Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  The idea of protagonists from late twentieth-century urban-technological societies stumbling upon evidence of pagan nature-based sacrificial rituals surviving in isolated rural locales was popular in early 1970s horror, with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man (1973) both being released the same year as Harvest Home, and both dealing with this very thing. A decade later, T. E. D. Klein’s novel The Ceremonies (1984) mined the same territory. It has since become a recognized and established trope in the genre—a development that can be traced in no small part to the influence of Harvest Home.

  Benjamin F. Fisher

  See also: Burnt Offerings; The Ceremonies; The Other; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

  “Thomas Tryon.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

  THE HAUNTED HOUSE OR CASTLE

  A haunted house may be defined simply as a dwelling that is inhabited by or visited regularly by a ghost. But the variants of this—the building, the circumstances, the type of supernatural intrusion, and the potential physical and emotional repercussions—are limitless. As a classic trope and setting in horror literature, the haunted house or castle has thus been subjected to a multitude of variations.

  As Sigmund Freud points out in his famous essay (1919), the very notion of “The Uncanny” could not exist without the concept of “home.” The haunted house story has to have, needless to say, a house—or, as it may be, a castle, chateau, of other place of assumed safety. In terms of plot line, the haunted house has to be the nexus of a series of supernatural events, and the best tales have a backstory (the history behind the situation that exists at the start of the main story) of the provenance and discovery of these events.

  Horace Walpole (1717–1797) first elevated the haunted castle from a mere setting to part of the narrative fabric in The Castle of Otranto (1764). Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) contributed skeletal remains under the floor, weird portraits turned toward the wall, and a suit of bloodstained armor. Ann Radcliffe developed these motifs to the fullest in her signature work The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

  The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is the father of the modern haunted house novel. Nathaniel Hawthorne weaves the theme so finely into the fabric of the story that it dominates the novel without overpowering the plot and characterizations. J. Sheridan Le Fanu has several masterly instances of the haunted house. In “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” (1861), a woman is literally scared to death in what may be the worst possible encounter of its kind. Even infants—as in “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853) and “The Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” (1863)—are not spared Le Fanu’s terrors. “Who Knows?” (French: “Qui sait?”; 1890) is a haunted house tale that is both horrifying and amusing in manner unique to Guy de Maupassant. Returning at night from the theater, the solitary narrator feels uneasy as he approaches his house and hears a commotion. Then he realizes what the noise is: all his possessions are animate and fleeing his domicile. His efforts to recover them are correspondingly eerie.

  The twentieth century saw new variants of the traditional theme. In Walter de la Mare’s “A Recluse” (1926), the narrator is out for an automobile ride, but is compelled to pull over to look at what appears to be an unoccupied house. Ray Bradbury created a poignant new variant in “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950): a mechanized house that can speak and maintain itself expires after its human occupants are vaporized by a nuclear explosion.

  Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), widely recognized as the greatest haunted house novel, is emphatically supernatural in its premise: four individuals sensitive to psychic phenomena come to Hill House to analyze its odd manifestations, and one seems to become so psychically fused with the house that she is unable to leave it. The novel was adapted to film in The Haunting (1963). Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) is a haunted house novel perhaps second only to Jackson’s. In it, a family rents a strange old house for an unusually cheap rate. There is an elderly woman upstairs who is never seen. The wife becomes attached to the woman and to the house, which seems to regenerate in threatening ways. The novel was adapted by Hollywood in 1973. Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971) has a plot roughly similar to Jackson’s Hill House—four people gather in a purportedly haunted house to investigate—and was adapted for film in the 1973 British production The Legend of Hell House.

  The haunted house story has proved amazingly flexible in accommodating a wide variety of themes: good versus evil, science versus the supernatural, economic conflict, class, gender, and so on. Over three centuries, the theme has been a compelling vehicle for the horror narrative, and it will doubtless continue to be so.

  Steven J. Mariconda

  See also: Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Burnt Offerings; The Castle of Otranto; de la Mare, Walter; The Haunting of Hill House; Hell House; The House of the Seven Gables; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Maupassant, Guy de; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Uncanny; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

  Further Reading

  Bailey, Dale. 2011. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

  Janicker, Rebecca. 2015. The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King and the Horror in Between. Jefferson NC: McFarland.

  Mariconda, Steven J. 2007. “The Haunted House.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 267–306. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.

  Railo, Eino. 1927. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: G. Routledge & Son.

  THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

  The Haunting of Hill House is a Gothic novel written by Shirley Jackson, first published in 1959 by Viking/Penguin. In the novel, Jackson created Hill House, which has come to be the prototype for the haunted house. The book not only helped secure Jackson’s legacy as a horror writer, earning her a nomination for the 1960 National Book Award for Fiction, but it also inspired decades of writers to pen their own ghost stories.

  Jackson’s novel is the quintessential haunted house story. A group of people is invited to Hill House, an old mansion, by Dr. Montague, a specialist in the occult hoping to prove the existence of a true haunting. Among his guests are Eleanor, a young woman seeking a place in the world; Theodora, a free spirit; and Luke, the heir to Hill House. The story is largely told from Eleanor’s perspective, and Jackson spends a great deal of time examining Eleanor’s relationship with Theodora. Both women are unique in that they explode the traditional gender roles of the day (neither woman is the typical wife and mother that would be considered the norm). These psychic detectives encounter what has now become commonplace in haunted house tales: unexpected cold spots, mysterious and ominous messages scribbled on the wall, a child’s cry when no children are around. Jackson deviates from the traditional haunted house tropes by introducing Eleanor as an unstable and unreliable witness, leaving readers to speculate whether the haunting is indeed real or only a manifestation of a troubled mind. In this way, The Haunting of Hill House could be considered the literary heir to Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, in which readers are never told whether the ghosts that plagued the governess and her two charges are real or not. Jackson was intrigued with psychic phenomenon and those who studied it; it was a scholarly interest for much of her adult life. She had the idea of writing a ghost story after learning about the Society for Psychic Research, a nineteenth-century group formed to study the possibility of ghosts. One such group rented a house that was rumored to be haunted for exactly such a purpose; once Jackson read the account, Hill House was born.

  Ghost Hunters

  The Haunting of Hill House has been adapted twice by Hollywood, first in 1963 by director Robert Wise and again in 1999 by direc
tor Jan de Bont, both times under the title The Haunting. But its cinematic influence extends much further, as its central motif of paranormal investigators taking up residence in a supposedly haunted house to investigate purportedly supernatural events has been seized upon by countless additional movies and television shows. From the 1973 horror film The Legend of Hell House (based on Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel, which took direct inspiration from Jackson) to the twenty-first century’s bumper crop of “ghost hunting” paranormal shows on cable television, Shirley Jackson’s most famous novel casts a long shadow across the landscape of subsequent paranormal media. This is despite the fact that she did not originate the theme in question, whose earliest clear incarnation may be Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1859 story “The Haunted and the Haunters,” which likewise has an investigator stay in a haunted house. There is also a long tradition of occult detectives and paranormal investigators in horror fiction hailing from the century between the publication of Bulwer’s story and the publication of Jackson’s 1959 novel. But The Haunting of Hill House remains the most prominent and influential such work.

  Matt Cardin

  Hill House and the people who come to study the mansion have become the prototype for nearly every haunted house story that has followed the first printing of Jackson’s book. Richard Matheson’s Hell House, published in 1971, and the film adaptation that followed (The Legend of Hell House, 1973) are both greatly influenced by Jackson’s story. Matheson’s Belasco House, like Hill House, is haunted, and like Hill House, it draws a team of psychic researchers. Unlike Jackson, however, Matheson favored shock over subtlety, making the ghosts in the house undeniably real. The idea of the house that was “born bad” (as opposed to human monsters or some other outside evil) became prevalent in the horror novels of the following decades. Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978) deviates in that the house in question is not an old Gothic manor—it’s a sleek modern design—but the premise is still the same: the house is a living, breathing organism that has evil intent toward any occupants who dare to step across the threshold. Stephen King has mentioned his admiration for Shirley Jackson in his nonfiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), and readers can see the influence of The Haunting of Hill House throughout his works. Both the novel (and the later film) The Shining (1977) and the television miniseries Rose Red (2002) feature remote places that attract the paranormal. King’s novel Carrie (1974) even includes a brief nod to Hill House’s Eleanor: both Carrie and Eleanor have experienced psychic phenomena at a young age, specifically in the form of rocks raining down on the roofs of their childhood homes.

  In 1963, director Robert Wise brought Jackson’s novel to the silver screen with his adaptation, The Haunting. Wise cast Julie Harris as Eleanor and Claire Bloom as Theodora. The film was a critical success and earned Wise a Golden Globe nomination for best director. In 2014, Wise’s film was nominated for a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films. In 1999, director Jan de Bont made another adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, likewise titled The Haunting. Though the film was cast with popular stars (Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta Jones, Owen Wilson), de Bont’s film was not met with the same critical acclaim.

  Lisa Kröger

  See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Hell House; The House Next Door; Jackson, Shirley; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Anderson, Melanie R. 2016. “Perception, Supernatural Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill House.” In Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 35–53. London: Routledge.

  Haggerty, George E. 2006. “‘Queer Company’: The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House.” In Queer Gothic, 131–150. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

  Hattenhauer, Darryl. 2003. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press.

  Hodges Holt, Shari. 2016. “The Tower or the Nursery? Paternal and Maternal Re-visions of Hill House on Film.” In Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 160–182. London: Routledge.

  King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

  Lootens, Tricia. 2005. “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” In Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, 150–168. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Wilson, Michael T. 2015. “‘Absolute Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.1: 114–123.

  HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864)

  Born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne, like Jane Austen, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, and Alexander Pushkin, is a major nineteenth-century writer from European traditions whose work is speckled with but not exhausted by Gothic effects and supernatural overtones. In his twenties, Hawthorne added a letter to his surname (much as fellow Gothic regionalist William Faulkner would do about a century later). He almost suppressed his anonymous first Gothic romance, Fanshawe (1828), after its commercial failure. Romance is a term Hawthorne used for novel-length fictions in marvelous or imaginative modes beyond the strict, mannered realism he saw novels demand.

  “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: A Poisonous Beauty

  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter: From the Writings of Aubépine” (1844) was initially published alongside Edgar Allan Poe marginalia. The tale’s forematter presents it as the work of a Gallicized persona of Hawthorne. This sixth-to-final piece of Hawthorne’s short fiction culminates prior themes of scientists and inventors tampering with dangerous forces in other tales that were likewise collected in his Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), such as “The Birth-Mark” (1843) and “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844). Beatrice Rappaccini, as a dying and deadly beautiful woman, literalizes a literary commonplace from contemporaries such as Louisa May Alcott and Poe.

  The tale offers deep ambiguities. Student Giovanni Guascontis falls in love with Beatrice, daughter of Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, after spying on her in her father’s garden. Having grown up in the presence of the poisonous plants cultivated by her father, Beatrice is herself poisonous, so flowers and insects die upon her touch. Giovanni’s feelings for Beatrice alternate between desire, loathing, and confusion, even as he himself becomes poisonous in Beatrice’s father’s secret experiment. A rival of Rappaccini gives Giovanni an antidote to save Beatrice, but the attempted cure kills her. The tale occurs in Padua, Italy, of unclear date, and alludes to Genesis, Mudrarakshasa, The Divine Comedy, Macbeth, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Paradise Lost, St. Leon, and Frankenstein.

  The tale informs Oliver Holmes’s romance of serpentine original sin, Elsie Venner (1861). Adaptations of it occur in poetry, operas, plays, radio, television, and popular music, and the Rappaccinis inspired several comic book antiheroines and villainesses. A cinematic adaptation, Twice-Told Tales (1963), is part of the U.S. and U.K. 1960s–1970s trend of horror anthology films. The tale’s segment, unlike the others, somewhat follows Hawthorne’s plot and characterizations but dampens the scientists’ rivalry, irradiates Beatrice’s blood, has Vincent Price play Giacomo in a mode more Freudian and Puritan, and climaxes with a triple suicide.

  Bob Hodges

  Hawthorne toiled on tales and literary sketches in the 1830s and 1840s for initially obscure publications, until collected reprints began to attract critical and commercial notice. Twice-Told Tales (2 vols., 1837, 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, expanded 1854), and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852) collect the bulk of his short fiction. Hawthorne follows Washington Irving in using detailed U.S. locales and histories for his tales, something New England predecessors John Neal, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child also explored in their longer romances.

  Some of the best commentary on Hawthorne comes from his success
ors: Herman Melville, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and Jorge Luis Borges. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) draws an extended contrast between the short fiction of Hawthorne and his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe. Poe represents a more calculated and impersonal supernatural fiction aimed at producing specific horrific effects on the reader often via violence, sensation, a general sense of cosmic indifference, and/or more indefinite, hence universal, settings and situations. In contrast, Hawthorne’s supernatural fiction poses indefinite but persistent allegory, melancholy, specific regional and historical detail, and concern with possibly irredeemable human sin and worldly evil. Lovecraft sees Poe as the paramount artist of modern horror, but his extensive treatment of Hawthorne evidences the latter’s influence on the weird. The seminal pulp magazine Weird Tales often reprinted nineteenth-century U.S. supernatural fiction and poetry before 1940, and they ran eight of Hawthorne’s tales, more than any writer except Poe.