoted to the Lovecraft tradition and responsible for a range of scholarly magazines; and Tartarus Press, which specialized in literary fiction with a supernatural bent and supported authors such as Robert Aickman. Magazine publishing continued with The 3rd Alternative, primarily focused on science fiction, fantasy, and slipstream stories.

  By end of the century, the Internet was beginning to offer new possibilities. In March, 2000, Stephen King published his novella Riding the Bullet as an eBook freely downloadable for the first week. The publicity stunt was so successful that the hosting servers crashed. Digital publishing offered small presses and magazines a way to reduce their printing and distribution costs while still making fiction available to the reading public. A popular electronic market during this phase was Darren McKeeman’s www.Gothic.net, but others arose with varying levels of success, including Imaginary Worlds, Sinister Element, and Terror Tales. Chiaroscuro: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words (known as ChiZine.com), founded by Brett Alexander Savory in 1997, was one of the few eZines that worked its way up to paying professional rates. In 2009 it was expanded to include a successful print arm, ChiZine Publications.