The ways that storytellers engage with what they find horrifying through creating horror stories – whether this be the Austrian film Ich seh, Ich seh by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, Stephen King’s novel Carrie, Steven Spielberg’s film Poltergeist or short story “Under the Black Water” by Mariana Enriquez – can be traced with the influence of HP Lovecraft in the horror genre.
Lovecraftian Horror Explained
HP Lovecraft opens his own essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, saying, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” The relationship created here is between horror literature and human emotion. Emotions of fear are created by invoking a sense of the unknown.
But Lovecraft can’t really be seen as an exemplary person in terms of being open and accepting of other humans. His posthumously published diaries and letters revealed a host of deep-seated prejudices against anyone who isn’t a white Christian male.
Lovecraft’s own feelings towards humans he deemed as other to himself arguably influenced how fear, for him, is created when one engages with something unfamiliar, or different from one’s own perception of the self.
Fear in Ich seh, Ich seh (Goodnight Mommy)
The 2014 Austrian psychological horror film Ich seh, Ich, seh (translated as Goodnight Mommy in English) by writer and director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala has a more tolerable engagement with the creation of fear from an unknown other. It, too, expresses how this other is inevitably endowed within an absence.
The movie follows two twins, Elias and Lukas, and their Mother, known only as Mother, as she attempts to connect with them after undergoing face surgery. The Mother spends most of the movie with bandages around her face.
This, along with the boys finding her personality to have grown stricter, causes them to believe that this woman is not their Mother. They begin a series of tests, including tying her to a bed and glueing her mouth shut.
The fear felt by the boys stems from their inability to know whether this bandaged woman really is who she says she is.
But the movie turns the audience’s trust in the twins upside-down. The boys plan to burn their home down at the movie’s climax in the hope that it will kill the woman they are certain is an imposter. Mother manages to free herself momentarily to plead with the boys for her life.
Here, the movie reveals that Lukas has been dead the entire time. Elias was merely conjuring him, presumably as a coping mechanism to deal with his brother’s sudden death. What caused his death, and whether it relates to his Mother’s injuries, is left unknown.
Mother does tell him, “It’s not your fault”, a comment which could say two things at once.
Motherhood in Ich seh Ich seh
Which Mother would tell their remaining son – especially one who now holds your own life in their hands – it is their fault that their twin brother died? Elias’s conjuring of Lukas seems to suggest his need to account for his brother’s absence, an absence whose cause remains unaccounted for.
The reason that this twist is so effective is that the story follows the gaze of the twins. We are made to question the bizarre actions of Mother and search for reasons to confirm why she is the imposter, the other.
The sleight of hand is that the unknown entity – call it a ghost or a conjuration by Elias to cope with the death of his brother – has been half of the duo we’ve been rooting for. Worse still, Lukas’ death becomes shockingly apparent when the film is re-watched.
Though Mother plays along with Elias at the beginning of the film, she begins to ignore Lukas’ presence. Without the knowledge of his death, the movie makes it seem like Mother is being unjust towards one of her own children, like only putting food out for Elias.
Whilst this seems to confirm her not being their Mother, on re-watching the movie, with the obvious known, one gets a sense that she wants to move on from the death of her son and really wants her remaining son to do the same.
It has been seen that part of this fear comes from a reversal of expectation – Mother is cruel to the boys, unmotherly, not what a mother should be. This does the opposite of pointing towards a natural disposition that mothers are supposedly endowed with but instead points towards the constructed expectations of what a mother should be.
Mother is considered an imposter because she pretends to be asleep when the boys enter her room. But because the movie gives her a life where she is dealing with surgery, divorce, the death of her one son and the delusions of the other, then her want to avoid the world and pretend to be sleeping is understandable.
She does not so much betray motherhood as points towards the audience’s expectations of what a mother should be. We are left with an absence of an ideal mother through the far more genuine portrayal of a woman, who, too, is a mother dealing with death.
Dull North American Ghosts
Ghosts in the North American world tend to deal with the guilt that they place into these absences. One cannot really talk about horror in the twentieth century without mention of Stephen King. King’s stories follow the same basic trajectory of a Lovecraftian notion of fear. Still, King has capitalised on the fear that the absence can provoke.
His stories rarely give closed endings, with questions of why certain events originally occurred being left to the audiences mind.
What’s Horrifying about Stephen King’s Carrie?
Take his debut novel, Carrie. Why Carrie is telekinetic is never revealed. What is revealed is her revenge against everyone (literally the entire town) who treated her as lesser. Carrie is an outcast in high school, the weird girl whose Mother is devotedly Christian (and is rumoured to have given birth to her through the use of a kitchen knife).
At age sixteen, Carrie gets her first period in an open high school shower. The other girls torment her. She walks home early, and her Mother locks her in a closet as punishment for sinning.
A boy named Tommy feels sorry for Carrie, as well as guilt and shame from once partaking in the acts of cruelty towards her, and decides to take as his date to their prom night. The night seems to be going fine, with Carrie finally talking to the popular kids. Better yet, the popular crowd sees that Carrie isn’t all that weird.
But right when Carrie’s life seems good, a bucket of pig’s blood is dropped on her. Carrie fights back. She kills everyone in the high school gym and most of the town.
There is little in the way of plot. The novel follows a loose epistolary form – why horror novels love the epistolary form is another essay – and King admits that he added most of it because it was too short to be a novel on its own.
What’s significant is how Carrie, as the outsider, is made to be the unknown only because the other school kids torment her. She is bullied and cast away from the crowd. King says that the character is based on a girl in his high school that he used to bully with the other ‘normal kids’.
The guilt, one could say, drove him to write the book. I guess most people can’t claim that they carry guilt from the mistakes they made as children.
Stephen King’s Poltergeist
A similar engagement with guilt is seen in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. The haunted house is built on an ancient Indian burial ground. This trope has become a cliché of North American guilt ever since. It’s a common fear in the country that past wrongdoings shall come and avenge themselves against the living.
What Poltergeist brings is how ghosts of past mistakes can haunt them. A poltergeist is a particular form of haunting. A specific projection onto the absence that forms a disturbance in the present. They make physical disturbances as if to make themselves known.
Objects are moved, which is to say, the physical world is affected by the poltergeist’s paradoxical absent presence. Their relation to Spielberg’s movie is this absent presence. The house built on an ancient Indian burial ground speaks to the US’s capitalist desire to ignore certain history.
The movie illustrates how a home can become a place of strange happenings because an unaccounted for presence is absent.
The Horrific in Mariana Enriquez
A shameful past is one way to feel discomfort at home. Still, many other reasons can exist, as seen in Marian Enriquez’s short story collection Things We Lost In The Fire. The collection is filled with stories which are technically horror, but only because they horrify.
I make this distinction to draw on what is horrifying about the stories, and the collection as a whole, when compared to what has been seen as horrifying in Stephen King. I can relate it to the Lovecraftian definition of horror literature through this.
Mariana Enriquez “Under the Black Water”
Mariana Enriquez’s story “Under the Black Water” illustrates how the places one lives can be haunted in a web-like fashion by the past, environmental degradation in the present, police brutality, and gender-based violence.
In the story, a district attorney (henceforth the DA) investigates the death of two boys, Emanuel and Yamil, who were found to have drowned in the river Riachuelo. There is nothing too mysterious about the death of the boys.
Death, too, is common in the slum of Villa Moreno. Despite the contrary evidence given by the police, the DA believes that the boys were pushed into the water by the police. This act led to their death. How and why they died is implied throughout: they were poor and their death will not cause a national outcry as disappearances at the hands of authorities are all too familiar in Argentina.
Enriquez grew up during the Argentine Guerra Sucia (Dirty Wars). During that time, people often disappeared or were killed by state forces. Enriquez notes in an interview with the Johannesburg Review of Books that growing up in Argentina when she did influenced the types of stories that she writes.
The slum where the boys lived, Villa Moreno, is entered by the DA during the story. Fear is created by the taxi driver refusing to drive her all the way into the slum. This creates fear through an unknown, but how Enriquez writes the DA’s reaction to this is interesting.
The DA is annoyed. Enriquez writes, “She threatened to complain about the driver’s behaviour to the owners of the taxi service; what a scandal to leave a judiciary official on foot in that area”. Note how, in this sentence, the area, Villa Moreno, is described as being unsafe. Its unsafeness is made to be common knowledge.
The DA considers how she might use her social status as a means to get the driver to go further. It also shows how, though she might not admit it, she does have fears of others whom she exists in a different social standing with.
Her fears could relate to guilt, adding a layer of complexity to how and why people live in and live with the fears of others. Living as someone who wants to help the poor, her guilt of being afraid of them can remain. But there is more. As a woman, she is fearful. Enriquez notes that,
She has left behind the tailored suits she always wore in the office and court, opting instead for jeans, a dark shirt, and nothing in her pockets except money to get home and her telephone so she could communicate with her contacts in the Villa. This is so she’d have nothing valuable to hand over if she was mugged.
Gender-based Violence and Mariana Enriquez
In “Under Black Water”, the theme of gender-based violence is present, but notice how it comes after a scene where the DA attempted to use her social standings to get the driver to go further. Her desire to be driven further relates to her position as a woman in an anti-woman society. However, her economic social status means that she is somewhat safer as she can enter and leave the slum at choice.
The web is conjoined with the environment. The river the boys were thrown into is described as being negatively affected by years of human environmental degradation. The DA, for instance, recalls a story her father told her about his days as a labourer on the river barges.
All the unwanted meat from the cattle that they killed was thrown into the river so that it ran red. This plague-like image ties the river and the story to the global commodity markets. That the slum has been terribly affected by these global capitalist forces should not come as a surprise.
The environmental damage affects the bodies of those living in the slums. People living in these areas are described as missing limbs or having other body deformities. A writer like Lovecraft would make these others the ones to be feared, but in Enriquez’s story, this is not really the case.
A cause for the deformities seems to lie in the pollution of the river. The government’s denial only strengthens the case. What becomes fearful, horrifying, is not the deformities, the strange found in the familiar human, but the fact that the pollution got so bad it negatively affected human life. More so, it’s horrifying that people have no choice but to live this way.
“In Enriquez’s world, no one is adequately shielded…Her narrators have to shrug past almost unbearable sights as part of their everyday routines. Thus, the act of looking takes on enormous importance. These women have a choice in what they notice and what they flinch away from. The consequences are dire, but there’s nevertheless a sense of agency in directing one’s gaze.”
To return to the DA, she earnestly wants to create a better life for those living in horrifying conditions. Her job, at least, requires her to partake in their lives. She cannot be separated from them as they live in proximity, much like she has to enter the slums as a woman.
The history of Argentina rears itself as she walks, and in the story that she already knows shall not be solved.
Horror and The Global South
This proximity of what cannot be avoided has interesting implications globally, but particular thought can be placed on its effects in the global South.
I borrow from JM Coetzee’s defining of the term in that the global South where “the winds blow in a certain way and the leaves fall in a certain way and the sun beats down in a certain way that is instantly recognisable from one part of the South to another.”
A past of still unexplained political killings is something that Argentina and South Africa, for instance, share, as well as a proliferation of GBV. And most countries of the global south share the specifics of having one’s environment destroyed for the exportation of goods.
Suppose one were to follow Coetzee’s definition. In that case, one’s left with the South as not that which is defined as the negative, other, to the global North, but rather as something recognisable for its own sake. Notably different, but not different through a definition of differences. The break-away of dichotomies to define the North from the South suggests that more than a binary of differences exists between them.
The differences found point towards not just the fact that such binary never existed, but also highlights the already-assumed assumption that such binary are in place. Much like ghosts, the differences obey no spatial boundaries. Attempts to lock them in cages or to define them would only point towards the creation of such cages at the moment when they are unlocked.
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An impossible exorcism of Lovecraft from the genre might just be the only call for action I can make. Or at least a re-look at his influence to better understand the limits set when one cannot see beyond him.
Kris Van der Bijl 
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