by Matt Cardin
Both the original novel and the film adaptations of The Hands of Orlac are significant for a number of reasons. First, Renard’s novel is an excellent early example of speculative fiction, a genre that combines diverse interests and forms. Renard took contemporary developments in biology, psychology, and medical practice in the early twentieth century and placed them in the world of horror, using rational means to explore the irrational. Second, the original 1924 film adaptation is one of the earliest and best examples of body horror cinema, in which horror is caused by the disfiguration, decay, or mutilation of the body. Other well-known body horror narratives include the films Freaks (1932), The Fly (1958; remade in 1986), The Blob (1958; remade in 1988), Alien (1979), and American Mary (2012), all of which owe some debt to Orlac because of its seminal position in the subgenre. This influence can be seen even more directly in a number of horror films that offer new takes on the idea of individual body parts possessing an evil will of their own, such as Body Parts (1991) and Idle Hands (1999).
Jim Holte
See also: Body Horror; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Goldberg, Ruth. 2002. “Of Mad Love, Alien Hands and the Film under Your Skin.” Kinoeye 2, no. 4 (February 18). http://www.kinoeye.org/02/04/goldberg04.php.
Olney, Jan. 2006. “The Problem Body Politic, or ‘These Hands Have a Mind All Their Own!’: Figuring Disability in the Horror Film Adaptations of Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34, no. 4: 294–302.
Reyes, Xavier Aldana. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
HARDY, THOMAS (1840–1928)
A poet, novelist, and short story writer whose most significant work spans the final three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, Thomas Hardy is a major figure in English literary history, renowned for his realistic treatment of rural settings and his pessimistic view of human existence as tragedy. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, Hardy’s poetry and “Novels of Character and Environment” (also known as the “Wessex Novels”) dramatize “the plight of mankind trapped in a universe oblivious to human feelings and ethical aspirations” (Schweik 1999, 63), usually by presenting passionately aspiring characters who become victims of indifferent forces that exceed their control and ultimately master or destroy them.
Born in the southwestern county of Dorset into a working-class family steeped in local folk traditions, Hardy also became an avid antiquarian and folklorist, committed to preserving in his fiction and poetry “a fairly true record of a vanishing life” (Hardy 1967, 22) during a period when industrialization, modernization, and urbanization were dismantling the traditional communities and folkways of the English countryside. Among the numerous traditional customs, stories, and superstitions that Hardy incorporated into his depictions of rural life in “Wessex” (a fictionalized version of his native Dorset), several figure with particular prominence throughout his career: the belief in ghosts (Tess of the d’Urbervilles; “The Superstitious Man’s Story”; “A January Night”; “The Harvest Supper”; “A Sound in the Night”; “At Shag’s Heath”), fairies (The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the d’Urbervilles), witchcraft (“The Withered Arm”; Under the Greenwood Tree; The Return of the Native; The Woodlanders), and assorted predictive superstitions such as omens, premonitions, and divination (The Return of the Native; Far From the Madding Crowd; Jude the Obscure; The Woodlanders).
In addition to providing Hardy’s fiction and poetry with authentic touches of local color that are ornamental and atmospheric, the evocation of occult folk belief serves narrative and thematic purposes as Hardy routinely adapted folk traditions to the needs of plotting, tone, and symbolism. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), for instance, the tale of the phantom coach presaging death and perceptible only to those of true d’Urberville ancestry has a basis in the Dorset tradition of a haunted carriage that could only be seen by members of a family named Turberville. Narrative accounts by the heroine’s two lovers of this spectral coach of ill-omen, in which a beautiful woman was once abducted and possibly murdered by a d’Urberville, heighten suspense around the fates of Tess and her lovers, which it obliquely foreshadows. More profoundly, the fatal coach is also a microcosm symbolizing the prison-like universe ruled by Fate against which Hardy’s archetypal heroine struggles. The ghost-coach in Tess, which functions both as a symbol of death and as an omen, epitomizes the role of supernatural belief in Hardy’s fiction, which is to create the uncanny atmosphere of fatality and predetermination that characterizes Hardy’s conception of a universe that is grotesquely indifferent to human striving.
As a narrative realist, Hardy did not generally grant the ghosts of his novels objective phenomenal existence; for the most part, they exist only as stories told by rustics and believers. Yet Hardy, in spite of his religious skepticism, was himself profoundly drawn to a belief in ghosts, and following his turn away from fiction toward poetry, Hardy became less coy about depicting ghostly phenomena, which acquire objective existence in his many ghost poems.
Hardy died in 1928, and his ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey. His heart is buried in the grave of his first wife, Emma Gifford, in Stinsford Churchyard.
Brian Johnson
See also: The Uncanny.
Further Reading
Firor, Ruth A. 1968. Folkways in Thomas Hardy. New York: Russell & Russell.
Gatrell, Simon. 2000. “Ghosts.” In Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, edited by Norman Page, 138–139. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hardy, Thomas. [1911] 1967. “General Preface to the Novels and Poems.” In Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, edited by Harold Orel, 44–50. London: Macmillan.
Robson, Peter. 2011. “Thomas Hardy’s Ghosts.” Tradition Today: The Journal for the Centre of English Traditional Heritage 1: 26–34. http://centre-for-english-traditional-heritage.org/traditiontoday1a.html.
Schweik, Robert. 1999. “The Influence of Religion, Science, and Philosophy on Hardy’s Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, 54–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HARRIS, THOMAS (1940–)
Thomas Harris is a writer of Gothic thrillers. He was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and is most well known for creating the character of Hannibal Lecter. He has published five novels and currently resides in South Florida.
Harris started his writing career after graduating from Baylor University and working as a local newspaper reporter in Waco, Texas (something he had done while earning his English degree at Baylor). Jason Cowley notes that Harris spent time working for the Associated Press in New York “where he excelled as a crime reporter, showing an unusual curiosity in the finer details and nuances of the crimes he wrote about, no matter how bleak” (2006). In 1975 Harris published his first novel, Black Sunday, while also working as a reporter. It is a thriller about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl using a blimp loaded with explosives. It met with only moderate success, but its rights were purchased by Hollywood. This gave Harris the freedom to write fiction for a living.
Harris’s second book, Red Dragon (1981), features FBI profiler Will Graham assisting in the hunt for serial killer Francis Dolarhyde or “the Tooth Fairy.” It also introduces the character of Hannibal Lecter as a psychopath that Graham must speak with in order to capture Dolarhyde. The novel is notable for its carefully detailed look into the world of FBI profiling. The research that Harris undertook for this was extensive; he even attended some behavioral science classes at the FBI Academy in Quantico. This detail-oriented focus became a signature element in Harris’s writing, enhancing his horror with procedural realism and journalistic integrity.
In 1988 Harris made Lecter a major character in his next book, The Silence of the Lambs. This part of the Lecter series switched protagonists with the
introduction of Clarice Starling as an FBI trainee who is asked to speak with the psychopath in order to find the serial killer, Buffalo Bill. The book was well received, winning the Bram Stoker and the Anthony awards for best novel. In 1991 it was adapted to film by director Jonathan Demme, with Sir Anthony Hopkins taking on the role of Lecter. The film won several Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and cemented Hannibal Lecter into American culture.
Harris based the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs on the real-life Ed Gein, who in 1950s Wisconsin murdered two women and robbed multiple graves to create a collection of costumes and memorabilia out of human female skin and body parts. Gein was likewise the inspiration for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, and several additional literary and cinematic serial killers and mass murderers.
Matt Cardin
The third book in the Lecter series, Hannibal (1999), features Lecter returning to Clarice while also escaping the clutches of the deformed magnate Mason Verger. The novel’s controversial ending, which involves Lecter brainwashing Clarice and taking her as a lover, divided critics and readers.
Harris’s final venture into the Lecter world was a prequel titled Hannibal Rising (2006). It tells the story of a young Lecter extracting revenge on his sister’s killers. This book met with mixed reviews, and it was suggested that the book was only written because movie producer Dino De Laurentiis intended to move forward on a cinematic version of the project with or without Harris’s help.
Harris’s work and his signature character of Hannibal Lecter were reconceptualized for television with the three-season run of NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015). Harris, known as a reclusive author, has not signaled an intent to publish another novel.
Chun H. Lee
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Cowley, Jason. 2006. “Creator of a Monstrous Hit.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/19/fiction.thomasharris.
Fierman, Daniel. 2007. “Hannibal Lecter Meets His End: One of the Best Horror Franchises in History Falls Apart.” Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/article/2007/02/16/hannibal-lecter-meets-his-end.
Grixti, Joseph. 1995. “Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Cultural Icons.” Journal of American Culture 18: 87–96.
Magistrale, Tony. 1996. “Transmogrified Gothic: The Novels of Thomas Harris.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 27–41. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
HARTLEY, L. P. (1895–1972)
Leslie Poles Hartley was an English writer and reviewer who achieved considerable fame in the mid-twentieth century, especially for his 1953 novel The Go-Between, a best seller that was adapted multiple times for stage and screen. In addition to publishing popular novels, he wrote many short stories, thirty-seven of which are fantastic, often horrifically so.
Hartley’s most horrific stories tend to work by indirection, a deliberate vagueness that adds emphasis to the horrors. The titular story of Night Fears (1924), his first collection, thus describes a secure and set night watchman whose snowy vigil is interrupted by a nameless stranger who, with but a few questions and sneers, destroys everything the watchman holds dear; the watchman commits suicide, and the stranger’s departing footprints lead to a blind alley. “A Visitor from Down Under” (1926) uses clues and indirection to show a newly returned colonial being pursued, haunted, and ultimately removed by James Hagberd, the revenant of the man he murdered in Australia. In “Podolo” (1948) the peripherally seen horror may resemble an ape, but as the visitors to its island learn, it is devastatingly hungry and vicious.
Indirection likewise plays a role in “Someone in the Lift” (1955), which is told largely through a child’s eyes: little Peter Maldon glimpses a shape in the elevator that no one else can see; he discovers its horrible identity on Christmas, when his father does not return. The admirably brief “The Waits” (1961) shows an apparently happy family visited by a pair of carolers on Christmas Eve: the ghosts of the people the father drove to murder and suicide. Several stories seem to pile on the horrors, then conclude just before anything is seen, letting the reader determine whether or not they are supernatural. For example, the nameless narrator of “A Summons” (1954) has agreed to assist his sister if she dreams of being murdered in her bed and knocks on the adjoining wall; he elects not to assist, and the knocking grows fainter and fainter. The question of what he will find remains unresolved, as it does in the marvelous “The Shadow on the Wall” (1969), in which houseguest Mildred Fanshawe learns that the room adjacent to hers is being held for the mysterious Count Olmütz. Fanshawe glimpses in the shadows a corpse with its throat cut, and from its head she recognizes it as a man she knows, but whether there is really a body is left unanswered; the story concludes with the opening of the count’s door.
In his introduction to Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book (1955), Hartley provided a rationale of the ghost story: “even ghosts must have rules and obey them. In the past, they had certain traditional activities; they could squeak and gibber, for instance; they could clank chains. They were generally local, confined to one spot. Now their liberties have been greatly extended; they can go anywhere, they can manifest themselves in scores of ways” (Hartley 2001, xiii). For all that Hartley chose to show these manifestations, he recognized that too much horrific material can lose its effectiveness, and a black humor thus enlivens many stories: “The Travelling Grave” (1929), for example, contains a conversation in which baby carriages are confused with coffins. Death assumes physical reality in “Mrs. Carteret Receives” (1971), but he is very ordinary and prosaic, “ugly, dirty, and wet through” (Hartley 1986, 648).
In the past several decades, Hartley’s stories have been made conveniently available to current readers in collected editions. Significantly for those who are interested in his fantastic and horrific writings, The Collected Macabre Stories, published by Tartarus Press in 2001, contains several stories that do not appear in The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, published by Beaufort (1973).
Richard Bleiler
See also: Arkham House; Machen, Arthur.
Further Reading
Athos, John. 2009. “L. P. Hartley and the Gothic Infatuation.” In Short Story Criticism, vol. 125, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic. Detroit: Gale. Originally published in Twentieth Century Literature 7.4 (Jan. 1962): 172–179.
Hartley, L. P. 1986. The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley. New York: Beaufort Books.
Hartley, L. P. 2001. The Collected Macabre Stories. Leyburn, UK: Tartarus Press.
Wright, Adrian. 2001. Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley. London and New York: Tauris Park.
HARVEST HOME
Harvest Home (1973) was the second novel by former Hollywood actor Thomas Tryon. It received both critical and popular acclaim, and is generally regarded as one of the most significant novels in the subgenre of rural horror. In the novel, myths that rural life is superior to urban life because it is more innocent and natural are inverted, along with gender roles. S. T. Joshi has described Harvest Home as “one of the great weird novels of our time, and a virtual textbook on how to update the form while simultaneously drawing upon history to lend texture and substance” (Joshi 2001, 200).
The plot is centered on Ned and Beth Constantine and their daughter, Kate, who move from New York City to Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut, a farming community whose inhabitants resist any changes to their longstanding way of life. These ways are derived from ancestry in Cornwall, England, where fertility rites were significant in growing corn as a staple crop. Ned, who narrates the novel, proves to be something of an unreliable narrator specifically in this area, because the information given to him about the longstanding traditions and practices of Harvest Home is oblique, and this contributes, with progressively increasing suspe
nse, to the horror of the novel’s final revelation.
The Constantines are initially welcomed into this usually closed community because the Widow Fortune—who has been mother, nurse, midwife, and overall guiding spirit to the community for many years—thinks that permitting them to move into Cornwall Coombe will provide new bloodlines to promote high-quality physical and mental health among the citizenry. Ned, however, is sterile, and this contributes to disharmony in his and Beth’s marriage. Beth, for her part, proves receptive to the Widow Fortune’s influence, which Ned finds increasingly oppressive and sinister. He does not readily comprehend or participate in Cornwall Coombe beliefs and customs, and thus he is ultimately ostracized and accorded drastic physical punishment for his scoffing at and interfering with “the old ways.” Ironically, he does not realize that his efforts to befriend various persons, notably young Worthy Pettinger, who becomes the designated Harvest Lord for the community’s climactic Harvest Festival that year—but who refuses to act as such—are deemed outrageous and dangerous by the locals. Several betrayals by community members, especially by several females (ultimately including Kate, who has adopted the area’s traditions), lead to his downfall.
In the rural Gothic, pastoral settings are used for Gothic or horrific effects, often by placing city dwellers in a geographically and socially isolated pastoral environment where the local inhabitants and the landscape itself become the locus of a claustrophobic, “backwoods” type of horror as dark secrets and dreadful cultural practices are revealed. Harvest Home illustrates this pattern as Ned’s probing of the mysteries of local life in Cornwall Coombe ultimately exposes physical and emotional violence and horrors, most appallingly in the novel’s climactic scene, where Ned spies on a forest ceremony and discovers that the community’s seasonal agricultural cycle is climaxed by a pagan ritual of human sacrifice. As the novel closes, Kate is teamed with local boy Jim Minerva, upcoming Harvest Lord, whose union with her will presumably produce offspring who will in turn contribute new life to the community. Kate is fully and joyfully enfolded within the community’s life and traditions. And Ned inhabits his own home as a prisoner, having had his eyes put out for his transgression.
