Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  Jaws keeps audiences engaged by carefully distributing information about an evolutionarily salient threat. The narrative prominence of that threat is signaled to the audience in the title of the film, on the official poster art, and in the very first scene. The promotional campaign surrounding the original release of the film focused almost exclusively on the great white, priming audiences to expect a drama pitting human characters against a dangerous shark. Peter Benchley offered an explanation for the wild success of the film, paraphrasing E. O. Wilson (1984) in an interview: “We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them. Fascination breeds preparedness, and preparedness survival” (Salisbury and Nathan 1995). His observation dovetails with the evolutionary approach advanced in this book. But the film is more than a depiction of a predator—it’s about people’s attempt to overcome fear and cope with danger, and about the conscientious, altruistic protagonist’s struggle to protect his fellow citizens from an almost otherworldly threat. Jaws is a horror story about that most basic and terrifying aspect of human existence—our vulnerability, the fact that we are “food with pretensions” (Plumwood 2012, 18). But it is also an action-adventure about a resourceful individual’s battle against, and defeat of, the harbinger of that terrible message. The film tells us that with vigilance, cunning, and perseverance, we can avoid becoming food.

  CHAPTER 10

  Haunted Houses, Haunted Minds

  The Shining (1977)

  Jack Torrance, a bright and sympathetic man with literary ambitions, a volatile temper, and a drinking problem, has recently lost his job teaching high school because he assaulted a student. His marriage to Wendy has been troubled ever since he in a drunken fury accidentally broke the arm of their now five-year-old son, Danny. A well-connected friend helps him get a job as the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, an upscale resort in the Rocky Mountains. Jack accepts the position, seeing it and its forced sobriety as a last chance at rescuing his marriage and his faltering literary career. Danny, who has clairvoyant abilities—the “shine”—is tormented by horrifying visions. He senses that something bad is going to happen at the Overlook. When the family arrives at the hotel just before it closes down for the winter, the cook, Hallorann, pulls Danny aside. Hallorann also has the shine, sees in Danny a fellow psychic, and warns him that the hotel is haunted—particularly room 217—but says that the ghosts can’t harm him. Hallorann is right about the hotel being haunted, wrong about their capacity to hurt Danny. There is an evil, supernatural force at the Overlook, a supernatural accumulation of the atrocities perpetrated by the Overlook’s past owners and inhabitants—gangsters, petty criminals, and ruthless businessmen. That evil force is fed by Danny’s psychic powers and becomes stronger until Danny is attacked by a zombie woman in room 217. He manages to escape. Danny and Wendy desperately want to leave the hotel, but they are snowed in, with no connection to the outside world because Jack has destroyed their radio and disabled their snowmobile. He refuses to acknowledge any danger and has no wish to leave the hotel and face unemployment and humiliation. The hotel wants to absorb Danny into its cast of evil ghosts because of his unique psychic powers, but it works on Jack, the family’s weakest link, and tempts him with alcohol and the promise of power to get him to murder his son. The evil force gradually unhinges Jack completely and turns him against his family in a murderous rage. Danny and Wendy are rescued at the last minute by Hallorann, whom Danny summoned with a psychic cry for help. Meanwhile, Jack has forgotten to dump the pressure on the hotel’s old boiler, which explodes, destroying the hotel and Jack. Danny, Wendy, and Hallorann escape (King 2011).

  Stephen King, born in 1947, is the world’s most successful horror writer. He has published about seventy books which have sold around 350 million copies, according to one estimate (Hough 2012), and his books have been translated into about fifty languages (Lilja 2015). King has won a staggering number of awards and prizes, most prestigiously the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 and, in 2015, the National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. Ever since his debut with Carrie in 1974 (King 1999), King’s work has attracted praise as well as hostility from critics (Magistrale 2013), but evidently his stories resonate with a very large number of people across the world. There are many reasons for King’s popularity. He writes in an accessible, colloquial style. His plots are eventful and dramatic, and he engages unashamedly with big and basic themes such as good vs. evil. His characters tend to be ordinary, recognizable people, but they are depicted in psychological complexity and with genuine compassion as they face very dire straits, whether from each other or from supernatural monsters. Moreover, King’s brand of supernaturalism—transcendent moral forces that manifest themselves, usually, as traditional horror figures such as malevolent ghosts and evil monsters—has wide appeal because it resonates with people’s intuitive beliefs about invisible, morally polarized supernatural agents who exert influence on the material world. And finally, the worldview that emerges from King’s fiction contains an unflinching acknowledgment of pain and suffering and evil in the world, yet tempers that acknowledgment with a romantic, sometimes sentimental, celebration of the human potential for good. That combination of hard-nosed realism and moral affirmation is attractive to many readers because, while not descending into nihilism, it seems to capture a difficult but important truth about the harshness of the world.

  All of those elements are prominent in The Shining (henceforth TS), King’s third published novel, his first bestseller (Magistrale 2010), and one of his most enduringly popular works. Literary critics have engaged with TS from a number of perspectives. Several have focused on the autobiographical elements in the novel, most obvious in the depiction of a writer struggling with alcoholism (Buday 2015, Dickerson 1990, Winter 1984). Others have traced its literary historical heritage to the dark American Romantics (Mustazza 1990), literary naturalism (Reesman 1990), and Shakespearean tragedy (Magistrale 1990). Historicists have attempted to situate TS in its historical moment. Cohen, for instance, claims that TS in its depiction of Jack’s descent into homicidal fury offers a “metaphor for the disintegration of American society in the post-Vietnam era” (1990, 48). Ferreira claims that the novel “mirrors the contemporary malaise in American political life” (1990, 27) in its focus on the Overlook’s dreadful secrets and sordid history. These critics all deal with important aspects of the novel, but they do not get us much closer to its staying power to engage audiences. Davenport (2000) develops the thesis that TS can be read as an index of peculiarly male anxieties arising from contemporary sociocultural organization, anxieties over masculinity and what it means to be a man. In this interpretation, Jack “represents a transitional form of masculinity,” torn between the father-image provided to him by his own abusive, patriarchal dad and a more contemporary, soft image of the father as a loving co-parent, a “primary caregiver” (Davenport 2000, 317). This is astute and important, but we still are not much closer to the story’s resonance across time and space. Steven Bruhm has tried to get a fix on the deeper psychological significance of TS (2012). He applies a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework and offers a queer reading of the novel, claiming that it is really about repressed homoerotic and Oedipal desires. That reading profoundly distorts the meaning of the novel. The story does not engage and terrify readers by confronting them with the monstrosity of repressed incestuous desire—Jack, claims Bruhm, faces “psychic dissolution and collapse” as he is confronted with his own sexual desire for his son (Bruhm 2012, 470, Alegre 2001, 109). The Freudian notion of the Oedipus complex has no correlates in psychological reality (Daly and Wilson 1990), and Lacanian psychoanalysis is scientifically deeply suspect (Buekens and Boudry 2015). In contrast, an evolutionary perspective gets into focus the novel’s meaning and its power to engage readers.

  The central conflicts of TS, Jack’s struggle again
st destructive forces inside and outside himself and Wendy and Danny’s struggle to overcome the dangers in the Overlook, go much deeper than King’s idiosyncratic concerns and the anxieties peculiar to the American 1970s discussed by most critics. They go straight to the bedrock of human nature. These conflicts reflect evolutionarily recurrent adaptive problems—the problem of balancing conflicting evolved motives, such as motives for selfish status striving versus motives for affiliative nurturing behavior, and the problem of surviving the hostile forces of nature. Moreover, the supernatural elements—crucial to the novel’s imaginative quality and its effect as a horror story—reverberate powerfully with evolved cognitive dispositions for magical thinking and metaphysical dualism (Bloom 2004). They seem to confirm what many people intuit, that there are immaterial, moral forces at work in the world—transcendent forces of evil, animated by antisocial motives, but also supernatural or “spiritual” powers within people, powers like the shine that can detect the powers of evil and thus help people to fend off evil. Those reasons together help explain why the novel continues to engage readers across the world.

  King skillfully builds sympathy for his characters via subjective narration and multiple viewpoints (Dymond 2015). He lets us see through their eyes, both inward and outward. We feel with Jack, a sympathetic but flawed man, and only gradually does that sympathy turn to horror as he descends into homicidal insanity (Manchel 1995). We also feel the horror of his wife and child when they become targets for his homicidal rage. The turning point in the reader’s sympathy for Jack occurs when Jack goes to examine the hotel’s snowmobile, their last medium for escape. King uses free indirect discourse to put us into Jack’s mind as he vacillates between wanting to leave the hotel, to protect his family, and wanting to stay, to pursue his own ambition. Jack cannot find a battery for the snowmobile. “It didn’t bother him in the slightest. In fact, it made him feel glad. He was relieved” (304). Jack then finds the battery, but decides to lie about it to Wendy and Danny. As he is leaving the shed that holds the snowmobile, he sees Danny playing in the snow. Again we follow his thoughts: “(What in God’s name were you thinking of?) The answer came back with no pause. (Me. I was thinking of me.)” Here Jack has a moment of clarity, a moment in which he realizes that he is yielding to the hotel’s evil. “In that instant, kneeling there, everything came clear to him. It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too . . . He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped” (306). That moment of clarity is followed by a vision of a life in poverty and alcoholism, the fate that Jack envisions for himself if he leaves the Overlook, his last chance at success. He then makes his final decision, yanks out a vital part of the snowmobile’s engine and throws it far away into the snow, feeling afterwards “at peace” (310). The reader is here forced away from sympathetic identification with Jack and toward sympathetic identification with his victims.

  The destructive forces that fuel Jack’s descent are simultaneously psychological and supernatural in character. The psychological forces are the weaknesses of Jack’s character, his tendency toward alcoholism, his violent outbursts, his desire for status, and the memory of his own father, a psychopathically abusive parent. That memory haunts Jack, and he is terrified of mirroring it in his own behavior. The supernatural forces are the hotel’s evil ghosts awakened by Danny’s clairvoyance. The supernatural elements of TS are not, as some critics have claimed, superfluous “icing on the cake” of a social realist story (Herron 1982, 74, Alegre 2001, Notkin 1982). Most readers will recognize that some of the most vividly memorable moments in the novel involve protagonists’ meetings with supernatural agents. They are material embodiments of moral forces from the past and the present. For Jack, the evil of the past and the latent evil inside himself gradually consume the present, taking over his mind, leaving nothing outside destructive rage. For Danny, the shine is a special power of insight that renders him vulnerable to horror but also ultimately enables him to transcend it. The forces of evil awaken no alluring echo in his own mind, although they do reach out to him—for example by cajoling him into breaking his promise not to enter room 217. Though caught in the cycle of evil transmitted through the generations, Danny does not internalize the evil that threatens to destroy him. Just as the reader is forced to break away from sympathetic identification with Jack, Danny is forced to sever the emotional bond with his father. The father that he knew and loved has already been consumed by the ghosts of the past. In place of his father, Danny has a bond with his mother, whose courage is equal to the challenge of defending her son from a once beloved husband, and he has also a bond with Hallorann, who shares his gift, tries to prepare him for the dangers to which his gift makes him vulnerable, and in the end becomes a surrogate father to Danny. Hallorann invites Danny into the imaginative world opened by the shine—a vital task that his own father, Jack, is unable to accomplish because he does not have the gift, and because he is unwilling to acknowledge to anyone but himself the reality of that imaginative world.

  Jack Torrance’s dispositions for alcoholism and violent aggression are set in tension with his affiliative dispositions for parental care and nurturing. Depicted as a likeable and ambitious man in a bad situation, Jack is torn between pursuing his ambitions and taking care of his family, two motives that prove increasingly incompatible over the course of the novel as the hotel’s evil forces lure him with alcohol and promises of power and status, bringing out his violent tendencies and turning him against his family. Jack becomes obsessed with the hotel’s violent and sordid past, its previous owners’ ties to organized crime, the suicides and brutal assassinations that have taken place there. The hotel promises him a “position of responsibility”; it promises him the prestige, power, and respect that he feels he doesn’t get elsewhere; it promises him a place in “the Overlook’s organizational structure. Perhaps . . . in time . . . [at] the very top,” as one ghost says to Jack (390). Jack, harboring dreams of writing a history of the Overlook, even sees a chance to salvage his literary career. As he is examining the snowmobile, he thinks:

  The Overlook didn’t want them to go and he didn’t want them to go either … Maybe he was part of it, now. Perhaps the Overlook, large and rambling Samuel Johnson that it was, had picked him to be its Boswell. You say the new caretaker writes? Very good, sign him on. Time we told our side. Let’s get rid of the woman and his snotnosed kid first, however. We don’t want him to be distracted. (309–310)

  Jack’s concern with status and social power dynamics is signaled from the beginning of the novel, from the very first sentence: “Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick” (3). The situation is Jack’s job interview with the manager of the Overlook. The manager, the officious little prick, Ullman, is highly condescending toward Jack, indelicately bringing up Jack’s past mistakes, the loss of his previous job and his alcoholism. Jack in turn is highly aware of, and resentful toward, the asymmetric power dynamics: “Ullman behind the desk and Jack in front of it, interviewer and interviewee, supplicant and reluctant patron . . . his original dislike [for Ullman] washed over him again in a wave” (5, 7). Jack is here forced into a position of submission, and he hates it. His desire for status, exemplified in his fantasy-image of himself as “acclaimed playwright and winner of the New York Critics Circle Award . . . man of letters, esteemed thinker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize at seventy” (420), is a representation of a basic, universal motive. People, and men more strongly than women, evolved to desire status (Buss 2012, 361). As the psychologist David Buss notes, people can obtain status by two routes—dominance and prestige. Dominance is obtained by force or threat of force, and tends to be perceived as illegitimate, whereas prestige is “freely conferred deference” (365)—that is, legitimate status. As Jack’s attempts to acquire status by prestige fail—he “had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father” (365)—he turns to aggressive dominance, spurred by the evil forces of the hotel, themselves repres
ented as metaphysical disembodiments of the violent dominance and illegitimate status wielded by the hotel’s previous owners, the gangsters and amoral businessmen.

  As the hotel’s bad influence becomes increasingly evident—Jack becomes short-tempered and preoccupied, Danny has violent seizures that accompany his disturbing premonitions—Wendy becomes increasingly anxious to leave the hotel, even though it would cost Jack his job and throw the family into economic despair. “She didn’t like what the Overlook seemed to be doing to Jack and Danny” (209). Her primary concern is for her family’s well-being. Jack, however, refuses to leave. He refuses to even acknowledge that there is a problem, a real danger to their son. After Danny has been attacked by the zombie woman in room 217, Jack goes to investigate. He senses that there is something in room 217, something nasty, and flees the room to report back to Danny and Wendy. That scene is followed by the novel’s shortest chapter, a chapter called “The Verdict” and only about a quarter of a page long. “ ‘Nothing there,’ he said, astounded by the heartiness of his voice. ‘Not a thing’ ” (281). The chapter is called “The Verdict” because it signals Jack’s decision to prioritize his ambition, his desire for status, over concern for his son’s well-being. Jack’s reasons for not wanting to quit his job and leave the Overlook are given in free indirect discourse, after Wendy has expressed her desire to flee the hotel on a snowmobile and go to Sidewinder, the nearest town: