Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  While written fiction was long the dedicated medium for the uncanny, cinema has also explored its potential. From the early days of the movie industry, directors such as F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu the Vampyre, Faust) and Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, M, Metropolis), alongside other figures of expressionist cinema, sought to create feelings of unease through the distortion of reality on screen. Their use of oblique camera angles, stark black and white contrasts, heavy makeup, special effects, and crooked landscapes paved the way for other directors such as Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes), Orson Welles (The Trial, Citizen Kane, The Lady of Shanghai), Alfred Hitchcock (The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Lolita) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Inland Empires).

  Elsa Charléty

  See also: Brown, Charles Brockden; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; The Haunted House or Castle; Hoffmann, E. T. A. ; James, Henry; Kafka, Franz; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; “The Sand-man”; “Schalken the Painter”; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

  Further Reading

  Fiedler, Leslie A. [1960] 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

  Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin.

  Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. University Presses of California, Columbia, and Princeton.

  Peel, Ellen. 1980. “Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature Studies 17, no. 4: 410–417. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245653.

  The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: Parts 1, 2, 3. 2006. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Written and presented by Slavoj Žižek. London: P Guide Limited. DVD.

  Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longman Publishing Group.

  Tatar, Maria M. 1981. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature 33, no. 2: 167.

  UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

  The term “unreliable narrator” refers to a narrative technique used in fiction when the story is told solely or partially through the single viewpoint of a first-person narrator who proves at some point to have failed to tell the entire truth, either intentionally or unintentionally. An unreliable narrator gives information to the reader that is biased, incomplete, fabricated, and/or insufficient. This type of narrator is especially common to, and significant in, Gothic romanticism, horror literature, and crime fiction.

  Even though literary critic Wayne Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 essay The Rhetoric of Fiction, the technique has existed as long as authors have written stories in which the narration, or part of it, is told from a subjective point of view. Early uses of a narrator’s unreliability can be traced as far back as Homer’s Odyssey (ca. eighth century BCE) and The Arabian Nights (ca. ninth century). With the rise of first-person narration in the eighteenth century and the publishing of novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (French: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), the question of the narrator’s reliability would become central in Western literature.

  “The Tell-Tale Heart”

  Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) epitomizes the narrative technique of the unreliable narrator and stands as probably the most famous and typical example of this technique in Poe’s short fiction. In this case the narrator is an insane murderer, and Poe plunges the reader directly into this narrator’s point of view and frame of mind right from the opening sentence and paragraph:

  True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

  The narrator then proceeds to lay out a tale in which the very thoughts and actions that he vigorously presents as evidence of his own sanity and rationality indicate the exact opposite to the reader: that the narrator is hopelessly and incontrovertibly mad.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 3. New York: Fred De Fau & Company.

  The fallibility of a narrator can be spotted through incongruities in his or her account such as repetitions, memory gaps, contradiction with other characters’ versions, and apparent discrepancies between the narrator’s statements and his or her actions. When made apparent, this unreliable quality of the narrator often leads to a complete overturn of the plot. It usually finds the narrator guilty of some dark deeds while he or she had painted himself or herself as innocent. It challenges heavily the reading experience, as a first-person narrator is the sole source of information for the reader.

  Because such a narrator delivers skewed perspectives and heightens plot ambiguities, this technique offers a privileged way for authors to challenge the limit between reality and fantasy and intensify the mysterious atmosphere of a text. It allows exploring not just the moral failings of individuals, but also psychological instability. Indeed, in Gothic fiction, the first-person narrator is often proven to be unreliable due to being in a state of mental distress that makes him or her incapable of giving a trustworthy account of events.

  For example, a narrator can be unreliable because he or she is a liar or delusional. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), the character of Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, is presented to the reader as a mere chronicler of the drama that unfolds in the plot. However, she plays a greater role than what she says she does, as she is blinded by her emotional attachment to the family she works for. It takes a second narrator, an outsider, to show the cracks in her logic and have the reader question her impartiality.

  An unreliable narrator can also be emotionally unstable, as in the case of Roderick Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic Gothic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Described by the main narrator of the story as a feeble, depressed hypochondriac, Roderick Usher is a tortured man haunted by the memory of his dead sister Madeline. He is the only one to know the truth about her death, but his precarious emotional state forces the reader to compensate for his fallibility when he (Roderick) describes Madeline’s death, and come up with his or her own interpretation of the mystery. It is also unclear, by the end of the novel, if the main narrator is completely trustworthy or, in fact, as mad as Usher himself. The reader, as is often the case with Poe’s stories, has to draw his or her own conclusions.

  Additional instances of mad narrators can be found in Poe (“The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “Berenice”), with the most representative being the “murderous maniac” of the “Tell-Tale Heart,” a narrative tour de force that uses the whole potentiality of an unreliable narrator to delve into the depth of human madness. A short text written solely from the point of view of an unidentified “I,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees the multiple attempts made by this anonymous narrator to convince the reader of his sanity as he sits in jail, accused of murdering his landlord. As the narration progresses and the narrator tells of the carefully calculated murder, as well as the dismembering and concealing of the body under the floorboards, he seems to have a harder time keeping his story in check. He eventually breaks into a hallucinatory rant and claims to have heard the beating heart of his dead victim through the floorboards. The first-person narrative makes it impossible for the reader to know where the truth lies: either the narrator is indeed mad, and his guilt-ridden conscience has made him fall into an acute paranoiac episode; or the narrator is, as he claims, not insane but the victim of some supernatural trick. Or he may be neither mad nor sane, but merely an avatar of Poe himself, who is playing with the conventions of narration and has invented the whole story from scratch.

  “The Tell-Tale Heart” was the precursor for many other figures of “mad” unreliable narrators, including Humber
t Humbert, the pervert maniac of Nabokov’s Lolita; the haunted governess of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw; and the murderous German submarine commander of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple.” Movie directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Vertigo), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Trial), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Lolita) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway) have also relied on the point of view of unstable characters to challenge viewers’ assumptions about the plot and create an atmosphere of mystery and fear through the medium of cinema.

  Elsa Charléty

  See also: The Brontë Sisters; Doubles, Doppelgängers and Split Selves; Faulkner, William; Gothic Hero/Villain; “The Horla”; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Other; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

  Further Reading

  Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Nünning, Ansgar. 1997. “‘But Why Will You Say That I Am Mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” In AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22, no. 1: 83–105.

  Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Longman Publishing Group.

  V

  VAMPIRES

  As a figure in literary texts, vampires can be read as metaphors for whatever terrifies and disgusts, whatever is seen as Other. They are cultural indices of the concerns of different ages, contexts, and people. Part of what terrifies and disgusts is their liminal position, between life and death, active at night, invading hearth and home as well as the bodies and blood of loved ones, infecting them like a deadly plague. Vampires are embodiments of contagion and the abject (the aspects of bodily life that people tend to reject because they are felt to be distasteful or horrifying). While some characteristics of literary vampires are consistent across time and place—the blood-sucking, fear of the sun and the sacred, including crucifixes and holy water in Christian contexts (although each of these is questioned in contemporary texts)—they are used differently to represent culturally and historically inflected terrors. The vampire of war, for instance, is World War II propaganda, and in Indian culture the god Kali herself is vampiric. It is in their relation to issues of gender, sexuality, property, and racial purity that vampires are widely used in Western culture, their invasions and rejections of boundaries upsetting certainties, laws, and norms at a fundamental level. This particularly emerges in fears of loss of control over sexuality, women’s bodies as property, and the purity of blood.

  Early European literary vampires appear in German poetry of the Sturm und Drang period including Gottfried August Bürger’s spectral ballad “Lenore” (1773), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth” (1797), and Robert Southey’s Oriental epic poem “Thalaba the Destroyer” (1801), in which the main character’s dead bride turns into a vampire. Lord Byron mentions vampires in “The Giaour” (1813). In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1797), Geraldine, a lamia character (lamias were feminine demonic proto-vampires in ancient Greek mythology), bewitches and preys on young, innocent Christabel. The first vampire tale by a woman is believed to be Elizabeth Caroline Grey’s Faustian penny dreadful The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress (1828). Malcolm Rymer’s penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847) and John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in his short story “The Vampyre” (1819) build on the ambiguity represented by the vampire in an elegant/hideous, godlike/bestial form, but literary vampires have been more broadly popularized since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), aspects of which—primarily the eponymous vampire’s name—were based on the bloodthirsty fifteenth-century Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes, who ruled Transylvania and who was popularly known as “Vlad the Impaler.” Dracula touched a range of cultural, social, personal, and historical concerns. The character of Dracula himself represents an invasion of the modern technological West by Otherness from Transylvania, part of little known, feared Eastern Europe, as Dracula buys up property in London, his coffins containing his broad vampire family delivered straight into the beating heart of Victorian London, when contemporary news reports indicate widespread anti-Semitism and fear of Jewish settlement. Dracula dramatizes the terror of invasion, both by hordes of others and through the blood of pure women. The vampire invades the home and the body of the beloved, bleeding her to undeath, subtly replacing the familiar loved one with a monster, no longer maternal, trustworthy, pure, and virginal.

  “For the Blood Is the Life”

  If this 1905 vampire story by F. Marion Crawford may seem conventional to modern readers, they should bear in mind that it was written after Dracula but well before the advent of vampire movies or the existence of fantasy magazines such as Weird Tales in which the vampire could be rendered a cliché. Crawford’s version is highly atmospheric and makes good use of its setting, a backwater village in Italy. The narrator dwells in a sixteenth-century tower, from which a grave-like mound is visible in a little valley nearby. A visitor notices it and remarks that there appears to be a corpse lying on it. But when he goes to investigate, there is only strangely clinging mist, leaving him to wonder if the corpse is an illusion.

  The narrator then supplies the main story: A miser died, leaving a great sum of money that was stolen by two masons, thus dashing the prospects and marriage plans of the miser’s much more decent son. Meanwhile a village girl longed for this young man, who never noticed her. By chance, she came upon the thieves burying their loot. They killed her and buried her with it. Driven by rage and restless need, she rose each night as a vampire, luring her beloved (the miser’s son) to a slow death as she drained his life away. She was dispatched with holy water and a stake, but the ghostly outline of her corpse remains.

  Crawford was born in Italy of American parents. He spent much of his life in that country, so he was familiar with the region described in the story, which at the time was one of the most backward and inaccessible parts of Europe. There was no reason vampires had to be found only in Transylvania.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Male vampires have generally been seen as dashing, frock-coated, alluring, and dangerously, sexually invasive. In popular fiction their predatory natures align them with dashing romantic leads, a version of relationships that, at its darkest, derives from and plays into sadomasochism. Stoker’s Dracula, metamorphosing into bat or huge dog, is not an attractive figure, although his allure for the young Lucy and the vampire women at his castle is based on sexuality and engulfing power. There are exceptions to this rule, however. The loathsome title vampire in Nosferatu (1922), the earliest (but unofficial) film adaptation of Dracula, is clearly more monster than man.

  Female vampires have also played into some of these same tropes. The non-nurturing vampire mother, for instance, is also used to explore domestic horror. The three vampire women Dracula keeps in his castle would prefer to eat and bleed a child than nurture it, and Lucy Westenra, after being changed into a vampire by Dracula, is discovered about to devour a child in a graveyard. These are dangerously powerful, sexually voracious, and engulfing archaic mothers who refuse children independence and drain adults and children alike. Both configurations connote male fears of castration and disempowerment, the latter arising from fear of the mother, whose body is seen as disgusting in its fecundity and potentially overwhelming, engulfing. As Barbara Creed notes: “Vampirism combines a number of abject activities: the mixing of blood and milk; the threat of castration; the feminization of the male victim” (Creed 1993, 70).

  Vampire mothers are both figures of horror and a vehicle through which more radical contemporary women horror writers undercut the stereotyping of conventional horror’s gender roles. Women disgust in conventional vampire narratives, but are revisited in contemporary women’s horror, such as by Angela Carter and Melanie Tem. In Tem’s “Mama” (1998, with Steve Rasnic Tem), the revenant vampire mother eats flies in the kitchen, gnaws on her husband, and dominates her teenage daughter’s life. Carter simultaneous
ly punctures romance and the vampire role. In “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979), Dracula’s last descendant is trapped by her vampire nature. Though she preys on travelers, she mostly devours small creatures. A victim of the fantasy of romance, she dies having fallen in love with a young wartime bicyclist, leaving the unaware young man a blood-filled rose.

  Contemporary women writers have found in the figure of the vampire marvelous potential for radical reappropriation. Vampires and romantic relationships, both heterosexual and homoerotic, are aligned in Anne Rice’s work (such as Interview with the Vampire, 1976), as they are in Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992), in which, post–Vietnam War, transitory vampire teens adopt America’s neglected children, offer community, and, performing as a rock band, devour at will. Brite authored several vampire novels and stories. Like Rice’s, her work is infused with the disruptive power of the erotic, focusing on the performative vampire as rock star, flâneur, and gay/lesbian/queer, figures providing social critique and highlighting and questioning the fixity of roles and behaviors. Others splice representation of vampires with crime (Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, nineteen novels from 1993 to 2010; Sherry Gottlieb’s Love Bites, 1994), time travel (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint-Germain, nineteen novels from 1978 to 2010), and romantic fictions building on the lesbian relations in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) in the works of such writers as Jeanne Kalogridis (The Diaries of the Family Dracul series, 1995–1997), Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories, 1992), and Victoria Brownworth’s collection Night Bites (1996). In popular fiction and media, Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels (2008–2011, televised as True Blood, 2008–2014) built on the popularity of Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), each problematizing representations of vampires as the Other, seeing them as likely to live alongside regular humans in small towns, high schools, and colleges. In this vein, Nina Auerbach celebrates their liberating potential: “Vampires were supposed to menace women, but to me at least, they promised protection against a destiny of girdles, spike heels and approval” (Auerbach 1995, 4). Latterly, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (since 2005) has taken an opportunity to reinforce conventional romantic traditions of the tall, dark, handsome demon lover interlacing teenage escape from boring marginality for Bella, stranded in school in Forks, Washington, with romantic involvement with the powerful, much older (128 years), assertive, masculine, protective vampire Edward Cullen. Meyer’s Mormon religion–influenced series emphasizes conventional family values, a departure from the critique of vampire mothers.