Geography of Horror: Spaces, Hauntings and the American Imagination (Palgrave Gothic) 3030993248, 9783030993245

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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

Geography of Horror Spaces, Hauntings and the American Imagination Marko Lukić

Luke Roberts

Palgrave Gothic Series Editor Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a designation for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatisfied with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the Gothic was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident throughout contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television programmes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre, ghostly tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented online. It is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation. This series offers readers the very best in new international research and scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and diversity of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to the eighteenth century, thePalgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new discussions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities emerging in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of obsolescence. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14698

Marko Lukić

Geography of Horror Spaces, Hauntings and the American Imagination

Marko Lukić University of Zadar Zadar, Croatia

ISSN 2634-6214     ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic) Palgrave Gothic ISBN 978-3-030-99324-5    ISBN 978-3-030-99325-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-­known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination. —Juan José Saer The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. —Stephen King

Dedicated to my parents and my little brother for their endless support and love.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Mapping Horror 19 3 The Frontier 49 4 Domestic Horrors 89 5 Small Town Heterotopias125 6 Urban Nightmares159 Index187

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king. —Stephen King, ‘Salem’s Lot

A possible entry point into the debate and analysis of the issue of space and place as it relates to the imaginary geography of the American horror genre can be achieved through an analytic deconstruction of Stephen King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot. The now classic story about a vampiric infestation of a small town in the state of Maine, published in 1975, had a significant impact on horror imagination, but even more important, it solidified and further promoted the relevance of space in the process of constructing an engaging horror narrative. By furthering and reshaping the already existing small-town horror tradition, inherited through authors such as Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, and many others, King articulates a multilayered spatial-based narrative which, while functioning as a setting for the monstrous prowling, opens itself to rich geographical readings. Starting with Maine, the readers are first introduced to a reimagining of the region/state now filled with coexisting real and imagined locations and towns, a praxis already implemented by Lovecraft and now embraced by King. This introduction to the “promised land of mythical times”, as described by Maurice Lévy (1988, 35), is followed by the reader’s exploration of the fictitious town of Jerusalem’s Lot, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Lukić, Geography of Horror, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2_1

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whose streets, shops, customs bear resemblance to an idealized Norman Rockwell painting. In doing so, the reader senses the existence of a dark and even morbid (spatial) underbelly characterized by continuous abuse and violence. King’s hypothetical geographic painting is completed with the introduction and acknowledgment of the Marsten house, a dark and foreboding structure looming over the small town—a catalyst for many of the occurrences within the novel. By mapping the region, the town, the (haunted) house, King creates a detailed spatially defined and interconnected universe that, when observed through the eyes of the main character (Ben Mears), acts as a living (monstrous) entity, surpassing the traditional “setting-based” perception of the horror loci. Consequently, if the setting is no longer a setting and space becomes a metaphoric and symbolically meaningful participant and contributor to a horror narrative at hand, this newly discovered layer calls to be deciphered and dissected. However, if one is to attempt a theoretical incursion into the meanings and functions of space, specifically when this space is articulated within the horror genre, a “simplified” and “consequential” approach, common in most contemporary analysis, can often be unfulfilling and it lacks a potentially deeper understanding of different spatially based problematics. For example, the geographic painting presented by King in ‘Salem’s Lot can be deconstructed through a racially based discourse, questioning the dominant whiteness of the prototypical American small-town Main Street. Another reading could venture into various feminist issues present or absent in King’s representation of different domestic environments and homes. Yet another approach could problematize the prototypical haunted house and its historical background, as well as its subsequent interpretations. All of these theoretical approaches are legitimate, and they directly contribute to the advancement of specific theoretical discourses (within different fields), as well as to the understanding of the genre in general. Furthermore, they directly contribute to the recognition, understanding, and potential discovery of spaces as key elements for the genre, and as something that surpasses the basic equivalence between space and setting. Nevertheless, despite these contributions, a series of questions remain unanswered. By once again using King’s novel as an example, and by addressing any of the previously mentioned questions, the derived analysis could shed light on many interesting social, cultural, and historical aspects relating to space. What these analyses traditionally fail to do is to answer questions about the actual spaces. In what way and why does King construct an imaginary map of Maine or a non-existent town within it? What

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is the role of the portrayed spaces within the presented narrative, or, even more important, their role in relation to the particularities of the genre? Is there a larger common denominator dictating the selection of certain spaces over others when attempting to create a specific genre-bound narrative? Is there a spatially based “theoretical key” that could be used to unlock certain narratives? Can the articulation of certain spaces and their subsequent functioning be observed as a sort of continuously evolving archetype, used by authors not necessarily to express a particular attitude or critique but instead to (spatially) contextualize specific inherent fears and anxieties, which will then be subsequently further elaborated by the storyline? To answer these questions, in relation to the proposed example, but also within a much broader horror genre context, it becomes necessary to define an adequate theoretical framework, one that would consider the geographical and topographical aspect of a particular narrative, while also understanding and valuing its humanistic and artistic components. Such a framework can be found within the context of human geography, which, while being part of the larger discipline of geography, predominantly focuses on the presence and activities of humans (Pitzl 2004, XXI). As evidenced by a variety of geographic and non-geographic fields within the studies offered by human geography, the connection between spaces and humans becomes a very fluid anthropocentric discourse focused on the interactivity between humans and their surroundings. This becomes even more relevant and elaborate with the introduction of the space-place binarity, with space denominating, as defined by Tim Cresswell (Place—A Short Introduction), an abstract concept such as outer space or the spaces in geometry, spaces with areas and volumes (8), or as seen by Yi-Fu Tuan (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience), as a concept akin to movement (6). This definition is then expanded to include the idea of place that is premised on the notion of pause (6), or more precisely, the moment when the interrupted movement allows for a human inscription to occur. This pause and the following inscription allow the creation of place—a theoretical hybrid located between a geographic reality and the abstraction of human emotions. As such, the concept of place, through its hybridity and adaptability, becomes widely used and substantially structured around human activities and interactions, while at the same time remaining, as Cresswell puts it once again, a non-specialized “piece of academic terminology” (2014, 1). The term, therefore, becomes prone to a variety of interpretative possibilities, many of them directed toward a better

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understanding of different interactive processes (social, cultural, economic, etc.) occurring between humans and their surroundings. The proposed human geography as a theoretical framework, together with the understanding and reading of different spaces in relation to the various proposed theories, especially those relating to the space-place binary, allows to test the possibilities and methods of using this approach to analyze and understand various narratives. This is especially true when discussing the horror genre, whose multifaceted, evolving, and perpetually challenging nature is traditionally approached following the already mentioned “cause and effect” method, which limits the analysis of spaces to the reading of their symbolical/metaphoric value in relation to a particular cultural, historical, or social issue. The situation escalates further when we consider the number of different spaces the horror genre has to offer—the spaces whose role, in most cases, is almost crucial for the storyline at hand. How to analyze, for example, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or its various cinematic interpretations, without addressing and contextualizing the role of the castle or (depending on the version) London or some other metropolis? What would be the focus of the analysis of Robert Eggers’s recent film, The Witch (2015), if the issue of frontier space was neglected? The necessity for an in-depth spatial analysis, together with the intention of reading the addressed spaces through the prism of the paradigms offered by human geography, calls for a more focused theoretical lynchpin between these notions. A solution, and a key for connecting and deconstructing the spatial dimension within the horror genre, can be found at the core of Yi-Fu Tuan’s research about humans and space. In his seminal work, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Tuan goes over a series of different concepts and ideas relating to the perception and construction of spaces. Ranging from ideas about experiencing different spaces as personal, mythical, or historical, as well as the idea of space and place in respect to architecture and even time, Tuan reveals the vast range and importance of the concept of space in our everyday existence. However, even more important is the emphasis he places on the human body as the centerpiece for any and all types of spatial creations. As Tuan states, “…if we look for fundamental principles of spatial organization, we find them in two kinds of facts: the posture and structure of the human body, and the relations (whether close or distant) between human beings” (2001, 34). He then continues his argument by explaining that the human body is unique in that it easily maintains the upright position, and as such it is ready to act, and that by standing upright, “space opens up before him and is

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immediately differentiable into front-back and right-left axes in conformity with the structure of his body” (2001, 35). Space is therefore constructed in accordance to a “corporeal schema” (2001, 36). This leads us to the question relating to the horror genre, where a similar anthropocentric argument could be made. Whether we start from its gothic roots, with a classical damsel in distress attempting to escape the clutches of a villain, or opt for the latest iteration of Hannibal Lecter and his avant-garde understanding of the posthumous body aesthetics, an anthropocentric discourse dictates the narrative. Regardless of the storyline, the horrors presented to the audience are almost exclusively premised on the peril of various characters. If this for some reason fails, and the audience becomes “disenchanted” with the protagonists, the focus quickly switches to the perpetrators and villains. In some extreme cases, when the living or barely surviving bodies, for whatever reason, become unattractive, the audience is allowed to experience the basic gruesome list of (un) dead and/or tortured bodies. This surface analytical level, however, is not the only one that can be addressed. A deeper and more engaging examination of various narratives will unearth different and more complex readings and projections of the notion of the body. If a stratum of the genre can be—and usually is—defined by a sheer number of endangered, menacing, and prohibiting (if not even explicitly monstrous) bodies, then there is an equally large and even more intricate one structured around different metaphoric and symbolic perceptions of the human body. Here we find various dream-based storylines, unconventional explorations of the genre, or even tokens whose symbolical value within a particular narrative is projected in accordance with the story (or desire) at hand. Nevertheless, despite the more innovative and possibly more artistic articulations, both analytical levels project bodies that retain an interconnectivity and/or a level of interdependence (symbolic, metaphoric, or actual) with the spaces they operate within or from which they derive. An even deeper and decisively more engaging level of observing, reading, and further perpetuating the construct of the body within the genre can be found in the already mentioned theoretical musings. Different humans, characters, and consequently bodies, locked within a perilous situation, now become extrapolated and deconstructed, once again in accordance with their behavioral patterns, and in turn, in accordance with the spaces they are connected to. As such, they become elements of a larger (metaphoric) body, serving the argument at hand. Although these three levels are nothing more than a tentative and extremely simplified overview of a specific aspect of the

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genre, the derived conclusion focusing on the dominant presence of an anthropocentric discourse cannot be ignored. The horror genre exists on and around the (potentially) infringed human body. Simultaneously, this anthropocentric backbone for the entire genre cannot be disconnected from the previously addressed spatial dimension. The same bodies belonging to any of the mentioned categories are located in or are a product of a particular space. As such, they follow Tuan’s idea of a “corporeal schema” which allows them to construct but also to experience the surrounding space, to be subjugated by it, or, on a symbolic and metaphoric level, to be representative of it. The horror genre recognizes the relevance and potential of this spatial bond and the derived interpretative value, making it an integral segment of its narrative. It is precisely this anthropocentric nexus that is the focus of the proposed research. Instead of approaching the spatial turn from the perspective of a “consequential” analysis, where the role of space tends to be observed as a setting of projected values and the analysis often centers around the consequences of a certain geographical, spatial, and cultural premises, the proposed text aims at refocusing the discourse by exploring space itself. This understands acknowledging and further elaborating some of the basic theoretical paradigms belonging to the human geography tradition and superimposing them on a series of horror genre cases. However, as far as the scope and the range of the research are concerned, the selection of these cases will be specific. As indicated by the title, the project’s main task will be the reading and analysis of the American horror genre, where a particularly tangible absence of an adequate elaboration of the relationship between the American horror imagination and its spatial and geographic component is present. This becomes even more relevant if we consider that American horror production has over the years achieved absolute worldwide dominance. Although the American horror genre describes an almost endless sequence of real or fictitious spaces and locations, ranging between complete wilderness (Abraham Panther’s “An Account of a Beautiful Young Lady” to the previously mentioned Robert Egger’s The Witch), abandoned cabins (Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead), suburban homes (Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street or John Carpenter’s Halloween), haunted hotels (Stephen King’s The Shining), the streets of a city (James DeMonaco’s The Purge), and eventually even sinister corridors of a monster-infested space ship (Ridley Scott’s Alien), surprisingly little criticism has been directed toward the analysis and understanding of spaces and places within these narratives. Furthermore, the existing theoretical discourse remains restricted to only

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a few areas focusing either on particular spatial-horror phenomena with authors such as Barry Curtis (Dark Places—The Haunted House in Film), Bernice M. Murphy (The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture), Richard Martin (The Architecture of David Lynch), a generalized development of a theoretical premise such as Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, the overviewing selection of essays by Robin Wood (American Nightmare—Essays on the Horror Film, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”, etc.), or the recently published collection The Spaces and Places of Horror, edited by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, studying a large variety of American and non-­ American space and horror-related topics. Covering the birth of the American horror genre (nineteenth-century American Romanticism) and its later evolutionary stages the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this analysis proposes a currently non-existent reading of the symbiotic coexistence of space and the American horror imagination from the perspective of human geography. Although this will be accomplished through the study of a series of narratives within the genre where the role of space and place functions as a key element for their successful articulation, it is not intended to be a diachronic historical survey of all the different spaces that can be encountered and explored within the American horror genre. When considering the number of different spaces articulated over the centuries and the number of theoretical concepts that could be used to analyze them, a comprehensive overview would be an almost impossible task. Therefore, what this research aims at is not a description or a listing of different spaces within the genre, but the development of different theoretical readings of a variety of (American) spaces that could, in turn, be applied to a range of different space-based horror narratives. With this in mind, the first chapter of the book will focus on outlining the theoretical starting point, or, in other words, it will begin by offering a larger theoretical framework within which American historical and cultural experiences connect and interact in relation to their setting, or more precisely, in relation to their spaces. Possible correlations will be theoretically approached by considering Edward Soja’s contribution to the field of human geography, specifically his development of Henri Lefebvre’s spatial analysis, which, within Soja’s reading, becomes articulated as the “trialectics of spatiality”. What Soja analyzes, and what will be used as an analytical instrument, is the definition, mutual interconnectivity, and interdependence between what he defines as Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace. Each of these spatial paradigms corresponds to a particular

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way of reading space, with Firstspace indicating what traditional human geography perceives as space, meaning a measurable and clearly definable concept; Secondspace being akin to the notion of a place, a conceived type of space that is metaphorically vulnerable to the influences of creative thoughts and imagination; and finally, Thirdspace which is defined as lived space, functioning as a simultaneous amalgam of the previous spatial paradigms but also a spatial entity on its own. With this in mind, the first chapter will position the American realities of the time and its imagination within Soja’s theoretical discourse. Such analytical approach, as it will be argued, allows for the evidencing of a unique national discourse and the articulation of a theoretical paradigm explaining the intrinsic connection between the subconscious of a nation and its literary production. And while the first part of the analysis will elaborate on the complexities of a national space, the second segment of the chapter will further explore the anthropocentric paradigm shared by human geography as well as the horror genre. By analyzing the human body as the key element in creating and articulating space, the analysis will attempt to trace the multi-­discursive role of the body in connecting space and the horror genre. To acquire a better understanding of the genre, it becomes necessary to understand the role and position of the body, while at the same time to understand the body, it is necessary to consider the surrounding space. However, this connection is not simple due to the human body’s previously mentioned unique central position in different horror narratives. Within any given analytical context, this allows for almost endless variations of both how a particular body should be read and how that same body can in turn be positioned within a theoretical/symbolical/geographical framework. With this in mind, the first chapter will propose a reading of the body as a multilayered space used within horror narratives, in general, only to be later followed by a thematic narrowing to the American horror production. By acknowledging the vast interpretative possibilities of both the reading of the concept of the body and Soja’s Thirdspace, this first chapter will then continue to explore both the ways and methods in which the human body has traditionally been used as a metaphoric space of inscription and a variety of other theoretical venues relating to the discourse of spatiality. The analysis will once again reset and position itself at the balancing point between the previously mentioned realities of the new country and its flourishing imagination. Despite being described—or even criticized—by James Fenimore Cooper as a place with “no annals for the historian … no obscure fictions for the writers of romance” (1843, 108),

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a creatively blank slate void of the historical background that characterized the European imagination, America very rapidly developed a keen taste for the unusual, violent, and macabre. Through a steady but decisive entwining of the violent Frontier experience, the Puritan legacy, slavery, and the notion of political utopianism (Smith 2012, 163–165), which was anything but utopian, the once required historical sedimentation was now replaced by descriptions of current acts of violence and depravity. This gothic sensibility, as Leslie A. Fiedler writes, served as a platform for the projection of all of these national concerns (2008, XXII), with the stories of gruesome torture and murders occurring either on the Frontier itself or within the rapidly developing urban centers, being embellished and glorified by the press, and widely disseminated among the craving public. While Fiedler, to a certain degree, laments the position of the American imagination and subsequent fiction by describing it as a “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic—a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (2008, XXIV), other authors more promptly accepted the exploration of American sensationalist practices of the nineteenth century. The research will therefore draw, among others, from David S.  Reynolds and his Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, Matthew Wynn Sivils and his exploration of the Indian captivity narratives, or Teresa A. Goddu and her evidencing slavery as a “core cultural context for the Gothic” (2014, 71), all of whom problematize a specific aspect of American history and reflect on the imagination of the nation. The readings and analysis of these authors will furthermore allow to address the fascination with real-life violence and morbidity underscoring the American romantic movement, as well as to develop and subsequently build on a particular narrative spatial awareness initially presented in the works of authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe. The symbolic and metaphoric use of spaces and related themes, whatever they might be, detected here (in this period and with these authors) influenced the development of different spatial paradigms, which over time became a referential staple within the American gothic and later horror storylines. Conclusively, although it will not focus on any extensive in-depth analysis of particular cases, this chapter will function as a catalyst necessary for a more comprehensive understanding of the different thematic and theoretical dynamics addressed in the following chapters.

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Following the introduction of the American romantic period as a historical context within which a particular taste for the macabre developed, the second chapter will expand upon this fascination by simultaneously restricting it to a particular spatial aspect: the space of the Frontier. This, however, does not mean that the idea of Frontier spaces is constrained to a selected time frame; instead, as the analysis will argue, it continuously develops and influences even the most recent narratives. As the historian Richard Slotkin summarizes, the myth of the Frontier is one of the oldest and most characteristic American myths, “expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries” (1998, 10). As such, it holds specific value within the American experience, and, even more important, it also presents a spatial construct deeply woven into the fabric of the American imagination. The Frontier as a spatial construct, together with other space-based patterns detected in the works of the authors discussed in this chapter, will be read, articulated, and built upon using Yi-Fu Tuan’s findings as presented in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience and Landscapes of Fear. An open space, as Tuan argues, “suggests the future and invites action” (2001, 54). However, space and freedom are a threat, or more precisely, “to be open and free is to be exposed and vulnerable. Open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed” (54). This binary understanding of the Frontier works both as a geographical reality and an ideological construct, where the Frontier exists as an actual physical divide between civilization and wilderness and at the same time serves as a promise of wealth infused with the certainty of fear. With this (theoretical) dichotomy in mind, the first segment of the chapter will start with several authors belonging to the Romantic movement by following their process of slowly relinquishing the European literary tradition (if not the influences), and their search for an authentic voice. It will further explore the influence of the Frontier experience on their writing and the metaphoric or real presence of actual Frontier (related) spaces. A key figure of this early phase is Charles Brockden Brown and his novels Wieland and Edgar Huntly. Wieland in particular will influence the further development of the genre through its distinctively odd characters and, perhaps more important, the first successful adaptation of the concept of the castle to the American context in the form of a house. As opposed to the traditional gothic castles and monasteries, this new type of setting allowed for the development of a progressively intimate surrounding and, therefore,

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narrative dynamics, further expanded by the fact that the readers were now able to identify with the characters and their surroundings. This sense of intimacy and domesticity is in turn emphasized by the spatial danger articulated by the descriptions of a house isolated and perched on the very brink of civilization. A similar approach to this spatial binarity can be observed in the works of other Romantic writers, most prominently Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. While Irving adapted European folklore by mixing it with American lore, by exploring the sinful nature of the human heart, Hawthorne found his literary voice in what was tentatively defined as Dark Romanticism. However, regardless of possible thematic differences, their narratives are for the most part constructed in relation (real or metaphoric) to the Frontier. From Wieland, “The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow”, “Young Goodman Brown”, to House of the Seven Gables and many other storylines, these authors use and develop space to evoke a specific emotional response. Whether it is a house with a strange family history, a small town filled with devil-worshippers, or a storyline inspired by puritan heritage and/or Indian captivity narratives, these plots remain premised on the use of (frontier) spaces—a pattern that will eventually significantly influence contemporary horror genre. What was foreshadowed by Brown or Hawthorne returned, now reinvented, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with authors such as Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes), Antonia Bird (Ravenous), Robert Eggers (The Witch), S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk), Emma Tammi (The Wind), and some others. As the proposed analysis will suggest, the transcendence of Frontier spaces over time, and their continuing existence in contemporary narratives, particularly those belonging to the horror genre, indicates not only the perpetual existence of a type of national as well as bipolar trauma but also the tendency to continuously revisit and re-articulate certain issue within the genre, through the use of a particular spatial paradigm. Building on the spatial directions proposed in the second chapter, the third chapter will approach the concept of the house as the archetypal locus in the contemporary American horror genre and its subsequent (logical) extension into the suburban spatial paradigm. Defined and articulated by Brown and Hawthorne, the house positions itself as a space offering an unprecedented level of intimacy. Hawthorne’s and Brown’s initial premise of a new domestic space gave rise to numerous interpretations by authors such as E. A. Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and others. However, all of these authors further developed the initially proposed concept of house domesticity (Poe with his spatial transference toward the mind of

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his characters, as well as the urban setting/urban gothic; Lovecraft with his imaginary geography and small-town horrors, etc.) and in doing so neglected many of the key elements and narrative mechanisms characterizing the early portrayals of domesticity—elements that will over time be converted into staples of house-based horror narratives. Therefore, the chapter will focus only on the “first phase” of spatial adaptation by outlining the main characteristics and novelties proposed by Brown and Hawthorne while tracing the different adaptation processes of these features within more contemporary narratives. This notion of domesticity-­ based horror, regardless of the narrative at hand, is characterized by different characters who are either conditioned to interact and reckon with each other or, due to an outside (violent) influence, find themselves forced to unite and fight back. This interaction, heavily influenced by the (metaphoric or real) spatial constraints, offers the readers/viewers the joy of a voyeuristic insight into a series of horrific events and, at the same time allows them, once again due to the familiarity of the space, to (safely) identify with the characters and their fate. As a prerequisite for a successful horror narrative articulation, the reading of the spatial component will be based, once again, on a theoretical binarity. Following the initial analysis of the house—and its enclosed domestic spaces—based on the reading of Gaston Bachelard and his seminal work, Poetics of Space, the space will be further explored as a philosophical paradigm, on the outside premised on architectural symbolic and real particularities, while on the inside constructed around preserved memories and notions of safety. Bachelard builds his argument, first and foremost, on the concept of special alveoli containing compressed time (1994, 8), or, in simpler terms, on the sets of memories that are triggered once a person revisits the familiar space of a home. The positive (or negative) reaffirmation of belonging, and the overall anthropocentric discourse derived from it—from the idea of domesticity and security to the imagining of real and abstract threats—make the concept of a house an extremely prolific source of horror. Once an established and ingrained system of values becomes threatened by an outside or inside force, which in turn triggers a catalytic process of (re)surfacing of suppressed social and cultural traumas. However, this classical, and to a certain degree self-contained (de)construction of domestic spaces, can be challenged and further developed by another spatial paradigm. One of the main contemporary challenges which impose itself, and a trope that has persisted within the horror genre for decades, is the idea of economic disenfranchisement. Economic discourse, among other things, leads to the

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decimation of the system of spatial values as defined by Bachelard. The “spatial alveoli”, the spaces of domesticity, Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of “place” (in this case, a home) as a locus exposed to an emotional inscription, become obsolete in the readings proposed, for example, by David Harvey. In Harvey’s readings, Bachelardian interactions between space and place, between movement and inscription are replaced by a kind of tension between place and the mobility of capital. By perceiving capital as a moving category as opposed to place which is inherently fixed, Harvey expands the idea of the production of space and place by exploring the influence of economy within such production processes. In other words, Harvey argues that it is in fact capital that defines the creation of place (rather than the romanticized philosophical or emotional musing of an individual), allowing for certain loci to prosper due to financial influx, while the places that stop being the focus of potential investment “have to be devalued, destroyed, and redeveloped while new places are created” (1996, 296). The house, an American horror trope, as the analysis will argue, finds itself precisely between these two theoretical paradigms—between the idealized and emotionally romanticized Bachelardian reading and the stark reality of Harvey’s departed capital. Following this initial positioning and reading of the house, the proposed analysis will expand its scope to a slightly larger concept of American suburban space and its purpose of extending the initial sense of endangered intimacy/safety of the house. By being firmly positioned within the idea of the American dream, the notion of suburban space, now exposed to the revealing violence of the horror genre, finds itself projecting a much starker reality hidden beneath the veneer of the post-World War II spatial utopia. By following the established theoretical patterns, the chapter will explore the binary and complementary position of the house and its suburban surroundings and, by doing so, address the outpouring issues relating once again to economic disenfranchisement, racism, misogynism, etc., as seen in a number of horror narratives. What was initially an enclosed microcosmos of horror, as presented by film directors such as Stuart Rosemberg (The Amityville Horror), James Wan (The Conjuring), Scott Derrickson (Sinister), or Stanley Kubrick (The Shining), now becomes a much larger social canvas whose symbolism and cultural intricacies permanently mark the contemporary horror genre. The now-classic narratives of the genre such as Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street and John Carpenter’s Halloween, as well as the more contemporary and more explicitly critical storylines such as Little Marvin’s Them, in their own

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distinct way recognize the death of the American suburban project and the advent of the actual nightmare hidden behind the dream. With the idea of spatial progression and expansion in mind, the fourth chapter will be dedicated to researching and analyzing yet another authentic (spatial) concept—the American small-town horror. Articulated through the previously addressed patterns proposed by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving, the notion of a small town as a potential site of unease or outright horror remains deeply ingrained in the American imagination. Due to their uniquely influential contribution to this spatial trope, two authors particularly stand out: Howard Philips Lovecraft and Stephen King. Even though many different authors previously approached and used the setting of a small town (Bradbury, Jackson, etc.), a more definitive version of this type of space could become an actual staple within the genre only through the prism of the work presented by these two authors. Although slightly vague in his descriptions, Lovecraft devises an imaginary (regional) geography structured around the superposition of fantastic/horrific over regular spaces. Set in the “Promised Land of mythical times” (Lévy 1988, 35), Lovecraft’s spaces offered a telling amalgam of historically significant and recognizable locations (an imported trademark of the European gothic tradition) and the notion of violence and darkness hidden under the optimistic veneer of the New World experience. By following, and to a certain extent imitating, this Lovecraftian notion of spatial duality, King devises a narrative structure that will become most recognizable within his small American town storylines. His vision of a small American town, and its unavoidable (de)evolution into “Norman Rockwell’s nightmare”, together with his extremely prolific career, resulted in the creation of a canonical reading of small towns within the horror genre and consequently led to countless imitations and tributes by other authors. Once again, by following Lovecraft’s storytelling mechanisms, King achieves a particular version of a haunted small town that relies on his unique way of juxtaposing two different types of spaces. Much in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, King starts off by depicting a perfect community, which is then contrasted by the revelation of the existence of an alternative reality, a different and darker space coexisting with the “normal” one. These spaces within King’s storylines have a twofold function. While on the one hand they have the purpose of introducing the monstrous and therefore function as a contrasting setting to the initially presented peaceful community, the role of an opposing space soon turns into one of a catalyst whose function is to instigate and expose the corrupt

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nature of a small town. Over the years, in a similar vein as Lovecraft, King developed a largerscale spatial binarity by creating and scattering several fictitious towns around the state of Maine, thus suggesting that a normal, everyday America potentially continues to coexist alongside something much darker. As mentioned in the introduction, this duality of spaces, and consequently duality of realities, can be observed through different metaphoric contexts developed as a consequence of particular spatial articulation. However, in this case, the remaining spatial mechanism, the space-place relations, is left somewhat unanswered. What this chapter will propose is the use of Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopian spaces as a potential initial theoretical concept that could frame and explain the functioning of space in both Lovecraft’s and King’s fiction. Presented by Foucault as a rather open-ended theoretical construct, heterotopias function as parallel realities, a “sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space we live in” (1986, 24). Foucault elaborates this idea by defining a series of principles through which he describes the possibilities of articulating and positioning such spaces within various social and cultural contexts. What stands as a common thread is the idea that, regardless of their positioning or modus operandi, these spaces function as a spatial construct that opposes regular space. By analyzing the various particularities of King’s and Lovecraft’s geography, this chapter will present and build on Foucault’s initial concept of heterotopian spaces as dark heterotopias—parallel spaces whose primary function surpasses the opposing and containing qualities as initially presented by Foucault that are now intent on subverting and possibly annihilating the dominant normal ones. This proposed notion of the deconstruction of the American projected reality will be addressed in the chapter through the analysis of a series of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft, such as “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Dunwitch Horror”, “The Colour Out of Space”, etc., together with King’s novels ‘Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, and It, which contribute to the mapping of the proposed spaces as well as to the better understanding of the spatially based subversiveness of the American small town within the discussed genre. The final segment of the research will once again evaluate the anthropocentric experience, production, and perpetuation of space, while, once again, correlating the American horror genre to a particular Foucauldian discourse. The analysis, focusing on urban spaces and horror narratives located within these surroundings, will initially define the features of urban horror and its relevance in relation to contemporary social and cultural issues. As the research will show, this relevance can once again be traced to

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numerous literary American sources, where the notion of an urban surrounding becoming an active element within a horror narrative gained increased popularity during the nineteenth century. The proposed analysis will start with the historical influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd”, and the notion of city streets now reconceptualized as a contemporary version of traditional gothic spaces (castles, houses, etc.). Although simple in its structure, the story became the subject of numerous theoretical readings, problematizing everything from the interpretations of the presented characters to Poe’s masterful control of sensationalism. The chapter’s initial theoretical approach will therefore develop around Poe’s characterization of the presented space and its dynamics, mirroring, in such a way, the notion of the city “constructed by people but yet unknowable to the individual” (Warwick 1998, 288). This will be achieved by exploring the idea of the flâneur—in Charles Baudelaire’s and Walter Benjamin’s interpretation—as a key figure for understanding Poe’s story and as a theoretical instrument used to understand nineteenth-century urban spaces. The notion of the flâneur directly contributes to the evolution of the urban gothic and eventually horror surroundings that are now accompanied by an increasing sense of fear and anxiety constructed around the notion of a continuously perilous and threatening space. Within contemporary horror narratives, the city, a metropolis, or postmetropolis (as articulated by Edward Soja) is no longer only a reflection of unknown threats (and as such a mirror image of traditional gothic genre mechanisms); instead, it becomes a complex system of relations of power. Here, power sources emanate their influence over the subjects, forcing them to confront and possibly defy a particular hegemonic discourse. As the analysis will show, the mechanisms of urban horror genre are located within those moments, within those intersections between the normative discourse trying to regulate, restrict, or coerce and the (initially) subjugated individuals and groups. The theoretical framework used for the reading of the spatial horror component within a city, or more precisely for the understanding of the space-based horror narrative mechanisms within such storylines, will be Michel Foucault’s discourses on power, as well as Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a hegemonic discourse. Among many different governmentality based paradigms presented by Foucault, one particularly traces the anxieties expressed by urban horror storylines. By following his elaboration of the idea of the dispositive/apparatus as system(s) of power set in place by a controlling entity, the analysis aims at singling out a series of critical narrative moments

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used to describe the rigidity and artificiality of urban spaces and the possibility of opposition and subversion. The overlapping of the theoretical construct of the dispositive/apparatus and urban horror allows an insight into the tension between a strategic planning of hegemonic discourse, the actualization of the necessary “tools”, and the anthropocentric experience of such spaces. As Foucault argues, these “tools” have a “dominant strategic function” (1980, 195), given that they transform urban spaces into instruments used for the promotion and implementation of discipline. The subsequent reaction to these measures, the experience, and further articulation of new spaces within the given oppressive context become the driving force behind narratives such as Alex Proyas’s Dark City, Ryûhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, James DeMonaco’s The Purge franchise, as well as others. And while each of these storylines will be and is characterized by (consequent) social and cultural issues such as racial inequalities, economic disenfranchisement, or, for example, the inability to fight back a capitalist discourse, the source of the expressed horror remains actively anchored within a particular spatial dimension/narrative. Conclusively, an attempt to offer a comprehensive mapping of the American horror tradition remains a nearly impossible task. This is not due to the sheer number of different storylines, narratives, platforms, and theories that could be accessed and used in the process, but much more due to the traditional role of maps and mapping over the centuries. In his introduction to Topophrenia—Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, Robert T. Tally Jr., for example, elaborates that mapping in itself is “a much-contested object or metaphor in critical theory and beyond … associated with empire, social repression, and all manners of ideological programs geared toward manipulating the representations of space for this or that group’s political benefit” (1). Simultaneously, mapping remains an activity that needs to be indulged. Whether we subscribe to Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of topophilia, which presents “an affective bond between people and place or setting” (1990, 4), or Tally’s term topophrenia indicating “a constant and uneasy ‘placemindedness’” followed by the “need to map, or at least to have access to a map” (2019, 1), the desire to spatially frame and contextualize our surroundings remains unchanged. With all these considerations, the mapping of the American dark imagination presented on these pages will remain subjective, flawed by its inability to encompass everything, and emboldened by the desire to uncover a paradigm able to spatially frame and unlock the proposed geography of fear.

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ReferenCes Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Cooper, James Fenimore. 1843. Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor. New York: Lea & Blanchard. Cresswell, Tim. 2014. Place: An Introduction. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Fiedler, Leslie A. 2008. Love and Death in the American Novel. Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge—Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault. Edited by Gordon Colin. New  York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Goddu, Teresa A. 2014. The African American Slave Narrative and the Gothic. In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L.  Crow, 71–83. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Lévy, Maurice. 1988. Lovecraft, A Study in the Fantastic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Pitzl, Gerald R. 2004. Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Westport: Greenwood Publishing. Slotkin, Richard. 1998. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith, Allan Lloyd. 2012. Nineteenth-Century American Gothic. In A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter, 163–175. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Tally, Robert T., Jr. 2019. Topophrenia—Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1990. Topophilia—A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warwick, Alexandra. 1998. Urban Gothic. In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 288–289. New York: New York University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Mapping Horror

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave. —Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

The Trialectics of Fear The urge to map a certain space, to define an area, a region or some other previously unexplored location, and to define its different parameters and characteristics is an innate trait found at the core of human behavior. Whether it is done from an empirical, strict, and goal-oriented standpoint—as part of a straightforward geographical task, a fearful inscription of meaning and value stemmed from the yet unknown and unexplored space—or it is just a fanciful imaginary exploration of actual or fictitious spaces, the necessity to create maps of particular surroundings (real or not) remains a constant of human nature. This urge is echoed in countless praxes, theoretical and practical analyses and musings, from the ancient Babylonian Imago Mundi and the European Mappa Mundi, contemporary readings of the role and function of space, to the obsessive mapping of any and all newly discovered spaces, such as the virtual space of the internet and the surface of Mars as seen through the lens of the latest rover. Despite this overwhelming historical tendency to address and give meaning to space, it is not until 1967, and the lecture titled “Of Other Spaces” given by Michel Foucault, that an actual awareness of the importance of space emerged within, what will come to be, a transdisciplinary © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Lukić, Geography of Horror, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2_2

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context. Referring to history as an idea that dominated the nineteenth century, Foucault proposes a different understanding of contemporaneity, one based on the acknowledgment and experience of space: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (1986, 22). A more contemporary summarization of this issue, as well as an obsession, can be found in the elaborations of Robert T. Tally, where, by stating, “I map, therefore I am” (2019, 1), he discusses mapping as something essential to our beings. Despite its ostensible simplicity, Tally’s statement, obviously followed by an extensive and detailed study of mapping, space, and spatiality, successfully conveys the human obsession with the need to define the surrounding unexplored spaces. Furthermore, this need is only amplified by the connection between these spaces and our own identity, where humans intertwine their own identity with their surroundings through what could be defined as an autoreferential loop. What begins with the locating of a body within a particular space soon develops into a discourse premised on the interaction between the body and the surrounding spaces. This is followed by human intervention into space, with rippling effects on social and cultural practices as well as norms. Therefore, the established loop becomes a constant characterized, first and foremost, by the progressive fragmentation of different narratives derived from this interaction. In turn, these continually evolving fragmentations, although almost innumerable, offer the possibility of theoretical contextualization and the creation and addressing of different spatially based discourses. The list of authors who were the first to recognize and draw attention to the occurred spatial turn—such as Gaston Bachelard and The Poetics of Space (1958), Henri Lefebvre and The Production of Space (1974), Michel Foucault with a series of different publications where the spatial component is being (in)directly used to explain old and new mechanisms of power, Edward Soja and Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996) together with the elaboration of the concept of “trialectics of spatiality”, Doreen Massey and her key contribution to the understanding and acknowledgment of gendered spaces/geography titled Space, Place, and Gender, etc.—rapidly expanded to include a host of scholars concerned with the more profound cultural

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impact of this newly recognized theoretical praxis. With Bertrand Westphal and his introduction of the term geocriticism as a tentative theoretical spatial reading of (cultural) contemporaneity (La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace, 2007), David Harvey and his numerous titles correlating globalization and the neoliberal discourse with spatial practices, Franco Moretti and his ingenious mapping of literature (Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, 1999), the already mentioned Robert T. Tally and his extensive contribution to the promotion and understanding of spatial literary studies, as well many others, the spatial turn and its multifaceted consequences have become an unavoidable tool when attempting to read many of the real or fictitious cultural and social phenomena that surround us. All of these authors, each in their own way and within their own field of study, added to the notion of space and helped establish it as a valuable instrument through which to challenge and further explore our currently existing knowledge. By following their paradigms, and different theoretical argumentations, it becomes possible to “locate” and analyze a large variety of discourses. One of these discourses, and the subject of this research, is the possibility of spatial contextualization of the American horror genre. More precisely, the goal of this study is to understand and evaluate how the spatial turn, and the theories that stemmed out of it, helps to better understand the genre. In order to do this, and to properly use the very prolific and diverse field of human geography, one needs to adopt a sequential approach to the subject. The starting point in this sequence of analyses needs to initially be directed towards a socio-cultural understanding of the new continent and the exploration of the connection between human geography and the genre at hand. The new loci, the new continent whose potential wealth was equaled only by the harshness of the daily realities, did not initially provide a prolific context within which the gothic genre could thrive. Traditionally structured around different historical elements, the tropes characterizing the British gothic narratives had to be adapted to a land with no apparent history. In turn, this led a variety of authors to start searching for alternative mechanisms for adapting the genre to the American continent. A good beginning for the positioning of this discourse can be found with Allan Lloyd Smith, who in his chapter titled “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic” proposes four distinct topics that shaped and marked the nineteenth-century American gothic imagination (2012, 163–165). With the increased recognition of the role of the frontier in the popular imagination, with the Puritan legacy as a possible historical point of reference, with the political life and the idea of a

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(problematic) utopianism, together with the looming presence of slavery, the concern once expressed by James Fenimore Cooper about the land with “no annals for the historian … no obscure fictions for the writers of romance” (1843, 108) slowly started to dissipate. Because of its specific geographical and symbolic function, the frontier now became the logical replacement for the haunted European spaces while simultaneously— through numerous Indian captivity narratives—acting as an immediate source of evil. The evident racism was obviously not limited to Native Americans, and it targeted anybody who was not white, creating in such a way an abundance of monstrous “others”. The final element, the much-­ needed effect of historicism, was (re)discovered within the Puritan legacy. Functioning as a historical point of reference, as well as context, the Puritan experience, together with its continuous influence and hold over the American society, provided the final proof that Gothicism, and all of the unsavory narratives that characterize it, could actually be found at the heart of the American experience, despite the proclaimed utopian nature of the new continent. The second question that poses itself while attempting to explore the continuously developing American horror genre is the potential role and position of human geography within this tumultuous and somewhat subversive context. How can the theoretical framework offered by this discipline be used to better understand the genre and its role within American culture and its imagination? When considering the multitude of theoretical approaches and the countless narratives that were and still are produced within the genre, it becomes almost impossible to provide a uniquely adequate answer or a self-explanatory theoretical paradigm. However, a hypothetical premise can be defined that can work as a possible nexus between the theoretical spatial praxis and the key necessities of the genre. In such a way, the instruments used by human geography to understand space and spatial practices could be applied to a concept without which the horror genre cannot exist. The idea of such a (re)contextualization of the genre within a particular spatial paradigm unavoidably necessitates a geocritical1 reading, or more 1  The term geocriticism is used as it was initially proposed and elaborated by Bertrand Westphal in his seminal text La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace. As Robert T. Tally writes in the introduction to his translation of Westphal’s work: “Geocriticism allows us to emphasize the ways that literature interacts with the world, but also to explore how all ways of dealing with the world are somewhat literary” (Westphal 2011, X).

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precisely it necessitates a detailed exploration of the interaction between a targeted geographical and a literary narrative. Considering the previously mentioned historical and cultural premises of the new continent and its influence on the repositioning of the genre, a fitting and logical theoretical framework can be found in the work of Edward Soja. Among numerous ideas relating to a better philosophical and actual physical reading of contemporary spaces, Soja’s concept of “thirdspaces” stands out as an almost ideal instrument to observe the mentioned interactivity. Published under the title Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (1996), Soja’s analysis builds on the work done by the French theorist Henri Lefebvre. Although Lefebvre identifies and problematizes a series of different spaces—offering a host of evolving definitions and interpretations2—it is with Soja that a slightly more focused spatial classification occurs. Soja elaborates on Lefebvre’s initial notions of spatial practice—the “materialized, socially produced, empirical space” (Soja 1996, 66); the representations of space—being a conceived space and “storehouse of epistemological power” (1996, 67); and spaces of representation—perceived as “directly lived” spaces (1996, 67), and consequently renames them as Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace. The newly established/developed spatial trialectics somewhat decreased the inherently vague and continuously evolving understanding of the different spaces as proposed by Lefebrve and presented a functional development of the traditionally accepted space-place binarity. The notion of Firstspace coincides with what traditional human geography perceives as space—a measurable and clearly definable concept. This is, as Soja describes it, a “materialized, socially produced empirical space”, a “perceived space, directly sensible and open, within limits, to accurate measurement and description” (1996, 66). Secondspace, in turn, correlates with the concept of place, a conceived space or the “primary space of utopian thought and vision, of the semiotician or decoder, and of the purely creative imagination of some artists and poets” (1996, 66). Following this, according to Soja, the binarity needs to be expanded by acknowledging the existence of a connecting third spatial context—a Thirdspace. By developing Lefebrve’s idea of a space of representation, which is different from the previous two spatial paradigms, while simultaneously stemming out of them, Soja introduces the idea of a lived space—“[c]ombining the real and the imagined, things and thought 2

 An issue Soja noted himself in his attempts to further Lefebvre’s research (1996, 66).

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on equal terms, or at least not privileging one over the other a priori, these lived spaces of representation are thus the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces’, spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized position” (1996, 68). In other words, Soja identifies a type of space that allows for the articulation of an alternative discourse structured around the continuous interaction between the real and the imaginary, the perceived and the conceived space. Such an interaction, resulting in recognition of a “lived space”, breaks down the initial binarity and in doing so articulates and opens the possibility of a truly transdisciplinary analysis and reading of a particular social and cultural phenomenon. Soja continues by describing the relevance and effectiveness of such spatially based paradigm through the construction of two diagrams. The first, named Trialectics of Being, argues for an interconnectivity between Spatiality, Historicality, and Sociality (1996, 71), which, when in balance, allows for the creation of “three ontological fields of knowledge formation from what for so long has only been one (Historicality-Sociality)” (1996, 72). The introduction and reinforcement of Spatiality ensures a defense against “any form of binary reductionism or totalization” (1996, 72). This becomes clearer and further expanded with the second proposed diagram where Soja elaborates on the Trialectics of Spatiality structured around the correlation between the conceived, perceived, and lived spatiality. Once again, if the balance is to be observed between the different components of the trialectics, or, as Soja puts it, between the different epistemologies, the produced Thirdspace will give rise to a limitless discourse that will continue to be reinvigorated and constructed by the first two spatial constructs, all the while creating new critical paradigms. The neatly proposed diagrams and philosophical argumentations of the breaking down of previously established spatial binarities and patterns are, however, in no way conclusive. By following the analytical discourse previously established by Lefebvre, Soja embraces the endlessness and, as he puts it, “critical and inquisitive nomadism” by leaving the discussion of Thirdspace “radically open” (1996, 82). In doing so, he devises a spatially based theoretical and analytical instrument whose inconclusiveness allows for a continuous adaptation and application. The idea of the Trialectics of Spatiality, and the notion of Thirdspace in itself, can be useful to spatially contextualize, and therefore better understand, the position and function of the horror genre within the American (non)literary tradition. This can be accomplished by revisiting the

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previously mentioned themes that dominated the early American gothic imagination. The perception, reading, and understanding of issues such the frontier, Puritan heritage, race, or political utopianism are traditionally approached—as Soja suggests—through the prism of the binary reductionism. This reductionism, however, is not exclusively premised on the idea of reading a particular theme within a simplified space-place/Firstspace-­ Secondspace dichotomy. Although a valid theoretical study of a particular problem could be based on the said dichotomy, the analysis of the connection between the horror genre and the American imagination requires a broader recontextualization. More precisely, in order to adequately elaborate the applicability of Soja’s Trialectics in the process of understanding the nation-genre symbiosis, it becomes necessary to apply the proposed spatial discourse on the larger concept of the newly born nation. By acknowledging this broader context, an image of a country slowly emerges divided between the already mentioned socially constructed Firstspace—a product of “human activity, behavior and experience” (Soja 1996, 66), and the theoretically conceived Secondspace. Various themes and influences consequently (and traditionally) find themselves positioned within these two theoretical paradigms. For example, while on the one hand the issue of the Frontier was treated as a geographical certainty, a clear and mappable dividing line between civilization and the yet to be defined wilderness, a symbolical understanding, and projection, of this particular space simultaneously developed within the national subconsciousness. The initial map, or a similarly empirical understanding of the frontier space, was now expanded within a narrative about the possibilities of wealth as well as untold perils laying on the other side of the (now) fictional dividing line. Both readings of this American phenomena remain legitimate in their own right given that they can be easily placed into the established Firstspace and Secondspace epistemologies, or in simpler terms, the traditional space-place binarity. However, despite their great analytical potential, both discourses perpetuate a reductionist approach to the subject conditioned by their epistemological nature. What is absent from these discourses is what Soja defines as lived space or Thirdspace, or, more precisely, the ability to explore and articulate the various connecting points between the two experienced spatial realities. A similar argument can be made regarding the rest of the influential themes. The issue of race, and the accompanying racism, which initially was built on the narrative of the frontier, led to the establishment and further elaboration of a new category of monstrousness attached to the Native Americans. This notion

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of the “monster as cultural other”, as proposed by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2014, 42), soon extended to the unfortunate enslaved Africans brought to the new continent by force. Although the approach to the different sources of “monstrousness” varied—with the Native Americans occasionally romanticized as “noble savages”—the dominant discourse was directed toward the identification of a monstrous “other” by means of racial oppression. Within such discourse a new spatial dimension starts to emerge, ranging between myth and reality, between storytelling and the racially biased social interventions and actions, whereby the Firstspace is articulated through the construction of not only a racially divided society but also a society that thrives on the concept of the “monstrous other”. The “concrete materiality of spatial forms” (Soja 1996, 10) characteristic of the Firstspace becomes articulated in the ostracized real-life perception of the non-white segment of the population. This is almost simultaneously mirrored in the development of what could be read as the Secondspace, with the creation of a series of fantastic and horrific narratives stressing and further elaborating the fear-based decisions that conditioned the creation of the Firstspace. The particular nature of a race-based discourse, together with the inherited European bias, and the unprecedented dependency on slavery, create a mutually supportive relationship between the two epistemologies, with the Secondspace continuously building upon the violent realities. This is shadowed closely by the discourse of political utopianism, which finds itself fragmented between the idealized perpetuation, as well as physical and social embodiment, of a narrative of success, deeply embedded within the national identity and its mythology, and the continuously remerging traumas caused by what Jean Baudrillard defines as the “crisis of an achieved Utopia” (1988, 77). Both spatial realities continue to exist with the utopian paradigm becoming articulated through “justice, plenty, rule of law, wealth, freedom” (Baudrillard 1988, 77), while the Secondspace finds itself located within the multitude of politically critical (non)fictional discourses. This fragmented narrative, just like the narratives evolving around the racial discourse, reconnects itself (from the perspective of spatial theory) only within a context of Thirdspace where the questioning of the issues of duration and permanence, as pointed out once again by Baudrillard (1988, 77), is confronted by a national belief system. Through these connecting points between two epistemologies, made possible through the introduction of Soja’s notion of Thirdspace, an analytical

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discourse can be developed, offering the possibility of an in-depth critical deconstruction of particular phenomena. Yet another centerpiece of the early American imagination—the Puritan tradition and legacy—can also be identified within the mentioned reductional binarity. Structured on the idea of a necessity of (additional) religious reformation, Puritanism presented itself as a pact with God, whose implementation within the context of the new continent had long-lasting effects. Authors such as William Bradford with his Of Plimouth Plantation (printed in 1856), or John Winthrop with his journal published under the title The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, recounted both the harshness of religious persecution and the challenges of the new continent. However, what is even more important, as described by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury in From Puritanism to Postmodernism—A History of American Literature, is the creation of a particular religious and moral narrative within the settlements. Ranging between Bradford’s ideas of the “actions of God’s Chosen People, sent on a divine errand into the wilderness” and Winthrop’s declaration that the Puritans were called to erect “‘a city upon a Hill’—a city that would stand as lesson and beacon to the entire world” (1991, 10–11), the proposed dogma was soon reverberating within the efforts to build a new society. The now established moral standards, self-perception, and subsequent expectations became the new national norm and an integral part of the national identity, culminating and becoming formalized in the myth of American exceptionalism,3 academically created and acclaimed during the twentieth century. By coexisting and eventually merging with the national political thought, the Puritan legacy forced itself in the almost exact theoretical binarity as political utopianism. Once again, functioning almost as a norm for social construction and planning—its initial radicalism being articulated in the horrid Salem witch trials in the 1690s—the ideological aspect of Puritanism materialized a clearly defined (Firstspace) society. Simultaneously, the attempted social engineering mirrored itself in literature with many authors using 3  The term “American exceptionalism” was not originally a product of American academia. It was in fact introduced by Joseph Stalin in 1929 when he used the phrase “the heresy of American Exceptionalism” in relation to the argument within his own party stating that America was “‘unique’ because it lacked the social and historical conditions that led to Europe’s economic collapse” (Pease 2007, 108). The term used by Stalin was re-­appropriated in the 1930s by the founders of American studies with the intent to explain and fortify the idea of a “destiny”-driven uniqueness of the United States in relation to the rest of the world (Pease 2007, 108).

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religious fervor as an inspiration to explore human nature and the darker aspects of the “city upon a hill”. This subsequently led to the creation of imaginary and projected representation of space that can once again be located within Soja’s theoretical notion of Secondspace. However, the proposed binarities, although revealing in their capacity to categorize different phenomena and indicate a possible spatial theoretical reading, necessitate the third component. By considering the third spatial paradigm, Soja’s Thirdspace, an insight into the interactivity of various themes and their actual role within the American social and cultural formative period becomes possible. More precisely, the notion of “lived” space, or spatial “thirding” (Soja 1996, 11), introduced as a theoretical argument, allows for the opening of metaphoric and actual space within which it becomes possible to actively observe a multitude of different influences which, at their core, are all interconnected and contributing to the singular narrative. Through the introduction of the premise of a “third space” as a multi-discursive tool to be used for reading and understanding the role and position of the horror genre within the American society it becomes possible to isolate diverse connecting points between the different epistemologies. The racial theme, for example, thus stops being purely a question of the native population attempting to rebel against the colonizing forces, or a simple emotionally charged and enticing “Indian captivity narrative” focused primarily on describing the torture and violent death of the unfortunate victims, and becomes a developing social and cultural discourse expanding beyond its initial interpretative qualities. In a similar vein, it becomes possible to shed a different light on the far-reaching influence of the Puritan heritage and explore how certain elements of this tradition found their place both in the political self-perception of the new nation and in folklore and (popular) culture. However, the actual value of the proposed spatial reading of the early American reality and imagination can be identified outside the selected themes’ particular scope. By outlining the patterns that emerge from the application of Soja’s trialectics, it becomes increasingly evident that the American formative period is almost exclusively structured around a perpetuation and fictionalization of violence. The idea of violence and its influence on American (Romantic) literature has been extensively researched in the works of authors such as Leslie A.  Fiedler or David S.  Reynolds, and many others. The analysis based on the application of human geography and a variety of theoretical premises stemming out of it goes beyond a simplified historical overview and allows for a different

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contextualization of a particular literary or otherwise artistic endeavor. More precisely, a further exploration of Soja’s trialectic thinking reveals an innate interconnectivity between the various elements/concepts. The previously mentioned relationship between historicality, sociality and spatiality, as well as the derived understanding of spatiality achieved through the interaction of perceived, conceived, and lived spaces, is in fact premised on mutual interdependence. As Soja explained: “The three moments of the ontological trialectic thus contain each other; they cannot successfully be understood in isolation or epistemologically privileged separately” (1996, 72). What this means is that once the trialectic paradigm is superimposed over, for example, Leslie Fiedler’s reading of American Gothicism or David S. Reynolds’ historical and phenomenological researching of the subversives of the American Renaissance, a chain of theoretical occurrences takes place. When gothic and gothic-related literature is being acknowledged as the core of the early American literary efforts, and as such belonging to the conceived segment of the theoretical paradigm, what follows is the establishing of the spaces of representation. Within this Thirdspace, the interaction between different epistemologies takes place, allowing for their analysis and, due to the previously mentioned interdependence, their identification (imaginary or real). This interaction/identification, in turn, completes the circle and allows the continuation and consequent creation of perceived spaces. However, since the conceived space is constructed from people that “identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived” (Soja 1996, 67), it can be concluded that both conceived and perceived spaces necessary share an innate horror-based trait. A similar theoretical elaboration and a final argument could be made about the historical outline of the American experience presented by Reynolds. By exploring the social phenomena of the attraction of wider population to various sensationalist practices of the period, the conceived space easily connects and contributes to the development of a particularly violent perceived space, only to be re-elaborated once again into a space of representation. It is through the formation, recognition, and analysis of these spaces of representation, as well as the acknowledgment of the entire process as defined by Soja, that a much more profound recognition of the depth of violence and its contemporaneous transference into a series of gothic/ horror narratives can take place. More precisely, the mapping of the recognized connection and interaction between the various spaces transcends a

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(traditional) analysis of a creative process and its mirroring of particular artistic tendencies within a historical period. Instead, the active role of a real and imaginary violent paradigm in creating a national (sub)consciousness is recognized.

Bodies in Space Edward Soja’s reading of space, in all its complexity, does not, however, function as a universal theoretical model for the understanding of the American horror genre. Although it positions the discourse within the historical and sociological framework of a nation, a more profound analysis requires a variety of theoretical approaches. While the idea of multiple theoretical readings will be developed and presented in the following chapters, the contribution of yet another author, in addition to Edward Soja, needs to be presented in order to adequately elaborate the position of the horror genre in relation to the American identity and the correlating creative processes. Soja’s idea of a continuously perpetuating and developing space and meaning, and the addressed use of such an approach for the metaphoric mapping of the American horror genre, can be expanded by the theoretical intervention into human geography done by Yi-Fu Tuan. While Soja’s preoccupation lies within the realm of philosophical tracing of spatial interactions and productions, Tuan explores the fundamentals of space production, structuring his analysis around the (biological) connection between the human body and its surroundings. In his two key studies, Topophilia—A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values and Space and Place—The Perspective of Experience, Tuan progressively constructs an anthropocentric argument by pointing out the connecting points between humans and their bodies and the imperative nature and influence of the biological sensory system in the process of constructing space. As explained by Tuan, the proposed anthropocentric praxis is not limited to spatial production; instead, through the use of a variety of narrative forms, it actively participates in the creation of a cultural discourse. The first step in the process of understanding the relationship between the body and spatiality starts with the meticulous analysis of the senses and the ways in which humans experience the surrounding spaces. A chapter from Topophilia, adequately titled “Common Traits in Perception: The Senses”, opens with Tuan’s description of the different predispositions of the human body and their functionality in the process of interacting with

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space. Starting with vision, the hands, and the ability to learn through tactile experience, hearing, smell, etc., Tuan constructs a simplified but effective argument for the theoretical collocation of the body in relation to human geography. The body, by simultaneously using all of its senses, is capable of perceiving an immense quantity of information (Tuan 1990, 10). Tuan then goes on to explore human behavioral patterns through the analysis of psychological responses, ethnocentrism, culture, and various environments, ranging from nature itself, the development of cities, and even the experience of American suburbia. Unfortunately, even though the analysis offers many interesting points about the human body’s potential and its practical and theoretical application the process of better understanding human geography and spatiality, its theoretical contribution remains limited by the time of its publication. In 1974, when Topophilia was first published, Tuan’s argument about the human body’s relevance for the spatial discourse was innovative for the time. Consequently, the breaking of new ground meant that his analysis functioned more as an introduction and an overview of possible interactions rather than an in-­ depth theoretical reading of the proposed problem. However, this is remedied in 1977 when Tuan revisits the subject in his Space and Place—The Perspective of Experience. Here Tuan properly contextualizes a series of anthropocentric premises through an elaboration of the space-place binarity. Starting with the idea of experience, he once again traces the connections between the sensory aspects of the body and the different real and perceived spatial concepts and brings forth/stresses/puts emphasis on the idea that “biology conditions our perceptual world” (2001, 20). Process of the creation of space and collocate the human body within a spatial context. Tuan in turn expands this idea by attempting to define the perceptive and constructive process of the creation of space and by collocating the human body within a spatial context. The process of collocation then starts with the notion of the human body being a “lived body” and space being a “humanly constructed space” (2001, 35). Tuan explains: Among mammals the human body is unique in that it easily maintains an upright position. Upright, man is ready to act. Space opens out before him and is immediately differentiable into front-back and right-left axes in conformity with the structure of his body. Vertical-horizontal, top-bottom, front-back and right-left are positions and coordinates of the body that are extrapolated onto space. (2001, 35)

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And goes on: What does it mean to be lost? I follow a path into the forest, stray from the path, and all of a sudden feel completely disoriented. Space is still organized in conformity with the sides of my body. There are the regions to my front and back, to my right and left, but they are not geared to external reference points and hence are quite useless. Front and back regions suddenly feel arbitrary, since I have no better reason to go forward than to go back. Let a flickering light appear behind a distant clump of trees. I remain lost in the sense that I still do not know where I am in the forest, but space has dramatically regained its structure. The flickering light has established a goal. As I move toward that goal, front and back, right and left, have resumed their meaning: I stride forward, am glad to have left dark space behind, and make sure that I do not veer to the right or left. The human being, by his mere presence, imposes a schema on space. (2001, 36)

Therefore, the proposed corporeal schema dictates the spatial perception and construction, but it does not stop with that. Through a series of experience-based processes, the anthropocentric paradigm imposes itself through a variety of symbolical, metaphorical, and real cultural and social articulations. Starting with the front and back differentiation of space (in relation to the body), the meaning expands well beyond its basic initial conception. Tuan argues that frontal space, by being visible, is necessarily illuminated, while back space, even in daylight, remains dark simply because it cannot be seen (2001, 40). This is further expanded with the concept of the frontal space being identified with the future, while back space stands for the past (2001, 40). The polarity mirrors itself in the cultural reading of the human body. As Tuan suggests, the human face commands respect and expresses dignity, causing lesser beings to lower their eyes. Consequently, the back space is profane, and the location where— hidden in the shadows—lesser beings dwell (2001, 40). A similar polarity can be observed in the division between the left and right sides of the body. Tuan explains that almost all known cultures prefer the right side to the left, with the right symbolizing sacred power, goodness, and legitimacy, while the left functions as its antithesis by standing for the profane, impure, ambivalent, maleficent, and something to be dreaded (2001, 43). Furthermore, this spatial projection of the body eventually finds its articulation in the physical construction of space where buildings and homes are built in accordance with the ingrained meaning of frontal and back spaces, while in terms of vertical division upper spaces carry more significance

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than the lower ones. Therefore, frontal spaces and entrances are used only by some, together with upper sections of a building, while the hidden lower and back spaces are used by others (2001, 41). A similar division is observed in the construction of homes, where the spatial organization of an apartment immediately presents the guests with a very visible and publicly accessible living room and/or dining room, while bedrooms, and other private spaces, remain out of sight (2001, 41). The construction of ancient cities followed the same pattern. The frontal side and surrounding walls would traditionally be excessive in size and appearance, with imposing entrances used for a variety of purposes, while the rest of the surrounding walls would retain their protecting function while being less visually prominent (2001, 41–42).4 Another key contribution to understanding the role, perception, and evolution of space within human geography can be observed in Tuan’s presentation and elaboration of the space and place binarity. Similar to the anthropocentric argument, the notion of a theoretical, and possibly practical, distinction between the idea of space and its potential development into a place came about during the 1970s and the early formative phase of the spatial turn discourse. After introducing the term topophilia to define the “affective bond between people and place and setting” (1990, 4), Tuan goes on to elaborate the meaning and distinction between space and place. He first establishes the mutual interdependency between the two ideas by describing and summarizing the simple yet complex transformation and the necessary elements involved in the process. He states: What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value … The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place, we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. (2001, 6)

Space functions as an emotionally blank concept, or as Tuan puts it, as something that can be equated with continuous movement and consequently the inability to inscribe meaning. The moment one pauses and 4  It is interesting to note Tuan’s comment that modern cities have no planned front and back, with the possible frontal side, or entrance, marked only by highways leading toward it (2001, 42).

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observes a particular space, an emotional inscription occurs transforming it into a place. More precisely, the abstract quality of the idea of space becomes replaced by a specific emotional experience expressed through the notion of place. The argument then continues with the theoretical outlining of the perception of these two concepts. While space, although being a theoretically abstract notion, exists through what Tuan calls “experiential perspective”, or, more precisely, through “the experience of kinesthesia, sight, and touch” (2001, 12), and is therefore susceptible to a certain physical and reality-based boundaries, the idea of place encompasses and defies all fixed limitations. In Tuan’s understanding, a place can be “as small as the corner of the room or as large as the earth itself”, making it in turn obvious that “most definitions of place are quite arbitrary” (1979, 421). The idea of the arbitrary nature of places expanded rapidly through the work of a number of authors, each challenging or exploring different aspects of the relationship and mutual perpetuation of space and place, or the polyvalent nature of place itself, a site whose endless possibilities offered an equally endless number of interpretations. Edward Relph and his Place and Placelessness (1976), in which he echoes Tuan by discussing the problem of place as a concept that we simultaneously use but are also emotionally connected to, and David Seamon, whose analysis in Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter (1979) focused on expanding the understanding of the role of the body in relation to space, were soon followed by more progressive researchers. In Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (1993), Gillian Rose proposed an alternative reading of domestic spaces and criticized the patriarchal understanding of home as proposed by authors such as Gaston Bachelard,5 Tuan, and other early (human) geographers. At the same time, David Harvey, in a series of different readings, focused on the neoliberal discourse and globalization, discussing/debating the role of place in relation to notions such as capital and its threatening mobility. The idea of place becomes even more abstract through the readings of Marc Augé, and his introduction of the concept of non-places (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)), where a place is now characterized by mobility itself and as such becomes “essentially the space of 5  Although it predates Tuan’s research, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) successfully articulates some place-based qualities relating to the concept of home. However, his argumentations were later on challenged through the readings of authors such as Gillian Rose, Doreen Massey, bell hooks, and others.

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travelers” (Cresswell 2014, 46), or through the attempt to localize and understand the role of place in the age of the internet as presented by Nigel Thrift who declared that place was now “compromised” and “permanently in a state of enunciation, between addresses, always deferred” (1994, 212).

Locating the Myths Although all of these discourses have interpretative value, and some of them will be used in later chapters to address certain narrative, spatial, and genre-bound specificities, their primary function in the analysis of the early developing phases of the genre is that of an indicator of the fluidity and theoretical diversity of the concept of place. However, most of these early readings undertaken within the spatial theoretical framework can be limited to the above-mentioned paradigms elaborated by Soja and Tuan. Soja’s idea of the trialectics of space makes up a (spatial) system that perpetuates itself into a continuous completion while simultaneously reaffirming the horrific nature of life during the formative years of the American nation. A revisiting of the previously mentioned four themes, as proposed by Allan Lloyd Smith, which influenced the early American gothic creativity—the Puritan heritage, the frontier, racism, and political utopianism—and the application of Soja’s trialectics—this time within the larger context of a national discourse, instead of the theoretical exploration of each individual theme—allows for a rather detailed mapping and insight into the socio-cultural landscape of American romanticism. The merging of the proposed theoretical reading with these problematic themes results in the evidencing of a system binarity structured between the utopian political discourse, strongly infused with the Puritan philosophical thought, and the violent heritage perpetuated through the interactivity of the frontier experience and racism issues. While on the one hand, as previously mentioned, the political paradigm perpetuates the immaculate image of the (white) settlers, and later nation, righteously inspired by God to build the fabled “City Upon a Hill”, the realities of a conquering and developing nation, steeped between the confrontation with the native population, and the dependency on slavery, create a radically opposite narrative. Once again, Soja’s argument lends itself to a better contextualization, and possibly understanding, of different readings of both the period and the genre, as well as the tensions between various ideologically and real-life-based issues. Smith’s thematically separated

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ideas of the frontier and slavery can now be merged and observed as a series of narratives premised on a traditional Gothic idea of otherness. The frontier, and the derived subgenre of Frontier Gothic, presents at its core an obsession with Indian captivity narratives. Developed as a real and fictionalized interpretation of the frontier experience, as their name suggests, the captivity narratives focused mainly on the stories of individuals or groups who managed to survive being captured by the Native Americans. These stories, almost exclusively portraying white characters of European origin, were characterized by extremely violent imagery, with victims very often being tortured, mutilated, or killed. As Matthew Wynn Sivils, among other authors, shows, the captivity narratives were typically published either as part of a larger work or as a stand-alone publication, a pamphlet, or broadsheet, which allowed them to become a bestselling American publication at the time (2014, 84–85). Sivils also points out one of the key elements connecting the discussed Puritan heritage and the frontier experience: the tendency of Puritan dogma to further shape the experience and perception of the unexplored wilderness and its inhabitants. He describes how “Puritan narratives further developed the genre by refining its motifs and by building upon the portrayal of the American wilderness as a hellish labyrinth populated with demonic Indians” (2014, 87). The threatening nature of this demonic infestation is additionally emphasized by the fact that a large number of victims were women, a circumstance that opened the imagination toward notions such as the “threat of rape, or—even worse according to Puritan beliefs—of intermarriage with a member of a tribe that had adopted Catholicism” (2014, 88). The result of such dogmatic approach and subsequent rhetoric is the creation of a progressively negative representation of the frontier region and the wilderness that characterized it, as well as its inhabitants, the mythologized beastlike “wild Indians” whose devilish nature opposed everything that was supposedly good and righteous. David S.  Reynolds, in his extensive analysis of the social and cultural aspects of American romanticism titled Beneath the American Renaissance, further elaborates on the cultural role and functioning of these types of narratives. By categorizing them as Dark Adventures,6 Reynolds addresses the publication trends of the period 6  In his analysis, Reynolds proposes a classification of the Romantic literary production. He separates the antebellum adventure fiction into Romantic Adventure fiction, subdivided into Moral Adventure and Dark Adventure, and Subversive fiction, more directly influenced by current political discourses (2011, 183).

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marked by the development of mass press, but, what is even more relevant, he also explains their popularity. While tracing the roots of the Dark Adventures back to British Gothic fiction and European Dark Romanticism, he states that the (sub)genre changed when it took on “distinctly American characteristics when reinterpreted by authors who wished to find literary correlatives for the horrific or turbulent aspects of perceived reality in the new republic” (2011, 190). However, in its transference into literature, the perceived reality was not conceptualized as a warning or a critique of the violence characterizing the new republic. What was instead offered to the public was a possibility to enjoy a continuous series of adventures structured around an excess of exploitative imagery depicting, among other themes, Indians indulging in a variety of horrific ordeals such as torture, maiming, cannibalism, etc. One of the most influential captivity narratives, as Sivils suggests, was the tale of Hannah Dustan, published by Cotton Mather. The story, which took place in 1697, recounts a raid on the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts, in which the members of the Abenaki tribe captured the main protagonist (Hannah), her week-old infant, her nursemaid, together with several other people (2014, 88). Soon after the capture, as Sivils describes, the Abenaki murdered the infant by smashing his head against a tree, executed a number of other people, all of which served as the promise of further torment as soon as they return to the Abenaki settlement. Hannah, afraid of additional torture, decides to attempt an escape, and with the help of the nursemaid and a young boy, she gets hold of some hatchets and successfully slays ten members of the tribe. However, not all of them were Abenaki warriors, and Hannah and her companions ended up killing two men, two women, and six children. As Sivils describes, this was followed by one final act of violence: “Dustan, in a surprising act of vengeance and capitalism, scalped each of the corpses and slipped out of the camp, back to Massachusetts where she claimed a bounty of fifty pounds per scalp” (2014, 88). Another similar plot can be found in a story somewhat elaborately titled A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady Who Was Taken by the Indians in the Year 1777, and After Making her Escape, She Retired to a Lonely Cave, Where She Lived Nine Years. Written as a fictional account of a captivity experience, the story takes shape of a letter from a certain Abraham Panther to an unknown friend, and it recounts the unfortunate tale of a young lady Panther encountered while living in a cave on one of his hunting expeditions into the wilderness. As it is soon discovered, the young woman escaped her home with a man who was deemed unsuitable

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by her father due to his lower social status. The two wandered in the wilderness for four days before being captured by Indians who then, faithfully following the established captivity narrative pattern, torture the man before ending his life by burning him alive. The young woman somehow manages to escape, and after a few days of aimless wandering, she encounters a man of a gigantic stature who takes her to his cave and in no subtle way lets her know that she was either to have intercourse with him or to be killed. She is given one night to choose her fate, during which she decides to take destiny into her own hands and, using the giant’s hatchet, kills him in his sleep. What follows is an image from, or homage to, the Hannah Dustan narrative, in which the woman dispatches the dead monster: “I then cut off his head, and next day having cut him into quarters drew him out of the cave about half a mile distance” (2013, 14). Once the monster was removed, she took possession of his cave and continued to live there for the next nine years, until her encounter with the narrator. While the story offers a variety of analytical perspectives, ranging from its influence on the development of the Frontier Gothic to the improvement of the character of the gothic heroine, as well as the perpetuation of the American myth of self-reliance, the key subtextual element, the behavior of the heroine, together with the representation of the wilderness and its inhabitants, yet again distinctly marks the cultural and social dialogues of the new republic. The patterns offered by the frontier-based experience were combined with, and expanded by, narratives of slavery. Teresa A. Goddu, for example, argues that, “[s]lavery—along with imperialism and revolution— served as a core cultural context for the Gothic” (2014, 71). She then continues by locating, once again, the gothic mechanism within the process of articulating the “otherness” by stating that, “[i]n demonizing the racialized ‘other’ and identifying ‘blackness’ with moral degeneration and dread, the Gothic coalesced and reinforced racial stereotypes. Whether through coding monsters as dark or through depictions of rebellious slaves as bloodthirsty fiends, the Gothic, in demonizing blackness, also dehumanized the slave” (2014, 71). W.  Scott Poole further elaborates this premise by connecting the concept of slavery as a fertile ground for locating the monstrousness of the new continent with the European racist traditions, as well as the economic system of the South. While tracing, among other things, Thomas Jefferson’s support of slavery despite his arguing against international slave trade, Poole concludes that “[r]acism became a new doctrine of monsters in America” with race and slavery bringing forth

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all kinds of monster tales (2011, 66). While the idea of otherness, developed through the Indian captivity narratives, functioned in the same way in the early depictions of slavery and slaves, with the enslaved population being equated to beasts, or simply property, the dynamic regarding these types of narratives became much more polarizing. The unprecedented dependence of the entire nation on slavery, and the subsequent daily reality of such a system, created a variety of narratives which greatly diverged from the often-fictionalized storylines belonging to the Frontier Gothic tradition. With the increasingly growing public discontent regarding slavery during the Romantic period, a social and cultural rift was developing between abolitionist and pro-slavery defenders. This in turn led to a more cautious approach to gothic fiction, mostly because of the ability of the genre, due to its unconventional nature, to expose the political and social realities hidden beneath the veneer of political utopianism. As argued, once again, by Goddu, “the Gothic becomes the mode through which to speak what often remains unspeakable within the American national narrative—the crime of slavery” (2007, 63). The growing dissent about slavery, therefore, led to an increased production of fiction that problematized slavery, while at the same time promoting a new type of sensibility toward this issue. The interpretative fluidity of gothic fiction lent itself almost perfectly to progressive fears and preoccupations of the pro-slavery advocates, whose traditional fears of the slave population, and their possible rebellion, were easily manifested in fiction. The threat of the black man, the beastly monster, was always present, and as such it haunted the dreams of the oppressors. Similarly, the abolitionists used gothic and slavery narratives to present and accentuate the position of slaves and the inhumanity of their situation, by particularly favoring “the gothic convention of the ‘evil double,’ that suggested that despite the glamorous image presented by the southern planter slavery, had a true face that would sicken and appall” (Poole 2011, 89). Within this active social and cultural conflict, which would in turn lead to the violent Civil War, many storylines found themselves critically problematized and analyzed. One particular narrative, however, provides an interesting context through which to observe the possibility of interpretative duality, as well as the manipulative nature of the gothic genre when focused on the issue of slavery during the American antebellum era. Edgar Allan Poe’s short tale “Hop Frog” published in 1849 tells a story of an abused slave, a dwarf, and a cripple who was kidnapped from a “barbarous region” (2006, 216) and forced to serve as a court jester, together with another young girl named Trippetta. On one

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occasion, coincidently Hop-Frog’s birthday, the two of them were invited to entertain the court, with the king and his seven councilors making fun of him and demanding to be entertained. While being forced to drink and toast to their absent friends, Hop-Frog devises a revenge plan. Claiming to organize a masquerade, he proposes that the king, together with his companions, dress as orangutans and scare other guests—a feature that would require of them to be chained and covered in tar. As Hop-Frog’s plan slowly progresses, the readers become increasingly aware of the imminent climax that sees the unsuspecting group, once tied and tricked into being hanged from the ceiling, set on fire. The mocking, vengeful Hop-­ Frog escapes leaving behind a scene of slaughter—“[t]he eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass” (Poe 2006, 223–224). Although the story takes place in an imaginary kingdom, and the readers are not presented with the country of origin of the unfortunate Hop-Frog (or Trippetta), the connection to the ongoing discourse on slavery is evident. Ranging from the treatment of slaves to the symbolic (and prophetic) use of chains, tar,7 and final burning, together with the upraise of the now vengeful slave(s), the tale positions itself at the core of current social conflicts. This positioning, however, is not a fixed one. Or, more precisely, it is fixed insomuch as it is connected to current events, but the interpretative side of it remains lost within different discourses. Authors such as Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet read Poe’s story as a “devastating rebuke to the Southern defence of slavery” that allowed Poe to “undermine Southern propaganda about the benevolence of slavery and the seeming acquiescence of slaves to their captivity” (2020, 66–67). This articulation of a critical argument, hidden in a traditional manner under the pretext of a gothic tale, positions Poe in a role of an abolitionist, a position that was debatable when considering some of his other writings. A similar interpretative attempt, although drastically different in its conclusion, can be observed in the analysis presented by Paul Christian Jones. In his text, forebodingly titled “The Danger of Sympathy: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Pathos”, Jones argues that Poe’s intention was not to promote an abolitionist rhetoric but to warn about the dangers of sympathizing with the position of the slaves. As Jones states, in this particular story, Poe, who traditionally positions horror within the concept of the racial other, opts for creating a 7  As well as a brief, but soon discarded, suggestion of one of the victims to use feathers (2006, 220).

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sense of sympathy for the slave (2001, 240). This is, in Jones’ reading, not an effort to create a compassionate image of the enslaved dwarf, but an expression of Poe’s own fears of slaves, as well as an attempt to “illustrate the dangers about the abolitionist rhetoric about slavery” which “mislead its readers about the truly dangerous consequences of the white readers aligning themselves with black slaves over white masters” (2001, 241). The discursive ambivalence of the story, and its main character, can be traced in Poe’s successful effort to gradually change the portrayal of Hop-­ Frog: initially described as benign and abused, Hop-Frog’s nature progressively changes with his astutely deviant planning and execution of his revenge. Alternatively, a better understanding of Poe’s position on slavery and the abolitionists’ attempts to eradicate it can be gained through the analysis of his other writings featuring slave figures where Poe firmly defined the horror of otherness. Regardless of Poe’s position on the subject of slavery, the social engagement of the proposed text can be considered a valuable analytical point of reference. In 1849, when it was published, “Hop-Frog” foreshadows two different arguments and two different political rhetorical strains, allowing each side to take from it what suits them most in the perpetuation of their partisan messaging—a perpetuation that will ultimately lead to the American Civil War. Turning once again to the larger national context, and the different themes that influenced the imagination and the cultural dynamic of the young nation, it becomes obvious that the theme of the Frontier, the narratives it inspired, and the burning issue of slavery form an ideological opposition to the previously stated puritan-based political utopianism. By reinforcing a narrative of horror structured around the notion of racial otherness and the unbridled violence unavoidably associated with it, a very peculiar socio-cultural phenomenon occurs, allowing for fiction to have a significant impact on the reality of the new republic. When debating the correlation between literary nationalism, the gothic, and the issue of representation of the Indians, Teresa A.  Goddu argues that the process of connecting all of these elements into a single discourse automatically resolved all of the perplexities that possibly developed between the politically utopian projections and actual realities. “The translation of the Indian into gothic form”, Goddu states, “solved the problem of how to create a uniquely American literature and also provided a discourse that justified the nation’s expansion” (1997, 56). Being taught “from infancy to see the Indian as a gothic monster, Americans were predisposed to accept the Indian extermination as justified” (1997, 57), which in turn led to the

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representation of the Indian as “at once a source of the sentimental and the sublime: the nation weeps nostalgically over his disappearance and is excited by the graves that mark his extinction” (1997, 57). A similar argument, this time in connection to the issue of slavery, can be found in Toni Morrison’s exploration of American literature and race titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, where she writes: Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American. (1993, 38)

By taking yet another step back and reverting to the initial theoretical paradigm proposed by Soja and the spatial trialectics, Goddu’s and Morrison’s readings resonate ever more clearly. More precisely, their elaboration of the influence of fiction on reality coincides with the interactivity described by Soja between conceived, perceived, and lived spaces. If a particular Indian captivity narrative, for example, creates and perpetuates a perceived space characterized by a discourse of distrust, fear, or outright hatred, the subsequently lived space will be a reality structured around preconceived biases. This will in turn lead to the creation of a particularly conceived type of space whose key characteristics will be coded by the messaging previously constructed within the perceived space. Just as vicious theoretical paradigm can be outlined when focusing on the slavery-­ based narratives. Although the initial coding, as seen with Poe’s story, can differ, projecting an either abolitionist or pro-slavery argument, the mechanism behind the rhetoric, once superimposed over the spatial paradigm, allows an insight into the creation of a racially based discourse perpetuated through the gothic genre and the national (sub)consciousness derived from such projections. Soja’s theoretical constructs, combined with the readings of Allan Lloyd Smith and a series of other authors dedicated to this early American period, all point out the dominance of a particular cultural and social discourse that finds itself best articulated within the literary boundaries of genre production. The recounting of an ideologically perceived reality, further distorted by a politically manipulated

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discourse, contributed to the creation of a national culture and cultural production that simultaneously abhors and glorifies its horrific roots. Nevertheless, although Soja’s ideas can be used as an interesting, and useful, theoretical prism through which to analyze a particular genre narrative, its all-encompassing and predominantly non-specific nature is better suited as an instrument used for the mapping of a larger national context. While Soja’s framework can therefore be applied toward a better understanding of American romanticism and the position of the horror genre within its tumultuous social and cultural interactions, Tuan, on the other hand, with his theoretical constructs, presents a methodology that can be successfully used to unlock the mechanisms behind the horror genre itself. In other words, Soja’s paradigm can be used to trace a variety of ideological obsessions, which, due to their extreme and violent nature, influence the creation of metaphorical cracks and fissures within the national utopian discourse. These metaphoric cracks between discourses, in turn, become the loci where the perpetuation of horror narratives takes place. Derived from the merging of reality and the imaginary (the conceived and the perceived), horror develops as an expression of the various connecting points between the two constructs, simultaneously reflecting reality and fiction. The narratives emerging from this nexus, inherently traumatic in nature, problematize an almost infinite number of storylines and cases, each focused on something that the horror genre is particularly suitable to express. It is on these connecting points and subsequent narrative cases that Yi-Fu Tuan’s theoretical readings can be applied. The first correlation between Tuan’s spatial analyses and the horror genre (in general) can be found in the positioning of the human body at the center of spatial production. This positioning—and subsequent perception of space and production of place—is premised on the concept Tuan defines as “experiential perspective” (2001, 8). What this slightly abstract idea refers to is the ability of the human body to sensory experience its surroundings, and then to elaborate and further explore the perceived experience through emotions and thoughts. The discussed pause in the movement, the experience of the surrounding space, the emotional inscription, and the subsequent creation of a particular place represent, however, a pattern that is not limited to a purely geographic experience. Much like Tuan’s universal human being, the horror genre proposes a variety of humans, and bodies, whose current existence, and possible demise, are premised on the idea of an experiential perspective. Regardless of the narrative at hand, the protagonists within a horror storyline are conditioned to experience their

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surroundings because their survival depends on it. Whether the focus is placed on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Stephen King’s The Shining, or even a more contemporary body-horror narrative such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, or the latest installment of the Saw franchise, all characters, regardless of their role, become deeply connected with their surroundings. Poe’s narrator, for example, while approaching the foreboding structure where his friend waits for him, cannot avoid experiencing the various details of the house. Already from the first glimpse, the House of Usher instills in the character a sense of “insufferable gloom”, followed by “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart” (2006, 126), which in turn leads to the negation of the sublime and the ability to intellectually rationalize the sight in front of him. “It was a mystery all insoluble” concludes the narrator while approaching the house and resigning himself to, “grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered” (2006, 126). Although the unsettling space lying before him held a promise of uncertainty, absurdity, madness, and danger, and despite his rationalization attempts, the house irresistibly lures him inside. Following a similar pattern of fear and uncertainty, we can experientially identify with Danny Torrance as he explores the halls of the Overlook Hotel. While exposed to an increasing threat from both the Hotel’s ghostly inhabitants and his obsessed father, Danny finds himself attracted (or exposed) to several surreal traps, culminating with his exploration of Room 217. The reader, as well as the viewers, if Stanley Kubrick’s vision is to be analyzed,8 are introduced to a binary situation that finds Danny standing in front of the hotel room. If observed through Tuan’s “experiential perspective”, and the subsequent transitional process from space to place, the scene allows us an insight into the process as experienced through Danny’s eyes. As the initial segment of the binary setup sees Danny in front of the door, and therefore outside of the room, his experience of what lies behind the door remains uncharted. Although a sense of potential danger lurks in his mind, a simultaneous attraction and feeling of arrogance prevails, neutralizing any previous emotional inscription into what lies in front of him. As such, prior to opening the door, Room 217 is nothing more than a space, a meaningless spatial location in a series of other similar locations. When Danny opens the door and steps in, the sight in front of him corresponds with the initial 8  Stephen King’s novel, originally published in 1977, was adapted by Stanley Kubrick in 1980.

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(emotional) notion of space: “He stepped farther in. Nothing here, nothing at all. Only an empty room … [a] closet, its door open to reveal a clutch of hotel hangers … [a] Gideon Bible on an endtable. To his left was the bathroom door, a full-length mirror on it reflecting his own white-­ faced image. That door was ajar and—” (King 1991, 199). What follows is Danny’s emotional outburst triggered by the sight of the creature lying and rotting behind the shower curtain. With the revelation of the actual threat, now visually contextualized in front of Danny’s eyes, all of the previously neutralized and extinguished fears become concrete, and the once emotionally void space is now rapidly and violently articulated into a place of horror. Danny’s body, in turn, becomes simultaneously a subject and a catalyst for the horrific (spatial) projections, with his mind experiencing the horror and his body trapped in the newly articulated place. The concept of place, however, due to its highly subjective nature, does not and will not allow a complete escape of the protagonists. While, for just a brief moment, Danny finds himself in the clutches of the rotting corpse, only to escape it a moment later, allowing the geography of the hotel to be reaffirmed as an emotionless space, other traps, inscriptions of meaning and subsequent places of horror await him as the story progresses. A comparable dynamic can be observed in the already mentioned examples of Hostel, the Saw franchise, or several similar titles. What is interesting about these titles is the process of redefining the spatial aspect of the narratives. While most traditional horror storylines center around a clearly definable outside threat, an active interaction between the source of the monstrous and the protagonist(s), different (metaphoric and actual) obstacles characterizing this interaction, and the influence of surrounding spaces, the body horror subgenre constructs its narrative arch by reducing the number of active elements within a particular story. This reductionist approach is particularly relevant for the spatial component, which is now no longer defined by the indulgence in the failing gothic map trope. The possibility of the characters escaping from the predominantly abstract confining spaces while at the same time remaining trapped by them is now replaced by a fixed geographic delineation of the setting. What becomes articulated instead is a type of space that intimately functions at the bodily level. Tuan’s binarity still exists, as well as the anthropocentric discourse of a spatial creation. However, in the portrayed situations, with human bodies being trapped in a closed room, bound to a chair and tortured, or exposed to surreal decisions in order to (possibly) save their lives, the spatial discourse shifts between the physicality of the geography of the

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room and the continuously and horrifically developing and escalating places of the mind. An adequate example of this shifting paradigm can be found in the first installment of the Saw franchise. Directed by James Wan in 2004, the story presents two individuals waking up in an apparently abandoned bathroom, trapped in a room with a corpse. After the initial evaluation of their situation, they start discovering clues, which leads them to the realization that in order to escape they will have to mutilate themselves and hack off their own chained limbs. On top of this, one of the characters will potentially have to kill the other if he wants his family to survive. The room, or the setting, sterile in its ugliness, places additional focus on the characters, while the enigmatic outside “monstrous” entity remains physically but also ideologically unknown until the very end, shifting in such a way the decision processes, unavoidably horrific, to the two trapped characters and their own moralities. What the viewers are introduced to is once again a series of narrative mechanisms initially explored during American romanticism, with the issue of sinfulness of the human heart extensively argued by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the idea of the mind of the characters as the new horror locus developed and presented by Edgar Allan Poe. The characters, accordingly, now located in a fixed spatial context, do not project, inscribe, or in any way articulate their anxieties and fears onto the space that surrounds them; instead, they focus on the growing internal fears and the horror provided by their own minds. Once again, through the experiential process, as described by Tuan, the creation of place occurs. However, this time the constructed place, following Poe’s tradition, resides exclusively in the minds of the protagonists. Although a large portion of the genre could be examined, and to a certain extent dissected, through the methodology offered by Tuan’s spatial binarity, it would be an analytical disservice to propose such a theoretical approach as the only method available for the understanding of the role of human geography within the genre. The simple recognition of the concept of space which, through the interaction with/between various protagonists, changes into a place allows for the deconstruction of the basic understanding of the idea of a setting. However, even though important, such an approach neglects to address a series of other interpretative paradigms that could be used to better understand the said relationship between spatiality and the genre. Instead, what needs to be done to acquire an all-encompassing argument about the relation between spatiality and horror is extrapolate the idea of the human body as a key element in the production of space and acknowledge its unique position within the genre. The function of the human body, as it relates to the creation and

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perpetuation of horror within any of the proposed narratives belonging to the genre, reflects on the creation of space. While the proposed spaces can be externalized or internalized, imbued with a deeper metaphorical or symbolic meaning, or simply serve as a conduit for a more encompassing message, it is the human experience, in this context, primarily human fears, that fuels the genre. Tuan’s theoretical paradigms, as well as Soja’s spatial trialectics, at least to a certain extent, have the precise function of tracing and consequently mapping these interactions and connecting points between body, experience, and space. Once this is achieved, the reading of this diverse genre unavoidably necessitates a theoretical expansion and the introduction of alternative spatial models and readings. It is only by applying a variety of theoretical readings, and by expanding the initially proposed “experiential perspective” (Tuan 2001, 8), that a meaningful analysis of the relationship between the American horror genre and its spatiality can truly begin.

References Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. America. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso. Bradbury, Malcolm, and Richard Ruland. 1991. From Puritanism to Postmodernism—A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin Books. Cooper, James Fenimore. 1843. Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor. New York: Lea & Blanchard. Cresswell, Tim. 2014. Place: An Introduction. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Goddu, Teresa A. 1997. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2007. American Gothic. In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 63–72. Oxon: Routledge. ———. 2014. The African American Slave Narrative and the Gothic. In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L. Crow, 71–83. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Jones, Paul Christian. 2001. The Danger of Sympathy: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop-­ Frog’ and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Pathos. Journal of American Studies 35 (2), Part 2: Warring in America: Encounters of Gender and Race, 239–254. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies. King, Stephen. 1991. The Shining. New York: Plume. Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik. 2020. American Horror: Origins and Early Trends. In Horror: A Literary History, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes, 53–75. London: The British Library.

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Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books. Panther, Abraham. 2013. A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady Who Was Taken by the Indians in the Year 1777, and After Making Her Escape, She Retired to a Lonely Cave, Where She Lived Nine Years. In American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft—An Anthology, ed. Charles L. Crow, 12–23. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Pease, Donald E. 2007. Exceptionalism. In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 108. New  York: New  York University Press. Poe, Edgar A. 2006. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Penguin Books, 223–224. Poole, W.  Scott. 2011. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Waco: Baylor University Press. Reynolds, David S. 2011. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New  York: Oxford University Press. Sivils, Matthew W. 2014. Indian Captivity Narratives and the Origins of American Frontier Gothic. In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L.  Crow, 84–95. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Smith, Allan Lloyd. 2012. Nineteenth-Century American Gothic. In A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter, 163–175. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Tally, Jr, and T.  Robert. 2019. Topophrenia—Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 1994. Inhuman Geographies: Landscapes of Speed, Light and Power. In Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies, ed. Ed P.  Cloke, 191–250. London: Paul Chapman. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1979. Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective. In Philosophy in Geography: Theory and Decision Library (An International Series in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social and Behavioral Sciences), ed. S.  Gale and G. Olsson, vol. 20, 387–427. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 1990. Topophilia—A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001. Space and Place—The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2014. American Monsters. In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L. Crow, 42. Malden: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Talley, Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

The Frontier

“What were we went out to this wilderness to find? Leaving our country, kindred, our father’s houses, for what? For the kingdom of God. Let us pray”. —Robert Eggers, The Witch

Space and Violent Identities While the highly creative and imaginative environment that characterized the American romantic period found a variety of ways to express itself, ranging between dark cautionary tales, politically motivated fictions, all the way to the somewhat graphically exploitative rendering of contemporary criminal deeds, certain tropes nevertheless stood out and so assured their historical persistence and relevance. As evidenced and partially addressed in the previous chapter, the concept of the Frontier, together with all of its qualities and complexities, positions itself as a key geo-­ political element used in the process of defining the new identity of the continent, as well as a continuous reference point for the imagination of the entire nation. Although the genesis of the idea and concept of the Frontier developed spontaneously, imposing itself as a geographical and spatial reality whose harshness had to be conquered if the new continent and its wilderness were to be tamed and exploited, its metaphoric and symbolic value had to be evaluated and valorized separately. This theoretical, as well as philosophical, endeavor, was initiated by Frederic Jackson © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Lukić, Geography of Horror, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2_3

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Turner, who in his lecture titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, presented on July 12th, 1893 to the American Historical Association in Chicago, discussed the distinctions between the American frontier and its spatial counterparts in Europe, as well as the influence and symbolic value derived through the interaction and experiences of American frontiersmen. Turner, therefore, articulates his understanding of the European frontier(s) as “sharply distinguished” from the American one because they function as “a fortified boundary line running through dense populations” (2021, 2). Conversely, the American frontier is perceived as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization”, functioning as a “line of most rapid and effective Americanization” (2021, 2). This is the space where “[t]he wilderness masters the colonist” and forces this “European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought” (2021, 2) to trade his railroad car for a birch canoe, remove his civilized garments and put on a hunting shirt and moccasins, live in a log cabin and quickly learn how to plant Indian corn by plowing the earth with a sharp stick, as well as to shout the war cry and take the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion (2021, 2). Therefore, the colonist is forced to deal with the overwhelming adversities thrust upon him, and after the realization that he is not strong enough to defeat them, he must learn to accept his condition and adapt by following Indian trails and customs (2021, 2). The image of the subdued colonist and later pioneer, whose desires and attempts to defeat what is metaphorically and physically preventing him from installing an immediate dominance over the new continent, together with the experience of the spatial “meeting point” between civilization and wilderness represent an experiential amalgam from which a dichotomy emerges. On the one hand, the idea of the Frontier becomes defined and perceived as a harsh physical and geographical reality, which clearly demarcates what is explored and civilized from the unknown and wild regions beyond it. On the other, the Frontier becomes subject to sensational understanding and reading, where the dangerous and often unforgiving realities, together with the individual experiences of such surroundings, go through the process of mythologization and subsequent weaving of a national tale of heroism and individuality. Turner continues by developing his arguments and descriptions around the slow process of expansion, followed by, as he states, the frontier of settlements that, through their advancements, carried with themselves individualism, democracy, and nationalism (2021, 8). The portrayed exploration and colonization, although complex and filled with challenges and hardships,

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remains a positive, if not even a utopian experience, resulting in the birth of a nation that successfully managed to capitalize on the endured trials by channeling the obtained knowledge into powerful traits such as acute individualism, stubbornness, restless energy, and several other qualities. Therefore, Turner’s essential contribution lies in the recognition of the correlation between a particular space and an ideological and clearly utopian projection of the nation’s desired identity. However, what Turner neglects to address is the inevitable violence that accompanied this expansion and the unavoidable scars that shaped the nation’s subconscious. A possible historical and narrative point of entry into the issue of violence characterizing America and its early expansionist policies can be found in the series of readings conducted by the American historian Richard Slotkin. Slotkin proposes a reading of the formation of the American identity no longer exclusively premised on the hardships and challenges but structured around the violence that accompanied the process of colonization. It is in his two key texts—Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America—that Slotkin elaborates and expands Turner’s initial premise of the European individual subdued by the American frontier experience. As stated throughout Regeneration Through Violence, one of the many violent cycles that defined the formative phase of the new nation was marked by the activities of these former Europeans and now colonists. Initially marked as pioneers, only to be later mythologized as gunslingers, they initiated a colonizing process premised equally on progress and greed. This, in turn, led to the creation of a uniquely American experience (Slotkin 1974, 21), evolving around a context that positioned the “English Puritan colonists against a culture that was antithetical to their own” (Slotkin 1974, 21). The resulting conflicts—culturally contextualized as the American frontier mythology, or historically known as the American Indian Wars—led to the creation and perpetuation of the cultural belief of Manifest destiny,1 a credence that deeply marked the formation of the American national identity. This idea of national unity was, once again, perpetuated through the 1  The term was introduced by John L. O’Sullivan in the Democratic Review in 1845, and, as explained by Deborah L. Madsen, it presented the idea that “the American continent was assigned by God to the United States”, a statement even further developed by O’Sullivan elucidation stating that the United States were “part of a sacred providential history, designed by God, and played out through his agents” (2010, 372).

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printed word. As Slotkin once again explains in Regeneration Through Violence, Americans turned to literature which positioned itself as the optimal perpetuator of myth, or more precisely, as “the primary vehicle for the communication of mythic material” (1974, 19). A similar analysis emphasizing the demagogic nature of early American frontier-based literature can be found in the previously mentioned work by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury (From Puritanism to Postmodernism—A History of American Literature) where the authors point out the importance of the Indian captivity narratives as a means for the creation of a culturally manipulated discourse aimed at producing and emphasizing a polarity between what was perceived as civilization as opposed to wilderness (1991, 26–27). The consequence of such a spatially based polarity is a gradual and lastingly impactful development of a divisive discourse separating, both physically and later on symbolically/metaphorically, two sides—the colonists/ pioneers and the “threatening” Indians and other savages. The impact of this continuously evolving discourse extends over different historical, cultural, social, and even theoretical segments characterizing the American nation. One possible segment manifests itself through the previously proposed notion relating to Edward Soja’s trialectics of space,2 which allows for the articulation of a specific discourse, disseminated through literature and the media, that has great influence on the perception and later creation of a particular type of (national) space. However, even though Soja’s argument can be successfully applied to theoretically contextualize and, therefore, better understand certain cultural and spatial phenomena, together with social processes which mark the development of a country as well as its artistic production, a variety of other processes can be identified beneath this theoretical exercise. Going once again back to Slotkin, it becomes obvious that the idea of the Myth of the Frontier, which he describes as the “oldest and most characteristic myth” (1998, 10), continuously reproduced through a variety of material and non-material sources over a period of three centuries, is in no way a self-contained social phenomenon but a characteristic of the nation itself. In no uncertain terms, he states that “[a]ccording to this myth-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization” 2

 See Chap. 2.

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(1998, 10). The initial spatial polarity of the Frontier becomes therefore reformulated as a space to be contested, but, even more important, it becomes a space distinctly marked by the use of violence as a means to address (and resolve) the ensuing conflicts of the opposing sides. Enforced by cultural constructs and discourses such as “Manifest destiny” or the “savage war”,3 the American identity becomes progressively equated with goodness, righteousness, and morally higher ground, in general, while the entities opposing such a paradigm remained inescapably locked within a discourse of subalternity. Even though the end of the frontier era was announced by the 11th U.S. census in 1890, to be re-proposed (and further elaborated) in Turner’s presentation to the American Historical Association in 1893, the official statements on population numbers and densities indicated that only the geographical aspect of the discourse disappeared. The symbolical value, the deep interconnectedness between the actual (and imaginary) spaces and the American identity, together with the imagination that amplified the experience of conquering a continent, nevertheless persisted by remaining inscribed within the national subconsciousness as a cultural reference in various writings, customs, folklore, and ritual practices. This persistence and its ideological potential were noticed by John F. Kennedy, who on July 16th 1960, while accepting his nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, (re)introduced the idea of the Frontier within the public discourse. By naming the concept “The New Frontier”, and by drawing from a political rhetoric more suitable for the Republican Party, which, as Slotkin puts it, “identified itself with the ‘rugged individualism’ associated with the Frontier” (1998, 2), Kennedy proposed a cultural shift in understanding and experiencing the concept of the Frontier. Following the rise of the United States as a hero nation that saved the world in World War II, Kennedy seized the historical and ideological hegemonic paradigms that fueled notions such as Manifest destiny and reforged them through the re-appropriated term of American exceptionalism. This allowed him to create a new public discourse and redefine the 3  Slotkin describes the “savage war” as a manipulation of public discourse whose aim was to blame the Native Americans “as instigators of a war of extermination” (Gunfighter 1998, 12). He elaborates how this attempt was premised on the idea to create a “psychological projection that made the Indians scapegoats for the morally troubling side of American expansion” while simultaneously becoming a “basic ideological convention of a culture that was itself increasingly devoted to the extermination or expropriation of the Indians and the kidnaping and enslavement of black Africans” (Gunfighter 1998, 12–13).

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nation’s political rhetoric, aimed at justifying expansionist tendencies of the post-WWII America. Furthermore, to assure the American identity’s continuity, an unceasing regeneration was needed, premised on emulating the traditional Frontier myth structured around notions such as individualism, which rhetorically induces righteousness and violence. The first manifestation of this new political paradigm occurred through the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict, where under the guise of fighting the spread of communism the United States took first steps as a critical factor on the global strategic, political, and economic scene. Simultaneously, while the “New Frontier” discourse was shaping the U.S. foreign policies, a re-emergence of classic Frontier mythologies was occurring within the Vietnam war. As Slotkin explains, American troops fighting in Vietnam were describing it as “Indian country”, the search and destroy missions as games of “Cowboys and Indians”, while Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam explained the military escalation by contextualizing it as a necessity to “move the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn’” (1998, 3). John Hellman, in his analysis of the Vietnam war titled American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, makes a similar point by emphasizing the clear existential and moral distinction between the two sides of the Frontier and tracing the origins of Myth directly to the Puritan heritage: “America was the leader of the Forces of Light and its enemies necessarily the forces of Darkness, agents of Satan, a role first assigned to the monarchies of Europe and the native inhabitants of the western forests” (1986, 6). A somewhat profounder approach to the necessity of polarization and conflict, which philosophically expands Slotkin’s idea of regeneration through violence, can be observed in the Hegelian reading of cultures of war and conflicts presented by Michael J. Shapiro. In Violent Cartographies—Mapping Cultures of War, Shapiro elaborates the utmost necessity for immobilization, domination, or destruction of the Enemy or the Others, in the interest of “the constitution of the national self” (1997, 45). Even though this multilayered analysis allows for a meaningful historical, social, and cultural mapping of the Frontier and its influences, the question of the position and function of the Frontier in relation to the American horror genre and experience nevertheless remains unanswered. What can be identified from the presented arguments is a narrative pattern structured around the spatial construct of the Frontier. Although initially relevant as a physical/geographical dividing line between civilization and wilderness and between danger and safety, it were the symbolic and

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imaginary aspects and effects of the space of the Frontier that left the biggest mark on the national subconscious. It is within the imaginary, within the fabled vast woods or menacing open desert spaces, filled with danger but also promises, that the actual construction of American individualism and self-reliance begins. Furthermore, this American identity is enriched by a very specific narrative pattern structured around the necessity to continuously construct, challenge, and confront some type of Other or Otherness, whose sole purpose is to reaffirm the discourse of self-worth and righteousness. The fact that such cultural and social discourse survived the disappearance of the physical Frontier—simultaneously evolving into a pattern for national expansion and becoming academically institutionalized under the title of American Exceptionalism—shows the lasting relevance and presence of the idea of the Frontier. The concept of Frontier horror, within such a context, develops by focusing on selected segments of the Frontier experience. Starting with the spatial paradigm that unequivocally enforces the division between two sides, the genre initially exposes the primordial fear of unknown and perilous spaces. This is further elaborated by the identification or, when needed, the construction of the Other as a direct projection of the dangerous spaces. The proposed characters, now exposed to unfriendly surroundings, together with the actual hostile manifestations of these spaces, become torn (sometimes quite literally) between the mythologized desire to conquer the unyielding spaces and the unmitigated threat these spaces carry within them. The construction of this spatial experience and the driving force behind the narratives is premised on the perpetual re-­ proposing of a scenario where a character, or a group of characters, functioning as emissaries and embodiments of civilized, tamed, and controlled spaces, become stripped of the existing preconceptions and are forced to re-evaluate their abilities to survive and conquer the newly discovered (actual or metaphoric) wilderness. In other words, Frontier horror forces its protagonists into the role of pioneers and colonists that are perpetually locked within a narrative closely resembling an Indian Captivity storyline. The mechanisms behind this imaginary spatial experience and the horrors derived from it can be explored through the work of the already addressed human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. By following his arguments about the anthropocentric nature of experiencing and developing space, as seen in Topophilia—A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1990) or Space and Place—The Perspective of Experience (2001), and by applying his observations to the idea of experiential intricacies and

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complexity of Frontier spaces, a close and almost innate connection with the horror genre emerges. Tuan’s spatial analyses offer an insight into the concept of spaciousness and the correlation between open spaces and the concept of freedom. By stating that “[s]pace lies open; it suggests the future and invites action” (2001, 54), Tuan, in a simplified manner, contextualizes the drive of the early American settlers to explore and conquer what lies before them. However, he then continues by pointing out that space and freedom can also be perceived as a threat: “A root meaning of the word ‘bad’ is ‘open.’ To be open and free is to be exposed and vulnerable. Open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed” (2001, 54). The open spaces, regardless of their potential, retain an aspect of imminent danger, hidden in both the fact that the individual becomes exposed to an outside influence and peril, and in a subjective form of endangerment articulated through the human inability to understand what lies in front of him. Different characters’ subjective Frontier horror experience is structured precisely around this perceptive uncertainty. The alluring open spaces, which dogmatically, particularly within the American expansionist praxis, call for action, affirmation of individuality, and eventually for belonging to a larger (national) identity, are being (narratively) contrasted to cultural inability to understand who or what resides on the other side of the dividing line.4 Such contrast creates a type of continuous friction set within a particular spatial context, where a dominant cultural ideology, in all of its multilayered complexity, is being opposed and confronted by a form of Otherness. This opposition unavoidably, and in concordance with the premises of the genre, culminates in a variety of acts of violence, where the unfortunate characters, who are almost always exemplifying the expanding/dominant culture, are punished for their trespassing.

4  It is interesting to notice that the approach to open spaces is strictly culturally conditioned. As Tuan explains, there is a very prominent difference in the interpretation of the environment between the American and Russian populations: “Americans have learned to accept the open plains of the West as a symbol of opportunity and freedom, but to the Russian peasants boundless space used to have the opposite meaning. It connoted despair rather than opportunity; it inhibited rather than encouraged action” (2001, 56). Such difference in perception and approach to open spaces once again strongly reinforces the connection between the American national rhetoric and Frontier spaces.

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Entering the Forest The variations and further developments of this basic premise within the American creative tradition are countless. From outright cautionary tales presented as Indian Captivity narratives, the subtle explorations of folklore, human spirit, and wilderness in the works of Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, to the political engagement of Charles Brockden Brown, perpetuated through decades and centuries and rehashed through an ever-increasing number of storytelling platforms, the idea of a foreboding Frontier space prominently stands apart from other narratives. However, this distinctive spatial and genre expression, structured around a rich tapestry of national symbolism, does not stand as a monolithic narrative strand, but can in fact be observed through (at least) two separate perspectives. By following the diachronic and geographic progression of the continent’s colonization, the first spatial expression of the Frontier forms through the image of a forest, while the second evolves around the empty spaces of the deserts. Both spatial contexts share a common system of value, and they both function in a very similar way given that the initially conceptualized spatial, cultural, and existential polarities fuel the narrative and the horrors. Nevertheless, over time, and through the work of different authors and the use of different contexts, a differentiation between the two spaces became increasingly noticeable. Starting with the anthologized forest, the readers, and later on viewers, are initially allowed an insight into the life of the early settlers, and their early-pioneer experiences as portrayed by the developing literary imagination of the American romantic movement. Even though one of the key texts of the period summarizing this experience—and the violence derived from it—is Abraham Panther’s exuberantly titled short story A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady Who Was Taken by the Indians in the Year 1777, and After Making her Escape, She Retired to a Lonely Cave, Where She Lived Nine Years5 it is with the appearance of a much stronger literary voice of Charles Brockden Brown that the issue of the Frontier and wilderness takes place is given a more proper address. An interesting figure, both from the perspective of authorship and imagination and his political activism, Charles Brockden Brown positions himself as one of the first American professional writers. Within the context of the early American (gothic) production, Brown, similar to Hawthorne after him, and unlike Irving, 5

 See Chap. 2.

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whose works will still greatly rely on the European literary tradition, will attempt to surpass the obvious absence of a historical dimension within the new nation. In the preface to Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-­ Walker, Brown writes that American writers indeed have an alternative source of inspiration to that which was up until that moment offered by the European literary tradition: “Puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras,” as Brown elaborates, “are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable; and for a native of America to overlook these would admit of no apology. These, therefore, are, in part, the ingredients of this tale, and these he has been ambitious of depicting in vivid and faithful colours. The success of his efforts must be estimated by the liberal and candid reader”. (1988, 3–4)

As argued by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in his reading of Brown’s contribution to American literature and the American gothic, Brown played “a foundational role in establishing the haunted American wilderness as an archetype of American Gothic literature” (2011, 29). With Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, and, albeit in a different way, with his later publication Edgar Huntly, Brown establishes a variety of tropes that will find their way in the larger context of the American gothic and horror genre. In Edgar Huntly, Brown reaffirms—and in a way validates— the literary value of the Indian captivity narratives that up to this point predominantly took shape of various pamphlet and dime novels, which, almost without exception, placed them in the category of sensationalist press of the time. By recounting a tale of a young farmer who, through a series of events, finds himself stranded on the other side of the Frontier, Brown embarks on explorative journey of all the perils that the experience in the wilderness could offer. Edgar, in his attempts to track a runaway character named Clithero, who he believed murdered his best friend, soon finds himself exposed to and affected by the austerities and dangers of the uncivilized space. After eventually finding Clithero, who now appears to be somewhat deranged and in an almost beast-like state, Edgar discovers his innocence but also his personal inability to resist the influence of the surrounding wilderness. Plagued by thirst and hunger, he gradually gives in to a more primordial aspect of his character while slowly (de)evolving in a state similar to Clithero’s:

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My hunger speedily became ferocious. I tore the linen of my shirt between my teeth and swallowed the fragments. I felt a strong propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth. (1988, 157)

This scene marks the start of Edgar’s rapid transition into a survivalist. While abandoning the idea of autocannibalism, he manages to kill a panther and feed on its flesh, an episode that is almost immediately followed by an encounter with a group of Indians and a captured white woman. He arms himself by stealing a musket and a hatchet and uses them to kill the Indians and escape with the prisoner. Despite being quite reminiscent of the previously addressed Abraham Panther’s story, and many other Indian captivity narratives, the conclusion of Brown’s story offers literary legitimization to these experiences. Edgar’s desired return home becomes tainted by the simple fact that his experience in the wilderness has changed him. This change is so radical that he questions whether he will be recognized, creating a sense of bewilderment and uncertainty similar to the one that will be seen in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”. Even though Edgar’s trauma is predominantly structured around its physicality, as opposed to the one in Hawthorne’s tale, the sense of spatially conditioned change remains identical: The sleek locks, neat apparel, pacific guise, sobriety and gentleness of aspect by which I was customarily distinguished, would in vain be sought in the apparition which would now present itself before them. My legs, neck and bosom were bare, and their native hue were exchanged for the livid marks of bruises and scarifications. A horrid scar was upon my cheek, and my uncombed locks; hollow eyes, made ghastly by my abstinence and cold, and the ruthless passions of which my mind had been the theatre, added to the musquet which I carried in my hand, would prepossess them with the notion of a maniac or ruffian. (1988, 227)

The success of Edgar Huntly, especially in terms of connecting/linking the narrative with the spatial discourse, is premised on Brown’s literary contextualizing—and to a certain extent mainstreaming—the symbolic, imaginary, and actual power of the frontier spaces. Even though in these descriptions Brown remains within the boundaries of validation of the already existing tropes, the imagery and the description of the surviving

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character, together with his emotional state and the actual physical damage, mark a turning point that will over time become relevant for the (sub)genre. The idea of a character exposed to a particular space, and the physical and psychological trauma that accompanies such an interaction, will continue to live within the American horror imagination, at least with those characters that manage to survive the experience. Wieland, although originally published in 1798, a year before Edgar Huntly, is another novel that had considerable influence on the development of the genre. Here Brown presents a story of a patriarch, Wieland Sr., a founder of his own religion, who decides to leave Germany and immigrate to America with the mission to spread the word of God to the local Indian population. Although his original plan quickly falls through, Wieland Sr. recognizes the benefits the new country has to offer, so he decides to settle, build a house, as well as a small temple next to it, which he uses for his daily prayers. In this same temple, he meets his death in the form of a divine light, a bolt out of the sky that kills him instantly. The death of Wieland Sr., however, serves only as a preamble for the actual story, which immediately refocuses on his two children—Clara and Theodore Wieland—who continue to live their lives in an almost utopian context, unaware of any occurrences in the rest of the country. As years pass, Theodore gets married and moves into the inherited house, while Clara moves to a small house nearby. The dynamic of the narrative becomes enriched with the characters of Catherine—who becomes Theodore’s wife—and Henry Pleyel—who Clara is secretly in love. This idyllic existence comes to an end with the appearance of Carwin, a mysterious figure who, in his attempts to win over Clara, starts influencing the group. Carwin, described by Leslie Fiedler as a combination of Don Juan and Faust (2008, 149), is particularly interesting in that he is a “biloquist”, who uses his vocal abilities to manipulate the individuals within the group. The one most affected by this influence is Theodore, who, as the story progresses, becomes increasingly similar to his father in his religious beliefs and becomes convinced that God is speaking to him. Although the story branches out in a few narrative strains, a horrific ending becomes almost unavoidable. The novel ends with the destruction of the Wieland family, with Theodore murdering his wife and children and then committing suicide, Clara barely surviving the ordeal, and Carwin walking away unpunished for his meddling. With the misfortunes of the Wieland family in mind, it becomes possible to explore a variety of venues belonging to the gothic/horror genre. In terms of spatial discourse, specifically the Frontier

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space, the narratives of Edgar Huntly and Wieland represent two clearly different treatments/uses of the topic. While in Edgar Huntly Brown structures almost the entire storyline around the consequences of spatial experience, with the issue of Huntly’s identity being tested and affected by the mythologized space and therefore symbolically conforming to the previously addressed Slotkin’s theoretical readings, Wieland only partially embodies the Frontier paradigm. Although the Wieland’s house and the temple indeed stand on the brink of civilization—Weinstock, for example, describes the fictional town of Mettingen where the house is located as “a haunted liminal space positioned on the border between the real and the fantastic and defined by its isolation and strangeness” (2011, 37)—a sense of imminent threat from uncivilized spaces is not directly expressed. Instead, what is presented is a sense of possibilities and uncertainties similar to Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, with the mentioned liminality of the surroundings allowing for the articulation of a variety of scenarios. However, the real contribution to the spatial discourse lies in Brown repositioning and possibly reimagining the prototypical gothic setting. In his process of adapting the European/British gothic tradition to the new country, and considering his own stance regarding the prolific and inspirational nature offered by the new setting, Brown downsizes the quintessential trope of the Gothic castle to the domestic setting of a house. While the challenge of adapting the various natural sceneries that characterized much of the early British gothic work was not a difficult task, the idea of successfully proposing almost any of the architectural sites associated with traditional gothic narratives was very improbable. Although some attempts of architectural transference occurred before, such as The Asylum; or Alonzo and Melissa (1811) in which Isaac Mitchell chooses Long Island as the site for his gothic country house, as Leslie Fiedler suggests, the existence of “such a structure in such a place remains not merely unconvincing but meaningless” (2008, 144). While the Gothic castle, as well as other similar structures, had a specific function, among other things, structured around a process of revisiting and critically approaching the past, the use of such a space within the American context would be culturally meaningless, or as Fiedler puts it: “[t]he counterpart of such a castle fifty miles from New York City [would lose] all point” (2008, 145). This, however, does not mean that Brown’s contribution to the spatial discourse within the genre was in any way diminished by the necessities of the context. Quite the opposite, as it will be discussed in the next chapter, the introduction of the idea of the house as a new spatial paradigm offered an unprecedented insight into

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the intimacy of the individuals living inside of it, together with the dynamics that characterize such cohabitation. Followed by Hawthorne, then Poe and a series of other authors to come, Brown’s Wieland and his reworking of the haunted castle into a (haunted) house successfully created an originally American spatial trope that persists as a staple of the genre even today.

Dreamy Darkness The mapping of the early American imagination continues in a somewhat milder tone with the work of authors such as Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne and their endeavors to trace the symbolic and metaphoric value of the forest and the surrounding frontier spaces. Both of these authors recognized the spatial value of the Frontier and the adjoined nature—as well as the threats that lurked within—which led to the creation of remarkable narrative patterns, similar to the one explored by Brown, premised on the idea of interactivity between their characters and what symbolically stands as a dividing line between “civilized” and “uncivilized” spaces. By opposing these spaces, as well as exposing their characters to the metaphoric and sometimes actual friction between the two, both Irving and Hawthorne are given an opportunity to explore the nature of both the newly formed country and the actual human nature in all of its complexities. The idea of interacting with the Frontier and nature, as well as the consequences of such interaction, can therefore be easily detected in Irving’s storylines focused on the American context. By directly drawing from the British and European romanticism and the role nature had within these literary traditions, Irving explores and presents the American natural attributes in all of their glory. In his descriptions, however, nature is not limited in its functionality or defined by some natural law, instead, by being inspired by European folklore and fairy tales, it appropriates certain mischievous, dangerous, and even supernatural qualities. In his famous story “Rip Van Winkle”, Irving introduces the reader to the beauties of the Kaatskill Mountains, describing in detail their “noble height”, their “magical hues and shapes”, as well as a small village “at the foot of these fairy mountains” (Norton Anthology 2003a, 981). In this ­village lives Rip Van Winkle, a comical carefree character, who in his attempts to avoid the nagging of his spouse, his unruly children, and the hard labor at the farm, decides to escape into nature, presumably to hunt with his dog. As he ventures into the mountains, climbing and admiring his surroundings, he encounters a stranger whose odd appearance, the

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knowledge of his name, and the fact that he is carrying a stout flask, intrigue Rip Van Winkle who decides to help him carry the flask up the mountain. After reaching a ravine and a strange amphitheater-like setting where he encounters more of these odd-looking figures, Rip first observes this strange group of people enjoying themselves with games and drinking, only to furtively start drinking himself, and soon after falling into a deep sleep. His sleep is followed by a strange awakening when he realizes a few curious details, such as his gun being possibly replaced as a prank with an old rust encrusted firelock, the absence of his dog, and a later realization that his beard was now gray and a foot long. What follows is Rip’s return to the village and a gradual surprise when he realizes some years have passed since he ventured into the mountains. Irving structures the rest of the story as a satirical commentary on the politics of the times without, much in the manner of his other writings, imposing an actual political stand. On the other hand, Rip Van Winkle metaphorically shares the faith of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner6 and keeps retelling his strange experience until the end of his days. However, what Irving’s fable-like storytelling also articulates is a spatially based pattern structured around the main character’s experience with fringe frontier spaces. Rip Van Winkle’s adventure, structured as a fable or even as a simplified myth, makes up a narrative structure that will be extensively explored in countless horror narratives. A character prone to or pushed into individualism (voluntary or involuntary) interacts with nature and by doing so comes into contact with some type of manifestation or embodiment of the unexplored spaces laid before him only to be forced to suffer in order to either adapt to the new spatiality or succumb to its violent nature. A similar pattern can be explored in yet another Irving’s famous tale—“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—where the reader is, once again, positioned on the very edges of the civilized space. Located in a valley a few miles from the small town of Greensburgh, a place called Sleepy Hollow exists in almost utmost tranquility. Irving, from the very start, emphasizes the uncommon nature of the village by giving it an almost abstract spatial/ geographic quality. In addition to already fringe location “among high 6  See Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834). In his portrayal of the mariner, Coleridge uses as a premise the figure of the Wandering Jew, a popular medieval legend telling a story about a Jew who refused to let Christ rest on his doorstep while bearing the cross to Calvary. Because of that he was condemned to wander the earth until the end of the world (Anderson 1965, 11).

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hills”, the village appears to be under “[a] drowsy, dreamy influence”, supposedly “bewitched by a high German doctor”, a place where “an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows […] before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson” (Norton Anthology 2003a, 992–993). The people living in Sleepy Hollow are also affected by their surroundings which abound “with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions” (2003a, 993). Their main preoccupation, however, is the haunting of a headless horseman, a ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head was blown off by a cannonball. Here Irving, once again, introduces a slightly comical character named Ichabod Crane who, although originating from the state of Connecticut—“a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest” (2003a, 994)—does not necessarily live up to the expectations of a pioneer. In spite of his employment as a schoolmaster, his awkward appearance, propensity for disciplinary measures with his students, as well as a general gentle demeanor emphasized even more by his passion for spending “long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives” (2003a, 997) while listening to tales of superstition and hauntings, allows for a narrative development similar to the one in “Rip Van Winkle”. A slightly satirical storyline, whose purpose is to present an amalgam of the structure of the European folk tale and the Frontier experiences and its folklore, follows Ichabod who becomes increasingly obsessed with the various superstitious stories, in particular with the legend of the headless Hessian, while simultaneously trying to win the hand of one Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a rich Dutch farmer. However, his opportunistic plans become challenged by the appearance of a competitor, a certain Brom Van Brunt, famous for his heroism, strength, and toughness. Unable to compete and finally rejected by Katrina, Ichabod becomes the victim of one final prank. By counting on the general sense of superstition characterizing the valley, and Ichabod Crane’s particularly gullible nature, Brom organizes an ambush of the unsuspecting schoolmaster. Masked as the Hessian horseman, Brom chases down Ichabod Crane who then, in a fit of superstitiously fueled panic, leaves Sleepy Hollow for good. Irving’s contribution to these two and numerous other tales lies primarily in the transitional value of adapting certain European literary norms to the American setting. However, in doing so, Irving manages not only to inaugurate a new literary tradition, and in part identify a new folklore, but he also emphasizes the close connection between his characters and the surrounding Frontier spaces, which unequivocally appear saturated with their own mythologies.

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Once again, with Ichabod Crane, Irving explores a fable-like pattern consisting of a character who—through the interaction with the still not completely civilized and/or rationalized spaces—is forced to face his own fears and insecurities and consequently has to decide whether to master or be subdued by this new spatial paradigm. Nevertheless, the transitional literary style characterizing Washington Irving’s writing becomes authentically American with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is Hawthorne who distances himself from the European tradition and its tendencies by drawing inspiration from European past and locating a new source of inspiration in the actual American experience. By addressing the Puritan heritage, the complexities and repercussions derived from the cohabitation of such moral norms and human existence, and by recognizing decidedly supernatural undertones present in both the Puritan experience and the spatial context within which these experiences took place, Hawthorne develops an authentic American voice. However, despite its originality, and the fact that a large segment of Hawthorne’s work is spatially contextualized within the metaphor of Puritan society and norms, and therefore not necessarily connected with the Frontier experience, one of his culturally more relevant short stories “Young Goodman Brown” stands out as a text that not only follows and reinforces a narrative path previously explored by Irving but also defines the framework within which a large portion of contemporary Frontier-based horror narratives will exist. Once again, the readers are introduced to a familiar setting consisting of a village, carrying the notorious name of Salem, located next to a forest, and the character of a young man, Goodman Brown, who decides to venture into the forest where he is supposed to meet a mysterious man—who eventually reveals himself as the Devil—and join his congregation. After the meeting and a brief discussion, Brown decides to return home to his spouse, Faith. However, within the darkness of the forest, strange things start to occur, and while walking and conversing about Brown’s return home, Brown and his mysterious companion stumble upon Goody Cloyse, a pious and respected old woman from the village. She recognizes the man as the Devil and immediately identifies herself as a witch. The group part ways, and while the Devil and Goody Cloyse continue their journey towards a secret location deeper in the woods where the ceremony will be held, Brown stays back, now holding the staff—given to him by the Devil in case he changed his mind—that will guide him to the secret location. Brown soon starts hearing other voices in the darkness and so he hides only to realize that the voices belong

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to the minister of the church and Deacon Gookin who are also on their way to the ceremony. The narrative escalates when Brown becomes sure that he heard the voice of his wife Faith, and in a fit of rage, desperation, and probable madness, he allows the staff to lead him to the clearing where the worshipping ceremony is taking place. There he finds a variety of people, ranging from respectable and not-so-respectable members of his community to Indian priests, all partaking in the same ceremony. A moment later, dragged by his fellow townsmen, Brown is forced to face a covered figure, which is soon revealed to be Faith, his spouse. The couple is announced as the two new converts, and as soon as Brown cries out to Faith to look up to Heaven and resist the Devil, he finds himself all alone in the middle of the forest. The conclusion of the tale sees Brown returning to Salem and finding, in disbelief, the townsfolk, his wife included, living their lives as if nothing had happened. Brown, not completely sure if the previous night’s events were real or just a dream, is forced to continue with his life, which is now marked by a deep sense of uncertainty, fear, and dread. Although its structure is somewhat reminiscent of Irving’s storylines, in the sense that it features a character interacting with nature—whereby these interactions receive various articulations—and returning to civilization changed by the experience, Hawthorne’s work projects a much deeper meaning. While Irving utilizes the structure of a fable and relies on the use of humor in order to alleviate any sense of gravitas caused by the predicaments in which his characters find themselves, Hawthorne directly addresses his character’s somber state of mind together with the context causing such distress. More specifically, Hawthorne draws a metaphoric map of uncertainties and anxieties of the early settlers by balancing and opposing Frontier-based fears and the religion-based obsessions of the Puritans. In doing so, he develops a set of tropes that will, over time, function both as staples for any Frontier-oriented horror narratives and as starting point for the development of new ones. The beginning of Brown’s venture into the forest immediately contextualizes the space as the opposite of civilization, where the safety of the main character’s home and his angelic spouse stand in stark contrast to the dark forest possibly hiding “a devilish Indian behind every tree” (2003b, 1264). The polarity between the two spaces further evolves with the introduction of the Devil who— although described as a fifty-year-old man somewhat resembling Brown himself, supposedly capable of traveling at unnatural speed, carrying a staff strangely shaped as a black snake, and projecting an “indescribable air of

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one who knew the world, and would not have felt abashed at the governor’s dinner-table, or in king William’s court” (2003b, 1265)—unquestionably belongs to the forest. This connection between the Devil and the forest, however, does not represent a simple manifestation of the monstrousness. Hawthorne’s exploration of human nature allows him to build on Frontier spatiality which was traditionally perceived as a mythologized source of the monstrous and perilous. Within Hawthorne’s narrative, this particular spatial context does not in fact function as monstrous compendium, but rather as a metaphoric mirror that allows various characters to reflect and articulate their true nature, which up until that moment remains deeply hidden under a deep veneer of religious and social righteousness. The Devil, traditionally portrayed as a trickster and deceiver, functions as an actual catalyst for all the suppressed desires of the Puritan community; in other words, the forest is now transmuted from a space of danger into a space of corruption. The permissiveness of the space becomes visible with the appearance of other characters, respected and virtuous members of the Salem community, who, right after stepping into the forest, shed their collective and individual quilt and openly embrace their sinful nature. Goody Cloyse identifies as a witch, the minister and Deacon Gookin say they would rather miss an ordination dinner than that night’s meeting and talk about the presence of the Indian powwows who “know almost as much deviltry as the best of us” (2003b, 1268). Brown himself changes the moment he realizes that Faith is also present in the forest, and in a moment of “grief, rage and terror” (2003b, 1269) gives in to the surrounding wilderness and becomes something else: “‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ roared goodman Brown, when the wind laughed at him. ‘Let us hear which will laugh loudest! Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself! and here comes goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you!’” (2003b, 1269). As the now almost demon-like Brown rushes through the forest, while screaming “horrid blasphemy” (2003b, 1269) and laughing insanely, his identification with the forest and the wickedness offered by the Devil become complete. The evolving cycle of tropes, starting with the representation of the forest as a dark and corrupting space, the accompanying physical manifestations of the lurking malevolence embodied in the figures of a demon or some other entity, as well as the actual possession of the main protagonist, becomes further explored with the introduction of the (spatial) expansion of the once contained evil. As Brown returns to Salem, after experiencing

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and succumbing to the influences of the forest, his perception of reality becomes permanently changed. Although not completely sure if his experiences were just a dream or actual reality, he cannot return to normalcy, and in a series of paranoid reactions redefines the initial perception of safety offered by the town. While walking the streets in bewilderment, he first encounters the old minister who unsuccessfully attempts to bestow a blessing on Brown, from which he shrinks away. Soon after he hears deacon Gookin worshiping and, in a frenzy, he asks him: “What God doth the wizard pray to?” (Norton Anthology 2003b, 1272). This is followed by Goody Cloyse and her attempt to catechize a little girl whom Brown snatches away as if to protect the child from a demon. Finally, Brown meets Faith again and responds to her affections with a stern and sad face. Hawthorne brings his tale to an end by portraying Brown as a desperate individual, disillusioned and fearful about his community as well as his family, living until the end of his life in a constant state of paranoia, and in doing so he not only provides a bleak and hopeless finale to a symbolically powerful narrative, but also proposes an ending that will be reworked endlessly as part of the horror genre production. By combining the premise of an individual who discovers a stark, if not outright horrific, reality looming beneath the apparently serene and utopian projection, Hawthorne successfully emphasizes the spatial discourse, the Frontier experience, together with a critique of the Puritan heritage. However, in addition to these discourses, and the specific ending, Hawthorne, using the concise short story form, successfully outlines an entire horror subgenre—small-town horror narratives (a topic that will be addressed later on in this research) that will be premised almost exclusively on the spatial, social and cultural dynamics characterizing the American small town.

Reimagining the Wilderness The modernization of these narratives—and the twentieth- and twenty-­ first-­century versions of the spaces and related fears expressed by American (dark) romanticism—saw a number of different manifestations, ranging from almost direct, if not historic, adaptations of the initially explored fears to imaginative contemporary elaborations and pastiche narratives focusing and further elaborating specific themes or tropes. However, even though it allows for numerous analytical approaches, this complex and affluent Romantic basis creates somewhat of a methodological problem when attempting to classify the different thematic or discursive strains. Is

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it more relevant to follow the adaptation of a trope and its connection to the Frontier spatial paradigm, or is it more productive to trace the development and interpretation of the Frontier itself? Furthermore, how to categorize the various approaches to Frontier spatiality in relation to the genre’s hyper-productivity regarding both themes and interpretations of different phenomena? A classification and a possible analytical method that encompasses the various aspects pertinent to this research can be derived by clustering narratives in accordance with the different reimagining of the Frontier space. Although all of the narratives in some way contribute to the genre through their originality, while at the same time reflecting many, if not all, of the features tackled by the early American gothic production, what properly distinguishes them is their approach to spatiality. More specifically, a differentiation between the different narratives can be established by observing the permeability of the Frontier space, which, as it will be argued, gradually changes as the sub-genre is reimagined over time. For example, the basic spatial binarity, especially when focused on the Frontier experience, is not limited to a clear and simple polarity, particularly when considering the always rapid development of the addressed genre. What follows the initial divisional simplicity is a gradual expansion on the introduced, adapted and developed features, with the Frontier spaces, wild men, Indians, and folk tales being slowly replaced by a more intimate spatial experience embodied in the image of the home and the house, as well as the popularization of urban gothic spaces. Nevertheless, the impact of the initial narratives was such that it created an experiential stratum whose influence within the genre can be, once again, easily contextualized within the paradigm offered by Richard Slotkin. The idea of a process involving an (in)voluntary exposure to a potentially dangerous space, with acts of violence and peril as the consequences of such exposure, together with the return to safety and normalcy which only leads to the realization of the extent of ensued existential and identitary changes, directly relates to the national experience of using violence as a form of regeneration. Starting with Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the corrupting nature of the Frontier, Irving’s explorations of fantastic and fable-like spaces together with the adjacent folktales, and finally Hawthorne’s tracing of religion and sinfulness in relation to the American spaces, a pattern started to emerge indicating the prolific nature of this particular aspect of the American experience. This spatial experience, the metaphoric and actual odysseys of the different protagonists, and the consequences of such explorations led to the recognition and establishment of

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a series of tropes whose recognizability and inevitable darkness, if not outright morbidity, made them an instant staple of the American horror genre. Although the actualization and use of these tropes within the contemporary horror genre varied depending on different storylines and spatial perspective regarding the use of forest or desert locations, the notion of spatially based rite of passage remained not only unchanged but it over the years evolved and got used in a variety of ways. This is to say that the mechanism and tropes—which start with the forest as the quintessential image and space of the Frontier only to further evolve and expand in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American horror production—offered by Brown, Irving, or Hawthorne remained similar, if not almost the same. With this in mind, a starting point for the analysis of a more contemporary approach to Frontier spatiality and Frontier Horror would be to consider two narratives ironically located in the past. Beginning with Robert Egger’s The Witch7 (2015) and moving to Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999), it becomes possible to visually and thematically enjoy the anxieties and outright horrors of the Frontier as described by Hawthorne, Irving, and Brown. As already said, both storylines focus on the experience of the American settlers and the existential adversities that accompanied their endeavor. Although thematically different—Egger’s narrative brings a Puritan family that decides to build a farm and live at the utmost outskirts of civilization, while Bird’s film centers on the misfortunes of Lieutenant John Boyd, a traumatized veteran of the Mexican-American War who gets appointed to a remote military outpost—the notion of the Frontier powerfully looms over all of the protagonists. After being exiled from a Puritan colony due to a dispute, the Puritan family, William and Katherine, with their four children, settle in a desolate area right next to a forest. Spatial binarity between the foreboding imagery of the surrounding forest and the barely civilized and functional spaces of the farm becomes articulated and emphasized almost immediately with the surprising disappearance of the youngest child. This disappearance, unconvincingly explained as an animal attack, marks the beginning of an active influence of the forest— and as the viewers eventually find out—its inhabitant(s)—over the unfortunate family torn between their religious beliefs and superstitions and the harshness of surviving in such austere circumstances. As the story progresses, and as the presence of a witch, and potentially the Devil himself, becomes increasingly evident, the influence of the forest grows. However, 7

 Originally titled The VVitch: A New-England Folktale.

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despite various occurrences—such as the death of the second child after his venturing into the forest and the encounter with the witch, and the growing religion-fueled paranoia of the remaining family members—the spatial dynamics do not change because the forest retains its impermeability and allows only brief, although impactful, visits akin to the one experienced by Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Similar to Hawthorne’s story, albeit in a much more violent manner, the climax of the created (spatial) tension sees a metaphoric extension of the shadow cast by the woods. Previously confined within the spatial boundaries of the forest, the evil is now surpassing its limitations, and in doing so, it starts affecting the already distraught family. The mother, Katherine, gradually loses her mind and inadvertently interacts with the witch/Devil. The tension that comes out of Katherine’s dissociation from reality becomes further amplified by the disappearance of two of her children leaving only the oldest— Thomasin—to face the bereaved mother, and the now crazed and desperate father. As the progressively violent accusations of Thomasin being a devil worshipper ensue, the final act of the story starts to unfold with the manifestation of the Devil, who now assumes the shape of a black goat (adequately named Black Phillip) and kills William. This is followed by one last confrontation between mother and daughter, with Thomasin killing Katherine in self-defense. With the arrival of the night, the narrative tension finally subsides as the Devil finally manifests himself to Thomasin, offering her a bargain for her soul. As she accepts the Devil’s offer and walks naked into the forest to join a supposed coven consisting of a group of naked women worshiping the Dark Lord, Egger’s forest completes its purpose by retaining and reinforcing its (symbolic) corruptive value deeply ingrained and portrayed within the American folklore and national imagination. A somewhat different take on the Frontier horror can be recognized in Bird’s Ravenous: here the narrative centers around Lieutenant John Boyd whose traumatic experience in the Mexican-American War—heightened by his cowardly attempt to survive by pretending to be killed during a conflict—positions him as a somewhat reluctant participant in the Frontier experience. Nevertheless, he is sent to a small military outpost in the mountains of Sierra Nevada, where, almost immediately upon his arrival, a supposedly half-frozen man named Colqhoun emerges from the surrounding wilderness. Here, just as was the case with The Witch, despite the interactivity of the two spaces marking the narrative, we detect a clear, albeit thin, dividing line between wilderness and civilization. Colqhoun

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presents himself as a (un)fortunate survivor of a wagon train that was making its way toward the Pacific Ocean but that got lost in the mountains while looking for a shortcut. The group, in order to avoid starvation, resorted to cannibalism, and Colqhoun says there are more survivors in the cave where they sought refuge during winter. The small crew managing the military fort quickly organizes an expedition deep into the wild in order to save the remaining travelers. Once again, the venturing into the space on the other side of the abstract dividing line is marked by consequences that now manifest themselves as a gruesome discovery: it was Colqhoun who murdered and ate his companions, turning after the fact into a Wendigo, a cannibalistic spirit which takes over a person after they consume human flesh. The changed cannibal, now gifted with increased strength and resistance, eliminates most of the group. Boyd, however, manages to hide and escape Colqhoun by himself eating the flesh of one of his fallen comrades. The rest of the story sees Boyd’s return to the fort, followed by a later reappearance of Colqhoun, now, in his deviousness, impersonating an officer. The final confrontation between the two ends with both of them dying. While Bird’s story, through the use of dark humor and actual historical occurrences,8 allows for a broader reading and interpretation9—as opposed to the rather folkloristic and fable-like storyline presented by Eggar—both narratives rely on spatial binarity and the accompanying tropes established by the already addressed Romantic writers. The consequences of such a traditional construction and reading of space manifest themselves on two different levels. The initial reaction when addressing the spatial paradigm offered by both narratives is that the spatial constructs are, at their core, uninventive, as they do not venture outside of the idea of evil thriving on the other side of the known geography. While both spaces occasionally project a sense of instability and potential “corruption”, nothing in their original functioning changes, so the safe and presumably civilized space remains such throughout both stories, and the presented forest and wilderness retains its impermeability. Nevertheless, this clear binarity and the emphasis on the horrific consequences of breaching the established boundaries once again reinforce 8  The story was partially inspired by the misfortunes of the Donner party who, while traveling to California, remained strained in the mountains of Sierra Nevada from 1846–1847, and who, in order to survive, had to eat the bodies of their perished traveling companions. 9  See, for example, Jennifer Brown’s interesting argument in Cannibalism in Literature and Film regarding the presented cannibalism as a warning of “the dangers of overconsumption, greed and avarice” (2013, 226).

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some of the previously and historically confirmed core (national) fears, which, in turn, successfully transfer to contemporary horror narratives and, by doing so, reaffirm the connection between (Frontier) spaces and the genre. The reading of Frontier spaces took a significant step forward during the renaissance of the genre in the post-Vietnam era of the 1970s. In this period, several authors found their artistic voice and the means to express the nation’s angst caused by the permeating and perpetuating violent imagery of the lost war, conflated with a culturally oppressive political reasoning characteristic of the time, thus initiating the cycle of reimagination of both the genre and the spatial paradigms within in. Although the idea of the Frontier was not necessarily dominant in all expressions of the genre, with the current political issues and debates remaining the central preoccupation of the produced horror discourse, the mythologized idea of the Frontier and the accompanying dangerous liminality slowly found its ways into various productions. A good example and an entry point for the analysis of a post-Romantic vision of a Frontier can be observed in Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1973), as well as Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978).10 Zarchi’s work was mostly characterized as a simplistic storyline further simplified by the amateur level of filming, depicting unnecessarily excessive acts of violence, which resulted in the abysmal reception of the critics. However, the proposed story featuring a woman writer from New York who travels to Connecticut to a house in the countryside to write a novel, only to be attacked and repeatedly gang-raped by a group of men, directly correlates with the experiences described in many of the Indian captivity narratives. The connection becomes even more obvious when considering its similarities with Abraham Panther’s “An Account of a Beautiful Young Lady” where the heroine takes revenge on her captor. Zarchi’s narration follows a similar pattern where the main protagonist, once exposed to the brutalities of the “uncivilized” space, is forced to adapt in order to survive, which is what the unfortunate heroine does. After surviving almost by accident, she decides to murder all the men involved in the attack, and she does this in a very creatively gruesome way. A similar, although structurally and narratively much more coherent take on the revenge horror subgenre (or possibly even the exploitation subgenre) can be seen in Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, where the notion of opposing spaces, civilization and wilderness, as well as the  Originally, and ironically, titled Day of the Woman.

10

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activities performed within these spaces, is even more prominent. The story follows two girls, Mari Collingwood and Phyllis Stone, who are celebrating Mari’s seventeenth birthday by attending a concert in the city. When trying to buy some marijuana prior to the concert, they are captured by a group of criminals consisting of Krug Stillo, a sadistic killer and rapist, Fred “Weasel” Podowski, a child molester, Stillo’s son Junior, and another accomplice named Sadie. The group flees the city and travels to a forest—coincidently close to Mari’s home—where they start torturing the two girls, forcing them to urinate on themselves and perform a sexual act in front of the group. After she attempts to escape, Phyllis is brutally stabbed, while Mari, after another bout of torture and rape, gets shot, execution style. After a brief, almost auto-reflective pause, the deranged group decides to clean up and, pretending to be merchants, spend the night, once again coincidently, at the house owned by Mari’s parents. The secret does not stay hidden for long, and through a series of events the parents become aware of what has happened and decide to take revenge on the killers by brutally murdering them. Conditioned by the times, the rise of counterculture, and the general social upheaval dominating the post-Vietnam era, Craven’s traumatic and eventually widely censored story is imbued with a variety of different messages. Violent uncensored imagery pouring out of Vietnam and the disillusionment with the government and the system in general fueled by events such as the My Lai massacre11 and the Kent State shooting12 all make up the elements that took the form of subliminal angst, channeled as senseless acts of violence that in turn functioned as intelligently structured (counter)cultural critical pastiche. However, the use of space takes the narrative back to the roots of 11  The My Lai massacre, which occurred March 16th, 1968, is considered to be the most prominent and gruesome military incident during the U.S. engagement in the Vietnam conflict: “On that day, a U.S. Army infantry company killed 504 unresisting women, children, and old men in the subhamlets of My Lai 4 and My Khe 4 of Son My village, Quang Ngai Province. The causes were complex and included psychological stress on the men, poor unit leadership, bad intelligence, and an overall American strategy that put more emphasis on killing—getting a high body count—than on protecting the people” (Anderson 2002, 98). The attack was followed by an unsuccessful cover up attempt sparking even more public outrage. 12  The U.S. engagement in the war was followed by an increasingly strong antiwar sentiment in the States. The protest at Kent State University, and the subsequent shooting which took place on May 4th, 1970, resulted in the National Guard shooting four students, with two more killed by police officers on May 14th in Jackson State University, Mississippi (Anderson 2002, 104).

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the genre and the previously discussed authors. Brown’s house in Wieland is positioned on the outskirts of urbanity, distant from the great centers but within the boundaries of the civilized. Such spatial liminality, to once again quote Weinstock (2011, 37), can also be detected in Craven’s narrative because the Collingwoods’ house is located in a scarcely populated area right next to a forest. Although the opposing space of the city remains portrayed as a potential source of danger and violence, the young girls, once abducted, are transported back to the forest before any of the actual violence is exerted on them. Once in the forest, the veneer of civilized behavior disappears, and the suppressed sadistic nature of the assailants fully manifests itself. The second spatial context within which violence occurs is a combination of a domestic environment and nature, echoing once again Brown’s spatial paradigm. The parents, painfully aware of their child’s fate, give in to violent behavior almost immediately and thus offer a stark contrast to the initially proposed image of a mild-tempered middle-­ class family. Instead of running away and looking for safety, or at least contacting the local authorities in order to apprehend the criminals, they decide to face the mindless violence and trauma spatially contextualized and symbolically manifested as an emanation of the surrounding wilderness by perpetuating the same type of violent behavior. By overlapping the violence occurring within the parental house and the surrounding nature, Craven, therefore, reinforces and emphasizes the idea of the liminality and transgressivness of the proposed metaphoric Frontier space. The proposed liminality here, as well as in Zarchi’s storyline, also emphasizes the previously addressed categorization of Frontier spaces within the genre in accordance with its permeability. While the traditional (Romantic) binarity prevents almost any spatial overlapping and interaction, with Zarchi and Craven we can observe a narrative willingness to present a space that simultaneously retains both the unmitigated evil and subsequent violence of the mythologized Frontier space, as well as active civilization tokens manifested either through the presented spaces or the characters victimized by their (uncivilized) surroundings. While the proposed liminal spaces, articulated within the films through images of nature, the forest, but also the unsafe homes, allow a possibility of escape and/or revenge, they successfully oppose and eventually deconstruct the originally fixed binarity. A somewhat more relaxed and culturally less engaged Frontier experience—and a different understanding of the porousness of the associated spaces—can be found in the work done by Sam Raimi. It is with his The

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Evil Dead, released in 1981, that the viewers stop being caught up in the tension of liminal or bordering spaces and instead become, forcefully and violently, relocated to the other side of the dividing line. While the spaces proposed up until that point, due to the binarity structured around the concept of dangerous and safe spaces, were not limiting and therefore always allowed the possibility of escape, what we see with Raimi, and eventually some other authors, is a type of closed spatial ecosystem that captures and slowly exterminates its inhabitants. Before expanding into a franchise, The Evil Dead, following the low budget amateur praxis, brought an interesting story of a group of young men and women going to a cabin located deep into the woods. The run-down cabin, resembling more a dead wooden corpse than an actually inhabitable place, presents itself as somewhat of a natural extension of the surrounding forest. The connection becomes even more prominent once the characters enter the cabin and discover a space embellished with hunting trophies as well as an assortment of horns, bones, and hooves. As they settle in, all kinds of weird things start to happen. They discover a cellar beneath the cabin containing strange audio recordings and an even stranger book13 that, once someone reads from it, summons countless demons that are seemingly originating from the surrounding forest. However, the proposed oscillation of the spatial setting, set between the run-down cabin and the surrounding forest, is deceitful, leading the viewers to believe that the building will provide refuge and safety for the unfortunate characters. With the story developing around the group of characters who become, after accidentally summoning a demonic force, stranded in the cabin, a spatial polarity ensues between the monstrous in the woods and the apparent safety of the cabin. Initially, the coding of these two spaces is made clear with Raimi emphasizing the emergence of the malevolent spirits from the forest through his innovative use of the camera. Raimi experimented, and de facto introduced, the use of the so-called shaky cam method, which was basically a hand-held camera whose purpose was to present the point of view of a particular person, or, in the case of The Evil Dead, the perspective of a demonic force either rushing toward the cabin where the protagonists were hiding or chasing some unfortunate victim. By opposing the monstrous and the human, such use of the camera strongly suggests a spatial layout of the narrative. This is further a­ ccentuated 13  The book was named Necronomicon, which is Raimi’s homage to Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work and his fabled introduction of the cursed tome into his mythologies.

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through the actual physical manifestation of the demonically induced dangers when the forest, specifically trees, comes to life and attacks the protagonists,14 so the characters themselves eventually have no choice but to acknowledge that the trees are alive and that they will not allow them to escape. However, an inversion of the initially proposed binarity occurs when the demonic entity infiltrates the cabin and—as if this is not troubling enough—the bodies of different party members. From the spatial point of view, the infiltration of the domestic space symbolizes an important turning point in the previously established spatial paradigm. The observed breach outlines a completely new and different geography of the narrative, wherein the cabin is recognized as a space of conflict and as such open to particular readings within the praxis of theorizing horror. The spatial aspect of the house can thus be interpreted using a Freudian approach where the structure of the house follows the division of human subconscious: the attic ideally corresponds to the notion of super-ego, the everyday living spaces to the ego, and dark and menacing cellar to the id.15 Even though the mapping of the house and its intricacies will be tackled in the following chapter, it is interesting to note the drastic change in the function and representation of space as the storyline of Raimi’s narrative progresses. Once the corruption of the domestic space occurs, and the monstrous starts emerging from the (mythologized) cellar, as well as from some other symbolically and functionally obscure spaces of the house,16 the domestic space ceases to exist and instead becomes the natural extension of the corrupted/corrupting forest. This particular aggressive spatial expansion is in turn amplified by the (in)action of the main character Ashley J. Williams, simply known as Ash. While the popularity of this character will in the course of a few years, and a series of sequels, reach a cult status, as well as a cult following, a more acute observation of the character 14  The described attack refers to a particularly criticized scene deemed unnecessarily gratuitous and explicit. In this scene a demonic tree traps and sexually assaults one of the female characters, which assured the film an NC-17 rating in the United States, and the banning and screening limitations in many other countries around the world. 15  This theoretical concept will be explored by a variety of authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Slavoj Žižek, and numerous others. 16  An additional reading of the space of the cabin could be articulated using the idea of “front” and “back”, and “public” and “private” spaces, as elaborated by Yi-Fu Tuan. Although not within the scope of this chapter, such theoretical contextualization would offer an additional insight into the spatial mechanics of the haunted cabin, wherein the “back/ intimate” spaces (the cellar, the shed) harbor the actual evil that disrupts the calm while the front/public spaces such as the living room offer the controlled spatial paradigm.

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within the first installment shows a rather unremarkable or at least unwilling, heroic figure. Through most of the film, Ash is portrayed as primarily focused on and concerned with his own survival. Attacked by the different demonic manifestations, later popularly named “Deadites”, Ash selfishly looks for ways to avoid being killed, and in the process, defies any of the features that traditionally characterize a hero. Even more so, he does not even necessarily transcend into the category of an antihero but instead finds himself locked in the position of a helpless victim, completely at the mercy of the expanding (spatial) danger. This status will not remain unchanged as Ash will, over the course of the film, and particularly over the course of the sequels (including the television series), be forced to reposition and reimagine himself as a proper hero. Nevertheless, as the first installment of the (later) franchise unfolds, he is less threatening and less capable of facing the horrifically reimagined frontier space surrounding him than the young lady in the already addressed Abraham Panther’s short story. Interestingly enough, Ash, just like the young lady, and many other Indian captivity and Frontier heroes, becomes forced into a process of transcendence predicated on the use of violence, which, in line with Raimi’s artistic preferences, manifests itself in copious amounts of blood. Once entrapped on the other side of the dividing line, the return to normalcy reflects the storyline already narrated in Edgar Huntly—a return is possible, but it necessitates hardship and sacrifices primarily induced by the merciless spaces surrounding the (anti)hero. Once the sacrifice has been made, the protagonist does traditionally emerge as a hero, or at least a victor, but now with a changed identity, warped and in many ways corrupted by the wilderness. The subgenre of the “haunted cabin in the woods” initiated by Raimi has soon been adopted and further explored by other authors. Even though many of the storylines hardly developed the initial premise, opting instead to follow a horror genre tradition focused on imitating old rather than innovating new tropes, certain exceptions can be noted, particularly when discussing the spatial component. An interesting experiment in reimagining Raimi spatiality can be seen in Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever from 2002. By following the established pattern of a group of young men and women venturing into the woods to find a cabin where they will enjoy themselves over a few days, Roth’s does not stray from the trail already mapped by Raimi. The group arrives at the cabin; they settle in and start enjoying both their accommodations and the surrounding forest, which in Roth’s version, at least initially, is in by no means foreboding. This,

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nevertheless, changes quickly when they run into one of the locals who lives in the woods where he got infected with a strange flesh-eating virus. The encounter turns violent, and the group manages to chase the infected stranger away from the cabin and, as they find out later on, kill him. The virus, however, is not stopped and the members of the group start slowly getting sick. The situation further escalates when the local folk become aggressive and attempt to eliminate the newcomers. While in The Evil Dead the addressed spatial polarity between the forest and the cabin eventually disappears—given that the demonic forces overrun the initial space of safety—the opposition between these two spaces in Cabin Fever remains very firm. This rigidity, however, is not unintentional. Raimi, in part, develops the idea of fear and horror around the notion of one space, the forest, overtaking the other. Roth creates a similar setting, but because of the lack of liminality characterizing his cabin, a displacement in the horror effect occurs. By inscribing meaning into the uncorrupted space of the cabin, the characters rely on its integrity for their own safety. This, in turn, conditions their behavior, and as the first member of the group develops the symptoms of sickness, the rest, without a trace of remorse, expel her from the cabin and lock her in a tool shed outside. Although the remaining storyline is filled with low-budget excessiveness—together with a series of homages to both Raimi’s work and the work of other authors—and the characters finally succumb either to the sickness or the murderous local population, the presented frontier space remains haunted and unforgiving. In 1999, after an unexpected and unpragmatic marketing campaign, the release of The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, introduced a new take on the forest and what might lurk inside, and at the same time re-proposed a traditional American trope. As suggested by the sterility of the title, and reinforced by the opening description stating that the presented recording is actually found footage, the film takes advantage of one of the oldest gothic narrative tricks—false authenticity, inaugurated, among others, by Horace Walpole and his “misleading” presentation of the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764).17 As the brief description states, the footage was shot in October 1994 by 17  The first edition was titled The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto, and it was presented as a translation of a 1529 manuscript from Naples. After the success of the first edition, Walpole admitted the authorship and wrote a different preface to the second edition.

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three documentarists who ventured into a Maryland forest and then disappeared. As it becomes more apparent through the viewer’s voyeuristic experience of the found materials, the filmmakers were researching a small town of Burkittsville, formerly known as Blair, and the local myth of a witch considered to be responsible for the death of a series of adults as well as children. As the story progresses, more and more details, testimonies, and historical facts start to emerge through the narrative voice of Heather Donahue—the crew’s leader and main researcher—while the filming gradually moves from the urban setting of the town, and the interviews with its townsmen, into the forest. The actual following of the supposed trail and the slow and almost uninteresting video documenting the crew entering and exploring the forest allows for a unique visual experience premised on the merging of the mythologized Frontier tropes and the (viewer’s) knowledge that something terrible is about to happen. A visual and narrative constant emerging from this documentary style of filming—mainly characterized by the low quality of the presented images, the apparent randomness of the recorded material and the overall cinéma verité approach—is the surrounding forest, which progressively, as the protagonists venture deeper into it, asserts itself as a dominant and clearly dangerous space. As noted by Bernice M.  Murphy in the introduction to her influential analysis of Rural Gothic, “The Blair Witch Project is essentially ‘Young Goodman Brown’ meets Cannibal Holocaust” (2013, 2), and as such, the spatial paradigm remains the same, so the characters, who willingly entered the forest, become aware of its dangers, and then decide to return to safety. Similar to Hawthorne’s story, they are subtly prevented from leaving and eventually even deterred from it by the disappearance of one member of the group. The climax occurs with the discovery of an abandoned and ruined house where, through a distressed camera lens, the viewers participate in the final moments of the search for the missing crew member. The presented house, although on a symbolical level still retaining its function, is now nothing more than a ruined structure fully reflecting the hostility of the surrounding spaces, while being additionally desecrated by a variety of demonic symbols together with the handprints of murdered children on its walls. By following the screams believed to belong to their comrade, the two remaining members separately descend into the cellar, where they are attacked and apparently killed by an unseen entity. And while Myrick and Sánchez do not offer a Hawthornean conclusion with the questioning of faith and the disillusionment with human nature, and instead opt for a climax premised on the contrast between the

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visually simplistic and the horrors of imagination, the proposed trail of the characters and the symbolic value of the surrounding spaces is almost equal to the one in Hawthorne’s story. The forest holds and nurtures evil that, when looked for, will in some way change or destroy our lives. From the spatial perspective, however, the film successfully reinforces the trend of deconstructing safe spaces, or more precisely, it marks the final evolutionary phase in the process of categorizing Frontier spaces within the genre. The presented characters, now stranded in an explicitly dangerous forest and actively prevented from escaping, are (un)intentionally led toward a house where they meet their final demise. While the houses in both Raimi’s and Roth’s work function, at least initially, as safe spaces, the one presented in Blair Witch functions completely differently. By immediately being presented as a haunted location, overrun both by the surrounding nature and under different maleficent influences, the proposed space actively negates any idea of safety or escape, leaving the viewers aware of the macabre promise made during the early minutes of the found footage.

Horrors of the Prairie The proposed discourse and analysis of Frontier spaces revolving around the representation of the forest did, however, experience somewhat of an upgrade with the previously mentioned historic repositioning of the frontier. With further exploration, and the unavoidable civilizational expansion, the American myth and the self-actualization of the American identity find themselves relocated—and finally adequately contextualized, one could argue—within the experience of conquering the American West. While preferring the seclusive and darker nature of the forest, as opposed to the open and usually bright spaces of the desert, horror successfully manages to reformat this new spatial experience by drawing on some of the key features of another literary expression—the Western. Although the number of actual intersectional narratives that could be analyzed is somewhat small—and the notion of space as an analytical starting point further restricts the number of samples—the adaptation, reworking, and further development of certain tropes makes it a contribution worth mentioning while analyzing Frontier Horror. The benchmark for successfully outlining the operational contours of this second elaboration of Frontier Horror can be found in West of Everything—The Inner Life of Westerners, Jane Tompkins’ very influential study of the Western genre and cultural

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phenomenology. Tompkins structures her analysis around the symbolic value that Westerns as a genre have for the American identity, starting with the idea that Westerns “satisfy a hunger to be in touch with something absolutely real” and that the West functions “as a symbol of freedom, and of opportunity for conquest”, offering a possibility for “escape from the conditions of life in modern industrial society” (1992, 3–4). “The desert light”, as Tompkins continues, “and the desert space, the creak of a saddle leather and the sun beating down, the horses’ energy and force—these things promise a translation of the self into something purer and more authentic, more intense, more real” (1992, 4). The proposed, almost utopian, idea of experiencing nature and existence in such a pure and absolute way is premised almost exclusively on the individual’s ability to control, at least to a certain extent, all the surrounding elements. The moment when this premise disappears, and the utopian preconceptions vanish leaving the protagonists at the mercy of their surroundings, represents the nexus within which the new Frontier Horror experience becomes articulated. Tompkins’ analysis covers, among other things, the various elements of the Western genre such as death, the importance of language, and its relation to women and men within these narratives, as well as the romanticized idea of a horse and its role within the genre. In addition, Tompkins pays particular attention to landscapes as a key element necessary for the presentation as well as the completion of the Western narrative. When comparing the Western landscape to the Old Testament, she writes: “God creates the heaven and the earth and then the light, the constituent elements of the Western landscape. In the Western as in Genesis, the physical world comes first. The only difference is that instead of being created by God, it is God. It is the Alpha and the Omega. If the opening shot recalls the earth at creation—solids rising from a level plain bathed in pristine light—it foreshadows the end of things as well. The desert is a landscape of death” (1992, 70). Such understanding of space, and the implication of its absolute supremacy over any other element, including human life, opens the possibility of very straightforward as well as peculiarly interesting visions of horror. Although the imagery of the desert visually suggests a completely different dynamic regarding the possibilities of horror, the mechanisms characterizing the functioning of the forest trope remain almost the same. Following Tompkins’ idea of the absolute value of the desert space, the previously addressed categorization according to the permeability of the analyzed spaces almost completely disappears. What we are dominantly left with is a progressively expanding, all-encompassing,

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and absolutely merciless space that in a variety of ways deals with the unfortunate protagonists who wonder into it. Much like The Blair Witch Project, or Cabin Fever, the characters are presented through an idealized notion of control and dominance, now reinforced through the belief in superiority over the surrounding elements ingrained in the genre, and an innate desire, as described by Tompkins, to experience, at least metaphorically, freedom and the elation of conquering. This idealized existence, however, becomes quickly deconstructed with the austere desert space projecting a variety of nightmares with the sole purpose of annihilating the unfortunate intruders. It is within this moment of “deconstruction”, be it an actual act of violence or just an artistic/metaphoric elimination of a cultural trope or preconception, that the most important differentiation between the forest- and desert-based narratives occurs. While at its core the forest retains a sense of mystery, with the potential evil or threat almost hiding up until the climactic moment of disclosure, the desert, as if reflecting Tompkins’ observation about the “landscape of death” (1992, 70), becomes defined by utterly explicit acts of violence. A good example of this can be observed in Wes Craven’s cult film The Hills Have Eyes (1977) which tells a story about a family who, while traveling by car and trailer to California, decide to visit an inherited silver mine located in the Nevada desert, in the middle of an uninhabited, closed-off area used for military testing. The detour proves to be a mistake because, just after their car breaks down, they are attacked by a clan of ruthless cannibals. In this simple, almost exploitative, storyline, where the plot—an unfortunate family is first murdered and tortured only to fight back—follows the (de) evolutionary pattern Wes Craven previously explored in The Last House on the Left, violence emerges as a dominant discourse of the presented narrative arc. The physical and symbolic role of the presented space, in all of its visually barren and sterile quality, is structured so as to emphasize the performed violence. The characters that survive the horrors by accepting the new behavior norms and necessities are now permanently traumatized and changed, thus conforming with the previously established punitive patterns related to the act of breaching the borders dividing civilized and uncivilized spaces. A very similar desert setting can be observed in S. Craig Zahler’s western horror Bone Tomahawk (2015), where, after a group of cannibals,18 once again, abducts two people, a rescue party is formed to go 18  In this particular case, a cannibalistic Indian tribe defined by the characters as the Troglodytes.

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and search for any survivors. The fact that Zahler’s film belongs to the very restricted subgenre of Western Horror allows for an immediate identification of the theoretical benchmark offered by Tompkins, while simultaneously emphasizing the departures from the established norms. The film, initially functioning as a proper Western, introduces a hero in the figure of the local sheriff who is, together with the rest of the men from the search party, confident in his knowledge of Indians and in his ability to deal with the threat. This confidence rapidly vanishes as the party confronts the cannibal tribe deep in the desert and unceremoniously, although very violently, gets either killed or captured. The initially proposed desert space becomes replaced by the more “intimate” caverns where the cannibals keep their prisoners for food or, in the case of women, for procreation. It is here that the last of Tompkins’ genre boundaries dissolve as death stops being a romanticized rite of passage reserved for the maturing of the main protagonist and instead becomes something to wish for as the violence and torture escalates. As the main protagonist dies and a few survivors manage to escape after fighting back the tribe, the promise of the “landscape of death” fulfills itself once again. A final and somewhat more original example of the desert experience can be found in Emma Tammi’s horror interpretation of the Frontier titled The Wind (2018). Tammi departs from the stereotypes of the Western genre by choosing a woman for her main protagonist—Lizzy Macklin, who, in the late 1800s, moves with her husband to the unpopulated area in the prairies of New Mexico. Presented in a non-chronological order, the story explores Lizzy’s adjustment to the new life, first in solitude, and then with Emma Harper, a young woman that together with her husband, moves into an abandoned house nearby. Emma’s pregnancy, unhappy marriage, and her claims that she is visited by something resembling demons cause the two women to bond since Lizzy herself previously gave birth to a stillborn baby and has experienced strange noises and outlandish occurrences emanating from the surrounding empty nature. The presented loneliness, enhanced by ideas of prosecution and paranoia, starts a chain of events that sees Emma committing suicide just before having her baby, leaving Lizzy unsuccessfully trying to save the unborn infant by performing a cesarean delivery. With both the mother and the child dead, the two men leave Lizzy behind and set off to report the deaths, allowing in such a way the beginning of the last act of the story. Lizzy, now completely alone and isolated, becomes forced to face her own fears and paranoias, which are presented as different emanations from the surrounding

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desert. Although the ending opts for a somewhat subversive plot twist, with the realization that Lizzy murdered Emma, and upon discovering this fact also her husband, the spatial paradigm dominating the storylines remains unchanged. The fact that Lizzy has become mentally unstable, either due to the loss of her own baby or utter isolation she finds herself subject to, allows for a variety of analytical entry points, ranging from feminist readings, mental health issues, or always relevant questions of guilt. Regardless of these possible theoretical approaches, the tension that develops as the story unfolds is almost exclusively premised on the binary relation between Lizzy (and her home) and the vast empty space surrounding her. Although in this case the consequences of crossing the spatial boundaries of the Frontier do not manifest themselves in the actual appearance of some malevolent force(s), the projected (metaphoric) violence and pressure of the empty prairie undoubtedly influence the main protagonist and her mental state, forcing her, in turn, to act violently herself. If we go back to the initially defined theoretical and historical context and consider the different literary and non-literary incarnations of the issue of Frontier spaces, a very interesting pattern emerges as a possible conclusive argument. Turner’s initial explanation of the American Frontier positions its uniqueness as a cultural and social phenomenon, while a more detailed historical analysis, such as the one presented in Richard Slotkin’s work, indicates the presence of a much more troubling aspect of that unavoidably colonizing experience. Nevertheless, both Turner and Slotkin argue that the end result of these conquering endeavors is the gradual formation of a new (American) identity born out of desire and necessity. Furthermore, Slotkin, in particular, claims that the ingrained necessity for violence is a critical catalyst needed for the (re)affirmation of Americanness: a praxis started during the early settling phase, continued as an integral element of the process of conquering the West and the rest of the continent, and then revisited as part of international policies with the reimagination of the American Frontier in the political discourse perpetuated by John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the national myth rightfully evolves around the binarity between violence and identity while simultaneously ignoring the (potentially) true nature of an identity constructed on such premises. It is within this interpretative discrepancy, or neglect, that horror finds its roots. As stated by Allan Lloyd Smith (2012, 163–165), the Frontier finds itself as one of the key elements of the American gothic/horror imagination. However, when considering the cultural and social function of the

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Frontier in relation to the genre, it becomes evident that the proposed spatial paradigm, and its accompanying complexities, are not only a source of interesting, albeit morbid lore, or a perpetuation of a political paradigm, but also a metaphoric insight into the consequences of breaching the established boundaries. Ranging from Brown, Irving, and Hawthorne, to the variety of more contemporary authors, the Frontier within the horror genre retains a dual nature. While on the one hand it perpetuates the search for identity, and by doing so conforms to the theoretical (and historical) readings of Turner or Slotkin, allowing us to indirectly partake and identify with the struggles of the involved protagonists, it also opens a window into the consequences of such endeavors. Even though the protagonists explore, struggle, and sometimes even overcome and survive the adversities, the newly conquered space, or the return to the initial place of safety, is marked not by a triumphantly positive identitary turn but by the genre-bound cognition of personal trauma and the subsequent revelation of a darker side to the American expansionist practices.

References Anderson, George K. 1965. The Legend of the Wandering Jew. Providence: Brown University Press. Anderson, David L. 2002. The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War. New York: Columbia University Press. Bradbury, Malcolm, and Richard Ruland. 1991. From Puritanism to Postmodernism – A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin Books. Brown, Charles Brockden. 1988. Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. New York: Penguin Books. Brown, Jennifer. 2013. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fiedler, Leslie A. 2008. Love and Death in the American Novel. Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 2003. Young Goodman Brown. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B, American Literature 1820–1865, ed. Julia Reidhead, 1263–1280. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Hellman, John. 1986. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New  York: Columbia University Press. Irving, Washington. 2003a. Rip Van Winkle. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B, American Literature 1820–1865, ed. Julia Reidhead, 981–992. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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———. 2003b. The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B, American Literature 1820–1865, ed. Julia Reidhead, 992–1013. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Madsen, Deborah L. 2010. The West and Manifest Destiny. In A Concise Companion to American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe, 369–386. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Murphy, Bernice M. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture  – Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shapiro, Michael J. 1997. Violent Cartographies  – Mapping Cultures of War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1974. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1998. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith, Allan Lloyd. 2012. Nineteenth-Century American Gothic. In A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter, 163–175. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of Everything – The Inner Life of Westerners. New York: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Frederic Jackson. 2021. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/. Accessed November 9 2021. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2011. Charles Brockden Brown. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

CHAPTER 4

Domestic Horrors

“Every town has an Elm street” —Wes Craven, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

the House In the multitude of different types of spaces that can be found and analyzed within the American horror genre, the house stands as an almost unique creation. Metaphorically distilled from the European spatial experience, with the gothic castle serving as an architectural and symbolic point of reference, the house develops as somewhat of a centerpiece within the horror discourse and as part of a larger popular culture context. Therefore, this chapter aims to understand the geography defining the American haunted house and to outline some of the correlations between the creation and elaboration of this unique spatial and narrative paradigm and the critical discourse that often accompanies and characterizes the horror genre. Although a prolific source of inspiration and interpretation, as confirmed by countless narratives centered around the haunted house/mansion trope, the proposed analysis will also extend to the concept of American suburban spaces that, by functioning as a natural extension of the space of the house, reinforces and further develops many of the previously established critical discourses. However, to adequately explore the cultural and symbolical sedimentation that characterizes the construct of the house, together with its later extensions and variations, it is once again © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Lukić, Geography of Horror, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2_4

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necessary to consider the historical dimension of the addressed trope. With the development of the early American literary production, which strongly relied on the existing European trends and traditions, a number of issues were raised regarding the ability to discover a truly American literary voice. As previously addressed, one of the key elements apparently missing was the absence of any real history, at least from the perspective of the colonizers, which hindered the possibility of culturally referencing different issues and creating art by doing so. Gothic fiction, in particular, although popular among the readerships, had trouble finding roots within the new setting predominantly due to the inherent necessity of the European gothic genre to rehash and, more often than not, criticize its own history. The spatial concept of the gothic castle functioned as an almost perfect example of this merging of history, culture, and literary praxes, where the proposed space offered a temporal insight into a distant past of a nation (the actual or fictional one), and by doing so uncovered or added a type of departure from normalcy traditionally premised around dominant and not well-intentioned male figures, damsels in distress, monsters or monster-like figures, aberrant behavior, and so on. And while the list of figures, evil doers, and distressed ladies expanded over the decades, the spatial component remained almost completely unchanged, firmly outlined by the necessity to project a sense of historicism while simultaneously providing a spatial paradigm that prevented its participants from escaping. The gothic castle, or abbeys, subterranean vaults, graveyards, etc., later on, was distinctly marked by the inability to be adequately mapped and defined, with the unfortunate protagonists being forced not only to escape the imminent threat but also having to confront the metaphoric failure of the map in front of them. Although this idea of spatial fluidity became a trope within the horror genre, with different characters having to escape different (unmappable) spaces, this spatial quality was not something that was completely retained during the adaptation process between the construct of the castle and its later itineration in the form of the house. As it will be argued in this chapter, the American house within the genre is in fact a natural and unavoidable extension of the European castle, but instead of simply replicating the narrative/experiential patterns, it adopts a variety of previously existing features, only to exponentially expand them in a multitude of other directions. Introduced and initially adapted by Charles Brockden Brown in his novel Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), the house presented itself as a versatile setting that could adequately mimic the gothic features offered by

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its European counterpart. Not nearly as dark and menacing, at least not in Brown’s early adaptation of the trope, and without a significant historical background, the space of the house relied on the idea of domesticity and intimacy. While the concept of a gothic castle assured a unique gloomy atmosphere, emphasized by its architectural distinctiveness, the storylines presented within it did not infer a sense of connectedness between the characters, the described activities, and the space itself. The castle functions on its initial premise of architecturally condensed history and symbolic meaning, within which the characters become temporally and functionally contextualized, without the actual ability to affect or interact with the surrounding spaces, especially when observing the possibility of inscription of meaning into the proposed medieval spatial context. This impersonal and detached approach to the interaction with the surroundings dramatically changed with the spatial reformatting and downsizing to the concept of the house, where all of the characters, regardless of their relations, are (spatially) forced to interact. This consequentially led to the introduction of a new type of narrative dynamic, but it also allowed the readers, and later on the viewers, an unprecedented insight into the intimacy of various characters, which now operated no longer within the abstract/fictional spatial boundaries of an imaginary castle, but instead within the familiar space of a house. Furthermore, the achieved familiarity of this “new” space was not successful only due to its novelty—its effect was directly connected with the ability of the readership/viewership to identify with the presented spaces. Brown’s exploration of this newly discovered “intimacy” was followed by other authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, who were looking for that sought out unique American literary voice. Each in their own, very specific way, both authors contributed to the gothic and later horror genre by reworking old tropes and sometimes even completely inventing new ones, which influenced both genre and non-genre literature. The contribution of these authors is very interesting in relation to the space of the house due to their exploration of this spatial context in the works such as The House of the Seven Gables or Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher”. While both texts approach the concept of space in a different way—Hawthorne reaffirming his obsession with the sinfulness of human nature while focusing on the Pyncheon family, its curse, and the occurrences within their house; Poe locating his version of a “family” and domesticity in a progressively liminal type of space positioned between coherence and (actual and symbolical) rot—they both successfully instigate a different reading of the

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once familiar space of the house. Unlike Poe’s, Hawthorne’s text is not supernatural at its core; instead, it strongly relies on the roots of the genre by presenting a storyline closely resembling Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. The traditional Gothic premise of the “sins of the father revisiting the sons” that marked both Walpole’s novel and countless others that came after it, finds itself at the core of Hawthorne’s novel as well. The presented dispute over the land wrongfully taken from its original owner influences the house and its inhabitants in the form of a curse, following a now modernized pattern of hauntings and occurrences very similar to the ones previously explored by Walpole. The lavish language used by Walpole to describe the dark halls of the castle, the clanking of the chains and paintings coming to life, is now replaced by more dynamic descriptions of mesmerism, photographs made using the Daguerre’s technique, and a disease/illness,1 thus reinforcing the idea of the house as a viable setting for the genre after Brown’s initial use of the idea. The exterior of Hawthorne’s house also departs from traditional gothic visuals by suggesting almost human features, an approach that will be also used by Poe. As the narrator describes, the house has always affected him “like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within” (1983, 355). With Hawthorne persisting on emphasizing both the human and biological features, as well as the layered complexities of the building resulting from its own history, the previously rather two-dimensional gothic settings now receive a deeper layer. The Pyncheon house is therefore “like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences” while at the same time its general appearance “gave the house such a meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon” (1983, 374). Poe’s house, on the other hand, refuses such temporal, physical, or thematic categorizations and instead opts for a multilayered fluidity. Initially presented through the eyes of the narrator as he unenthusiastically approaches it, the house projects a sense of nondefinable unease, “a sickening of the heart”, as described by Poe, 1  Hawthorne contemporizes his narrative by using popular tropes and praxes of the time, such as mesmerism or animal magnetism, which is a type of hypnotism and pseudo-science introduced by Franz Mesmer in the eighteenth century (further explored in Poe’s short stories “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) and “Mesmeric Revelations” (1846)), Louis Daguerre’s technical achievements in photography, and “apoplexy”, sudden fainting or death caused by some sort of internal bleeding, etc.

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“an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime” (2006, 126). The “wrongness” of the house becomes further emphasized through the narrator’s attempt to rationalize it by questioning whether a different arrangement of the awkward elements in front of him would lead to the negation of the sense of unease, followed by the realization that such an attempt is not only futile but that it contributes to the initially perceived gloom. Poe’s house is not only a hunted space, a traditional building, characterized by its static nature and a threatening entity looming in its dark halls, but it establishes itself as a monster, and a threat on its own, animated by the insane figures of Madeline and Roderick Usher locked deep within its bowels. The author’s explicit detachment from the use of the sublime and the introduction of an outrightly dangerous and morbid locus, together with the spatial and conceptual instability of the proposed house resembling more a decaying body miraculously kept alive than a habitable location, allows for a dramatic reimagining of domestic spaces within the genre—a narrative improvement that later authors will use extensively. However, the image of the (haunted) house was not exclusively conceived and perpetuated through the American Romantic experience or through literature. The identified potential of the house still lacked a suitable mainstream visual representation and recognizability, which became available through a completely alternative developmental path. An interesting historical overview of the cultural and, eventually, genre positioning is presented by Steven J.  Mariconda who in his research elaborates the gradual yet influential development of the trope. By following the historical progression, Mariconda discusses the Frenchman François Mansart (1598–1666) of the Beaux Arts School of Architecture in Paris and his influence in designing a house with a very particular roofing style that became known as “mansard” (2007, 272). Popularly known as Second Empire architecture,2 the houses were characterized by a particular roof that had four sides, with each side’s lower slope steeper than the upper slope (2007, 272). Mariconda continues by providing a detailed description of the architectural vision:

2  Mariconda explains that the term “Second Empire” came to be used after a “second revival of the mansard roof occurred when Paris was rebuilt by Napoleon III in the 1850s” (2007, 272).

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Decorative wrought iron cresting is often set above the upper cornice of the roof. Mansard roofs were considered practical because their angled panels increased the inside ceiling space such that what would have been an attic could be used as a bedroom or other living space. Also, the outward-facing side of a mansard roof may be set with a window—a dormer, which extends out and has its own roof which may be flat, arched, or pointed. Dormers are typically set in the lower slope of the mansard roof. (2007, 272)

The exterior of the house follows the contours of the interior layout of the rooms which is asymmetrical and partitioned, “creating a mosaic of rooms that may be small or oddly shaped” (2007, 273). The cultural impact of the design varied as the architectural style traveled from France to England and finally to the United States, where it dominated from around 1860 to 1880, after which, due to economic depression, changes in architectural tastes, and new cultural norms, the Victorian home becomes replaced by more straightforward layouts (2007, 273). A final cultural and spatial turn of the Victorian/Second Empire house took place in the 1950s and the 1960s, when the buildings first fell in disuse as reminders of a decadent “aristocratic” past, only to be highly successfully re-proposed as gloomy settings in works such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or David Levy’s The Addams Family (1964) (2007, 273). And while the architectural style fell into disuse, the popularity of these two stories established an everlasting prototype of the haunted house within American popular culture. Over the years, and following a series of different interpretations, the newly established image of the house became prone to visual changes in its appearance in accordance with the necessities of different narratives and artistic choices. However, regardless of the presented visuals, the deeply imbued sense of historical gravitas, and metaphoric or actual “wrongness” of the proposed space, much like the traditional space of the European Gothic castle, assured both a specific atmosphere and approach to the proposed storylines. Considering these two developmental trajectories—and the unavoidable subsequent amalgam of the two premised, among other things, on historical plausibility extended by literary tradition to contemporary cultural reimagining—any analysis of the house opens a variety of interpretative angles. Taking into consideration different stories set within the boundaries of the house, different themes, and their interaction with the proposed spatial context, as well as possible discursive and critical variations that can be analytically derived from different cases, the paradigm of

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the house cannot be easily (theoretically) confined. This is particularly true when we attempt to analyze its actual and metaphorical layout by introducing different discourses belonging to human geography. One can easily venture into observing the dark rooms of the house through the universal prism of Yi-Fu Tuan’s space and place relation, whereby the newly constituted place serves as a source of horror precisely due to the inscribed emotional value. This, in turn, can be expanded into an actual mapping of the house structured around the Freudian reading of the house as a reflection of human subconscious, with the attic correlating to the super-ego, the living spaces to the ego, and the cellar as the locus of the problematic id—an idea partially reflected in Gaston Bachelard’s seminal work Poetics of Space. The emotional value inscribed into these domestic spaces can also be perceived as problematic, which is why the authors such as Gillian Rose question the male-dominated, and consequently male-centric, understandings and readings of traditional human geography, presenting the domestic experience/space as a female one. In Feminism and Geography— The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Rose argues that (white) feminist perceives the idea of the home as a site of exploitation and oppression, and not, as previously proposed by human geographers, as an ultimate sense of place (1993, 55). Alternatively, and contrasting Gillian Rose, one can explore the readings of bell hooks who presents the home and the accompanying domesticity not as a site of oppression but as a site of resistance. The homeplace, now contextualized through the prism of African American experience, is no longer understood as a limiting site, but instead it acquires protective and nourishing qualities. By emphasizing the issue of the “radical political dimension” of the homeplace, bell explains that “one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist” (1990, 42). The home, as hooks continues, was in fact, a “safe place where black people could affirm one another and by doing so heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (1990, 42). All of these theoretical approaches, as well as numerous others dedicated to the better understanding of the spatial dynamics of the house and the accompanying concepts of homeplace and domesticity, create a very prolific context for the thriving of the horror genre. Positioned between the ideas of the space of the house and the ongoing praxis of intimacy within, the horror genre evolves as these intimacies and domesticities become altered. In this multitude of interpretative

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­ ossibilities and theoretical options, the easiest entry point is necessarily p the simplest one. By going back to the idea of the transition from space to place due to emotional inscription, as explored by Yi-Fu Tuan, Tim Cresswell, and many others, various houses become redefined by the characters at hand. Through their history, their memories, or a simple interaction, they transmute the proposed spaces from a monolithic edifice into a continuously evolving place. However, this new spatial paradigm within the genre is predominantly characterized by the characters’ inability to completely or successfully escape their confining spatial context. In contrast to many other spatial settings present within the genre, the horror that comes out of the house is strongly structured around personal experiences and situations, which results in an almost inescapable scenario in which the characters struggle to come to terms with themselves. This mirroring horror can be further explored by expanding the simplistic spaceplace binarity through two separate and somewhat opposing theoretical readings. The first, based on the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, presents the house as a complex philosophical experience. Although Bachelard’s work in The Poetics of Space, published in 1958, can be considered as somewhat dated, the elaborated philosophical outline of the house offers a unique reading of the functionality of space in relation to the horror genre. Bachelard presents the idea of the house not as a stable physical construct but as a space that is susceptible to our personal experiences and that at the same time functions as our “first universe” (1994, 4), the space by which we measure and evaluate all other spaces. The “sheltered being”, as Bachelard puts it, “experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams” (1994, 5). Bachelard then defines the main function of the house, which is to protect the dreamer and to allow one “to dream in peace” (1994, 6), thus showing that it is “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (1994, 6). This oneiric experience becomes then, in a matter of speaking, operationalized by the house itself which, through its various elements such as the roof, the rooms, corridors, etc., safeguards and, when possible, (re)actualizes our memories, which is, in turn, one of the key elements of the experience of the house. Bachelard explains that “[w]e live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home […]” (1994, 6).

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And while the spaces of the house retain their interpretative fluidity premised on the subjective experiences and histories of the occupants, what remains as a spatial marker are elements which Bachelard defines as “spatial alveoli”—spatial inscriptions that contain compressed time, or, in other words, memories. So how does this idea of (metaphoric) fluid spatiality and compressed memories play into the requirements and preferences of the horror genre? Once again, the answer can be derived from Bachelard’s analysis of the relation between space and human memory which he contextualizes at the very beginning by stating that “[w]e bring our lares with us” (1994, 5). Previous experiences, memories, and histories of an individual are either part of emotional inscription into space, or, as it is often the case in this genre, are already inscribed in the form of the previously mentioned spatial alveoli. The characters that venture into the (traditionally) historically problematic house are usually closely connected with the surrounding spaces, and even when they are not, a bond becomes instilled between them and the preexisting memories. The “spatial alveoli”, the remaining slivers of good memories and/or traumas and pain that usually take shape of a variety of different occurrences (ghosts, demons, vampires, curses, madmen, etc.), now haunt the unfortunate occupants and force them to confront either their own past or the past of the surrounding spaces. This spatial experience premised on the volatility of memories, however, is not void of certain physical attributes. For Bachelard, the sheltering quality of the house is not a subjective experience; instead, it resides in reality by being structured around deeply symbolically imbued physicality. The first physical quality that stands out is the verticality of the house which allows the edifice to differentiate itself from its surroundings. Additionally, this verticality also allows the differentiation between the spaces within the house, mainly the cellar and the attic, with each of them opening the possibility for “two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination” (1994, 17). The attic immediately positions itself as a safe space, a space that is rational and has a clear purpose. As Bachelard points out, this functionality reflects itself both in the physical shape of the attic/roof, which can clearly indicate the surrounding climate, and in the subjective and imaginative human perception of this space as the one providing protection (1994, 18). This, however, is strongly contrasted by the cellar and its irrationality. Although its space is used and can be organized and quantified, it remains “first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces” (1994, 18).

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As previously mentioned, Bachelard’s spatial division partially corresponds to the psychoanalytical division of the human psyche, and as such it finds its way into many representations of houses within the genre. Regardless of the story at hand, the characters find themselves constrained within the polarity of a dangerous and often violent id-centric cellar and the possible metaphoric escape through the rational and super-ego-driven attic. A very interesting application of such spatial division of the house can be seen in the analysis proposed by Slavoj Žižek. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), the documentary directed by Sophie Fiennes, Žižek, in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), offers a reading of the house in relation to Norman Bates’ subconscious. Žižek begins by designating three separate levels—the first floor, the ground floor, and the basement—for the events that take place in the film. The ground floor reflects Bates’ normality, the normalcy of an everyday existence dictated by the ego. As the story develops, the viewers become introduced to the first floor, the upper segment of the house, where Norman’s (deceased) mother resides. It is her voice that commands and directs Norman, and as such she acts as a manifestation of the super-ego. Finally, the cellar, which Žižek describes as the location of the id and the “reservoir of illicit drives” (The Pervert’s Guide, 2006), positions itself as the key catalyst for the emergence of violence. The premise for this type of behavior is symbolically triggered by Norman carrying his mother into the basement, or, in Žižek’s words, by Norman transposing his mother in his own mind as a psyching agency from super-ego to id. Although Žižek then goes on to reflect on the interchangeability of id and super-ego, it remains clear that Norman in a way relinquishes self-control by physically and psychologically repositioning the controlling (super-ego) voice of his mother from the attic into the darkness of the cellar. The importance of Bachelard’s readings of the house as a dream and memory-based experience functions as a key element necessary for a more meaningful understanding of the connection between classic representations of haunted, or otherwise problematic, houses, such as the ones seen in Hawthorne and Poe, as well as the more contemporary versions presented in current horror narratives. While Hawthorne presents history sedimented in the image and the space of a house as a potential source of unease, and Poe explores the house as an even more fluid entity resembling with its inhabitants a corpse that came back to life rather than a family home, Bachelard focuses on the core of the issue, and thus (unintentionally) traces the mechanisms behind the haunted house trope:

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coming face to face with the condensed memories/histories, the innate symbolical division of the spaces within the house together with the interpretative possibilities offered by the genre. However, the representations of the houses in the contemporary horror genre tend to extend beyond the somewhat narrow idea of a haunted space and a few harrowing experiences within it. Although the idea of a ghost or demon-infested domestic space still retains its power and can be (and was) successfully used repeatedly for many decades, modern audiences, particularly viewers of the horror genre, asked for an additional dimension to their narratives. What positioned itself as a source of inspiration and additional dimension to the horror narratives focusing on houses and the enclosed domesticity was capitalism itself. The introduction and presence of economy was nevertheless not a novelty within horror or related genres. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s when the American audiences started looking for an escape from the harsh everyday realities, which led to the creation and perpetuation of, for example, the Universal monster movies and the appearance of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, as well as the legendary, although somewhat unorthodox, King Kong, economy positioned itself as a relevant factor in relation to the horror genre. And while the horror production of the 1930s was the result of the need for escapism, the consequence of the economic depression of the 1970s was not necessarily a distraction but the introduction of the said new narrative dimension. The evidence of the new narrative paradigm making its way into the American horror subconscious was visible not only in the production of very particular titles such as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Stuart Rosemberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979), George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), or many others, but also in the cultural and critical analysis of the genre of the time. A succinct although very precise narrowing of the elaboration could be seen, for example, in Stephen King’s impactful analysis of the development of the genre titled Danse Macabre, where he states: “In terms of the times—18 percent inflation, mortgage rates out of sight, gasoline selling at a cool dollar forty a gallon—The Amityville Horror, like The Exorcist, could not have come at a more opportune moment” (1983, 142). The emerging horror narratives were of course entertaining and in many ways distracting from the recession that marked the American economy from 1973 to 1975, but what truly influenced and marked the genre was an increased social and cultural awareness articulated, among other things, through the economic discourse. The proposed economy, as well as its role within the genre, took a

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variety of forms ranging from explicit representation of disenfranchisement to more subtle and metaphoric subtexts structured around a variety of different storylines. However, regardless of its implementation, what it addressed was a collective sense of anxiety that stood in direct relation to the financial situation of the viewers. The monsters projected on the screens and pages, together with the accompanying frightened protagonists, comprised the first narrative dimension in which the viewers, through a process of identification, enjoyed and/or feared the presented monstrous entity. Nevertheless, due to the specific nature of the economic discourse, and the ways it was portrayed within genre, alongside the main plotline, a parallel narrative dimension was developed. While the screens and pages presented the viewers and readers with dangerous or victimized individuals or groups exposed to often absurd levels of peril, it is in fact the conscious and subconscious economic fears and anxieties of the viewers that were becoming the actual sites of horror. The economy, and the related fears of disenfranchisement, were the actual monsters, the monsters that transcended the medium, and, unlike the ones portrayed on the pages of the book or on the screen, they were much harder to confront and destroy. Due to the innate qualities of capitalism and the neoliberal discourse in general, this trend of merging an economy-based discourse with the horror genre persisted throughout the years with the latest versions of recession-related fears presented in the very successful titles such as James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013), Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012), a variety of seasons and episodes of the American Horror Story, and many others. Going back to the initial discourse about the house and its role within the genre, two relevant questions need to be addressed: what spatial theoretical paradigm can be used to understand this particular context, and how does the issue of the economy become contextualized within the space of the house and the previously explored Bachelardian characteristics? The tracing of the interaction between space and economy needs to begin somewhat outside of the philosophical musings proposed by Bachelard and within the slightly more practical monetary debates explored by the economic geographer David Harvey. Right from the start, Harvey’s definition of the concept of place stands on a radically different position than that of traditional human geographers. As summarized by Tim Cresswell, Harvey sees the place as a “form of fixed capital which exists in tension with other forms of mobile capital” (2004, 26), which positions the concept of place under a constant influence and possible

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reinterpretation in accordance with economy-based changes. This premise remained at the basis of Harvey’s exploration of an abundance of different arguments and analyses of the relationship between geography and space and the global economic realm, its history, and changes over time, as well as globalization and the currently dominant neoliberal discourse. Within all this work, one rather specific proposition potentially has the ability to unravel and better explain the relationship between the idea of the haunted house and the economic paradigm. In a chapter titled “The Political Economy of Place Construction Under Capitalism”, Harvey begins by emphasizing the relevance of the idea of place, which has been changed and sometimes even revolutionized under the influence of capitalism. Changes in capitalist trends caused deviations between places and affected the “internalized processes of place construction, sustenance, and dissolution” (1996, 295). The consequence of this praxis is a radical reorganization of place, which is now forced to conform to the requirements of the spatial mobility of capital. Put differently, a place has to either reconfigure itself in accordance with the “new transport and communication systems and physical infrastructures, new centers and styles of production and consumption, new agglomerations of labor power, and modified social infrastructures” (1996, 296), or it will fall into disuse. As Harvey elaborates, these “old places […] have to be devalued, destroyed, and redeveloped”, so, for example, a cathedral city has to become a heritage center, the mining community a ghost town, the old industrial town needs to be deindustrialized and replaced by gentrified neighborhoods, etc. (1996, 296).3 It is within these processes and changes that the horror genre house exists. These “intense phases of spatial reorganization” (1996, 296), as Harvey describes them, are the necessary catalyst needed for the (spatial) actualization of the condensed and suppressed horrors characterizing the haunted places. However, these “reorganizational” processes, and the horrors that ensue from them, are not uniform in their actualization. More precisely, they do not exclusively affect the portrayal and the functioning of a place within a particular narrative; instead, they affect a variety of different elements. Nevertheless, the process starts with the idea of the 3  It is interesting to notice that Harvey’s analysis to a certain extent mirrors Yi-Fu Tuan’s understanding of the construction of place and the previously addressed idea of space that allows movement, while place becomes produced as result of a pause in that same movement. The key difference, however, remains the fact that, in Tuan’s understanding, the movement and the pausing are an exclusively anthropocentric experience, while Harvey sees capital as the moving and pausing entity.

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house perpetually emulating the cultural (and economic) abandonment of the prototypically haunted mansard house. Although many of the presented houses do not necessarily follow the aesthetic qualities of the mansard house, mostly due to its overly popular and even comic representation within contemporary popular culture, the sense of isolation and abandonment remains. Together with the entities within it, the house acts as an embodiment of this neglect caused by the departure of the mentioned capital. Whether monetary, physical, or emotional, the loss of investments causes the house to slip and regress into something akin to the previously mentioned Bachelardian spatial alveoli. The haunted house becomes a memory that exists as a liminal and almost non-existent space, which regains its physicality, and therefore its life, the moment that some of the protagonists engage with it. Once again, depending on the storyline, the engagement activates the suppressed and condensed memories that now function as a conduit for the reemergence of the haunted past. However, this liminal spatiality, and its resurfacing potential, is not the only consequence of the relationship between places and economic praxis. An additional dimension of the presented discourse can be observed through the various protagonists and their relation to the problematic space of the house. While on the one hand the appearance or symbolic value of such houses reflect the already mentioned economic displacement, on the other, the characters occupying them become subject to a different nightmare. By following the historically established pattern of alternating economic crises and recessions, mainly from 1973 until 1975, as well as from 2007 until 2009, the horror genre produced a number of titles focusing on the subjective experiences of American families during these difficult financial times. This experience, mostly constructed around the idea of a family moving in or already living within a problematic house, focuses on the tension rising between the gradual realization of the perilous spaces they are inhabiting and the financial inability to move away and find a new home. The purpose of the house now becomes twofold, reaffirming the already established spatial horror tropes while simultaneously promoting a new type of fear and anxiety structured around the notion of disenfranchisement. Narratives such as The Amityville Horror, Stephen King’s (or Kubrick’s) The Shining, as well as the more recent James Wan’s The Conjuring or Derrickson’s Sinister, all rely on explicitness in order to achieve a fearful reaction from the audience. Nevertheless, while the audience, or readership, enjoys their exposure to the horrors lurking around the house’s interior, it is the characters’ financial inability to escape these

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dangerous spaces that creates a true sense of anxiety. All of the presented characters, regardless of the decade they appear in, are, first and foremost, forced to face recession and their inability to either find employment or to be able to adequately provide for their families. As such, they are forced to accept their situation that, in accordance with the postulates of the genre, is closely tied to a particular building. Although the initial buying of the property appears to be a bargain, mostly due to the sketchy history of the house itself, once the dark past starts to unravel, actual financial impotency reaffirms itself, forcing the characters to confront whatever lies within while compelling the audience to face their own financial concerns. This fear of disenfranchisement strikes at the very core of capitalist paradigm, and in doing so, allows a much more subjective experience of the presented “fictionalized” horrors. The application of these multidirectional theoretical readings of the haunted house on the different narratives allows us to lay down a tentative map of both individual cases and a generalized spatial positioning and functionality of tropes within the haunted house subgenre. The use of the term “tentative map”, however, does not reflect the inability to give precise connotations and contours to the analyzed spaces/narrative; instead, its function is to emphasize the endlessly changing nature of the domestic space of the house, its perpetually changing physicality, and its unbreakable link to traditional gothic spaces and the continuous notion of the “failure of the map”. Even though the 1970s were marked by many interesting horror titles, many of which changed the perception of the genre by inventing new or reinvigorating old tropes, only some of them left a mark in the American national and international cultural subconscious. By pushing the boundaries of the acceptable, fueled by the rising counterculture and the socio-political post-Vietnam circumstances, horror proved to be as a perfect conduit for the tumultuous social anxieties of the period. Among this variety of titles and themes, the concept of the house appears as an impactful space, as well as concept, through which the issue of the American family and the economic adversities they were facing could be addressed. Stuart Rosemberg’s adaptation of Jay Anson’s novel The Amityville Horror,4 represents a rather successful and culturally influential interpretation of the economic discourses of the time. While presenting itself as a true story, supposedly describing the experiences of George and Kathy Lutz, who bought and moved into a suburban house located in 4

 Anson’s novel was published in 1977, while Rosemberg’s movie was released in 1979.

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Amityville, Long Island, both the novel and its adaptation explore the haunting that comes out of the nexus between a corrupted/abandoned space and a disenfranchised family. The economic discourse imposes itself right from the start as the Lutz family were barely able to buy the property for 80,000 dollars, a price that was already drastically reduced due to a gruesome murder that occurred some 13 months earlier when, in a spree of insanity, on November 14th, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered six members of his family in their sleep. As the couple talks over the decision to buy the property, the question of the committed murders comes to the surface, only to be immediately dismissed by George’s almost emotionless reply that houses do not have memories, followed by an economic rationale about the house being barely affordable precisely because of the slaughter that occurred in it. George’s statement obviously opens two analytical directions, with the first layer of anxiety in the audience building around the foreboding dismissal of the house’s violent past, closely followed by the emergence of a frightening discourse evolving around economic uncertainties. This allows for the immediate articulation of a Bachelardian experience of spaces, emphasized in the film adaptation through short snippets showing the execution of the DeFeo family. As the story progresses, the house reaffirms its “verticality”, as its various sections come to life in accordance with both the requirements of the genre and the paradigm offered by Bachelard. While uniformly dangerous and emanating what can only be defined as evil, the upper and lower segments of the house maintain the division between more and less rational spaces, a fact almost immediately confirmed in Rosemberg’s movie with a visit from a priest. Invited to bless the house, the priest does not find anybody inside, and while looking for the family wanders onto the second floor of the house. There, through a window, he notices the Lutz family walking outside near the river, but he is unable to call them because a window refuses to open. While deciding to go on with the blessing ritual, he starts noticing some strange occurrences such as a rapid accumulation of flies on the windows and on himself, the closing of the room door, and a sudden sickness overtaking his body. A similar situation unfolds later on with the visit of a nun, who feels sick almost immediately and has to leave the house. A much less rational spatial experience is found in the cellar where the story’s final act takes place. Even though rather poorly summarized in the movie adaptation, where the discovered hole in the wall is simply defined as the “passage to hell”, Anson’s novel provides a larger context for the basis of the house. As noted by Bernice M. Murphy in her impactful analysis of

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Suburban Gothic, Anson’s novel expands on the lore by explaining that the house was actually built on the burial ground of the Shinnecock Indians, or more precisely that it was used as a location where the tribe segregated its sick, mad, or dying members (2009, 114–115). In addition, the house was also the burial ground of a warlock named John Ketchum, a devil worshipper expelled from Salem, who practiced his worshipping on the house grounds (2009, 115). As Murphy concludes, “[t]he reader is unsurprised therefore when the basement rather abruptly becomes an entrance to hell” (2009, 115), a plot point that is also addressed in the adaptation. The achieved spatial polarity is then expanded through the experience of the house residents who, similar to the representatives of the church, are being affected by the malignant entity permeating the building. The prolonged exposure to the space of the house affects the minds of both George and Kathy who start experiencing, or, in George’s case identifying with, the unfortunate events that took place in the house. The resurfacing of the past through dreams, hallucinations, and uncertainties marks the activation of Bachelardian spatial alveoli, which forces George— whose behavior is becoming more and more similar to the murderer DeFeo—to act erratically or even dangerously. The re-emerged past, now channeled through George, does not, however, remain unchallenged. Following the initially addressed financial issues, as the story progresses, the audience becomes increasingly and painfully aware of the dire economic situation of the Lutz family. As the influence of the house progresses, George has difficulties controlling his everyday life, which includes his work. The level of dissociation from real-life becomes clear in two instances when George’s colleague confronts him about his work responsibilities, not coming to work, people complaining, etc., all of it confirming that an already financially complicated situation was unstoppably becoming worse. Therefore, the house not only excludes itself from what could be considered a good or desirable investment, but it is actively working on diminishing the economic status and potential of the owner itself. Despite its horrendous past and the different moderately horrific occurrences within the house, the story ends on a positive note. George manages to evacuate his family from an increasingly haunted building, and after a final visit to the house’s cellar in order to save the dog and one final interaction with the proclaimed “passage to hell”, George succeeds in escaping the house itself. He joins his family waiting for him in a van, and what the audience is left with is a final commentary: “George and Kathleen Lutz and their family never reclaimed their house or their personal

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belongings. Today they live in another state”. Murphy addresses this issue in the conclusion of her analysis by pointing out that the connecting point between the Lutz family and the house is almost directly opposed to numerous predecessors featuring a similar storyline. While many families, unfortunate enough to be stuck in a haunted space, were connected to that particular space either “by familial, historical or, latterly, psychological bonds” (2009, 116), the interaction between the Lutz family and the house is premised on a connection that is “viewed from the outset in largely material terms” (2009, 116). Therefore, the horror, initially evolving from a spatial remembrance and the subsequent reemergence of evil or demonic memories, finds its final articulation within a purely economic discourse, with the Lutz family, although safe, apparently financially ruined. More contemporary examples of haunted houses articulated between a memory-based experience and financial discourse influencing these spaces’ realities can be observed, for example, in the narratives presented by authors such as James Wan and Scott Derrickson. While their stories, respectively, The Conjuring (2013) and Sinister (2012), reinvigorated the genre through cunning directorial skills, together with a healthy influx of morbidity, the core premises are minimally altered in relation to the narrative structure seen in Rosenberg’s work. The concept of the house, once again expanded by the family in grave financial situation moving in the house, dominates both storylines. In Derrickson’s Sinister, the audience follows Ellison Oswalt, the author of true crime books, as he and his family move into a new house where he plans to write his new book. Even though the house initially appears to be just a random suburban home, things start to unravel as Ellison finds a box of home movies in the attic, which he soon realizes are the recordings of gruesome murders of a series of families dating all the way back to the 1960s. Once the family settles in and Ellison realizes that the material he found could serve as inspiration for his own work, things start to rapidly worsen. The space loses its presumed safety as Ellison’s wife Tracy discovers that the previous owners were murdered in what is now their new home. This was, in turn, the reason why the house was on sale and why Ellison wanted to move in. Once famous for his work, he wants to reestablish himself as a bestselling author, mostly due to his own ego but also because of the family’s deteriorating financial situation. As genre dictates, this leads him to an almost maniacal dedication to his work, discovering more and more details about the pagan deity named Bughuul, which progressively takes over the narrative, and Ellison’s life, as he watches and analyzes more and more of the found footage. And while

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the storyline of Sinister, although effective in its presentation, does not drastically stray away from similar titles, it is interesting to notice how Derrickson constructs his haunted house. What is nominally avoided is the use of “supernatural gadgetry”, with the house not actually coming to life. Similarly, the Oswalt’s house does not follow the previously addressed structural division, making it an even more mundane type of space. However, what does relate to a Bachelardian reading of a domestic space is the escalating polarity between Ellison and the footage of the murdered families. Confined in a home by his own greed and an unfavorable financial situation, Ellison becomes forced to face the emerging memories which, once again, act as pockets of compressed time, expanding and overtaking reality once they come into contact with a (susceptible) human. Although not haunted in itself, the house acts as host and conduit for the haunting past, forcing the Oswalts to eventually give in, and much like the Lutz family, abandon their home. A much more (financially) forgiving setting is explored in Wan’s The Conjuring where the presented house, and the family forced to interact with it, conforms to a large degree to a more traditional use of the haunted trope. Once again, a family finds itself stranded in a house where strange things start to happen. Set in 1971, Wan exploits the narrative structure already explored in The Amityville Horror where the family was forced to face a demonic presence within their home while simultaneously being unable to leave the haunted premises due to the recession and lack of work. Although visually run down, the house is a meaningful investment for the Perrons, who now have to discover the hidden past of the property in order to face it. As observed by Barry Curtis in his readings of haunted spaces, “[t]he house conceals a truth that has to be symptomatically worked out” (2008, 11), and that is precisely what the Perrons intend to do, aided by the famous couple Ed and Lorraine Warren.5 Operationally, the house follows to the letter the established genre patterns, as well as the spatial division. The attic, although not entirely safe, retains a dose of sobriety and rationalism. The cellar consequently acts as both the location of evil and the setting for the 5  Ed and Lorraine Warren became famous for being involved in a number of renowned and supposedly true cases of hauntings and possessions. While Lorraine acted as a medium and spiritualist, Ed presented himself as a demonologist. Although they became familiar to a larger audience through the creation of Wan’s horror universe (The Conjuring, The Conjuring 2, Annabelle, etc.), they were also previously known through their engagement in the actual Amityville case in 1975 when they held a séance trying to determine the origins of the trouble in the home of the Lutz family.

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final unfolding of the storyline. Evolving around the spirit of a certain Bathsheba Sherman—a witch who sacrificed her newborn baby to the devil, only to, later on, take her own life and curse all of those who will take her land—the story proposes the haunting of not only the space of the house but also of its residents, mainly Carolyn Perron. The use of Carolyn as both the subject of a possession and a woman and a mother marks a provisional departure from similar titles. This becomes increasingly important regarding the mapping of horror spaces as it expands and also problematizes the correlation between the female protagonist and the domestic space. While the experience of the home in Amityville or Sinister is done through an almost exclusively male viewpoint, conforming in such a way to the criticized male-centric understanding of domesticity, The Conjuring focuses on female experience in a presumably hostile domestic environment, which is hostile even prior to the advent of the supernatural occurrences. As Gillian Rose elaborates: In the late 1970s, the family was seen by socialist feminists as the major site of women’s oppression. The family was the site of women’s labour in the reproduction of the capitalist system: women gave birth to future workers, women’s role in the home sustained and satisfied children and adults and thus maintained the capitalist system ideologically, and materially women fed and clothed and serviced the labour force. (1993, 54)6

This locates and locks women in a very specific spatial role, allowing for additional arguments and analysis to be made when reading the space of a haunted house. A more complex and layered analysis of the relation between capital oscillations and oneiric understanding of a house can be seen in Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977), where the main character faces a monstrous entity, in this case, a haunted hotel, while simultaneously confronting his own self-destructing nature. Even though traditionally, on an interpretative level, the space of a hotel does not equate a house, King’s story symbolically repurposes the used space. Jack Torrance, alongside his wife Wendy and their son Danny, is forced, due to Jack’s alcoholism and inability to find adequate employment, to move to a resort located in the Colorado mountains. Jack is to be a caretaker of the Overlook Hotel 6  As referenced earlier, Rose’s arguments stem from an experiential perspective of a white feminist, which drastically differs from a black feminist experience.

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­ uring the closed season, a period that he also intends to use to work on d his play. Separated from the rest of the world due to winter conditions and left completely alone because there are no residents or staff in the hotel, the Torrance family uses the entire hotel as their home, which allows the development of a sense of domesticity and intimacy—both of which are extensively exploited as the story progresses. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of King’s novel presented a vision that turned out to be somewhat different from King’s initial intention. The differences between the original text and its later adaptation are particularly relevant when the source of the monstrous is being addressed. By laying out the pieces of the puzzle that are ready to be connected and activated as needed, King painstakingly develops a profound background for his characters. On the other hand, Kubrick eliminates the characters’ background almost completely, leaving the viewers with an almost two-dimensional type of individuals who are simply thrusted into the maleficent environment of the hotel. Furthermore, the novel meticulously structures and portrays Jack as an intrinsically well-meaning father who is unable to properly control his alcoholism and deal with his own traumas and abuses, while at the same time being a published author who is planning to use the solitary confinement of the hotel in order to complete his play and possibly make it as a writer. Kubrick’s image of Jack is radically different because he depicts him, to use Roger Luckhurst’s words, as “a blank slate on which the hotel can begin to write its own script” (2019, 56). Jack as a father, Wendy as a mother, and Danny as a child, each have a specific role within the narrative, but their freedom to develop or act as characters within the storyline is entirely dominated and controlled by the hotel’s presence. The initial premise of Jack as the source of the monstrous dissipates into the mentioned “blankness”, while Kubrick’s analytical mind focuses its gaze on the Overlook Hotel. Everything Jack lacks as a character can be found manifested in the hotel, which Kubrick confirms, articulates, and animates almost from the first shots of the Overlook Hotel. With this in mind, Kubrick’s interpretation of the story, which creates a distinct spatial presence by focusing on the hotel and the visually unique presentation of the haunted space, is a much better platform for the analysis of horror spaces. It is evident that the subtext of Kubrick’s Overlook (as presented above) rests on financial issues marking both the Torrance family and the hotel. While the family’s economic situation is clear from the start, the hotel’s layered (and troublesome) history is much more complex. As argued by Fredric Jameson in his essay “Historicism in The Shining”, one of the key

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components of the narrative is the existence of an alternative, economically conditioned site/source of horror primarily mirrored in Jack’s attempts to improve his social status. At the same time, it is highly likely that Jack’s hardships are as a reflection of actual social issues caused by the 1973–1975 recession in the United States and King’s own blue-collar background. Still, given that the building’s true nature is deeply locked in the memories suppressed within its walls, the spatial outline of the hotel, once again, follows the proposed Bachelardian formula. And while the actual hotel is not (initially) abandoned and left at the mercy of economic disregard, its plain reality is very distant from the now suppressed decadent glory days. However, with this in mind, it is necessary to point out the differences in the historical context of the haunted hotel as presented by King and later Kubrick. While King derives his hauntings from the post-World War II period, and the surge of the American ideology, industry, and the subsequent re-appropriation of the concept of American exceptionalism, Kubrick dismisses the 1940s and shifts further back in history to the 1920s marked by the final moments of what could be perceived as the last of the American aristocracy. Jameson, whose analysis is focused on Kubrick’s version, further elaborates the present economic discourse: The twenties were the last moment in which a genuine American leisure class led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American ruling class projected a class-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its emblems of top-hat and champagne glass, on the social stage in full view of the other classes. (1992, 130)

It is only with the arrival of the Torrance family and the specific aptitudes of Jack and Danny, that these memories become activated and start interacting with and reshaping reality. Therefore, the hotel is not abandoned, but its true reality lies not in the previously mentioned plain contemporaneity but in the 1920s instead. What the Torrance family initially perceives and experiences is nothing more than a symbolically abandoned building waiting for capital—in this case, Danny and his supernatural talents—to revitalize it to its former glory. Within this context, Kubrick positions Jack as a character, that is, being an unsuccessful struggling writer and an alcoholic who longs for some kind of affirmation within society and acknowledgment of his talent and

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qualities, manipulated by the entities within the hotel. Jack is therefore offered a metaphoric “seat at the table”, and a possible “managerial position” if he succumbs to the undeniably American ideology of obtaining success through self-sacrifice, loyalty, and devotion to the cause. The specter of a carefree American aristocracy haunts Jack on two different levels. While on the one hand there is only a ghost-ridden narrative, with Jack being possessed and as such doing the Overlook’s bidding, on a different level, it allows the viewers to more easily identify with him. What is on one level perceived as a soulless and aggressive character, once observed through the economic prism provided by Kubrick, becomes a reflection of the viewers themselves—caught in the continuous circle of desire and denial of the elusive American dream. This is amplified by both the period in which the film was released, with the economy still recovering from the recession of the 1970s, and the simple fact that the monstrous is directly identified and equated with wealth and capital. When examining the presence and function of the economic paradigm in Kubrick’s narrative, a familiar pattern emerges between Jack and the hotel’s owner(s). Jack is nothing more than an employee—a fact King sporadically brings up in his novel—yet in Kubrick’s interpretation this fact becomes an identifiably painful reality for both the character himself as well as the audience. Whether it is Jack’s conversation with the bartender Lloyd where he asks him who is paying for his drinks and Lloyd dismisses him dryly by saying, “It’s not a matter that concerns you” (Kubrick 1980), or Jack’s working clothes and apparent inability to assimilate with the ghostly crème de la crème of the Gold Room, or Delbert Grady’s, formal caretaker’s, patronizing tone when Wendy locks him in the pantry, Jack always finds himself in a submissive position. A final confirmation of the dominant economic/ capitalist subtext of Kubrick’s film can be found in the film’s final scene where the camera slowly zooms in on a framed photograph hanging on the hotel wall. In the forefront of the photograph, dated July 4th, 1921, we see Jack Torrance, elegantly dressed, a wide grin on his face, surrounded by a large group of people wearing just as stylish clothes. The confirmation of the capitalist paradigm is articulated through Jack’s narrative path and his interactions with the Overlook. While King’s version stresses the paramount importance for the hotel to keep and enslave Danny because of his “shining”, Kubrick is much more concerned with Jack’s “performance” within a given “system”. The Overlook expects him to perform, to kill his own family, and in return offers him a position within the establishment. He manages to go mad, kill Halloran and almost

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his wife, only to finally be outsmarted by Danny, which leaves him trapped in the maze outside of the hotel where he dies. What Kubrick offers at the end of his movie is the message saying that, regardless of the possible (un) successful outcome, Jack is rewarded by being allowed to join the rest of the prestigious company in the hotel. If he is ready to “pull himself up by his own bootstraps”, to sacrifice his sanity, his life and the life of his family, he will be able to achieve and partake in the alluring (past or present) reality of the Overlook Hotel. What the viewers are left with is the subliminal horror of the capitalist reality, now oscillating between the austerity of the past recession and the promising, although sacrificially based, consumerist future. By observing these patterns, it becomes obvious that these shifts in the American economy are unavoidably projected into the American imagination, or, more precisely, they are being recognized as a potentially new locus for monstrosity.

feaR thy neighboR The construct of the house within the American horror imagination is therefore strongly positioned as a vital trope of the genre, whose fluidity, interpretative possibilities, and a general versatility for channeling contemporary social and cultural issues is possibly unprecedented. Nevertheless, from a spatial perspective, the discourse involving domestic spaces and their problematic existences is exclusively limited to the house itself. By following the evolutionary and storytelling patterns, particularly within the American horror tradition, what emerges as the next stage is the idea of the American suburbia. Constructed as a series of houses, while being uniquely socially coded, the suburban spaces reposition the notion of horror from the segregated setting defined by four walls, an attic, and a cellar, to a larger scale of a small community. As observed in different narratives, this does not mean a deconstruction or disappearance of the basic haunted house trope, but rather an extension of already existing domestic and intimate fears onto a somewhat larger community. Bernice M. Murphy masterfully traced these narrative permutations and thematic evolutions resulting in the American suburban horror in The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009). Starting with the historical development of these basically gated communities and the ideological notions that accompanied their creation, now enhanced by a progressively fast-paced consumerist culture, Murphy provides a functional framework for the American suburban dreams and nightmares. By delineating the

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relationship between the construction of the American identity and the consumerist praxis of the post-World War II period, Murphy locates the horror within the social and cultural fissures developing between utopian preconceptions and actual reality. Developed around a post-World War II housing boom as an “archetypal middle-class invention” (Fishman, 1987, 3), the suburban “dream” was presented to the American soldiers returning from the war almost as a marketing ploy. By promising them the possibility of moving away from overcrowded urban centers into a house of their own, they were subsidized, as Murphy states, with $2000 dollars, followed by a drastic rise in marriage rates and an unprecedented baby boom (2009, 6). Murphy brings some exceptional growth numbers showing that the period between 1948 and 1958 saw the development of 11 million new homes, which meant that “83 percent of all population growth during the 1950s took place” (2009, 6) in the suburbs. The post-­ war American population was now enriched by a spatial and existential experience organized around a series of specificities such as homeliness, ownership, a friendly neighborhood, a safe and family-focused setting, as well as some other positive aspects (Murphy 2009, 3). However, while the idea of such a utopian setting functioned perfectly and progressively attracted millions of people on the promotional level, potential dangers such spatial and social construct was bringing to the nation were a topic of many critical debates. As Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese suggest in their “Critiques of Postwar Suburbia”: By the mid-1950s, a much darker view of suburban life began to emerge. According to the critics—including academics, novelists, filmmakers, and designer-planners, among others—the mass-produced landscape of suburbia was a breeding ground for the most troubling social trends of the era: conformity, materialism, a blind embrace of corporate culture, excessive mobility, and female oppression. (2006, 291)

All these elements started to factor in once the shiny appearance of the new life started to wear off, influencing the residents and those who aspired to become ones. Fragmented according to the particular interests of specific groups such as the problem of race, conformity, or the position of women, these real-life issues were soon channeled into what came to be known as Suburban Gothic. As Murphy once again explains, the development of this subgenre created a mirroring effect by projecting the darker side of the idealized new community. What was once ownership, a sense of

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homeliness and safety, suddenly became haunted, open to the possibility of financial entanglement and debt, infested with neighbors with dark secrets, and an open threat to the safety of the children (2009, 3). As previously mentioned, the space of the house, even now within this new suburban context, retains a similar, if not identical symbolical value, reflecting and problematizing within itself a variety of social and cultural issues relating to both the family/residents living inside of it and society in general. However, with the introduction of a larger spatial context, together with the particularities of this new type of space, the archetype of the house takes a slightly different form. Instead of retaining what could be defined as a self-sustainable model of haunting, separating its residents from the outside world while torturing them with the re-emerging past, the house now positions itself as a simultaneously oppressing space, and a space that needs to be protected from the outside influences and dangers. What it progressively loses is a sense of supernatural haunting, and the prototypical demonic possession thus becomes less important and is slowly replaced by previously mentioned issues such as conformity, oppression, race, consumerism, etc. It is within these new preoccupations of the genre that the horror positions itself and in turn articulates the spatial discourse. An interesting metaphoric slice of this new trend within the genre can be observed in the narratives appearing toward the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. Once on the brink of being uninhabitable and void of economic value, as portrayed in numerous earlier storylines, in the 1980s, the house is recontextualized under the influence of Roland Reagan’s new economic praxis.7 Following the newly established consumerist customs, and being connected to the glorified suburban myth, the image of the house, and subsequently its theoretical construct within the genre, becomes reimagined as the new locus of wealth. Once again, the horror, at least in part, comes out of certain economic praxis, which now repositions the house as a symbol of the American middle-class stability and tradition and as something that needs to be protected from outside influences. It is within this narrative that a divergence starts to emerge, with the subgenre creating storylines that, on a surface level, 7  Popularly known as Reaganomics and structured around the introduction of conservative economic policies focused on scaling down governmental activities, lowering taxes, and decreased interference with the market activities. The expected result was a faster growth of the American economy and a decreased inflation. (Blanchard 1987, 15–56). These policies also affected the spending habits of the population and gave rise to consumerism.

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fundamentally function as an advertisement for the suburban lifestyle. The subgenre, therefore, first establishes the spatial value of the suburban context, a subjective experience that ranges from simple economic superiority and the adjacent consumerism to the perpetuation of the traditional American way of life. Once the values are set, the genre gets focused on their subversion by articulating various threats to the established way of life. Each time an outside entity, regardless of its current incarnation, threatens the established social order, a different critical discourse emerges, indicating some (or many) of the issues of suburban spaces. One of the first successful titles, and one that will set the tone for countless to come, is John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Set in the small town of Haddonfield, the story initially begins in 1963 through the eyes, as the audience soon discovers, of a young boy who, without any apparent reason, first stalks his sister and her boyfriend and then murders her in cold blood. And while the storyline will soon switch to present day (1978), when the now grown-up child Michael Myers escapes from an asylum and returns to Haddonfield to continue his murderous spree, the spatial paradigms that will dominate the entire narrative were immediately set. As the story progresses, the articulation and consumption of space becomes channeled through two different patterns. On one level, initiated at the very beginning of the movie, Myers, also known as “The Shape”,8 is positioned on the outside of a suburban residence, observing the house and the occurrences inside. Once he decides to enter the house, the audience is forced to do the same by continuing to share Michael’s perspective. Similarly, after his escape from the sanitarium, the pattern repeats itself and Myers once again stalks the suburban spaces of Haddonfield before invading the space of the house. The change in the understanding of the house immediately becomes apparent as the life of the residents is in no way problematized by the house itself. What positions itself as a key threat is, in fact, Myers, who not only penetrates the confines of a domestic space but also goes a step further and engages his victims in bedrooms of different houses. If we once again recall Yi-Fu Tuan’s emphasis on the relevance of frontal and back spaces within Western culture (2001, 41), with frontal spaces (halls, dining rooms, living rooms, etc.) functioning as more public 8  Carpenter initially used this name/term in the original script, as well as in the credits. While it adequately conveys Carpenter’s intention to stress a general sense of evil rather than a character, it also puts emphasis on the victims and the suburban lifestyle as opposed to the antagonist.

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and accessible, almost as a stage where the public/guests can be entertained, and the back spaces necessarily being private and intimate (bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.), it becomes obvious that Myers’ attacks are indeed directed at the very core of the suburban dream. The absence of any real motivation or personality of the killer only adds to the fact. Known only as “The Shape”, or the “boogeyman”, Myers is referred to by his actual name only by Dr. Samuel Loomis, whose diagnosis and explanation of his patient’s behavior boils down to the idea of pure evil maniacally directed toward destruction. The absence of a meaningful rationale behind his destructiveness further emphasizes the position of the suburban space/house, whose symbolical representation of the American existential and consumerist values needs to be protected. It is precisely this notion of protection, and its failure, that amplifies the sense of loss and horror as the audience, through the eyes of the killer, witness the rapid process of deconstruction and devolution of the suburban home. This is confirmed through the development of a secondary spatial paradigm set in motion by the events occurring at the beginning of the movie. Once the murders have been committed, and once Myers intentionally desecrated the safe and intimate space of the home, the remaining space loses its symbolic value as protective and nurturing space and is thus stripped of its economic value. Myers’ home, initially presented as a house identic to any other in its suburban neighborhood, devolves into a haunted space without value, except for its violent past. The second spatial paradigm, therefore, sees Myers, through his vicious interventions, actively changing the suburban map by perpetuating the pattern used on his own home, leaving in his wake a landscape void of life, security, and wealth. On a larger scale, the audience is also introduced to the merciless nature of the suburban space on its own. In an impactful scene that shows the character of Laurie Strode running outside of the house while being chased by the killer, the friendly and neighborly suburbanites turn their back on the victim and ignore Laurie’s cries for help. As Murphy points out, Carpenter was inspired by the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese in the courtyard of a New York apartment complex, where the young girl was stabbed to death while 38 bystanders did not nothing to stop the attack, despite the victim’s cries (2009, 146). An argument can therefore be made about the self-destructive nature of suburbia with Myers mirroring all of the issues previously suppressed under the consumerist ideology around which the suburban narrative has been constructed. Interestingly, the notion of Myers as nothing more than a self-projection of the true suburban nature

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can possibly be seen by observing the streets of Haddonfield and its suburban area. In spite of numerous exterior shots, the audience is almost exclusively allowed to see either Michael, acting as the obvious threat, or Laurie and her friends, being the targeted victims. As residents and users of the proposed spaces, Laurie and her friends act as consumers, unaware of the true (negative) nature of suburbia. Michael, on the other hand, while successfully exploiting the suburban spaces (streets, houses, backyards), acts as the actual embodiment of these hidden anxieties. Finally, the refusal to help the heroine and Myers’ disappearance despite being repeatedly shot and most likely seriously wounded show that “[a]ny illusion of safety and suburban community has been fatally compromised”, which paints the image of the suburban space as the “perfect setting for narratives in which the safety and security of both the family unit and the community at large are decisively undermined from within” (Murphy 2009, 146). While Carpenter’s vision warned the audience about the darker side of the American housing utopia by addressing the fears and possibilities of disrupting it, Wes Craven focused his attention on a somewhat symbolically more layered narrative. In 1984, now even more deeply entrenched in the consumerist lifestyles of Reagan’s 1980s, Craven presented a story about a child killer, who, after being discovered, is executed by a group of suburbanites—parents who did not strictly believe in the judicial system. Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street opened a series of different, and difficult questions regarding the sustainability of suburban spaces, and the continuously existing metaphoric underbelly to these idealized communities. Resembling Carpenter’s work in Halloween, the audience is again pitted against a single villain, Freddy Krueger, whose evil nature, and, as it is discovered, wish for revenge, allows him to return from the dead in the form of a demonic force haunting the dreams of his victims. Unfortunately, what happens in the dreams reflects in reality, causing the children of the vengeful suburbanites to die in a variety of horrible ways. Within this very classic gothic premise of the sins of the fathers revisiting the sons, there are, however, different layers of meaning, including an interesting elaboration of the suburban spatial paradigm. While the issue of space continuously re-emerges due to the concept of suburbia itself, the idea of Krueger being able to exist and act in dreams, first philosophically and then actually deconstructs the traditional understanding of the house, whether it is a haunted place or a plain and simple suburban home. By going back to the previously explored articulations of space argued by Bachelard, it can be

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noticed that the subject within the house “experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams” (1994, 5). He then explains the interactivity between dreams, daydreams, memory and imagination: [T]he daydream deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens up for the dreamer of a home beyond man’s earliest memory […] In this remote region, memory and imagination remain associated, each one working for their mutual deepening […] Through dreams, the various dwelling-­ places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. (1994, 5)

However, what happens if the foundation, the mentioned remote region, does not conform to Bachelard’s assumption that the residents are (re)living “fixations of happiness” and “memories of protection” (1994, 6), but rather become exposed to a nightmare? It is within this inversion of values that Krueger thrives by channeling through his attacks not the safety promised by the suburban rhetoric, but the fear of the inability to protect the children. By entertaining the idea of dreams being derived from memories and imagination, Freddy’s ability to control the dreams of his victims by infusing them both with trauma, violence, and eventually death, successfully devolves, much like the previously discussed Michael Myers, the suburban houses into a state of emotional and practical disuse. With each victim the spaces/places they inhabit are therefore immediately transmuted into a hunting and haunting ground, a change fueled by the violent vigilante justice perpetuated by the parents as well as the sense of entitlement which allowed an event like that to occur in the first place. An alternative reading of the relationship between Freddy and suburban spaces can be derived by reevaluating the idea of the functionality of the monstrous, or, more precisely, this idea can be explored by evaluating the position of the female characters, first and foremost, the main female protagonist Nancy Thompson, within the analyzed suburban spaces. A key starting point for such an analysis is the feminist geographer Doreen Massey who in her seminal text Space, Place and Gender states that “[t]he limitation of women’s mobility, in terms both of identity and space, has been in some cultural contexts a crucial means of subordination. The attempt to confine women to the domestic sphere was both a specifically spatial control and, through that, a social control on identity” (1994, 179). Massey’s statement is very closely connected to William Douglas’

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study of suburbia where he underlines the post-WWII differentiation between men and women. With the emphasis now being placed on the idea of the family, the suburban project started pushing women back into the domestic sphere—a status that was changed with the advent of WWII and larger segments of male population joining the war effort. Douglas elaborates the promotional aspect of this new paradigm performed through popular culture (mainly television) by explaining that this new situation and the resulting tensions “were resolved through a system of family rights and responsibilities that invested males with wide authority, extending explicitly to family life, and allowed females to be articulate and thoughtful but, nonetheless, satisfied with an exclusively domestic role” (2003, 83). The implementation of this “social contract”, and the resulting subordination to the ideologically infused space, functions as a dominant theme in Craven’s work given that the story presents two female characters constrained by their socially imposed roles. The first character, Nancy’s mother Marge, is shown as a proper suburban housewife who, despite the luxuries of a middle-class existence and the apparent peaceful family life, is not only an alcoholic but is also haunted by her role in the execution of Freddy. Her submissive position in relation to her life and her husband leads her to excessive self-involvement and an obsessive attempt to maintain her existential status quo. On the other hand, her teenage daughter Nancy, rebellious and unaware of the burdens of her overprotective mother, finds herself facing the choice to either accept the suburban ideology or try to break free from it. This idea of entrapment escalates with Marge’s attempt to protect herself from facing the truth of her resurfacing past as well as with her daughter’s decision to place bars on all the windows of their suburban home, effectively creating a physical and an emotional/mental prison. However, Nancy’s position of a prisoner unexpectedly mirrors Freddy’s who, although free to inflict harm, is still confined to the realm of dreams. Every time Freddy attacks Nancy, he pulls her into his world, or more precisely into his space which resembles an alternative dimension within or of the house itself. Specifically, Nancy is pulled into a cellar, a subterranean maze-like space filled with industrialized details such as bursting pressure pipes, heating ducts, and steam, engulfed in a dark red hue giving it the appearance of Hell, rather than a domestic, suburban surrounding. Going once more back to Bachelard and his perception of the cellar as the unconscious of the dreamer (1994, 19), we are free to ask: whose unconscious is Craven actually exploring? An argument can be made that Freddy, as well as his space, is in fact part of

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Nancy subconscious/unconscious, which she, in turn, manipulates in order to confront both the social norms inherited through the suburban ideology and her mother’s attempt to confine her to this submissive position. With the approach of the climax of the story, Nancy realizes that she can bring objects back from her dream state and immediately concludes that the best way to destroy Freddy would be to bring him back and therefore make him mortal. However, the confrontation with the creature she brought back does not end with the defeat of the monster as Freddy eventually attacks and kills Nancy’s mother. Therefore, as the narrative circle closes, the past, now channeled through the rebellious (and subconsciously monstrous) Nancy, resurfaces once again, thus marking the deconstruction of the ideology of the suburban home, this time from within, and emphasizes the inability to escape from its own dark and apparently repressed nature. The final suppressed trope, and possibly the most problematic, evolves around racial exclusivity, which for a long time marked the suburban experience. As described by Nicolaides and Wiese, the housing boom opened the possibility for upward mobility and the possibility to own a home for millions of Americans (2006, 321). However, the realization of this possibility was conditioned by race, and the ideological discourse surrounding the suburban project was strongly premised on segregation. Promoted as a type of space that unified “common aspirations, shared lifeways, and similar political and economic interests”, and reinforced through popular culture—first and foremost, television showing “white families celebrating the postwar suburban dream” (2006, 321)—the idea of a racially uniform space became an apparently unquestionable reality. Nevertheless, such a construct came with a fair amount of economically based fears developing out the consumerist practices of the time. The process of indulging in the postwar suburban utopia was progressively premised on consumerism, and as such owning a home became a “critical class marker”—something that was expectedly opposed by public policies and the real estate industry when addressing non-white families, claiming that “racial mixing lowered property values” (2006, 321). The consequences of an integration, as summarized by Nicolaides and Wiese, would be catastrophic: The logic thus extended full circle: if integration occurred, property values would drop, a family’s status and very identity as part of the middle class would be destroyed. Individual and class identities, thus, became intertwined with the expectation of all-white neighborhoods. For families newly

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arrived in the middle class—recently unionized blue-collar workers earning a good wage or low-level white-collar workers in their first jobs—the stakes were highest. Their gains were fresh, and the fear of loss strong. (2006, 321)

The position of the horror genre within this social and cultural tension remained somewhat silent and different authors addressed a variety of topics while somehow avoiding this particular aspect of the suburban narrative. Carpenter’s or Craven’s storylines, although crucial both for the development of the subgenre and for shedding light on many of the troublesome aspects of this residential paradigm, completely neglected the question of segregation, and opted for a critical discourse developed from a (racial) status quo instead. After the establishment of the subgenre, mostly achieved through financial success, many other authors endeavored in the production of similar storylines: such as Tom Holland’s Fright Night (1985), Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), or the more recent The House of the Devil (2009) directed by Ti West, and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014). Apart from Wes Craven’s second attempt at suburban horror with The People Under the Stairs (1991) where he addresses, at least in part, the question of race in relation to the suburbs, all other authors focused more on the survival issues of the main (white) protagonist haunted by repressed suburban traumas. From the perspective of spatial discourse, these titles/works articulated a racially monolithic residential community self-consumed by purely existential fears. Nevertheless, Them, a recent TV series directed by Little Marvin, in its entirety focused on an African American family moving into a completely white suburbia in the 1950s, actively engaged and challenged this monolithic nature. By striking directly at capitalist and racial fears, Marvin’s narrative visually unfolds the results of the public and political efforts to prevent the influx of African Americans to these newly established neighborhoods. While extremely multilayered in its presentation, Them successfully relates to the African American experience of being unwanted, if not outright hated, and achieves a uniquely explicit and terrifying storytelling experience by channeling it through the genre. What becomes crucial from a spatial reading of the phenomena is the reevaluation and reimagining of the suburban postulates and maps. The once troublesome spaces consumed between normality and the hauntings of repressed fears become unveiled as an utterly unredeemable locus, perpetually cursed by its monolithic whiteness. In Marvin’s vision, this whiteness stands as the key problem and dominant trope of suburban spaces, a direct line to the national

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subconsciousness that becomes activated once the African American f­ amily decides to challenge its boundaries. The developed spatial binarity is now structured between the home of the Emory family, which functions in accordance with the previously addressed African American reading of the home by bell hooks, and the uniformly white rest of the neighborhood structured according to dominant dogma. The idea of a “radical political dimension” of the homeplace, as proposed by bell hooks, functions almost like a lifeline for the Emory family because it allows them to “freely confront the issue of humanization” (1990, 42), and therefore enables them to resist the horrors waiting on the other side of the door. Simultaneously, and unfortunately, as the story progresses, and the racial intolerance exerted by the white neighbors escalates into explicit horror and morbidity, the Emorys are not allowed to use their home to mend “many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (1990, 42). Instead, they become utterly overpowered and unable to flee the physical horrors and the psychological pressure imposed on them by the unquestionably racist suburban context. Through the explicitness of the genre, Marvin’s Them, as many of his predecessors, re-proposes the suburban space as a locus of horror, while at the same time challenging all spatial and metaphoric presuppositions that this kind of space entails. In Marvin’s vision, the new map is one of despair, explored and foreshadowed through intentionally and institutionally organized perpetuation of exclusion and pain, with the masked and supernatural hauntings now replaced by mundane suburbanites.

RefeRenCes Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Blanchard, Olivier Jean. 1987. Reaganomics. Economic Policy 2 (5): 15–56. Cresswell, Tim. 2004. Place: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Curtis, Barry. 2008. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books. Fishman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias  – The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1983. Collected Novels. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning – Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Historicism in the Shining. In Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge. King, Stephen. 1983. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley. Kubrick, Stanley. 1980. The Shining. Warner Bros. Luckhurst, Roger. 2019. The Shining. London: BFI Film Classics. Mariconda, Steven J. 2007. The Haunted House. In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural  – An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, Volume 1, ed. S.T. Joshi, 267–305. Westport: Greenwood Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murphy, Bernice M. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicolaides, Becky M., and Andrew Wiese. 2006. Critiques of Postwar Suburbia. In The Suburb Reader, ed. Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese. New York: Routledge. Poe, Edgar A. 2006. In The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J.  Gerald Kennedy, 126–144. New York: Penguin Books. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography  – The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place – The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Mischief Films. William, Douglas. 2003. Television Families  – Is Something Wrong in Suburbia. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers.

CHAPTER 5

Small Town Heterotopias

“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chant out between two worlds, fire walk with me!” David Lynch, Twin Peaks

Mirrored Spaces While previous chapters offered a reading of American haunted house and just as disturbing suburban spaces from the perspective of narrow spatial experience, which, first and foremost, comes out of individual and subjective confrontation with spatially very localized sources of horror, a larger map on which to trace various American nightmares can be derived from the notion of a small town. The idea of different houses, various families, and neighborhoods that become in some way threatened or are threatening, mirrors, once again, Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and the troublesome experiences within his own community. As Brown ventures into the forest, he gradually becomes more and more aware of an existential paradigm parallel to his everyday life. His town, neighbors, friends, and even his spouse are corrupted—metaphorically and literally—by the forest and the entity that manifests itself within it. And while the forest acts as a prohibitive space, a location where the demonic becomes articulated, and as such offers a polarity-based understanding of space, whereby the small-town functions as a safe haven against the surrounding threats, Brown realizes that the actual evil (or its potential) is not necessarily © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Lukić, Geography of Horror, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2_5

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confined to a particular space, but that it is instead present within the hearts and minds of his fellow townsmen and women. The process that unfolds in Hawthorne’s short story—and that will mark the development of the small-town horror subgenre—is therefore built around two separate stages. The first stage is the identification of a threatening space, a location whose nature symbolically resembles any of the previously addressed haunted spaces. The exploration of the map of the American small town— naturally, within the confines of the genre—will most often reveal a location whose function and symbolic value is similar to the prototypical gothic castle, the haunted house, or the violent, dark forest, yet it stands in direct spatial opposition to them. Furthermore, all of these opposing and subversive spaces are characterized by their fluidity and tendency to model themselves according to the horrors that trod within them, or more precisely, they are most often articulated through an autoreferential loop, where their level of threat, morbidity, and outright horror comes out of the opposition with the spaces that are presented as “normal”. The polarity ensuing from this initial stage presents the readers or the viewers with a clear divergence between a small town’s cultural, social, moral, etc., qualities and the corrupting nature of (haunted) spaces. This binarity, however, mirroring once again the unfortunate circumstances of Young Goodman Brown, is not stable; instead, it keeps challenging the imposed spatial boundaries between the two settings until their inevitable violent breakdown. Although simple in its eventual manifestation of violence, the relationship between these two spaces is rather complex. To understand these complexities, it is necessary to explore and define what lies outside of the boundaries of normal and, therefore, safe space. To do so, it is helpful to step outside of rigid theoretical paradigms and briefly look at the historical and literary attempts of mapping the (un)known spaces. Therefore, an analogy could be drawn between the coexistence of these spaces and the fantastic structure and functionality of the medieval mappaemundi. Although they were initially used as an instructional tool to teach about significant Christian historical events rather than to record a particular location, they are a valuable source giving insight into different aspects of medieval life (Woodward 1987, 286). However, in addition to their historical value, these ideological rather than geographical accounts of the world offered a particular mapping of the sensibilities and cultural realities of the known world while at the same time providing multilayered interpretations of what lay in those still unexplored regions. As Peter Turchi argues in his analysis of the relationship between writers and

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cartography, focusing primarily on the concept of blank (unexplored) regions illustrated in the maps, the yet undiscovered and unconquered parts of the world were often depicted through drawings of sea serpents, dragons, griffins, as well as other mythological creatures, including “freakishly exotic people” (2009, 34). These maps were not precise, or for that matter geographically valuable, since, as Turchi explains, the “[g]eographic features, people and nations were omitted”, and what was left in their place were “spiritual landmarks” (2009, 35). David Woodward goes further in his historical readings of the content and meaning of the mappaemundi by delineating three different analytical directions: the historical and geographical facts; the marvels, legends, and traditions; and the symbolic content (1987, 326). While the historical and geographical facts were heavily informed by the “classical and biblical” (1987, 326), drawing, first and foremost, from the Old Testament and anxiously stressing “that knowledge of the earth was of strictly secondary importance to the Christian whose eyes should be on a higher spiritual plane” (1987, 326), the narrative offered by the legends and tradition was much more creative and imaginative. “Representations of monstrous races and historical legends on mappaemundi reflected the medieval craving for the bizarre and fantastic” (1987, 330), but, despite being entertaining, such representations raised an issue with the fathers of the church—especially when it came to monstrous races. As Woodward describes it, the idea of other/monstrous races opened up the question of their humanity and descendance from Adam and Noah, as well as the possibility that such creatures might have a soul and that this soul had to be saved (1987, 332). Among different uses of the mappaemundi, Woodward points out an example of medieval missionaries who found it necessary to convert the so-called “Cynocephali-the dog-headed peoples sometimes associated with Islam” (1987, 332), and in doing so confirm the absolute power of the Gospel. However, the list of semi-mythical and undoubtedly monstrous races was not limited to the dog-headed peoples: the outskirts of the Catholic-centric mappaemundi were populated with all kinds of creatures, such as the Anthropophagi, the man-eaters from Africa; the Cyclopes which were found in Sicily and India; the Troglodytes or cave dwellers from Ethiopia; and a plethora of other fantastic beings (1987, 331). Their dissemination was depicted in relation to, and as far as possible from, the “civilized center of the Earth-Jerusalem” (1987, 332), while at the same

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time, as Woodward puts it, “within the reach of the left arm of Christ”1 (1987, 332). This interesting approach in describing space—and consuming it as a potential didactic instrument—mirrors itself onto the creation of the American small-town geography. Even though the initial premise of the town, usually presented through the introductory narrative, eases the reader/viewer into an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of this type of space, only to be followed by a presentation of the immaculate nature and moral innocence of its inhabitants, a second glance of the presented image uncovers the existence of problematic spatial paradigms. The evidencing of a spatial polarity, regardless of the problematized spaces, leads to a conditioned perception of opposition between what could metaphorically be understood, to borrow Eliade Mircea’s idea, as a sacred and profane space. By observing the small town as an ideological construct that perpetuates its virtuosity almost as a sacred dogma and consequently becomes a type of sacred space on its own, the existence of a profane spatial paradigm becomes unavoidable. As all human geographers agree, these spatial realities and divisions are a product of the humans themselves and their subjective experience. If applied to the small-town setting, it becomes obvious that it is the experience and belief of the townspeople, at least on a superficial level, that dictates the type of space that will be articulated. As seen in countless horror narratives, a utopian articulation and perpetuation of a small-town identity can be equated to a dogmatic, if not even religious praxis that leads to a specific understanding of space. As Mircea argues when discussing the interaction between religion, sacred spaces, and the individual experience, a very clear distinction appears between spaces. “For religious man”, Mircea explains, “this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred—the only real and really existing space—and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it” (1987, 20). The perception and construction of space—be it from the perspective of the different ­mappaemundi 1  The importance of the left arm of Christ, as opposed to the right one, is derived from an almost universal cultural bias of the superiority of the right side of the body over its left side. As Yi-Fu Tuan explains: “[T]he right is perceived to signify sacred power, the principle of all effective activity, and the source of everything that is good and legitimate” (2001, 43). Consequently, the left side of the body functions as the complete opposite signifying “the profane, the impure, the ambivalent and the feeble, which is maleficent and to be dreaded” (2002, 43). In relation to Christ and his representation in the paintings of the Last Judgement, as Tuan points out, “his right hand raised toward the bright region of Heaven, and his left hand pointing downward to dark Hell” (2001, 43).

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or the readings Mircea proposes—is set upon an opposition between the mediated center reinforced through its ideologies and the uncontrolled periphery of the map filled with a variety of (subversive) monsters. The said division between spaces allows a distinction between what is close and what is far, between what is part of the everyday consumption and interaction and what is distant if not outright invisible. Furthermore, as opposed to other spaces defined by their fringe nature, the strength of the utopian spatial dogma offered by the proposed small-town imagery allows for a high degree of familiarity, and therefore acceptance. However, this accepted understanding does not extend to “profane” spaces, prompting in such a way an inquiry of their possible functioning as well as positioning within the genre. Given that the only certainty is that these spaces function in opposition to the dogma of “normalcy”, and in accordance with their own paradigm, their position within the genre is that of a continuous, although never fully explored threat. A possible reading of their connection to normal spaces and an attempt to better understand their metaphoric, symbolic, and real functionality can be found in Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopian spaces. Even though Foucault presented his idea on a few different occasions, its very impactful elaboration remains somewhat succinct. In the preface to The Order of Things (1966), Foucault introduces the idea of the existence of an alternative type of space that functions as a disruptive force. The initial premise starts with the idea of utopias as spaces that “afford consolation” despite not having a “real locality”, and as such, allow for the unfolding of “fantastic” and “untroubled regions” (2005, xix), and, consequently, “cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical” (2005, xix). This is, however, challenged by the introduction of heterotopias whose function is everything but the perpetuation of the established order. As Foucault points out, “[h]eterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance”, which is a process that surpasses the basic function of constructing sentences and extends instead to “syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’” (2005, xix). He then goes on to show—although, curiously, not using the term explicitly—the presence of heterotopian space by analyzing Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, where he notes, among other things, the role of the mirror and the issue of reflection in the heterotopian discourse. A much

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more elaborate analysis and explanation of the concept of heterotopian spaces appears in 1967 in a lecture-based text that presents some of the main characteristics of heterotopian modus operandi. Once again, Foucault uses the idea of utopias as a discursive entry point and emphasizes their inability to exist within the real world alongside real spaces, which is to say that they can be imagined but there is no actual way of enacting these types of spaces. On the other hand, Foucault argues that there are real places that actually exist and are formed in a society, within which they function as a type of “counter-sites”. More precisely, as Foucault elaborates, these “counter-sites” are “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1986, 24). Even though they can be located, as Foucault continues, these places function outside of and in opposition to all other places (1986, 24). Foucault uses the notion of the mirror to show how heterotopian spaces operate. The mirror is perceived as a perfect utopia because it is a placeless place within which one’s projection is reflected. Simultaneously, however, the mirror allows for the articulation of a perfect heterotopian space. The person whose image is mirrored can experience his or her being within their own reality as well as within the reflected image. Furthermore, both the physical and mirrored entity are connected to their spatial surroundings. However, despite their actual physicality premised on the spatial and physical existence of the mirror itself, the observer is not able to interact with or penetrate the observed reflected spaces. A further development of this idea can be found in Foucault’s 1967 lecture-based text titled “Of Other Spaces” where he provides a systematization of the functionality of heterotopias through a series of principles, each addressing a particular aspect relating to spatial construct. The first principle, therefore, elaborates on the idea of so-called crisis heterotopias, which manifest themselves in spaces such as boarding schools or military service for young men—or, as Foucault explains, “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.” (1986, 24). Within more contemporary contexts, the crisis heterotopias are replaced by heterotopias of deviation—spaces reserved for individuals “whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm” (1986, 25), such as prisons or psychiatric wards. The second principle involves the idea of polyvalent nature of heterotopias and the possibilities that their symbolic and actual

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function changes in accordance with the continuously evolving cultural and social needs and trends. As an example of such spaces Foucault mentions cemeteries whose traditional spatial positioning in relation to a city or a town was at its center, next to a church. This location reflects, as Foucault argues, a belief system structured around the notion of the immortality of the soul, or, more precisely, around the belief in the possibility of resurrection which deems keeping dead bodies close acceptable. This belief, however, becomes tarnished through what Foucault describes as the “individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery” (1986, 25), as well as the progressive equation of death to illness. This led to spatial dislocation which meant that the cemeteries were no longer perceived as closely connected “sacred and immortal heart of the city”, but they now became distinctly heterotopian “‘other city’, where each family possesses its dark resting place” (1986, 25). The idea of the third principle evolves around the possibility of heterotopias to juxtapose several otherwise incompatible spaces within a single real space. This paradigm can be observed in locations such as theaters or cinemas, which are limited by their architecture but are capable of reproducing and hosting, sometimes even simultaneously, a plethora of different spaces. In the fourth principle, Foucault explores the connection between heterotopias and time by introducing the term heterochronies. More specifically, he argues that certain spaces/heterotopias have a unique characteristic of being able to “accumulate” time. Locations such as museums or libraries in such a way, as Foucault puts it, mirror the needs of “our modernity” through our tendency to perpetually and indefinitely accumulate time in an immobile space (1986, 26). And finally, the last, the fifth principle, says that access to heterotopian spaces is in fact moderated through a “system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (1986, 26). The entrance into these heterotopias is either compulsory, as is the case with military barracks or prisons, or they require the individual to submit to ritualistic and purificatory procedures before he can access them (1986, 26). Despite its originality and versatility, Foucault’s notion of heterotopian spaces remains somewhat contested, mainly because of a rather limited elaboration of the initial premise in which the author did not present arguments that go beyond the ones found in “Of Other Spaces”. An additional critical contestation can be found in a slightly different understanding of heterotopias offered in the introduction to The Order of Things (1966), where Foucault emphasizes the disruptive nature of these types of spaces,

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which stands in opposition to his later reading where heterotopias are presented as coexisting with normal spaces as a type of counter-sites. An interesting solution to some of these interpretative issues—as well as a potent connection between Foucault’s spatial arguments and the horror genre—can be observed in Kelvin T. Knight’s “Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia”. Knight here offers a resolution for the paradoxical use of the term by pointing out that the original lecture “Of Other Spaces” was presented to a group of architects and thus perceived as a theoretical intervention into real material spaces. This type of intervention was not Foucault’s initial intention, but rather, as Knight claims, it was directed toward the “fictional representations of these semi-­ mythical places” (2016, 2). Knight draws his argument from a radio talk Foucault gave in the period between the publication of The Order of Things and “Of Other Spaces”. And while the radio talk/lecture aired on France Culture2 was later adapted and posthumously published—first in 1984 as “Des espaces autres”, and then two years later in English translation as “Of Other Spaces”—Foucault’s original lecture, as Knight argues, was not adequately adapted. The original talk was published in 2005 under the title “Les Hétérotopies”3 confirming the many similarities between the original and the adaptation, yet with one key difference. As Knight states, among other variances, “while ‘Of Other Spaces’ is almost entirely devoid of literary significance, ‘Les Hétérotopies’ contains references to a number of works of fiction” (2016, 5). Following the idea of heterotopias as enacted utopias, Knight points out that in “Les Hétérotopies” Foucault underlines the strong connection between utopias and literature, while in “Of Other Spaces” the utopias are simply defined as “sites with no real place” (1986, 24), whereas in The Order of Things, and in the untranslated broadcast, they are closely connected to language and as such they are “being described as the presupposing convergence of an a priori imaginary landscape and the narrative by which it is mapped” (2016, 6). Knight goes on to say that utopias, while being an ideal, as well as an imaginary place, can also sometimes be “tied to a specific time and place […] with which children are all too familiar; in the spaces of their play, the attic, the garden or their parents’ bed, they find the ocean, the sky or the Wild West” (2016, 2  France Culture was considered “the country’s foremost cultural radio station” which during that period presented a series of lectures dedicated to literature and utopias (2016, 4-5). 3  The text at this moment is still not translated.

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6). Furthermore, what also remains unaddressed in the untranslated text is Foucault’s opinion that these spaces are not limited to the musings of children but that they are instead also embraced by adults who also “perform this imaginative transformation of space, a practice that finds an outlet not in play per se, but in the space of literature” (2016, 6). Therefore, from this can be deduced that heterotopian spaces act as an extraordinarily viable spatial construct. By oscillating between Foucault’s somewhat inconclusive theoretical explorations, the romanticized modeling of the same theories in the production of fictional narratives, and the musings about their potential in real-life contexts, heterotopian spaces are successfully, albeit unconsciously, embraced by the horror genre. The variety of proposed principles, in turn, allows for a continuous recreation and reimagination of genre-bound spaces which act as counter-sites to the mundane geography of, in this case, the American small town as well as the loci within which the town’s subconsciousness is being suppressed and from which the monstrous is being articulated. However, the proposed theoretical framing of the horror genre and the heterotopian paradigm is characterized by one major flaw. The idea of utopian spaces, or the enactment of utopian spaces that transmute into heterotopias, cannot be entirely applied to the horror genre due to its inherently violent and unconventional nature. As Parezanović and Lukić show in their analysis, a solution for understanding this problematic relationship can be found in the previously discussed role and functionality of the mirror. While the mirror projects a reflection and therefore creates a heterotopian space, it also retains “curious heterotopian ability to invert, distort, or otherwise warp the reality one is experientially accustomed to” (2020, 1139). Furthermore, the analysis of the mirroring effect—and created counter-sites—extends, for example, to Foucault’s analysis of the heterotopias of crisis and the functioning of locations such as prisons, psychiatric institutions, retirement homes, etc. Primary function of these spaces is the containment of people or situations that could be considered outside of the proscribed social norms. More specifically, as Parezanović and Lukić argue, “the implication is that these places contain, in one form or another, a lurking danger the release of which might threaten and utterly shatter the conventional social order” (2020, 1139). A similarly problematic situation, particularly from a gothic/horror point of view, can be observed with Foucault second principle where he equates cemeteries as heterotopian spaces to “the other city in which dead people reside, and which perversely imitates relationships within the living families as well as urban infrastructure” (2020, 1139).

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The binarity between such regular and regulated spaces, between order and its (dys)topian reflection within the horror genre unavoidably deteriorates to the point in which the mirrored spaces, due to their overpowering dark and violent nature, start overflowing into and subverting the regulated realities. Parezanović and Lukić define this spatial disruption, and the identification of a potentially threatening heterotopian space, as a dark heterotopia, a new type of spatial paradigm that in certain aspects of functionality differs from Foucault’s initial concept. Parezanović and Lukić therefore argue that “[w]hile the basic premise that heterotopia is built on is that of a set or cluster of spatial relations, which includes different locations, each clearly separated from the others and not reducible to, superimposable or replaceable by, or mixable with the others, dark heterotopias possess the capacity to invade ordinary places and transfigure them into equally threatening ‘other’ spaces” (2020, 1140). The proposed dissection of space starting with the mappaemundi and ending with the proposed concept of dark heterotopias completes its analytical circle by once again returning to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”. As Brown hastens into the forest, first to meet the demonic figure and later to save his wife, he becomes painfully aware that many men and women from his small town are regular visitors of the dark forest. As such, they make a parallel and mirrored community to the one defined by the regulated spaces of the town. Consequently, the cause of horror and morbidity of the narrative are not the potentially disturbing events taking place in the forest, but Brown’s confrontation with his new reality, which will take place the following morning. While the image of a small town remains the same as before, marked by Hawthorne’s trademark focus on sinfulness of human nature and heightened sense of guilt, it also allows us to detect in it a dark heterotopian setting. Traditionally portrayed as just a dark and threatening spatial entity on the outskirts of civilization, the forest now becomes recognized as an active “participant” in the narrative that, through Brown’s faltering faith, overflows and subverts the previously established reality. As a result, a perpetual spatial dichotomy is now established between normalcy and the slightly hidden, but nevertheless always present, sense of dread and monstrousness, this time taking the contours of a small American town. By mirroring the intimacy of a home, and therefore a sense of homeliness and safety, while simultaneously threatening the very existence and subjective experience of such a space, Hawthorne successfully defined both the direction of future horror-based narratives and the role that space can potentially have within the genre.

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Traces of this aspect of Hawthorne’s work are visible in the efforts of many later authors who were looking to explore the unique particularities and dread offered by the small American town. Some of the first and more prominent examples can be found in the stories by Shirley Jackson or William Faulkner. Even though traditionally not perceived as gothic or horror writers, their stories, such as “The Lottery” (1948) and “A Rose for Emily” (1930), presented a very bleak, if not outright dystopian, vision of a small town. Similar to Hawthorne in her ability to present a very particular place-related system of values, as well as the accompanying atmosphere, Jackson unravels a tale of a small town and its inhabitants and their firm adherence to traditions. Described as a peaceful community filled with hard-working people, serene families, and carefree children, the town Jackson paints in “The Lottery” functions as an enacted utopia. With the adherence to an (initially) unexplained custom of a type of an annual lottery as the only concert, the story moves along until its dramatic climax— the unfortunate winner of the lottery is stoned to death by the rest of the town. Although short and apparently simplistic, the story was received with consternation by the general public, but it also offered a variety of interpretations ranging from the development of regional horror, in this case, New England4, to the problematization of the position of the individual in relation to a larger community, evoking in such a way the classic theme of Puritanism (Faye Ringel 2014, 144), witch prosecutions, and mob psychology, as well as the previously addressed Richard Slotkin’s idea of the necessity of violence in the process of (re)affirmation of one’s identity. From the perspective of human geography and spatial discourse, the story does not function from a firm standpoint of two opposing spatial paradigms, but rather offers a direct glimpse into a dark heterotopian setting. The townsmen and women, at least apparently, live a regular if not idyllic life within the setting of a small town. This, however, does not mean that the awareness of an alternative existential paradigm is not present and actively perpetuated through the knowledge and tradition that are associated with the lottery. And it is the lottery that acts as a trigger and conduit for the emergence and subsequent heterotopian incursion (Parezanović and Lukić 2018, 110). Based on Foucault’s description of heterotopias as “a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (1986, 26), as well as the necessity for observing a particular ritual in order to access them, the townsmen’s 4

 The exact location is not specified in the story.

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enactment of the tradition and the ritual of the lottery allows for the manifestation and incursion of the heterotopian space. The consequence is the subversion of normalcy in which the regularity and benignity of a mundane small-town life is instantly replaced by the violence of a mob mentality. However, in both Jackson’s short story and the other cases that will be addressed in this chapter, it is necessary to note that incursion of heterotopias on normal spaces is not necessarily followed by bouts of madness and lunatic behavior of their various inhabitants. Quite the opposite, while the issue of madness can be a motivator, the functioning of dark heterotopias suggests the development of a new normalcy rather than chaos and insanity. Jackson’s townsmen and women are not lunatics but normal people who need to conform to a new spatial—now heterotopian—paradigm. While it moves along similar lines, the issue of space and the idea of a heterotopian context in Faulkner’s short story take on a different form. The story once again introduces the readers to a small town and the funeral of an elderly Southern lady named Emily Grierson, whose family has fallen on hard times after the conclusion of the Civil War. What unfolds is a tale of a tragic character locked between the patriarchal influence and her social position. As such, due to the control of her father, a prominent and influential figure within the small community, Emily is prevented from having any type of romantic involvement, at least until her father passes away. It is then that she ventures into a relationship with a certain Homer Barron, a road construction foreman and a Northerner, as well as, the story reveals, a homosexual. Traumatized by her dominating father and afraid of being “abandoned again”, Emily decides to poison her love interest and keep his body in the house, specifically in her bed. The story reaches its morbid climax toward its end when, after Emily’s death, the townsmen enter her house and her bedroom where they find Barron’s decomposed body lying in bed and Emily’s body-shaped indentation on the bed next to the corpse. While the story does not lend itself to a more profound thematic reading—as is the case with “The Lottery”—placing more emphasis on the patriarchal and traditional post-war South, the curiously morbid climax of the story outlines an interesting spatial paradigm. With the town, on one side, described as open to changes, so a new political establishment inherits the old ones, and with a distinct sense of time passing being present within the story, Emily’s house, and her bedroom, in particular, stands apart not only as a different spatial context but, by again following Foucault’s readings, as a functional heterotopian space. As the fourth principle dictates, heterotopias can function as “slices of time”,

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or more precisely, “heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (1986, 26), a notion fully embraced by Emily. Within her house, but even more within her bedroom, she creates a temporal equivalent of a museum or a library, a spatial suspension focused on the idea of “indefinitely accumulating time” (1986, 26), or, in her experience, a temporally indefinite macabre emotional gratification. Being such a subjective emotional experience and a distinctly contained spatial one, the heterotopian experience does not act as a subversive counter-site. Regardless of their morbid nature, the deeds of a dead woman remain contained and presumably eventually dismantled within the house. As such, the proposed heterotopia does not represent an actual spatial threat. However, Faulkner’s story successfully explores the element of secrecy, which will become one of the main characteristics of the future American small-town horror narratives, mirroring in many ways similar dynamics also seen in the suburban subgenre. It is in these secrets, regardless of their nature, source, or purpose, that a break from normalcy occurs and within whose rifts heterotopian discourses begin to develop.

Land of Mythical Times The search for a more impactful contribution to the development of the horrific small-town narratives evolves beyond these brief glimpses of unease and morbidity and rapidly expands in the narrative opus of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. An awkward and troublesome figure, both in the larger literary context and in his lifetime, Lovecraft capitalized on the connection between horror and space, in his case, the hauntingly historic New England. As Maurice Lévy describes, for Lovecraft New England was the “land of origins, of the first beginnings, the Promised Land of mythical times”, a location “where a historic profundity is embedded under the surface of everyday life” (1998, 35). It is within this context that Lovecraft first locates and then spatially defines the historical dimension of the land of the early American settlers, while simultaneously exploring (or perhaps expressing) the fears, anxieties, and, ultimately, the horrors of the already mentioned “Promised Land of mythical times”. Lovecraft’s gradual process of creation and mapping can obviously be contextualized through the proposed theoretical and historical frames, with the crude but colorful idea of the mappaemundi presenting itself as the first step in the author’s geography. Just like a medieval map of the world, Lovecraft’s view and

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presentation of New England do not have a geographical function of describing or spatially collocating actual locations. Instead, as part of Lovecraft’s didactic discourse, problematic and subversive sites are identified within the larger New England background whereby the author pays particular attention to the idea of monstrosity as one of the determining factors for both the definition and the understanding of the explored locations. An additional element necessary for understanding Lovecraftian monstrosity, and therefore his didactic spatiality, is his upbringing, specifically the fact that Lovecraft embraced racism as a system of value. As Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argue, for Lovecraft and for his fiction, “racial differences were broadly understood as clearly demarcated and dependable, a seemingly neutral and natural means of measuring human worth, ability, and intelligence” (2016, 26). Other critics, such as James Kneale, put even more emphasis on the influence of Lovecraft’s racism by suggesting that “once Lovecraft’s racism is discovered, it is difficult not to read him solely in terms of these fears and hatreds. His pathology represents a critical singularity, from which interpretations struggle to escape” (2006, 116-117). And while the repercussions of such an approach can be either extensively debated or removed from the discourse completely5, its role remains undeniable in the process of articulating horrific spaces in his fiction. In terms of Lovecraftian mappaemundi, the audience—the readers and, in recent years, the viewers—is exposed to a map of New England consisting of both real and fabricated spaces and locations. More specifically, by bringing into existence a series of fictional small towns alongside real ones, Lovecraft creates a parallel spatial reality and, in doing so, emulates the ideological praxis of medieval maps and points out the existence of a spatial alternative harboring different kinds of threatening otherness. Places such as the mythical Arkham and its never defined location, the coastal town of Innsmouth inhabited by a hybrid population and controlled by an ancient cult, together with the neighboring Kingsport, and finally Dunwich and its (de)evolved townsmen at the north center of Massachusetts, all form what came to be known as the Miscatonic Region, or sometimes even the Miscatonic County. From a cartographic perspective, these towns are placed within the authentic map of New England, functioning perhaps as a metaphoric shadow of their real-life counterparts. 5  S.T. Joshi, for example, argues that a lot of criticism directed toward Lovecraft’s racism, although justifiable, is in fact misdirected since “his racism is at least logically separable from the rest of his philosophical and even political thought” (2001, 358).

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While the exact position of the town of Arkham, based on the image of Salem, is never quite specified, allowing for the town appear in accordance with the needs of different storylines, Innsmouth, for example, finds itself located on the coast of Essex County, between Plum Island and Cape Ann. Similarly, Kingsport, another coastal town, is located in the vicinity of Salem, yet it retains Arkham’s quality to shift positions within different narratives. This takes us to Maurice Lévy’s study of Lovecraft’s work and his understanding of the necessity of such a spatial dichotomy in which Lévy emphasizes the “physical, topographical, historical” reality of this world (1998, 36). Lévy also says that “[i]t is well known that the truly fantastic exists only where the impossible can make an irruption, through time and space, into an objectively familiar locale” (1998, 36-37), and in such a way opens the possibility for a heterotopian understanding of Lovecraft’s geography. The proposed small towns act as counterparts as well as counter-sites to the regular spaces, and are thus allowed to articulate a variety of discourses in accordance with Lovecraft’s personal affinities. These affinities, in turn, as different critics elaborate, range from Lovecraft’s love for science and astronomy, with actual outer space becoming the source of evil, the historical sedimentation of New England manifested through both traditions as well as folklore, to a direct addressing of the idea of monstrosity and its influence on the “purity” of the country constructed on outright racist discourses. Nevertheless, despite the Foucauldian binary approach in addressing the issue of heterotopian spaces, where the discourse of regular spaces is being opposed by subversive ones, Lovecraft’s geography encapsulates a much wider spectrum of oppositions. While one level registers a spatial dichotomy between an imaginary town and the rest of reality, for example, between Arkham and all of its manifestations, another level shows spatial subversiveness coming out of the tension between the outer space/cosmic horror, the Elder Gods/Old Ones, and the utterly insignificant humans unaware of the larger context. However, a particularly interesting and indicative heterotopian paradigm can be noted if values are inverted, whereby Lovecraft’s idealized presentation of New England proves to be theoretically and practically troublesome. Lovecraft’s country, New England, unfolds itself in all of its historical complexity, or to use Lévy’s words, New England is “a place of profound towns, rooted in the homogeneous tradition of Puritanism and the culture of a single race” (1998, 36). Within this spatial paradigm, Levy’s statement allows us to address Lovecraft’s profound racism as a sign of the existence of an already corrupted “normal” space.

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What Lovecraft portrays—naturally, from the perspective of a Foucauldian spatial paradigm—is an abnormal “normalcy” derived from a racially reinforced religious dogma deeply rooted into the history of the region. A detailed reading of these spaces will therefore uncover majestic towns and marvelous landscapes which perpetually reinforce and promote the glorious and righteous (racist) past of the first settlers. Nevertheless, within this spatially intimate exploration of fictional small communities, the towns of Arkham or Innsmouth act as mirrored dark heterotopias whose primary function is to cause disruption as they allow the existence of subversive creatures and their potential incursion into normalcy. On the other hand, a reading within a larger and a more contemporary cultural context shows Lovecraft as an author whose concept of a haunted reflection of reality is structured around a monstrous racial interpretation of its inhabitants. A very good example of this praxis can be found in Lovecraft’s short story “The Horror at Red Hook”, which, surprisingly, is not set in a small town but takes place in New  York and is inspired by Lovecraft’s brief living experience—and a brief marriage6—in the city. While the story does not contribute to the addressed small-town heterotopian paradigm, it does offer a glimpse into the construction of the monstrous and its relation to an urban setting. Named after a small peninsula in Brooklyn, the story presents a simple plot revolving around a detective, Thomas Malone, and a wealthy individual of European descent named Robert Suydam. Malone’s investigation into Red Hook and Suydam’s dealings, although critically considered as one of the less memorable Lovecraft’s tales, marked by an unimaginative if not “pulpish” storyline, allows for a deeper understanding of the author’s perspective regarding other races and offers insight into Lovecraft’s experience of New York itself. Considering that he spent most of his life in New England—he was deeply enamored with the region and its simpler ways of life—as well as his already mentioned racial preferences, the notion of a city grown out of a multitude of races was particularly problematic for Lovecraft. Lovecraft describes the experience of Red Hook as “a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island … The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant” (Lovecraft 2014, 338). Figures such as “hybrid squalor” or “hopeless 6  Lovecraft was briefly married to Sonia Haft Greene, which led him to move to New York for a period of two years.

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tangle and enigma”, as Joshi argues, are a clear indicator of Lovecraft’s opinion regarding racial integration (1999, 105). The situation escalates as the story progresses and Malone discovers a dilapidated church under which he finds “unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails” only to conclude that they were filled with “cosmic sin […] and festered by unhallowed rites […] Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved” (Lovecraft 2014, 349). Following Lovecraft’s ornate narrative, the story reaches its peak when we learn that Suydam not only took part in the unholy rituals but also participated in men-smuggling (illegal immigration)—both facts are only briefly addressed and eventually blurred by the collapse of the surface buildings and Suydam’s death. The story comes to an end by returning to Lovecraft’s, and therefore the reader’s, initial fear of a city threatened by a “monstrous” other, with Red Hook remaining the same as before. The terror, embodied in Suydam, is now gone, “but the evil spirits of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear” (2014, 353). Although located outside of the regional confines of New England, other Lovecraft’s stories do not necessarily follow the same narratively confusing and explicit racist patterns. Instead of expressing the author’s horror with a big and (racially) uncontrollable space of a metropolis, Lovecraft’s classic stories, such as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” or the novella The Dunwich Horror, investigate the already mentioned parallel realities of heterotopian spaces located within a much more familiar setting. While here the monstrous is still equated with non-white races, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, for example, tells a proper tale of exploration, spatial contrast, and subversion, with the unnamed narrator7, presumably the writer himself, who, enthralled by the mystery surrounding the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth, decides to investigate it further. The story develops around the town itself, supposedly a subject of 1927–1928 federal inquiry and intervention that was presented in the public as an effort in the prohibition war. Following a series of organized efforts to burn or explode large portions of the town, large-scale arrests of the local 7  Even though the story does not mention the name of the narrator, in his research Joshi confirms that his name was in fact Robert Olmstead, an information found within the notes of the novel (1999, 159).

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populations and their secretive incarceration, together with a military intervention that even included a submarine launching torpedoes into the marine abyss next to a reef at some distance from the harbor itself, the town is immediately set as a problematic space, a location that does not conform to ubiquitous normalcy of the surrounding regions. As such, the space directly conforms to functionality principles of heterotopian locations, ranging from its simple appearance, suggesting a mirrored but nevertheless distorted imagery, to more profound issues of functionality, now tainted by the already mentioned notion of horror-based heterotopia. As Lovecraft’s story develops, the list of Foucauldian principles slowly emerges: the readers first experience the physical segregation of the coastal town which is deemed so unpopular or, as it is later discovered, so frightful that it is omitted from maps and guidebooks. There are no meaningful ways to reach the town, except by an old bus driven by one of the inhabitants of Innsmouth, which forces the narrator to endure the explicitly strange and unpleasant sight and fishy smell of the driver before reaching Innsmouth. After the arduous—and somewhat ritualized—journey to the mysterious location, the narrator encounters an apparently abandoned and dilapidated town that somehow managed to preserve a temporal status quo, which only confirms its counter-site qualities. As the narrator walks the streets of these otherwise decaying surroundings for the first time, he notices that the “[p]avement and sidewalks were increasingly well defined, and though most of the houses were quite old—wood and brick structures of the early nineteenth century—they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past” (2014, 878). The idea of a heterotopian site not easily accessible to the uninitiated or the uninformed, as well as temporal displacement or internal temporal paradigm, is then expanded through the narrator’s further exploration, and amazement caused by the discovery of the possibility of juxtaposition of several, otherwise incompatible spaces, within a real one. Innsmouth is not only a half-deserted fishing town, almost completely destroyed for suspicious reasons by the government, but it is also the site of a cult named the Esoteric Order of Dagon through which the locals interact with some strange fish-frog creatures living in the deep. The interaction, premised on an exchange of fish and gold for human sacrifice, soon escalates as the locals become forced to mate with the creatures; in return, as a new hybrid reality sets in, the locals are offered immortal life in the vast underwater cities. From a spatial perspective, the town,

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therefore, has a multilayered purpose whereby, while functioning as a counter-­site to outside spaces, it becomes subject to the influence and creation of other counter-sites within itself, which in turn subvert the previous paradigm. This idea of heterotopian spaces within or in relation to other heterotopian spaces—a notion that could tentatively be described as a post-heterotopian concept—is something that will heavily mark the entire small-town spatial paradigm, particularly the interpretations of the trope that will be presented in the following chapters, for example, in the works of Stephen King. However, as the story progresses, the true horror once again rises from Lovecraft’s concerns about race and the actual possibility of hybridity. By following the already seen patterns of Lovecraft’s racial position, such as the one previously addressed in “The Horror at Red Hook”, the conclusion of the tale of Innsmouth sees the protagonist successfully fleeing the accursed town while being hunted by groups of people created as a mutation between the human and the fish-frog race. However, in line with the customs of such narratives, the actual climax of the story occurs at its very end. The narrator, obsessed with the experience, continues his research of the region and the town, confirming in such a way yet another heterotopian principle, which unknowingly dominated most of the narrative. While it shows evidence of different heterotopian praxes, the idea behind this story best encapsulates the first principle—the heterotopias of deviation—of Foucauldian paradigm. Innsmouth is a space where natural degenerations need to be kept at a safe distance and the only place where the horror of hybridity and the mixture of races could exist. And as the readers grow increasingly aware of this truth, they, just like the narrator himself, as an unknowing descendant of an Innsmouth family, go through the horror of turning into a fish-like creature. With this metamorphosis underway, the incursion and affirmation of Innsmouth’s monstrosity is completed, confirming once again the continuously looming threat of Lovecraft’s dark heterotopias. A similar pattern of heterotopian spaces and their subversive nature can be observed in a series of Lovecraft’s New England stories where he enriches the New England map with new spaces and locations as well as different kinds of horror that can be derived from them. However, another space manifested in the form of a very particular town and a particular theoretical and spatial functionality stands out in the rest of Lovecraft’s geography. The mythical town of Arkham, while appearing in numerous stories, although not always as the dominant location of the narrative, is an almost textbook example of heterotopian discourse in Lovecraft’s fiction.

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What sets Arkham apart—besides the fact that it does not have a fixed spatial location and that it regularly reappears all over New England depending on the needs of a storyline—is the previously mentioned notion of a post-heterotopian setting. By simultaneously appearing as a spatial center of a particular narrative while also existing as a type of spatial extension and even subversion to spaces that already function as counter-sites, Arkham effectively mirrors an already monstrous spatiality. Arkham reflects to the letter Foucault’s idea of heterotopian spaces being akin to a ship, and as such functions, in Foucault’s words, as a “heterotopia par excellence” (1986, 27). As “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (2986, 27), the ship reflects the functionality of Arkham and its ability to serve both as an opposition to regular sites and, through its geographic fluidity and versatility, as a counter-site to the already existing heterotopias. An example of this type of functionality and its position in Lovecraft’s geography can be found in, for example, The Dunwich Horror where the readers encounter the lugubrious village of Dunwich with most of the houses “deserted and falling to ruin”, a “broken-­steepled church,” and a “faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries” (2014, 674). Dunwich, a shunned and “ridiculously old” (2014, 677) place, is a location where Lavinia Whateley, an albino and physically deformed woman, living with her half-insane father notorious for practicing witchcraft, gave birth to Wilbur Whateley, a unique and apparently fatherless child. In typical Lovecraftian fashion, the story exposes the madness of the Whateley family through the hushed gossip of the superstitious locals who take notice of the odd behavior of the family. Their concerns and fears are further heightened by the realization of the unnatural development of Wilbur who at the age of a year and seven months has grown like a child of four and is “a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker” (2014, 681). Besides the child’s unnatural growth, the locals are particularly suspicious of the work on the Whateley house: its constant remodeling and expansion, as it will soon be discovered, is necessary to accommodate the growth and eventual rise of an unknown creature and progeny of Lovecraft’s mythological deity Yog-Sothoth. However, to complete the process, the prodigious Wilbur needs to obtain an integral copy of the Necronomicon, given that his own lacks the much-needed pages. This moment in the story marks the introduction of Arkham as a post-heterotopian space. It is Arkham’s Library of the Miscatonic University, alongside a few other prestigious locations,

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such as Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, and the University of Buenos Ayres, that holds a priceless copy of the fabled tome. To place it within a heterotopian context, Wilbur needs to venture outside of his own counter-site and into another space which, in terms of its functionality, conforms to the principles outlined by Foucault. While not a heterotopia of crisis or deviation, a library preserves its own temporality and the ability to contain a variety of worlds within it. Similarly, it changes its function according to the context—while readily available to the educated population of Arkham, it remains a prohibitive and not easily accessible space, which Wilbur himself comes to realize when he is prevented from taking the coveted book back home. As the story progresses—Wilbur dies and the creature hidden in Dunwich breaks free—the spatial dynamics between the locations and the heterotopian quality of Arkham in relation to Dunwich remain intact. This, however, is not a unique example confirming Arkham as either a heterotopian or a post-heterotopian space. In stories such as “Herbert West—Reanimator”, “The Unnamable”, “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, and many others, Arkham emerges as a town mostly void of (racial) degeneracy and overall monstrosities8. It nevertheless conforms to many of the heterotopian principles as it unfolds itself through a variety of very specific, and heterotopically segregated structures such as a university, a library, a hospital, a sanitarium, as well as cemetery.

Walking Down Main Street The transition from Lovecraft to a more contemporary representation of small-town horror, although limited in production, was nevertheless marked by culturally influential titles such Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers published as a novel in 1955, and since then adapted and reinterpreted through a variety of formats ranging from film to video games bearing the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Finney’s supposed metaphor for fear of communism finds itself unfolding within the setting of an idyllic American small town invaded by the aliens whose goal is to replace the town’s 8  Except possibly for its connection to witches, witchcraft and the Salem witch trials, as seen, among other stories, in “The Dream of the Witch House”. As described by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, Arkham is a location where “terrible ceremonies are said to have taken place” and many of its buildings are “silent witnesses of dark deeds” (2000, 34).

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inhabitants with perfect, albeit alien, doppelgangers. Perhaps an even more influential aspect regarding the heterotopian discourse can be explored in Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), where yet another perfect small town—Green Town, Illinois—is being threatened by The Pandemonium Shadow Show, a visiting carnival that metaphorically and actually feeds off of its inhabitants. While Bradbury builds his novel around a variety of topics such as childhood and maturing, loneliness and the accompanying fears, as well as the often-addressed loss of the individuality characteristic for small communities, from the perspective of a spatial discourse, he presents a very interesting polarity between the town and the sinister carnival. Seen through the prism of a heterotopian paradigm, the carnival manifests itself as a counter-site that, through its dark nature, preys upon the inhabitants of Green Town by promising them a desired reality and in doing so feeds on them. However, despite these sporadic examples—whose excellence perpetuated the viability of the small-town trope within the genre—the correlation between horror and small-town spatiality in a manner akin to Lovecraft’s was not developed further. It is not until the advent of Stephen King and his reading and writing of the American small town that a more significant spatial expansion within the genre occurred. Despite his unique approach to horror and his many innovative contributions to the genre, King’s absolute understanding of the trope ultimately led to a standardization of what a small town should be.9 Despite his reinvention or at least reinvigoration of the genre, King’s work did not develop in a vacuum, but rather grew out of the work of many of his predecessors, including all of the previously mentioned authors. From the geographical and regional perspective, however, Lovecraft remained the most influential point of reference, so it comes as no surprise that King readily adopted Lovecraft’s, at the time, unique, coexistence of fictional and real spaces within the larger map of the region. The often dark and deranged locations such as Innsmouth or Dunwich, or even slightly more structured and civilized Arkham, in King’s 9  This obviously does not mean that the vision of other authors, particularly in television and film, did not contribute to this spatial phenomenon. For example, David Lynch and his Twin Peaks radically expanded and reinvented the (spatial) limits of horror and the small town. A similar, although strongly nostalgia-based reinvention can be seen in Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things (cf. Lukić M., Parezanović T. (2018) “Tracing the Nowhere— Heterotopian Incursions in Twin Peaks.” in The Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 51, No. 1. 109-128., as well as Lukić M., Parezanović T. (2020) “Heterotopian Horrors.” In: Bloom C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic).

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fiction find their incarnation in towns such as Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot, Haven, and the ever-foreboding Derry. Located within the state of Maine, once again in New England, from a theoretical and spatial point, all of these towns project an almost identical functionality premised on identifying a subversive spatial other and offering an imaginary playground within which to locate selected fears and obsessions. With regards to the use of geography and structure of nightmarish small towns, similarities between King and Lovecraft, however, end with spatial binarity because the core of King’s imaginary community evolves in a somewhat different direction. While Lovecraft often depicts his small communities as products of an unacceptable racial amalgamation, leading to the genesis of unthinkable horrors which in turn subvert the surrounding spaces, King’s approach is void of such fantastic (and obviously racist) constructs and instead returns to the core of the American imagination embodied in the works of authors such as Hawthorne or Irving. Even though King’s small towns unquestionably continue to be counter-sites to the surrounding geography and proper sites of horror, the source of the produced uneasiness now stems from the tensions within the communities themselves. By recalling the sternness of the Puritan heritage, now combined with the existential particularities of rural Maine, King writes about the terror of vampires, crazed, murderous dogs, or Lovecraftian deities living in the sewers, while in fact addressing the horrors typical of these small communities such as, as Tony Magistrale argues, “encrusted isolation, pressures to conform, and lack of compassion” (2010, 29). Yet, there is a need to create a balance, a counterpart to the monstrous, therefore, these negative sides are obviously not enough. While Lovecraft’s answer to this is to present an intellectual and often elitist counterpart to evil, King shows that the monstrous can be addressed within the community itself. As Magistrale explains, King’s “regionalism recognizes the limits inherent in his fellow natives – their tendency toward a punitive groupthink behavior”, while, at the same time, “he has also carved out many of his most memorable characters from the New England personality’s fierce streak of independence and dignified humility” (2010, 29). This idea of an internal struggle and the possibility to rise above the situation, whereby King’s rural inhabitants are unable to “initiate difficult moral choices”, but are instead inclined to obediently follow an imposed dictatorship of evil (2010, 29), reflects itself onto spatial articulation of King’s communities, particularly when observed as an example of a heterotopian context.

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A very impactful example illustrating these dynamics can be observed in King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot. Imagined as a transference of Stoker’s vampire Dracula to a small town in Maine, ‘Salem’s Lot creates a pattern King will revisit on many different occasions in his career. Following the premise of a monster looming in the background of the town—and thus closely resembling Stoker’s dynamic between the vampire and London—King methodically highlights the visible and invisible social tissue of the small community and in doing so provides possibly the most succinct and all-­ encompassing profile of a haunted town. The story opens with the return of Ben Mears to Jerusalem’s Lot: a writer who spent part of his childhood here is now intended to write a book about his experiences during his stay, particularly about the supposedly haunted mansion named Marsten House overlooking the town. Unbeknown to Mears, the problematic house has already been purchased by a certain Kurt Barlow and his partner Richard Straker. Barlow, the main vampire and therefore the antagonist of the story, and his human helper Straker changes the town by slowly turning its population into vampires. While this dynamic is not unusual for vampire titles—whose original premise was developed by Stoker—King masterfully locks onto the description and the reactions of the small town while facing the unknown danger. As the readers follow Ben’s arrival, they become privy to the town’s uniqueness presented more as an idyllic vision of a small-town American experience of Norman Rockwell type than an unsettling memory associated with the Marsten house. However, this changes as the story develops and King progressively outlines the various mundane aspects of small-town routines that serve only as a veneer for the true human depravity hiding beneath it. Once the metaphoric contours of the town are set, King presents the true nature of the town and its innate corruption. “The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul” (1991, 185). King then continues to almost dissect the town and portrays its various segments as “an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land” (1991, 185). Each segment carries a separate burden that, when set apart and eventually taken as a whole, creates an archetypal idea of a small-town in rural Maine. As King describes it, “[t]he melting pot never melted very much” (1991, 185), so the population is still largely Scotch-English or French, the buildings are “constructed of honest wood”, and the older houses and stores unexplainably

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“false-fronted” (1991, 185). Finally, the “granite-bodied” land is making farming a “thankless, sweaty, miserable, crazy business” (1991, 185). These features, while depicting the true harshness of the town, serve also as markers of division between the initially projected utopian perception of an outsider and the eventually unfolded heterotopian subversiveness hiding beneath the surface. “There is no life here”, King continues, “but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take” (1991, 186). The town’s secrets are many, as the author suggests, and they are well kept, known to some, unknown to others. As such, the vampire’s appearance, and the subsequent death or, in vampiric terms, transformation of the town becomes, in spatial terms, irrelevant. “The town cares for devil’s no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough” (1991, 188). This undisputable darkness therefore functions as a counter-site to both normal spaces and to initial appearance of normalcy. This heterotopian site is, once again, defined by principles that dictate not only the existence of such a space but also the mechanisms through which they function in relation to non-heterotopian spaces. This interactivity in turn facilitates the birth and perpetuation of horror, where, in King’s narrative, the attack of the vampire, however horrific, sometimes remains unmatched by the brutality offered by the town itself, its selfishness, its ignorance, and its violence. Furthermore, ‘Salem’s Lot is not void of the previously addressed post-heterotopian sites which here assume the image and function of the Marsten House. Looming over the town “like a ruined king” (1991, 372) or like a “dark idol” (1991, 106), the house sets itself apart from the rest of the described spaces. Formerly owned by Hubert “Hubie” Marsten, who performed strange rituals and eventually murdered his wife and committed suicide within its walls, the house transitions into a perfectly corrupted location in which the master vampire will settle. However, the house is as it is—corrupted sometime in the past and now functioning exclusively as a conduit for the introduction of the vampire. Despite its appearance, and undoubtedly ominous projections throughout the narrative, it does not function outside of the confines imposed by the trope itself. While its role in relation to the surface-level projection of the town does function as a potential heterotopian site, its true nature is articulated only through its complementarity to the actual hidden nature of the town. More precisely, the heterotopian and post-­ heterotopian dynamic between the house and the town evolves around

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the house’s limited permeability. As a site of deviation with its own temporal reality locked within the features of the horror trope, together with its ability to juxtapose different spaces and functionalities—such as a home, a graveyard, or a desecrated site—within itself, and by allowing very limited access to itself, the house acts as a subversive site in relation to the town below. As such, it provides the town with the impetus needed for the activation of its suppressed darkness, articulated through vampire attacks and the local population subsequently turning into vampires themselves. The consequence of the spread of vampirism in King’s novel, as Magistrale argues, is different from what can be observed in Dracula, where vampirism functions as a subversive act, transforming the victims into highly sexualized and transgressive beings (2003, 180). In King’s interpretation, the vampire’s attack leads to the final elimination of individuality, which is now replaced by the “mass homogenization of small-town America” (2003, 180), a process initiated before Barlow’s arrival. King’s presentation of the interaction between the town and the vampire/house also operates as a metaphoric comment on the political situation of the time. His fictional vampires thus mirror the “silent majority” of Americans, as President Nixon called them, who conformed to “traditional and conservative moral and political values that were under siege during the 1960s and early 1970s” yet failed “intercede against an immoral war and an immoral president who was a crook” (Magistrale 2003, 179). When placed within a spatial discourse, the said vampire-induced homogenization of the town can therefore be observed as the formation of a heterotopian counter-site that opposes the progressive forces of American (counter)culture and politics of the time. As the story unravels, the readers experience the dread of the main protagonist and his allies who are witnessing the unstoppable mutation of the entire town, which can also be observed as its final spatial form. The narrative arch of the hero(s) concludes with their defeat of the main vampire, the catalyst for the homogenization, rendering the post-heterotopian space superfluous. Nevertheless, it is not a happy ending because both the heroes and the readers are aware that the destruction of the main antagonist did not neutralize the threat of the vampires hiding behind closed doors and shut curtains of ‘Salem’s Lot. The now fully actualized dark heterotopian space remains a constant both in the novel and in the larger geographical context of King’s imaginary Maine. While in the novel the protagonists, as an epilogue, attempted to finally destroy the town by burning it to the ground, it is obvious that their efforts were futile, a fact confirmed in “One for the Road” where

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King revisits ‘Salem’s Lot—this time from the outside of the mirrored reality, observing the dark heterotopian space from the position of normalcy. This story, acting as a sequel10 to the events in the novel, describes the encounter between two locals and an unexpected visitor who bursts into a bar in the middle of a heavy snowstorm and asks them to help him rescue his wife and daughter who got stranded in a car just outside of the nearby town of ‘Salem’s Lot. As their rescue attempt fails and they barely manage to escape the now changed mother and daughter, the two locals run away, leaving the crazed father at the mercy of his family, thus further fueling the local mythology of the haunted region. Burned down two years before, Jerusalem’s Lot never got rebuilt despite attempts from different settlers and the only constant are occasional disappearances of people who attempted to live there or were simply passing through. The town is now no longer a porous and interactive entity, but it rather acts as a monolithic dark heterotopia, a mirrored dark reflection of former reality whose unconventional nature now manifests itself only through the incursions of its now exclusively homogeneous vampire population. In the process of mapping King’s heterotopian Maine, Castle Rock is an interesting town to visit. Appearing in several novels, such as The Dead Zone (1979), Cujo (1981), The Dark Half (1989), as well as series of short stories, its most impactful presentation remains the one from Needful Things (1991). By presenting, once again, a story of a small town, King falls into a narrative pattern similar to the one found in ‘Salem’s Lot. Here King once again explores various nuances of a close community, riddled with small conflicts, unfulfilled dreams crushed by the mundane small-­ town existence, and above all secrets. Analogous to the narrative premise, the presented spatial paradigms resemble the ones found in the previously analyzed novel. While, on the surface at least, not as problematic as Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock exists as a heterotopian entity within the larger map of Maine. What makes Castle Rock different from, for example Jerusalem’s Lot, Haven, or even Derry, is the variety and number of bad things that—in numerous novels—occurred in or in relation to the town. Ranging from a rabid St. Bernard, a potential fascist presidential candidate, a doppelgänger coming to life from a writer’s alter ego, to a whole 10  It is interesting to notice that King not only developed a sequel to his novel, but also a prequel—a short story titled “Jerusalem’s Lot”. Furthermore, the town has been referred to in a number of King’s novels such as The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary, and three books from The Dark Tower series, etc.

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sequence of other violent and generally difficultly explained occurrences, the town positions itself as a polyvalent heterotopian entity. Through this heterotopian status, it manages to successfully mirror a regular small town together with all of its mundane idiosyncrasies, which simultaneously coexist with a variety of horrors. The (apparent) last iteration of the town unfolds in Needful Things, prophetically subtitled The Last Castle Rock Story, where the spatial and heterotopian status of the town is one final time subverted by a post-heterotopian paradigm. The story centers around a new shop named “Needful Things” which opens in the town and immediately attracts the townspeople who are at first curious about the store and its owner—Leland Gaunt, an older and very charming gentleman— only to find themselves strangely and inexplicably attracted by particular items found in it. The items are mostly ordinary everyday objects, but they have a special effect on a person, making them irresistible. Strangely enough, the price is a bargain and the only condition is that eventually they will need to perform a small favor in return—they will have to prank someone from the community. Although initially presented as just a businessman, Gaunt is much more than just a shop owner and, as the readers soon realize, he has intimate knowledge of all the town’s feuds, disagreements, and general tensions. This knowledge, accompanied by the enticing bargains the store offers, allows him to create a network of mischief, which, once activated, will annihilate the town. The spatial dynamics follows the already established pattern whereby the town of Castle Rock conforms to the darker side of Maine’s geography of and King’s imagination and, as such, mirrors and subverts the adjacent normal spaces. Just like ‘Salem’s Lot, Castle Rock projects and conforms to the same type of heterotopian qualities because it is simultaneously connected and dissociated from the rest of the world and it is conditioning or completely prohibiting access to outsiders. Furthermore, the town encompasses a variety of different realities in itself while functioning as a space of entrapment for an endless number of horrors. And while this heterotopian praxis presents itself as a type of self-sustainable dark geographic subconscious, its proper activation and subsequent deconstruction occurs only through the introduction of an additional, post-heterotopian space. As Gaunt’s store establishes as a heterotopian space mirroring another heterotopian space, the subversion of the initial space ensues. The pacing of subversion is steady as Gaunt gradually sets the necessary pieces in place. The outline of the counter-site starts to take shape with the store’s first customer, a young boy named Brian Rusk. The store is dim, with only a few spotlights

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illuminating glass display cases. The floor “covered in a rich wall-to-wall carpet color of burgundy wine”, accompanied by walls “painted eggshell white” (1992, 22) suggests a setting more akin to a library than a shop. A sudden appearance of Leland Gaunt who emerges from a doorway hidden behind a dark velvet curtain only adds to the sensation, eerie and pleasurable at the same time. Even though the store is unlocked, which means Brian is allowed to enter, he stays at the doorway until the strange man invites him inside. This transitional moment, although described without particularities, somehow stands out in its simplicity. As Mr. Gaunt invites Brian inside and extends his hand to greet him, a noticeable distinction between the outside and the space inside occurs: “He had to step over the threshold and into the shop to clasp the tall man’s hand, and he did so without a single qualm. The door shut behind him and latched of its own accord. Brian did not notice” (1992, 23). The potential for the subversion of the already subverting space continues through Gaunt himself, whose appearance, although pleasurable and agreeable on the surface, reflects both his nature and the nature of the space he represents. As Gaunt smiles, Brian notices his teeth are crooked and yellow, only to realize Gaunt’s fingers are “extremely narrow and extremely long” (1992, 24), and they are making a hissing sound when he rubs his hands. Brian is therefore locked in a state of apprehension caused by the surface-level gratification with his ensuing acquisition, Gaunt’s congeniality, and the profound intuitive certainty that something here is wrong—a state that will eventually be shared by all of the townsfolk of Castle Rock. From this point on, Gaunt’s influence will uncontrollably rise, culminating in a final confrontation first between the manipulated Castle Rock townspeople now turning on each other, and then finally between Gaunt himself and a small group of protagonists. And as Gaunt finally reveals his true nature and flees the crumbling town with the store now destroyed, the subversion of the initial dark heterotopia is complete and the town’s true nature, much like the one in Jerusalem’s Lot, surfaces out of the rubble. While Castle Rock stands as a centerpiece of King’s geography by being the spatial focus of many different storylines, the most complex small-­ town spatial construct is the one presented with the town of Derry. While appearing for the first time in the short story “The Bird and the Album”, and later on in novels such as Insomnia and 11/22/63, Derry’s only proper articulation, together with King’s most multilayered portrayal of small town and its horrors, takes shape in the author’s lengthy novel It. Inspired by the real town of Bangor (also in Maine), It manages to present a

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complex storyline spanning over years, decades, and even centuries, narrating the monstrous cohabitation between a creature living in the town’s sewers and the town itself. As Magistrale describes it and King himself confirms, the novel represents “the magnum opus of his two decades of work”, encompassing “many of the issues, themes, and narrative stylistics King has been employing since Carrie” (1992, 101), leading to an extensively rich narrative covering not only the main protagonists, their interaction with the town, and with Pennywise, but also the history and the social structure of the town, thus outlining the many manifestations of the monstrous in the town fueled by the presence of the creature. While addressing the novel’s sheer number of different themes would require a separate chapter, if not an entirely separate study, the spatial perspective offers a fairly straightforward, albeit intricate, insight into the connection between the narrated spatial paradigm and horror. In one of his approaches to the novel, Magistrale discusses the notion of the “sociology of It” and develops his basic argument around the connection between the creature and the town with respect to the fact that It arrived to Earth in an era corresponding “to the age of prehistoric America” and landed on the future location of Derry, suggesting in such a way “the absolute link between the genesis of It (and its cryptic allusion to original sin) and the human town that will settle upon It” (1992, 102-103). This connection is extremely important for the understanding of the spatial paradigm of Derry, especially in relation to the previously addressed “subconscious” of the town which, in order to show its actual nature, necessitates a metaphoric or actual push from another entity. Furthermore, if the discourse is contextualized within the “boundaries” of Foucauldian heterotopia, the evidenced strength of the connection negates the necessity and therefore the existence of a strictly post-heterotopian context. What King creates with Derry is not only a small town with a multitude of dark secrets, but a self-­ sustainable monstrous entity that has through the ages created and perpetuated a series of internal heterotopias, all under the control of a hidden entity. As one of the characters (Mike Hanlon) states: “It’s become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or Bassey Park, or the library. Only It’s not a matter of outward geography […] Somehow It’s gotten inside” (1987, 479). Consequently, each episode in the town’s history, each act of violence perpetuated against the innocent or somehow different, contextualized within a different historical or social or spatial setting (within the limits of the town) represents a heterotopian universe on its own, subservient only to the desires and

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needs of Pennywise. The idea of a string of coexisting heterotopian spaces relates to the monster itself and its cycle of appearance of approximately every 25 years. Reminiscent of many Lovecraftian horrors, It awakes and starts feeding on children, which in turn influences and parallels various violent episodes throughout the town. These episodes, however, are somehow never recorded or publicly evidenced, which indicates that the town suffers from bouts of collective amnesia. As such, each violent event occurs in an independent temporal frame and only briefly mirrors the true nature of the town. The participants that are “allowed” to enter these distortions of reality are the “othered” victims and their victimizers, now bound together within these spatial deviations by incomprehensible acts of violence that occur within. These anomalies and the accompanying violence do not, however, become the norm, as the town almost immediately resets itself into a forgetful slumber void of any suggestion of the transpired occurrences. Following Magistrale’s reasoning which says that It and Derry cannot be observed as separate entities, but that Derry needs to be considered “an extension or manifestation of It, and vice versa” (1992, 104), it can be argued that there cannot be a mutual heterotopian opposition because, once again, there is no opposition between the creature and the town. The violence and the monstrousness, however, does not remain without answer, so King, in his attempt to pen the ultimate narrative on children and monsters, writes a story about a group of kids, named the Losers Club, who oppose Derry’s darkness. Destined to come together because of their personal traumas and later encounters with the creature, the so-­ called Losers Club decide to face the monster for the first time in the late 1950s, and then, because the cycle continues and the creature reappears every so often, one final time in 1985. And while the readers become privy to the truly horrific nature of Derry as the novel develops, the spatial paradigm does not make the full circle before 1985 when the group of kids, now adults, returns to their hometown. Just one member of the Losers Club, Mike Hanlon, remained in Derry working as a librarian and the town’s (un)intentional historian. Apart from his role in the group, Hanlon serves as a connecting point between the past and the future, an archivist of the appearance and immediate disappearance of various heterotopian incursions/sites. Once the group gets together again, Hanlon shares what he has learned through his work and so reveals the full scope of violence in Derry. As Hanlon reveals to the group, the recent murder of nine children is the last in the morbid pattern that took place on a least five more

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occasions: from 1957 to 1958, from 1929 to 1930, from 1769 to 1770, from 1740 to 1743, and from 1715 to 1716. Each murderous cycle, nevertheless, remains publicly unaddressed and the only indicator that something is wrong is the rise of violent or unexplained events causing the death of large groups of people. Hanlon’s revelation of a pattern brings out the spatial paradigm and shows that Derry, and consequently It, even though characterized by fleeing heterotopian sites, is in fact a proper, all-­ encompassing dark heterotopian site in itself, hiding its monstrousness beneath its surface, or within its self-imposed forgetfulness, which emerges on its own volition. Regardless of which small town the story maps, be it Derry, Jerusalem’s Lot, Arkham, Innsmouth, or any other American small town, its horrors are intrinsically linked to the spatial component of the narrative. Returning once more to the initially proposed concept of the mappaemundi, we can observe the genre’s obsession with the exploration of the unknown, and the curiosity for the horrific, as well as the tendency to quantify and understand what it discovers on the other side in accordance with its own experiences and cultural and social preconceptions. Both Lovecraft and King, while influenced by a familiar geography, need to create an alternative spatial platform on which they can explore their personal obsessions and fears. The introduction or appropriation of the concept of a small town, defined by religious, racial, and other similarly exclusionary ideologies, allows these authors to challenge and critique both their own realities and preconceptions while enjoying the safety provided by the boundaries of the genre. As explored within the chapter, these initial ideas and their functionalities, as well as success within the genre, can in turn be analytically expanded upon using Foucault’s idea of heterotopian spaces and their role as primary sites of imagination. Within this heterotopian paradigm, where a successful dislocation from the established cultural moral and finally spatial norms occurs, the initial mechanism of mappaemundi becomes adequately articulated thus allowing the core reality/normalcy to be mirrored onto the “discovered” space and its subsequent distortion caused by the proposed Foucauldian principles as well as by the nature of the genre itself. What emerges is a new mappaemundi, a drawing of a new map that, while still depicting the unknown horrors (or the horrors of the unknown), indicates a close correlation between known and unknown spaces as well as the heterotopia induced tendencies to project and mirror our true selves.

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References Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Order of Things—An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. ———. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Guadalupi, Gianni, and Alberto Manguel. 2000. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. New York: Harcourt Brace. Joshi, S.T. 2001. A Dreamer and a Visionary H. P. Lovecraft in his Time. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———. 1999. A Subtler Magick—The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft. Gillette: Wildside Press. King, Stephen. 1987. It. New York: Signet. ———. 1991. ‘Salem’s Lot. New York: Plume. ———. 1992. Needful Things. New York: Signet. Kneale, James. 2006. From Beyond: H.  P. Lovecraft and the Place of Horror. Cultural Geographies 13: 106–126. Knight, Kelvin T. 2016. Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia. Textual Practice 22 (4): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0950236X.2016.1156151. Lévy, Maurice. 1998. Lovecraft—A Study in the Fantastic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. 2014. The Complete Fiction of H.P.  Lovecraft. New York: Race Point Publishing. Lukić, M., and T.  Parezanović. 2018. Tracing the Nowhere—Heterotopian Incursions in Twin Peaks. The Journal of Popular Culture 51 (1): 109–128. ———. 2020. Heterotopian Horrors. In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­33136-­8_68. Magistrale, Tony. 1992. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. New York: Twayne Publishers. ———. 2003. Hollywood’s Stephen King. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Stephen King—America’s Storyteller. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Mircea, Eliade. 1987. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harvest Book. Ringel, Faye. 2014. New England Gothic. In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L. Crow, 139–150. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. 2016. Lovecraft Rising. In The Age of Lovecraft, ed. Carl H.  Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 1–42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place—The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Turchi, Peter. 2009. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. Woodward, David. 1987. Medieval Mappaemundi. In The History of Cartography, Volume 1—Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J.B. Harley and David Woodward, 286–370. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 6

Urban Nightmares

“We could be pets, we could be food, but all we really are is livestock.” John Carpenter, They Live

DaRk Alleys When it comes to the function of space and the correlation between space and the horror genre, a common point of reference, as the cases addressed in previous chapters show, is a sense of intimacy and immediacy, whereby the proposed spaces directly condition the audience and protagonists, which in turn leads to an instantaneous and highly subjective horror experience. This subjective experience takes form and is fueled by a variety of different contexts and with different goals, which are for the most part closely related to the scale of the explored spaces. While the American frontier represents a physically and metaphorically different space than a suburban setting, in both cases, the spatially conditioned horrors are a product of a constructed Other which directly, and often violently, interacts with the protagonists. In turn, the produced horror becomes a direct indicator of a particular issue(s) whereby the portrayed violence often stands as a metaphor for larger social and cultural problems. As all of the studied examples show, the presented spatial narratives tend to operate, even on a theoretical level, around a binary system of opposition structured around what is presented as normal and everything else that is perceived as foreign, subversive, and therefore threatening. However, a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Lukić, Geography of Horror, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99325-2_6

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departure and reinvention of the binarity within the genre does exist, and it thrives within the not-so-strict subgenre boundaries of urban gothic and urban horror. Developed as a somewhat natural diachronic and physical evolution of spatial context within the genre, urban gothic and later urban horror1 deconstruct the already discussed intimacy by positioning its narratives within the urban confines of a city. The narrative dynamics of this new space and the change in the level of intimacy between the professed protagonist(s) and the articulated Other can initially be observed through a very succinct, although often addressed idea, presented by Alexandra Warwick in The Handbook to Gothic Literature where she argues that “[t]he city is seen as uncanny, constructed by people yet unknowable by the individual” (1998, 288). Although this idea will be expanded and recontextualized in a larger theoretical framework of this chapter, it remains a key point of reference for understanding the basic functionality of the explored spaces. The notion of Freudian recognition, and even physical or metaphorical construction of a particular space, followed and perpetually accompanied by a constant inability to fully understand what has been created and observed, leads to a unique spatial premise. In fact, through this notion of repressed fears, of the ever-growing unhomeliness of the city projected upon the individual, a sense of dread develops. However, what contrasts the space of the city to the previously addressed spaces is the already mentioned lack of intimacy, which, although premised on the familiar polarity between the presumably normal and different, fails to identify the true nature of the Other. The resulting dynamics is a continuous tension between the subjective realities of the different protagonists captured within an urban environment and the unpredictable changes and threats that such environment allows. Furthermore, because of the uncanny nature of the city, the threats and dangers of such spaces within the horror genre are not only limited to the actual dangers characterizing large urban centers but often mirror subjective fears of the protagonists themselves. Furthermore, even if the city is explored through an anthropological or even geographical lens, offering a more disciplined framework than a 1  The differentiation between the two terms is premised on the progressive departure of the various more contemporary narratives from what could be perceived as an intrinsically gothic storyline. As it will be argued later in the chapter, contemporary urban narratives are more akin, mostly due to their violence, explicitness and general addressing of particular issues, to a horror sensibility, rather than a more romanticized gothic one.

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somewhat abstract Freudian reading, the results historically, as Yi-Fu Tuan among others notes, lead to an image of a perilous and fear-inducing space. Even though the city is “[b]uilt to rectify the apparent confusion and chaos of nature” it “itself becomes a disorienting physical environment in which tenement houses collapse on their inhabitants, fires break out, and heavy traffic threatens life and limb. Although every street and building—and indeed all the bricks and stone blocks in them—are clearly the products of planning and thought, the final result may be a vast, disorderly labyrinth” (2013, 146-147). The perils derived from such “disorderly labyrinth” are not limited to unforeseen occurrences within the city walls, but they also include an increase in criminality that is the result of a progressive division between the wealthy and poor sections of the city, additionally fueled by the growth of urban areas. As described by Tuan while discussing London, the citizens were dominantly characterized by an outright prejudice toward strangers, a fear that grew until the townspeople became reluctant “to go out into the ill-lit streets” (2013, 160) as certain portions of the metropolis were completely given over to criminal population, creating whole areas of the city which both regular citizens and officers of the law hesitated to visit (2013, 161). The chaos of the city and its potential as a new source of inspiration for both Gothic and non-Gothic writers was enormous and as such it became an important setting for countless narratives. Interestingly, an American author, Charles Brockden Brown, was among the first to recognize the potential of the urban setting and explore it in Arthur Mervyn published in 1799. Largely set in the city of Philadelphia, the novel tells the story of the eponymous main protagonist who moves from a rural area into the city where he faces all kinds of adversities, ranging from a rampant yellow fever epidemic to characters who are trying either to help him or somehow trick him or deceive him, all of which makes Arthur abandon the city and return to the country. Similar to Brown’s other novels, Arthur Mervyn’s main plot allows for the existence of a subplot and an adjacent political if not philosophical critique of urban practices and customs such as slave trading and its financial dealings. As such, the resulting novel defined the city as a prolific space that offered more complex narratives and gave authors the possibility to address previously unexplored themes. The appeal of the urban setting was not, however, reserved only for the American literary scene, as the European authors soon started to rapidly follow their own industrialization and its inevitable influence on the arts. With the growth of large urban centers such as London or Paris, and their

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cultural and social gravitas and importance, the city became the preferred background for literary staples such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and the ever-popular Bran Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Each of these novellas and novels relies heavily on its urbanity for both an adequate expression of contemporaneity and the articulation of very particular fears and horrors. Stevenson’s exploration of the dark potential of human nature finds its mirroring in the spatial dichotomy of the city, with the main street reflecting Dr. Jekyll’s benevolent properness of a Victorian gentleman and the city’s darker criminal underbelly acting as the hunting ground for the animalistic Mr. Hyde. Stoker’s London becomes the hiding space for the Transylvanian vampire, and potentially even a haunting presence itself since it allows the monster to simply vanish in its numerous dark and foggy streets and alleys, only to emerge on its own volition in order to feed on the citizens of Victorian London. Within the American context, an important step forward in the process of combining the discovered urbanity with the side-produced anxieties can be observed in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Specifically, by reconceptualizing the prototypical Gothic haunted space such as a castle and presenting its dynamics within the larger spatial paradigm of the city, Poe, in his short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1845), develops an interesting urban setting acting in accordance with its European counterparts. With the story set in London, Poe’s narrator sits behind his hotel window and observes as the night falls on the city. As the evening turns to night, and the streets get darker, the narrator takes note of the changes in the figures and crowds he sees from his window. The nighttime setting and the narrator avoiding any type of interaction with his surroundings paint a rather gloomy image of the city, with isolation, if not actual alienation, as strongly permeating the storyline. The sense of urban curiosity evoked by the encounters with colorful noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradespeople, and clerks slowly dissipates as the narrator becomes aware of the darker undertones of the city and its less savory inhabitants. With the disappearance of an upper stratum population, a darker London emerges, showing its peddlers, disabled, as well as drunkards. It is within this context, deep in the night, that the narrator notices an unusual figure, a decrepit older man, who projects a strangely idiosyncratic expression despite its surface-level appearance. As Poe describes, the old man conveys and inspires “ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of

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intense—of supreme despair” (2006, 233), and in doing so immediately catches the narrator’s attention. Intrigued by this development and the unusual figure, the narrator sets off into the night to follow the older man and hopefully learn more about him and his activities. Although short, thin, and apparently feeble, dressed in filthy rags rather than proper clothes, the old man continues to surprise the narrator as strange little details start to emerge in the stranger’s appearance. Astonishingly, the narrator observers how the old man’s linen “although dirty, was of beautiful texture”, as well as the presence of both “a diamond and of a dagger” (2006, 234), spurring even more interest in the strange figure. As the night and the pursue continues, the narrator learns more and more about the old man’s behavior, but he also becomes increasingly aware of a different version of the city around him: “It was the most noisome quarter of London, where everything wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime” (2003, 236). Even though the presented continuous pace of the pursuit, the curious character whose behavior suggests an imminent and possibly extravagant criminal activity, and the usually unexplored locations of a metropolis would suggest an impending narrative climax, Poe opts for an entirely anti-climactic ending in which the narrator follows the old man for the entire night, and the following day, only to realize the pursuit is in fact futile. Realizing that the old man will only continue with his wonderings, without a final goal in mind, the narrator concludes that the old man is in fact a “genius of deep crime” who “refuses to be alone”—“[h]e is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds” (2006, 237). Poe’s story evidently allows for different interpretations, starting with the immediate problematization of the position of the individual in relation to the big city. Following the traditional gothic spatial paradigm and the mentioned Freudian approach, the story develops by addressing a series of uncanny occurrences, ranging from the mild amusement of the narrator with the ever-changing crowds, the later appearance of the old man, and finally with the changes of the spatial context and the uncovering of unknown spaces in the otherwise familiar city. Alternatively, Poe’s narrative can be contextualized within the work of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin and their musings about the phenomena of the flâneur. The flâneur, in his simplest form, is nothing more than a predominantly male figure, whose main purpose in life is to walk the streets of large nineteenth-century metropolises such as Paris or London and observe the

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complexities or banalities of the industrialized urban life. This oversimplification, however, functions only as a type of surface-level description that can be used to address the awe with the large urban centers and their everyday practices. On a more important theoretical level, the stroller represents a complex set of interconnected contemporary nineteenth-century values. Starting with Baudelaire’s flâneur, as described in The Painter of Modern Life, the proposed image is one of a stroller, or more specifically of a “passionate spectator”, whose “immense joy” is premised on finding himself “in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite” (1964, 9). What makes Baudelaire’s stroller unique, both in relation to the city and as a possible analytical key point for Poe’s short story, is his perpetual status of an anonymous observer or “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito” (1964, 9). This idea of detachment and an “incognito” status, as well as the function of the flâneur, can also be observed in the work of Walter Benjamin who, partly basing his argument on Poe’s story, maintains the idea of the stroller who is “on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man” (1991, 420). Poe’s narrator therefore acts as Baudelaire’s or Benjamin’s stroller, detached, first by his hotel window, and later by simple distance and refusal to interact with others, while concurrently being a keen observer and commentator of the events and people on the city streets. This position of power achieved through the state of detachment has resulted in the development of different types of strollers, and consequently, their mirroring onto different genres and storylines. While on one hand there is Baudelaire’s and Poe’s flâneur whose main purpose is to consume his surroundings at will, while enjoying the anonymity offered by the city, actualized in Poe’s narrator relishing his pursuit and investigation without any consequences, Benjamin’s readings go even further as he assesses the possibility of further expansion of the meaning of the explored figure. However, this idea, although suitable when applied to a narrative such as Poe’s story, is premised on the subversion of the initial idea of detachment. To better understand the proposed premise, it becomes necessary to consider the city’s larger context, or more precisely, it becomes necessary to contextualize Benjamin’s analysis spatially. Since one of the key features of flâneurism is to consume, the spatial location and the theoretical home of the flâneur, as described by Benjamin, are in fact the Parisian Arcades, a site whose implicit nature was consumerism itself. As

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Susan Buck-Morss states, “[the Parisian Arcades] were the precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconsciousness of the dreaming collective” where “[a]ll of the errors of the bourgeois consciousness could be found […] (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as ‘inwardness’), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams” (1991, 39). It is precisely this space that reveals a weakness in the flâneur’s paradigm as his initial “I”—the ability to observe and partake of his surroundings in a detached manner, is challenged by the possibility to become a “non-I”, or in Baudelaire’s words, the stroller “is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’” (1964, 9). While this “appetite” could be controlled on the streets of the city, the confined and specifically purposeful space of the Arcades, initially articulated as “the classical form of the intérieur, which is how the flâneur sees the street” (Benjamin 1985, 54), was much more challenging. This challenge becomes even more complicated with the spatial reconceptualization of the intérieur into a space resembling a department store. What was once an equivalent of a street, allowing a disconnected strolling, now became a location of consumerist practices where the flâneur “roamed through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city” (1985, 54). Such spatial reframing is important in that it marks the deconstruction of the traditional flâneur and his main quality as the romanticized emanation of the urban paradigm, and allows for the introduction of a now compromised, but at the same time more complex character. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson suggests in her analysis, “[t]he flâneur’s disregard of the commercial has itself become utopian. This disdain puts him outside the bourgeois pale, a deviant within the larger utilitarian model of society. Not even the artist—especially not the artist—can keep the commercial at a safe distance” (2015, 33–34). This unavoidably leads to the creation of an actively consuming stroller, one that has given in to Baudelaire’s “non-­ I”, and in doing so can choose to partake in the possibly inciting activities around him. From a creative perspective, this change marks the possibility for a variety of interpretations and adaptations. As Benjamin explains, the flâneur is able to take over a role similar to a detective since there is an unavoidable connection between the flâneur and the object he pursues. “[N]o matter what trail the flâneur may follow”, Benjamin argues, “every one of them will lead him to a crime” (1985, 41). This theoretical and artistic reworking will result in the creation of a prototypical detective, ranging from Poe’s fictional detective C.  Auguste Dupin, appearing in

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stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and even Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. In turn, it will even lead to the development of film noir. Its potential influence on the horror genre can be noticed in an observation made by Tom McDonough, who refers to Benjamin’s connection between the flâneur and the crime and states that the stroller— due to his knowledge and keen sense of observation—may be perceived as a detective and is, therefore, able to track the crime and the criminal. However, this allows for the existence of an alternative interpretation where the flâneur himself is, in fact, a criminal, and “his wanderings through the city streets [are] themselves perhaps criminal acts, inevitably leading him into crime” (2002, 101). In this reading, the already complex figure of the stroller is given a new layer which allows him a simultaneous identification with a potential objective observer, the active stroller or the detective, and finally the criminal and the crime itself. It is within this last category that lies the possibility for the development of urban horror. The flâneur, now an active participant and a potential criminal, becomes both an emanation of the problematic and never adequately articulated urban space and a narrative point of reference for the readers and the audience. As such he becomes a cultural polygon on which the genre can inscribe a variety of meanings as well as critical discourses. Regardless of the many theoretical and narrative possibilities stemming out of the figure of the flâneur, many of which can be addressed beyond the scope of this study, its contribution to the discussion about the relation between urban spaces and the genre comes out of the emphasis placed on the binarity between the individual and the city. More specifically, if we once more return to Poe’s short story and its possible interpretation, we will see two possible discursive levels/paradigms. The initial level begins within Poe’s contemporaneity, where through his fiction and its reflecting of the urban surroundings, an innovative theoretical paradigm develops. This paradigm, in turn, as previously elaborated, allows for the creation of an urban gothic (anti)hero, whose main feature is derived from his interactivity with the surrounding city. As the city metaphorically and physically becomes more empowered, it begins to affect the stroller who, in order to adapt to the rapidly changing surroundings, needs to abandon his nineteenth-­century traditional methods of consuming space and has to transmute into something else. This change, accompanied by the progressive evolution of the urban environment, as witnessed by both Baudelaire and Benjamin, acts as a trigger for the activation of the second discourse

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whose fundamental premise is proper articulation of the addressed spatial paradigm. By emphasizing the purpose and symbolical value of the city through the mere existence and activity of the stroller, the issue of space transcends the anonymity offered to it by a possible Freudian reading and instead it becomes an active participant of the narrative in itself. Consequently, the role of the stroller, regardless of its adaptation, becomes suppressed and subordinate to the overbearing spatial paradigm of the city and, as such, defines the modern turn of urban horror narratives. Leaving Poe’s London behind, in contemporary horror narratives the modern city becomes a self-sustainable and often self-serving entity that allows the existence of strollers in all of their varieties while simultaneously scrutinizing and controlling their behavior. To understand the functioning of this new paradigm, it is necessary to address the relationship that develops between the individual, as a potential albeit controlled stroller, and the urban context within which he exists. A possible theoretical framework that could be used for a better understanding of this relation and its influence on urban horror narratives can be found in Michel Foucault’s discourses of power. If we consider Foucault’s theoretical work on governmentality—and its application to the construction of systems of control and power—and apply such discourses on horror narratives whose core premise is derived on the opposition between an individual and an oppressive system, we will inevitably see a pattern together with a number of analytical indicators. When observed from the perspective of theorizing space, horror narratives such as Alex Proyas’s Dark City, or, for example, James DeMonaco’s The Purge, immediately reveal a strong narrative undertone focused on the power relation between the urban spatial context and the different protagonists. Through its different interpretations and instances, the space of the city is perpetually attempting to establish and maintain a system of control over its inhabitants, which is in Foucault’s readings presented through the concept of the dispositive or apparatus. However, before a more detailed analytical application of the proposed term(s), it is necessary to provide a more detailed explanation of its etymology and subsequent use. The starting definition of the term, as well as its functionality and applicability, can be observed in one of Foucault’s interviews, where he provides the basic theoretical outline of the concept: What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,

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philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.” (1980, 194)

He then contextualizes the theoretical construct in reality by attempting to identify within the proposed apparatus “the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogenous elements” and explaining that “a particular discourse can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-­interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality” (1980, 194-195). Finally, Foucault concludes by saying that the term apparatus “has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need” and as such it “has a dominant strategic function” (1980, 195), which he further exemplifies by explaining that this function, or more precisely its strategic nature, is channeled into “certain manipulation of relations of forces, either developing them in a particular direction, blocking them, stabilising them, utilising them, etc.” (1980, 196). The apparatus is, therefore, “always inscribed in a play of power,” and simultaneously always linked “to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it” (1980, 196). In simpler terms, what Foucault argues is the existence of a system ingrained within the different aspects of a society focused on establishing or perpetuating a specific relation of power. Regardless of its physical or abstract manifestation, the proposed discourse has at its core, as already stated, a strategic if not even disciplinary function that relates to the organization and control of a particular society or any of its segments. However, the terms dispositive and apparatus, as its initial translation and equation, are not uniquely accepted. As Jeffrey Bussolini suggests in his analysis titled “What is a Dispositive?”, there have been some ambivalences caused by various translations of Foucault’s original work leading to a theoretical equation between the dispositive and apparatus. By relating in his research to an analysis of Foucault’s lectures conducted by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben which suggests a different approach to the two terms, Bussolini argues that the concept/term dispositive is a “tool for analysing or understanding a multiplicity of forces in movement and contest” as well as a “tool to think about power in the perpetually dynamic social field” (2010, 90). Bussolini then contrasts this idea to the definition of the apparatus,

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which in his understanding “seems to be a smaller subset of dispositive, and one that is more specifically state-centered and instrumental” (2010, 93). More precisely, as Bussolini concludes, the “apparatus might be said to be the instruments or discrete set of instruments themselves—the implements or equipment. Dispositive, on the other hand, may denote more the arrangement—the strategic arrangement—or the implements in a dynamic function” (2010, 96). While Foucault’s recognition of a strategic and disciplinary system in itself allows for the development of a new theoretical reading of a city, Bussolini’s differentiation expands the initial understanding, opening the possibility for an even more complex reading of the urban paradigm. The question that follows is how these theoretical concepts, ranging from the flâneur to Foucault’s dispositive and subsequent elaboration of these ideas, are contributing to a better understanding of the urban horror geography? An appropriate example that ad litteram includes all the discussed aspects is Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998) where the storyline, set in a distinctly noirish city, follows the character of John Murdoch who, after waking up next to a murdered woman and realizing he has no memories, runs off into the streets of the city. As the story progresses, the audience becomes aware of a series of strange occurrences, most of all the existence of a humanoid alien race, identified as the “Strangers”, that can control the city and model its physical appearance as well as its human inhabitants. As opposed to some narratives that will be addressed later in this chapter, Proyas’ story exemplifies a very straightforward representation of the discussed theoretical concepts. Starting with the main protagonist, the idea of a flâneur presents itself immediately, given that from the very beginning the character assumes the role of an observing stroller. His lack of memory, the realization that he was part of something horrible, together with the unfamiliar urban setting, forces him to learn as much as possible through observation. This will progressively, as the main character learns more about the situation around him, evolve into a status of an active, if not outright violent, flâneur. The Strangers, existing as a hive mind and only simulating their human appearance, require the understanding of human individuality and soul to save their own race. In order to do this, they regularly remodel the appearance of the city and, in doing so, switch the memories and life circumstances of its citizens, hoping in this way to learn more about human nature. The third active element is the city itself. Constantly changing while retaining an anachronistic quality, the city under the control of the Strangers acts both as a setting and an

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instrument of control. Its citizens, utterly unaware that they are perpetually locked within a cycle of change, are equally unaware that the city is nothing more than an artificially created habitat travelling through space, a large conglomeration of buildings resembling a petri dish in which the aliens perform their experiments. Each night, or more precisely each cycle since the city is engulfed in a perpetual night, all citizens are rendered unconscious, allowing the Strangers to reconstruct the city and reposition all of the inhabitants according to their new social and spatial location. The implemented discourse and subsequent cycle of power is avoided only by Murdoch who, due to some evolutionary advancements, is able to remain awake and eventually even manipulate the surrounding spaces himself. From a theoretical point of view, Murdoch establishes his position of a flâneur by staying awake and therefore separating himself from the rest of the citizens. In doing so, he is able to observe the perpetuation of the Foucauldian discourse of power. This process of observation and learning, contextualized within the space of the city, forms the backbone of the narrative by revealing both the dispositive (the strategic intentions and final goal of the Strangers) and the apparatus (or the implementation instruments) consisting of the city itself, and the instrumentalized citizens. As the story progresses, Murdoch’s abilities grow and he can learn more and more about the intention of the alien race and the mechanics behind the city’s functioning. Realizing that his and everybody else’s existence is only a final product fabricated by what could be defined as a power discourse, as well as his unpleasant understanding of the spatial restrictions of the city now progressively acting as a prison rather than an urban environment, Murdoch decides to fight back. With the help of two other citizens, a police detective and a scientist, as well as a previous collaborator of the Strangers, Murdoch masters the power of “tuning”—the ability to control the environment and therefore the experiment—and in the process submits and destroys the alien ruling caste. Proyas’ entire narrative, therefore, focuses on different discourses of power. While the initial segment sees a helpless man, who is forced to re-learn his reality, regardless of how fabricated it eventually turns out to be, together with an absolute dominance and control exerted by the aliens, the later segments follow the articulation of an initially subversive, yet eventually fully-fledged discourse of rebellion, derived dominantly from the protagonist’s strolling experiences. Once the protagonist garners enough power to be able to subvert the force controlling the city, he replaces them, and in doing so, he installs, in Foucault’s terms, a new dispositive. The new city, now freed from the

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“oppressor”, becomes subject to a new and potentially more benevolent ruler with a new strategic approach, while, as the narrative draws to an end, its population, still unaware of its submissive position, remains subject to the same apparatus. Proyas’ Dark City, therefore, in addition to being an interesting narrative in itself, serves as an excellent example of cities and their function as spaces within an urban horror context. Although lacking explicitness that will characterize many of the later interpretations of dreary urban surroundings, Proyas’ narrative establishes the connection between a system of power embodied within the faceless urbanity and the protagonist(s), the people living in these cities who function as condemned subjects and victims of either the merciless apparatus or the somewhat dissociated dispositive. Although differently contextualized and presented in various narratives, the horror comes out of the tension between the usually forceful implementation of particular Foucauldian dispositive and the usually unsuccessful potential for the development of a parallel and subversive type of discourse. Another example of the darker side of a city approached in similar terms can be found in Ryûhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train (2008). Loosely based on a short story written by Clive Barker in 1984, the narrative once again concentrates on the experiences of a single person, Leon Kaufmann, a struggling young photographer, who decides to venture into the streets at night in order to capture the true nature of the city. Therefore, the story immediately claims the idea of a flâneur whose purpose is not precisely defined and whose only goal is to expose himself to the secret life of a big city during the night. The use of the camera and Leon’s inquisitive nature mirrors Proyas’ protagonist, but, more important, it also strongly resembles the previously discussed Poe’s unknown narrator, and, in doing so, confirms once again the importance of Poe’s contribution to the contemporary genre. Leon, who appears to be financially independent, effortlessly merges and loses himself in the city’s masses while using his camera to capture slices of the mundane. As he says, he is interested in the city because “[n]o one has ever captured it. Not the way it really is. The heart of it … that’s my goal … that’s my dream” (Kitamura, 2008). Nevertheless, despite his talent and his flâneurish taking in and appreciating the city, his work lacks an element of “truth”, or as the gallery owner where Leon wants to present his art says, it lacks a certain sense of “finality”. The connection between Leon and the theoretical premise of the flâneur does not end here given that his initial portrayal shows him in the constraints of the already mentioned Baudelaire’s

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“I”, limiting him in such a way to an exclusive role of a non-partaking observer. What is truly needed is succinctly conveyed to Leon by the gallery owner: You were at the right place, weren’t you?! … But not the right time. The image grabs our attention, sure, but so what? It’s melodrama. Arresting but empty. I want to know what comes next. I want to see the face of the businessman when the filth touches him. The next time you find yourself at the heart of the city stay put … be brave … keep shooting. (Kitamura, 2008)

Consequently, what follows is his more active involvement, which results in witnessing a violent episode where a young woman is being attacked, and Leon, now willing to evolve from the status of a simple observer, decides to step into the theorized Baudelairean “non-I”, and become an active part of his surroundings. Hoping for a photographic opportunity, he follows a group of young men, possibly delinquents, and catches them as they brutally attack a young girl walking toward a subway station. Instead of simply taking a picture, Leon challenges the group leader by facing him with his camera objective. As the attackers move toward him with the obvious intention of hurting him, Leon points at the city surveillance camera and asks: “Ever starred in a movie before?” (Kitamura, 2008). And while the interrupted attack ends there, and Leon finds himself consoling the girl, his position and his decisiveness now get radically challenged as he foreshadows Benjamin’s flâneur detective and assumes a behavioral pattern of more proactive engagement with the city. The confrontation with the group, leading to the change in Leon’s behavior, is not the only turning point in the narrative. The moment of confrontation climaxing in the acknowledgment of the city camera announces the presence of a third party—the city, which actively participates in the unfolding events. Although the function of the city, at least initially, is not defined, the fact that the camera captures both the leader of the group and Leon restructures the order of power within the narrative. While Leon’s position of a stroller evolves, allowing him to behave more freely in relation to his surroundings, the acknowledgment of an additional surveilling entity perpetuates a binarity similar to the one addressed in Proyas’ film. Despite the variety of occurrences, it is the city that oversees and, in turn, controls everything that occurs within it through its panoptic activities.

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The Foucauldian discourse of power starts with the city surveillance camera, which clearly defines the positions of the dispositive and the subsequent apparatus, but it further evolves with Leon’s discovery of an interesting male figure roaming the streets and using the city subway. Just like Poe’s unnamed narrator, Leon follows the strange man and notices his elegant clothes, slicked-back hair, and a large leather bag. What stands out as a particularly interesting detail is a strange ring which Leon uses, unlike Poe’s unnamed narrator, to discover more details about the mysterious man. As Leon learns, the man’s name is Mahogany, and he lives as a permanent resident in a hotel, works as a butcher in a local meat processing plant, and often uses the subway train—a fact that will, after some research, be linked to an uncomfortable truth about the man’s connection to a series of murders over the past 150 years. The consequences of such a discovery marks the beginning of one final transformation of the flâneur, as well as the final revelation of the city’s true nature. The final progressive deconstruction of the stroller occurs in two different stages. The first stage can be traced through the dynamics established in Poe’s short story, where the narrative revolves around the stroller who follows and observes a fascinating old man. Kitamura’s interpretation breaks the established patters as Leon is first caught by the man he is following and then he himself becomes the subject of observation with Mahogany following and observing him during his everyday activities. What this causes is the coexistence of two different flâneurs, the initial embodied in the figure of Leon and functioning as a theoretical projection of Baudelaire’s detached observer, and a more contemporary version seen through the character of Mahogany, corresponding to Benjamin’s reading of a flâneur-detective, ready to follow and discover a crime, but also more than willing to commit one. This disruption of the established order is followed by a final confrontation between the two characters, which, interestingly, takes place in a moving subway train. As the title of film suggests, the theme of the subway system and the train is not random as it appears throughout the movie. The assault on the girl, the girl’s later murder by Mahogany, and Leon’s first and last significant interaction with Mahogany, all occur in the vicinity or in the subway. This opens the possibility of yet another spatial and metaphoric discourse deriving from the initial suggestion that Leon should search for inspiration in the true “heart of city”, in this case, in its subterranean spaces. The city’s true heart is therefore not on its streets but underneath them, and this is where Leon goes to confront Mahogany one last time. The two antagonists brutally fight until the train comes to a stop

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in a nondescript location deep under the city. Victorious, Leon stands over Mahogany and ritually executes him as Mahogany utters the initially nonsensical “Welcome” (Kitamura, 2008). The mystery is soon dispelled as an actual conductor of the train reveals himself and explains to Leon that Mahogany’s job was to hunt people and deliver their bodies to a race of creatures living below the city. As Leon stumbles from his wounds and shock, the conductor impassively recounts Mahogany’s role: “He didn’t have what it takes anymore. He knew what must be done. It was a privilege” (Kitamura, 2008). He then explains Leon’s own future duty in the system: Before you were born, or the birth of any other human thing, that’s how long, or longer, and now you found us … as only a few before you have … the intimate circle that keeps the secret … we protect and nurture them, and order is thereby preserved. It must be done … to keep the world separate. You’ll understand soon enough. Now serve. As we all do. Without question. (Kitamura, 2008)

Leon, therefore, assumes the position of the new hunter and gatherer, but what is even more important, he yet again redefines the role of the flâneur by changing the theoretical premise into a form that could be defined as an “aggressive flâneur”, a creation that perfectly fits the dynamics and the needs of an urban horror setting.2 Although Kitamura’s narrative presents an ending, and positions the final climax, very much in line with the traditions of the genre, both the final moments as well as the preceding storyline successfully draw out a complete map of a haunted city. Furthermore, by defining its subjects—the unknowing regular citizens—who ultimately serve as sacrificial cattle, the apparatus or the instrument of repression and control is successfully established. Personified first in Mahogany and later in Leon, together with the overreaching dispositive presented as a Lovecraftian deity/horror that needs to be appeased in order not to usurp the surface world, Kitamura’s adaptation succeeds in portraying a multilayered urban horror setting.

2  For an in-depth reading and analysis of the concept of the aggressive flâneur see Lukić, Marko and Tijana Parezanović, “Strolling through Hell—The Birth of the Aggressive Flâneur” in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7 (2016), 4; 322-333, as well as Lukić, Marko and Tijana Parezanović, “The Dark Heart of the City and the (De)Evolution of the Flâneur” in Književna smotra: c ̌asopis za svjetsku književnost, 179 (2016), 1; 15-24.

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However, both Kitamura’s and Proyas’ narratives are stereotypical in their representation of space, offering an urban environment that directly lends itself to both the exploration of protagonist stroller and the emergence of a discourse of power and its projection through different apparatus-like entities. Other narratives approach the issue of urban space by completely avoiding, for example, the paradigm of the flâneur, which despite its versatility, has many limitations. Similarly, the idea of a physical and architectural manifestation of Foucault’s governmentality is not something that every urban horror or gothic storyline will include or perpetuate. Nevertheless, Foucault’s discourse persists, mostly due to the already mentioned “heterogeneous ensemble” of a variety of concrete and abstract things, the “said as much as the unsaid” (1980, 194). The city or its elements that make up an urban horror setting are necessarily and unavoidably linked to some type of discourse relating to power and therefore to control. Consequently, this connection mirrors Foucault’s idea of the dispositive/apparatus, and its continuous presence within “a play of power” (1980, 196). However, this type of connection can defy a physical manifestation or embodiment of power and become replaced by a hegemonic discourse, allowing for the perpetuation of similarly influential rhetoric, but now expressed in a much subtler way. A prime example of a narrative structured in accordance with a hegemonic discourse—naturally, in relation to an urban environment—and its particular spatial connotations is George Romero’s classic title Dawn of the Dead (1978). Although the film has been extensively discussed from numerous perspectives, it is interesting to point out a unique merging of a hegemonic discourse and a spatial paradigm as yet another example of the mapping of urban horror. While Romero’s revolutionary Night of the Living Dead (1968) opened doors to zombie phenomenon and contributed to the further development of the gothic/horror house trope, its sequel Dawn of the Dead, while still focused on the zombies, presented a very different spatial paradigm. Following the spreading of the “disease” causing bodies to be reanimated, society is slowly crumbling under the increasing chaos caused by people trying to cope and find a way to survive. One such group finds its way into a large shopping mall, hoping to barricade themselves in and use the resources they find there to survive. In line with what will become a traditional narrative arch for zombie storylines, Romero develops a binary approach to storytelling, where one segment is dedicated to the constantly looming threat of the zombies outside of the captured building while another serves as a social critique and addresses the human and social

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struggle occurring behind the barricaded walls. Just like the deeply metaphorical house from the previous zombie storyline, the space in Dawn of the Dead functions as a key point of reference for both the presented action and the author’s critique. Coinciding with the phenomenon of large shopping malls, especially popular in the United States in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, as well as with the fear of the recession which swept through the country from 1973 to 1975 causing an increased focus on the economic issues, the selection of a mall as a setting served as an ideal context on which to develop a critical discourse. The survivors, now seemingly safe from the zombie threat outside, initially find themselves relieved by the sense of security, which almost immediately turns into an enjoyable isolation, with the horrors of a crumbling society fading somewhere outside of the shopping mall walls. However, the sense of relief induced by safety is almost immediately replaced by a sense of bliss caused by the protagonists’ realization that they are basically stranded in what could be defined as the quintessential American consumerist temple. Immersed in a consumerist fantasy with the entire shopping mall at their disposal, they are now able to unrestrictedly live out the American Dream of the 1970s. Nevertheless, this dissociation from the horrific reality of the world outside of the shopping mall gates comes to a painful end in two connected climactic scenes. The first subtly emerges through a shopping sequence which shows the characters’ initial and somewhat manic interest in seizing objects, food, and even money from the now-abandoned stores and banks. The absent expressions on their faces, altered only occasionally by the sudden pang of pleasure derived from the possibility to indulge themselves unconditionally and without any consequences in the surrounding material abundance, clearly indicate they are captives in the consumerist culture disguised as the American Dream. This becomes almost prophetically confirmed in one of the following scenes where the group stands in the middle of the mall and watches the mass of undead bodies crawling on the other side the closed gates. One of the characters comments in a combination of fear and disgust, “They are after us, they know we are still in here”, while the other immediately replies, “They are after the place, they don’t know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here”. Then follows the question, “What the hell are they?” and the response “They are us, that’s all” (Romero, 1978). Reality now settles in, and the characters are left with the understanding that the safety consumerism offers is not an escape, but rather an equating factor locking

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both them and the living dead in an inescapable consumerist behavioral pattern. This behavioral pattern allows us to establish a theoretical connection between space and power. Following Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, it can be concluded that Romero, through his metaphoric representation of a postapocalyptic society, identifies as a key critical problem the inability to break free from consumerist praxis. As John Storey states, a hegemonic discourse necessitates a specific kind of consensus where “a social group seeks to present its own particular interests as the general interests of the society as a whole” (2015, 83). The consequence of this is a society that “despite oppression and exploitation” has “a high degree of consensus, a large measure of social stability […] in which subordinate groups and classes appear to actively support and subscribe to values, ideals, objectives, cultural and political meanings, which bind them to, and ‘incorporate’ them into, the prevailing structures of power” (2015, 83). This process of incorporation, however, is not conflict free, as Storey explains, and the hegemonic discourse needs to be continuously maintained “by dominant groups and classes ‘negotiating’ with, and making concessions to, subordinate groups and classes” (2015, 84). As a system which at its core remains very dependent on the exercising of governmentality praxis while also being dependent on active consumerism, capitalism combines the two praxis and creates a third one, a hegemonic consumerist discourse, whose function is to mitigate possible conflicts emerging from the lower working classes while simultaneously incorporating them “into the prevailing structures of power” (2015, 83). Noam Chomsky, among others, debates the birth of hegemonic consumerist discourse and the articulation of control through such a system. Offering a somewhat wide analytical perspective, Chomsky argues that in a democratic society it is impossible to control people by force so it is necessary to control their attitudes and opinions (2005, 22). The actualization and sustention of such hegemonic discourse requires the development of a public relation industry that began, as Chomsky expounds, in the 1920s, during the period of Taylorism,3 which created a “highly efficient industry with 3  Taylorism functioned as a system of scientific management advocated by Fred W. Taylor. It focused on determining the best for the worker to perform its duties, together with the use of proper tools, training and incentive. The system was also characterized by the breaking down of the process into motions, which were then analyzed and timed, leading to the elimination of unnecessary ones, and therefore increasing production (Encyclopedia Britannica 2018).

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human beings being turned into automata” (2005, 21). What emerges as a necessity in order to sustain and further develop this system is the extension of the already existing concept of “on-job control” to a concept of “off-job control”4 (2005, 21). As Chomsky further explains, “Off-job control means turning people into robots in every part of their lives by inducing a ‘philosophy of futility,’ focusing people on ‘the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption’”5 (2005, 21), which in turn results in the undisturbed continuation of one or many discourses of power premised on the control of attitudes and opinions. When seeing Romero’s work through the lens of blind consumerism enforced and promoted by a neoliberal capitalist society, it becomes obvious that the presence of the monstrous, regardless of its interpretative symbolic potential, is no longer crucial for unlocking the narrative and that we have to turn to the idea of space that dictates both the effects of horror and any potential critical discourses derived from the context. Romero’s protagonists are not stuck in a haunted castle or mansion, and they are not forced to discover a hidden and horrific heterotopian aspect of the space they use as a sanctuary. Instead, they are safe within the uneventful walls of a shopping mall, a place that in Meaghan Morris’s words is “monolithically present—solid, monumental, rigidly and indisputably on the landscape, and in our lives” (1999, 394). The neutrality of this space, however, functions only at a surface level since its core function is derived from perpetuating a false reality, or, as Morris puts it, these spaces produce and perpetuate “a myth of identity” (1999, 393). And it is precisely this identity that Romero’s protagonists are looking for as they storm the various stores and indulge in a (pseudo)capitalist consumption. Or, to contextualize it in Foucauldian terms, the protagonists, despite the ongoing apocalypse and the unavoidable deconstruction of society itself, find themselves controlled by the capitalist dispositive. Even though the world is dying, the capitalist paradigm lives on, and in doing so successfully controls its subjects through the still active apparatus of the shopping mall. Therefore, the intended subliminal message of Romero’s narrative and the actual horror are derived not from the threat of the aggressive monstrous but from the realization that the myth of a possible 4  Chomsky uses the concepts previously used by Michael Dawson in The Consumer Trap (University of Illinois Press, 2003). 5  In this segment Chomsky refers to Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness (McGraw-­ Hill, 1976), p. 85.

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consumerist identity is false. As the characters observe the living dead who instinctually want to submit themselves to the apparatus, as they did through their lifetime, it is the realization of their position of a subject within the larger discourse of power that generates the actual horror.

SuRveilling hoRRoR While they may be applied to various narratives, The Purge, James DeMonaco’s new anthology, is probably the best platform to test different theoretical readings that focus on progressively abstract relations between urban geography and the horror genre. Set in a not-so-distant future, DeMonaco’s universe presents a dystopian American society, which is, due to certain political and economic reasons and quasi-religious rhetoric, forced to introduce a national day of “purging”, structured around the idea that for one night during a year, all laws are suspended, and everybody can do whatever they desire. As the audience is informed at the beginning, in the year 2022, this dystopian arrangement resulted in one per cent unemployment rate, crime at all-time low, and violence almost non-existent. This presentation of data is, however, followed by a segment indicating a religious doctrine: “Blessed be the New Founding Fathers for letting us purge and cleanse our souls, Blessed be America, a nation reborn” (DeMonaco, 2013). The initial premise, therefore, is clear: putting a stern but effective dispositive in place whose functioning is premised on the compliance of the subjects within the system, and the replacement of a moral doctrine with a religious one. The system is further perfected by the fact that apparently it does not require existence of an apparatus sub-system, since the role of surveillance and punishment is now located within the subjects themselves. As the story develops, it becomes clear that most of the crimes occurring during the hiatus of the law is actually focused on perpetuating violence on other people or simply murder. Fellow citizens, neighbors, and even friends and family are under constant surveillance, their wrongdoings are recorded on a daily basis, throughout the year, and then, in a single night, they are “punished” in the most violent way. The abstraction of morality through a doctrine ensures perpetual and self-sustainable nature of the system whereby the citizens self-regulate themselves and mutually regulate each other in order to avoid the possible “capital punishment” at the end of the yearlong cycle. The narrative’s spatial aspect, while conforming to the urban context throughout the series, varies from one sequel to another. Starting with the first movie The

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Purge (2013), DeMonaco initially introduces the larger situation in the country, together with socio-political context preceding the introduction of the Purge. The narrative then gradually moves away from the national perspective only to focus on the event as it unfolds within a high-end gated suburban setting and a house. The story begins on the eve of the Purge when the main character, James Sandin, a wealthy expert in home security systems, returns home where he plans to barricade himself with his family to wait out the night. The narrative initially brings focus to the impending event and subtly, through casual chatter over the radio, outlines the various issues pertaining to the Purge. “The poor can afford to protect themselves. They are the victims tonight…” one voice states while the host replies, “We all got our own opinions … that’s what makes this country great” (DeMonaco, 2013), only to move on to a second caller who states that she wants to stay behind locked doors, and to the final third one who expresses his desire to hunt down his boss. As the host concludes, “Clearly more people will be purging this year than ever before. America’s streets will be running red tonight when people release the beast in record numbers…” (DeMonaco, 2013), Sandin pauses for a moment to talk to one of his neighbors about their security system and then pulls into the driveway of his large house. The second element that influences the later development of the narrative—especially in the context of the correlation between space and control, is the fact that Sandin is part of the (dogmatic) system insomuch that he contributes both to the control and the supposed protection from the occurring violence, while also profiting from it. Furthermore, his presence and his job open the question of the role of technology in relation to the system. With the arrival of the night, the Sandin family initiates the lockdown: they gather in their living room and keep an eye on three large monitors showing the images from a number of inconspicuous cameras located around the property. Within the theoretical analysis of discourses of power in relation to space, such a setup immediately recalls Foucault’s analysis of Bentham’s panopticon6 and its versatility in the process of monitoring and controlling subjects within a prison system, but also outside of it. The scene in which Sandin 6  Foucault discussed the functionality of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a panopticon by claiming that such a construct, on the example of a prison but also outside of it, would have an effect of constant visibility of the inmates or citizens. This visibility in turn would assure the automatic functioning of power, making the panopticon a “cruel, ingenious cage” (1995, 205).

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casually comments on his neighbors’ activities and movements as the Purge begins suggests that he is placed outside of the ideological and punitive system—a presumption that soon becomes challenged, first through secretive intrusion of his daughter’s boyfriend who stands up to him and then later through the presence of a wounded black homeless war veteran running from a group of white people who want to kill him. And while the storyline develops in the tradition of a home-invasion subgenre, with the various intruders and family members hunted or killed in the process, the climax occurs at the very end. With the Sandins left at the mercy of the intruders, they are suddenly saved by their neighbors, only to discover that they were there to execute them themselves, envious of the Sandin’s wealth. Regardless of a somewhat predictable ending and a limiting spatial context within which the story occurs, the narrative offers a very interesting articulation of horror by combining a variety of factors. The horror erupts from the gradual realization that money and the position of power, actualized through the technological ability to anonymously monitor others, do not exclude one from the overreaching dispositive, but that they clearly outline a system whose functionality is assured through the interchangeability of its apparatus. Following the success of the first installment, The Purge: Anarchy (2014), DeMonaco’s second film in the series, elevates the spatial paradigm to a higher level and, in doing so, opens new topics pertaining to the already mentioned Foucauldian topics. The setting here in no longer a house, but the Greater Los Angeles area, which in turn allows for a wider thematic approach and the further development of the lore. Following the premise of a doctrine-led praxis which allows one night in the year to be used for the purging of a nation-wide built-up violence and discontent, the second installment explores different storylines and characters while further developing the idea of power-related intent hiding behind the religious dogma. Cleverly promoted with a tagline simply stating “An American Tradition”, superimposed alongside the title over a reimagined American flag and emblems, the movie unequivocally offers a metaphoric critique of American contemporaneity while at the same time builds on the already mentioned paradigms of power and their contextualization within the urban environment. While the presence of a discourse of power in the first installment was lightly introduced through radio chatter, the second installment sees one of the New Founding Fathers actively promoting the Purge in a commercial format by saying: “Our regime was voted into office nine years ago, and the first order of business was to deal

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with the epidemic of crime that was plaguing this nation. The answer was the purge” (DeMonaco, 2014). This is almost immediately opposed by an alternative, subversive discourse of an underground revolutionary force dedicated to uncovering the real truth behind both the regime and the introduction of the Purge holiday. Prior to the beginning of the Purge, the resistance leader gives a speech on an illegal broadcast program: We lost our souls to obtain this peace. We no longer worship at the altar of Christ, Muhammad, Jahve… we worship at the altar of Smith and Wesson. We the people know not what we do. The Purge is not about containing crime to one night and cleansing our soul by releasing aggression … it’s about one thing … money. Who dies tonight? The poor. We can’t afford to protect ourselves. (DeMonaco, 2014)

In addition to the already mentioned dispositive embodied in the political and religious dogma and activating the self-regulatory and disposable apparatus perpetuated by the citizens, the narratives introduce a third element directly connected to the spatial rescaling. The idea of a government using ideology to secretly reform and restructure its population also highlights the close relationship between the initial idea of the strategic planning and implementation of a particular power discourse and the notion of biopolitics. Although Foucault addressed it in a series of texts and analyses, the idea of biopolitics and biopower remains somewhat vague. Nevertheless, Foucault presents a tentative definition of the concept in his text The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. where he explains that this type of power could be observed as “[…] a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (1978, 137). He then outlines the various entities and practices within a society that are in charge of creating and perpetuating this type of power: During the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines—universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower”. (1978, 137)

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And while this construct and the derived practices can be used to improve a society, its controlling aspects are evocative of the possibility of a much darker version of governmentality. Within an extreme context such as The Purge franchise, deeply steeped in the conventions of the genre, the idea of a beneficial articulation of biopolitics obviously becomes an impossibility, leaving the audience to enjoy a dystopian albeit culturally predictable version of America. As the introductory part ends and the city starts its night of purging, different characters and their struggles to survive become overshadowed by the looming presence of organized and possibly military forces within the city, focused on targeting specific neighborhoods and specific segments of the population. While the forces remain anonymous in their appearance, their coordinator, a grotesque figure named Big Daddy, stands as a visual representation of the true nature of the dispositive while actively performing his role as an apparatus. A white man, dressed in jeans, covered in a butcher’s apron, with sunglasses and a cap spouting an American flag, Big Daddy uses a Gatling gun from the back of a large semi-trailer truck to mercilessly execute anybody he encounters. It is in the film’s final act that a clear class and racial/racist binarity opens itself up by showing an auction organized by a group of wealthy white man and women bidding for the possibility to ceremoniously hunt down and murder a group of people distinctly belonging to a lower social stratum, mirroring once again Foucault’s idea of sovereign power and its long tradition of having the right “to decide life and death” (1978, 135). And while some of the captives manage to survive and are rescued by the revolutionary forces, and the narrative draws to an end in an almost optimistic tone, the final scene sees a city in flames followed by the announcement that there are 364 days before the beginning of the next annual Purge. Although not the last of the installments, the third and the fourth sequel paint the final contours of the city as seen through a Foucauldian lens and reveal a larger national paradigm which influences the structuring of the dispositive and the operating of the apparatus. Respectively titled The Purge: Election Year (2016) and The First Purge (2018), these storylines explore the institutionalization of the biopolitical praxis within the political discourse of the country while, in accordance with the genre, providing a strong critique of both political realities and the persistence of

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what Hannah Arendt defines as the “banality of evil”7 within the general American population. While Election Year explores the idea of a U.S. Senator running for the U.S. Presidency on a platform wanting to ban the Purge and uncovering the profoundly religious and racist undertones, the story’s contribution does necessarily add to the analysis of the discourse of power. With a series of details helping to expand the franchise’s universe, Election Year surprisingly ends on a positive note with the Senator winning the race and thus supposedly prohibiting the practice of the Purge. However, in The First Purge, acting as a prequel to the events presented in other three installments, the audience is introduced to the original social experiment, which eventually evolved into a national praxis. In an alternate timeline, the rising unemployment, high crime rates, and rampant inflation and housing crisis lead to the rise of a third U.S. political party named the New Founding Fathers of America. Their political agenda is soon actualized in the form of a politically coordinated sociological experiment structured around the idea of allowing the citizens of Staten Island a period of 12 hours to commit any crime, including murder. The experiment will be monitored, and the citizens will be rewarded for their participation. Even though closely following the pattern of the previous installments, The First Purge addresses the idea of state racism in much stronger and non-equivocal terms, with the issue of the identified Other dominantly structured around non-white races, although ultimately including all of segments of the population belonging to a lower income stratum. By returning to Foucault and his elaborations of biopolitics in relation to the changes occurring during the transition from sovereignty to modern societies, it is interesting to observe the difference with respect to the preservation of the established paradigm of power. While in the context of a sovereignty-based system there is a tendency to wage war not to necessarily defend the sovereignty, but to defend and to assure the existence of everybody (regardless of the used methods) (1978, 137), modern societies, influenced by development and perpetuation of biopolitics, are 7  Arendt presented the term “banality of evil” while covering the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann. As Arendt observes, the main issue regarding Eichmann, despite his crimes, was “that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (2006, 276). “This normality”, she continues, “was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied […] that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong” (2006, 276).

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inclined to create a different type of discourse as well as a suitable dispositive and apparatus. As Foucault explained, modern societies will perpetuate a discourse of “a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage” (2003, 61). This results in the birth of State racism: “a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization” (2003, 62). What The First Purge therefore proposes, or, more precisely, where its narrative positions itself, is at the core of a modern biopolitical state. Foucault’s words resonate further as the Staten Island experiment initially fails, only to be reignited and pushed forward by the presence of masked mercenaries organized by the New Founding Fathers party who eradicate the poor segment of the population, assuring the reestablishment of the economic balance between the wealthy and the underprivileged. As a result, the audience is allowed not only to consume a horror narrative opportunistically set within an urban center, but also to witness, in simplified genre-bound terms, the functionality of a spatially contextualized biopolitical discourse and its role in the creation of horror. Therefore, to address the nature of the spatial paradigm characterizing urban gothic or urban horror it becomes necessary to acknowledge the gradual disappearance of a possibly clear and unique spatial dichotomy. And while certain binarities still exist, most clearly the one articulated between a single figure and his or her drive to explore and understand the fearful nature of the city, they too eventually disappear with the evolution of the dark urban centers within the genre. Poe’s contribution, together with Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s theoretical elaborations, position the individual as a single figure metaphorically standing on the edge of a precipice, and in doing so allowing him to observe, from a safe discursive position, the horrors laid in front of him. However, this protected point of view fades as contemporary narratives become mirrors of much more complex realities, providing more dangerous and morbid heterotopian reflections while simultaneously emphasizing the discursive honesty and critique otherwise absent in the realities the narrative reflects. The urban spatial paradigm therefore develops into a succession of spaces of discourse whose primary function is to expose and articulate contemporary fears, while also challenging dominant hegemonic beliefs.

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RefeRenCes Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaedon Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1985. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso. ———. 1991. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Britannica, T.  Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Taylorism.” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 15, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism. Buck Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bussolini, Jeffrey. 2010. What Is a Dispositive? Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85–107. Chomsky, Noam, and David Barsamian. 2005. Imperial Ambitions—Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World. New York: Penguin Group. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1995. Discipline and Punish—The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New  York: Pantheon Books. ———. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”—Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, ed Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador. McDonough, Tom. 2002. The Crimes of the Flaneur. October 102: 101–122. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228702320826470. Morris, Meaghan. 1999. Things to do with Shopping Centers. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 391–409. New York: Routledge. Poe, Edgar Allan. 2006. The Man of the Crowd. In The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy, 229–237. New York: Penguin Books. Storey, John. 2015. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture—An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2013. Landscapes of Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warwick, Alexandra. 1998. Urban Gothic. In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 288–289. New York: New York University Press.

inDex1

A Agamben, Giorgio, 168 Alien, 6 America, 9, 15, 27n3, 38, 51, 54, 58, 60, 150, 154, 179, 180, 183, 184 American dream, 13, 111, 176 American exceptionalism, 27, 27n3, 53, 55, 110 American Renaissance, 29 American romanticism, 7, 35, 36, 43, 46 Amityville Horror, The (1979), 13, 99, 102, 103, 107 Anderson, David L., 74n11, 74n12 Anderson, George K., 63n6 Anthropocentric, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 15, 17, 30–33, 45, 55, 101n3 Apparatus, 16, 17, 167–171, 173–175, 178, 179, 181–183, 185 Arcades, 164, 165 Arendt, Hannah, 184, 184n7

Arkham, 138–140, 143–146, 145n8, 156 Arthur Mervyn (1799), 161 Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1999), 21 Augé, Marc, 34 B Bachelard, Gaston, 12, 13, 20, 34, 34n5, 77n15, 95–98, 100, 104, 117–119 Barker, Clive, 171 Baudelaire, Charles, 16, 163–166, 171, 173, 185 Baudrillard, Jean, 26 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 163–166, 172, 173, 185 Bentham, Jeremy, 180, 180n6 Bird, Antonia, 11, 70–72 Blair Witch Project, The, 79, 80, 83 Blanchard, Olivier Jean, 114n7

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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188 

INDEX

Body Snatchers, The (1955), 145 Bone Tomahawk (2015), 11, 83 Bradbury, Malcolm, 27, 52 Bradbury, Ray, 1, 14, 146 Bradford, William, 27 Brown, Charles Brockden, 10–12, 57–62, 69, 70, 75, 86, 90–92, 161 Brown, Jennifer, 72n9 Buck-Morss, Susan, 165 Burkittsville, 80 Burton, Tim, 121 Bussolini, Jeffrey, 168, 169 C Cabin Fever (2002), 78, 79, 83 Capitalism, 37, 99–101, 177 Carpenter, John, 6, 13, 115–117, 115n8, 121 Castle of Otranto, The (1764), 79, 79n17, 92 Castle Rock, 147, 151–153 Chomsky, Noam, 177, 178, 178n4, 178n5 City, 6, 16, 27, 61, 74, 75, 101, 131, 133, 140, 141, 160–167, 169–175, 183, 185 City Upon a Hill, 27, 28, 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 63n6 “Colour Out of Space, The,” 15, 145 Colqhoun, 71, 72 Conjuring, The (2013), 13, 100, 102, 106–108, 107n5 Control, 16, 82, 83, 109, 118, 136, 154, 167–170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 182 Cooper, James Fenimore, 8, 22 Counterspaces, 24 Crane, Ichabod, 64, 65 Craven, Wes, 6, 11, 13, 73–75, 83, 117, 119, 121

Cresswell, Tim, 3, 35, 96, 100 Curtis, Barry, 7, 107 D Dagon, 142 Danse Macabre, 99 Dark Adventures, 36, 37 Dark City (1998), 17, 167, 169, 171 Dawn of the Dead (1978), 17, 99, 175, 176 Deadites, 78 Dead Zone, The (1979), 151, 151n10 Deleuze, Gilles, 168 DeMonaco, James, 6, 17, 167, 179–182 Derrickson, Scott, 13, 100, 102, 106, 107 Derry, 147, 151, 153–156 Desert, 55, 57, 70, 81–85 Detective, 140, 165, 166, 170, 172, 173 Dispositive, 16, 17, 167–171, 173–175, 178, 179, 181–183, 185 Domesticity, 11–13, 91, 95, 99, 108, 109 Douglas, William, 118, 119 Dracula (1897), 4, 162 “Dream of the Witch House, The,” 145n8 Dunwich, 138, 144–146 Dunwich Horror, The, 141, 144 Dustan, Hannah, 37, 38 E Edgar Huntly, 10, 58–61, 69, 78 Eggers, Robert, 4, 11 Elder Gods, 139 English, 51, 132

 INDEX 

Evil, 22, 39, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77n16, 81, 83, 90, 104, 106, 107, 115n8, 116, 117, 125, 139, 141, 147, 149, 184, 184n7 Evil Dead, The (1981), 6, 76, 79 Exorcist, The, 99 F “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The (1845),” 92n1 “Fall of the House of Usher, The,” 44, 91 Faulkner, William, 135–137 Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (1993), 34, 95 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 165 Fiedler, Leslie A., 9, 28, 29, 60, 61 Finney, Jack, 145 First Purge, The (2018), 183–185 Firstspace, 7, 8, 23, 25–27 Fishman, Robert, 113 Flâneur, 16, 163–166, 169–175, 174n2 Forest, 32, 54, 57–62, 64–68, 70–72, 74–83, 125, 126, 134 Foucault, Michel, 15–17, 19, 20, 129–136, 144, 145, 156, 167–170, 175, 180, 180n6, 182–185 Fright Night (1985), 121 Frontier, 4, 9–11, 21, 22, 25, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 49–86, 159 Frontiersmen, 50 G Gaunt, Leland, 152, 153 Genre, 1–8, 10–16, 21–25, 28, 30, 35–37, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 54–58, 60–62, 68–70, 73, 75, 78,

189

81–84, 86, 89–93, 95–104, 106, 107, 112, 114, 115, 121, 122, 126, 129, 132–134, 146, 156, 159, 160, 164, 166, 171, 174, 179, 183, 185 Geography, 1, 3, 4, 6–8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 20–23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 45, 46, 72, 89, 95, 101, 128, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143, 144, 147, 152–154, 156, 169, 179 Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter (1979), 34 Goddu, Teresa A., 9, 38, 39, 41, 42 Gramsci, Antonio, 16, 177 Guadalupi, Gianni, 145n8 Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, 51 H Haddonfield, 115, 117 Halloween (1978), 6, 13, 115, 117 Harvey, David, 13, 21, 34, 100, 101, 101n3 Haunted, 2, 6, 14, 22, 39, 58, 61, 62, 64, 77n16, 78, 79, 81, 89, 93, 94, 98, 99, 101–103, 105–110, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 125, 126, 140, 148, 151, 162, 174, 178 Haven, 125, 147, 151 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9, 11, 12, 14, 46, 57, 59, 62, 65–71, 80, 81, 86, 91, 92, 92n1, 98, 125, 126, 134, 135, 147 Hellman, John, 54 Heterotopia, 15, 125–156 Hills Have Eyes, The (1977), 11, 83 History of New England from 1630 to 1649, The, 27 History of Sexuality, The, 182

190 

INDEX

Hitchcock, Alfred, 94, 98 Holland, Tom, 121 hooks, bell, 34n5, 95, 122 Hooper, Tobe, 99 “Hop Frog,” 39–41 Horror, 1–9, 11–17, 19–47, 54–58, 60, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73, 77–79, 81–86, 89–122, 125, 126, 128, 132–135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145–147, 146n9, 149, 150, 152–156, 159, 160, 160n1, 162, 166, 167, 169, 171, 174–176, 178–185 “Horror at Red Hook, The,” 140, 143 Hostel, 44, 45 House, 2, 10–13, 16, 44, 60–62, 69, 73–75, 77, 80, 81, 84, 89–119, 125, 126, 136, 137, 141, 142, 144, 148–150, 161, 175, 176, 180, 181 House of the Seven Gables, 11, 91 Human geography, 3, 4, 6–8, 21–23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 46, 95, 135 I Identity, 20, 26, 27, 30, 49–56, 61, 78, 81, 82, 85, 86, 113, 118, 120, 128, 135, 178, 179 Imago Mundi, 19 Innsmouth, 138–143, 146, 156 Irving, Washington, 11, 14, 57, 61–66, 69, 70, 86, 147 I Spit on Your Grave (1978), 73 It, 15, 153 J Jackson Shirley, 1, 14, 135, 136 Jameson, Fredric, 109, 110 Jefferson, Thomas, 38

Jerusalem’s Lot, 1, 147, 148, 151, 151n10, 153, 156 Jones, Paul Christian, 40, 41 Joshi, S.T., 138n5, 141, 141n7 K Kaufmann, Leon, 171 Kennedy, John F., 53, 54, 85 Kent State University, 74n12 King, Stephen, 1, 2, 6, 14, 15, 44, 44n8, 45, 99, 102, 108–111, 143, 146–156, 151n10 Kingsport, 138, 139 Kitamura, Ryûhei, 17, 171–175 Kneale, James, 138 Knight, Kelvin T., 132 Krueger, Freddy, 117, 118 Kubrick, Stanley, 13, 44, 44n8, 102, 109–112 L La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace (2007), 21, 22n1 Landscape, 35, 82–84, 113, 116, 132, 140, 178 Landscape of Fear, 10 Last House on the Left, The (1973), 73, 83 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 20, 23, 23n2, 24 “Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, The,” 11 Lévy, Maurice, 1, 14, 137, 139 Losers Club, 155 “Lottery, The (1948),” 135, 136 Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, 1, 11, 12, 14, 15, 76n13, 137–147, 138n5, 140n6, 156 Luckhurst, Roger, 109 Lutz, George, 104–107, 107n5 Lutz, Kathy, 103, 105

 INDEX 

M Macklin, Lizzy, 84 Madsen, Deborah L., 51n1 Magistrale, Tony, 147, 150, 154, 155 Maine, 1, 2, 15, 147, 148, 150–153 Manguel, Alberto, 145n8 Manifest destiny, 51, 53 “Man of the Crowd, The (1845),” 16, 162 Mansard, 93, 93n2, 94, 102 Mansart, François, 93 Map, 2, 17, 19, 20, 25, 45, 66, 90, 103, 116, 121, 122, 125–127, 129, 137, 138, 142, 143, 146, 151, 156, 174 Mappaemundi, 126–128, 134, 137, 138, 156 Mappa Mundi, 19 Mapping, 2, 15, 17, 19–21, 29, 30, 35, 43, 47, 54, 62, 77, 95, 108, 126, 137, 151, 175 Mariconda, Steven J., 93, 93n2 Marsten, 2, 148, 149 Martin, Richard, 7 Marvin, Little, 13, 121, 122 Massey, Doreen, 20, 34n5, 118 Mather, Cotton, 37 McDonough, Tom, 166 Mears, Ben, 2, 148 “Mesmeric Revelations (1846),” 92n1 Midnight Meat Train, The (2008), 17, 171 Mircea, Eliade, 128, 129 Miscatonic, 138 Mitchell, David Robert, 121 Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik, 40 Monstrous, 1, 2, 5, 14, 22, 26, 45, 46, 67, 76, 77, 100, 108, 109, 111, 118, 120, 127, 133, 140, 141, 144, 147, 154, 178 Moretti, Franco, 21 Morris, Meaghan, 178

191

Morrison, Toni, 42 Murphy, Bernice M., 7, 80, 104–106, 112, 113, 116, 117 My Lai, 74, 74n11 Myers, Michael, 115–118 Myrick, Daniel, 79, 80 Myth, 10, 26, 27, 35–47, 52, 54, 63, 80, 81, 85, 114, 178 N Native Americans, 22, 25, 26, 36, 52, 53n3 Necronomicon, 76n13, 144 Needful Things, 15, 151, 152 New England, 135, 137–141, 143, 144, 147 New Founding Fathers, 179, 181, 184, 185 Nicolaides, Becky M., 113, 120 Nightmare on Elm Street, A, 6, 13, 117 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 175 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), 34 O “Of Other Spaces,” 19, 130–132 “One for the Road,” 150 Order of Things, The (1966), 129, 131, 132 Other, 55, 159, 160, 184 Otherness, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 55, 56, 138 Overlook Hotel, 44, 108, 109, 112 P Painter of Modern Life, The, 164 Panopticon, 180, 180n6

192 

INDEX

Panther, Abraham, 6, 37, 57, 59, 73, 78 Parezanović, Tijana, 133–135, 146n9 Pascuzzi, Francesco, 7 Pease, Donald E., 27n3 Pet Sematary, 151n10 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (1890), 162 Place, 1, 3, 4, 6–8, 13, 16, 17, 23, 28, 29, 33–35, 37, 40, 43–46, 57, 61, 63–66, 74n12, 76, 86, 94–96, 98, 100–102, 101n3, 104, 105, 113, 117–119, 127, 130–134, 138–140, 143–145, 145n8, 152, 155, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179 Place and Placelessness (1976), 34 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 42 Plimouth Plantation, Of (1856), 27 Poe, Edgar Allan, 9, 11, 40, 41, 46, 62, 91, 92, 98, 162, 163 Poetics of Space, The (1958), 12, 20, 34n5, 95, 96 Poole, W. Scott, 38, 39 Power, 16, 20, 23, 32, 59, 96, 99, 101, 127, 128n1, 162, 164, 167, 168, 170–173, 175, 177–185, 180n6 Prison, 119, 130, 131, 133, 170, 180, 180n6 Production of Space, The (1974), 20 Proyas, Alex, 17, 167, 169–172, 175 Purge, The, 6, 17, 167, 179, 180, 183 Purge: Anarchy, The (2014), 181 Purge: Election Year, The (2016), 183 Puritanism, 27, 135, 139 Puritanism to Postmodernism–A History of American Literature, From, 27, 52 Pyncheon (family), 91, 92

R Racism, 13, 22, 25, 35, 138, 138n5, 139, 184, 185 Raimi, Sam, 6, 75–79, 76n13, 81 Ravenous (1999), 11, 70, 71 Relph, Edward, 34 Reynolds, David S., 9, 28, 29, 36, 36n6 “Rip Van Winkle,” 62–64 Romanticism, 35, 36, 43, 46, 62, 68 Romero, George, 17, 99, 175–178 Room 217, 44 “Rose for Emily, A (1930),” 135 Rose, Gillian, 34, 34n5, 95, 108, 108n6 Rosemberg, Stuart, 13, 99, 103, 103n4, 104 Roth, Eli, 44, 78, 79, 81 Ruland, Richard, 27, 52 S Salem, 27, 65–67, 105, 139, 145n8 Salem’s Lot, 1, 2, 15, 148–152 Sánchez, Eduardo, 79–81 Sandin, James, 180, 181 Savage war, 53, 53n3 Saw, 44–46 Scott, Ridley, 6 Seamon, David, 34 Second Empire, 93, 93n2 Secondspace, 7, 8, 23, 25, 26, 28 Sederholm, Carl H., 138 “Shadow Over Innsmouth, The,” 15, 141 Shape, the, 115, 116 Shapiro, Michael J., 54 Shining, The, 6, 13, 44, 102, 108, 109 Shopping mall, 175, 176, 178 Sinister (2012), 13, 100, 102, 106–108 Sivils, Matthew Wynn, 9, 36, 37 Slavery, 9, 22, 26, 35, 36, 38–42 Slotkin, Richard, 10, 51–54, 53n3, 61, 69, 85, 86, 135

 INDEX 

Small-town/small town, 1, 2, 11, 12, 14, 15, 63, 68, 80, 115, 125–156 Smith, Allan Lloyd, 9, 21, 35, 42, 85, 182 Soja, Edward, 7, 8, 16, 20, 23–26, 23n2, 28–30, 35, 42, 43, 47, 52 Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), 146 Space, 1, 19, 49–56, 89, 125–137, 159 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (2001), 3, 4, 10, 30, 31, 55 Spatial alveoli, 13, 97, 102, 105 Spatiality, 8, 20, 24, 29–31, 46, 47, 63, 67, 69, 70, 78, 97, 102, 138, 144, 146 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 162 Stillo, Krug, 74 Stoker, Bram, 4, 148, 162 Storey, John, 177 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), 162 Stroller, 164–167, 169, 172, 173, 175 Suburban space, 13, 89, 112, 115–118, 121, 122, 125 Suburbia, 31, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 121 “A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady Who Was Taken by the Indians…,” 37, 57 System, 12, 13, 16, 26, 30, 35, 38, 39, 57, 74, 101, 108, 111, 117, 119, 131, 135, 138, 159, 167–169, 171, 173, 174, 177–181, 177n3, 184 T Tally Jr., Robert T., 17, 20, 21, 22n1 Tammi, Emma, 11, 84

193

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974), 99 Them, 13, 121, 122 Thirdspace, 7, 8, 23–26, 28, 29 Thrift, Nigel, 35 Tompkins, Jane, 81–84 Topophilia, 17, 30, 31, 33 Topophrenia, 17 Torrance, Danny, 44, 45, 108–112 Torrance, Jack, 108–112 Torrance, Wendy, 108, 109, 111 Town, 1, 2, 14, 15, 37, 61, 68, 80, 101, 125, 128, 131, 133–136, 138–143, 145–155, 151n10 Trialectics, 19–30, 35, 42, 47, 52 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 3, 4, 6, 10, 13, 17, 30–35, 33n4, 34n5, 43–47, 55, 56, 56n4, 77n16, 95, 96, 101n3, 115, 128n1, 161 Turchi, Peter, 126, 127 Turner, Frederic Jackson, 49–51, 53, 85, 86 U “Unnamable, The,” 145 Urban, 9, 12, 15–17, 69, 80, 113, 133, 140, 159–185 Usher, 93 Utopia, 13, 117, 120, 129, 130, 132, 132n2, 135 V Vietnam, 54, 74, 74n11 Violence, 2, 9, 13, 14, 28, 29, 37, 41, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 69, 73–75, 78, 83–85, 98, 118, 126, 135, 136, 149, 154, 155, 159, 160n1, 179–181 Violent Cartographies–Mapping Cultures of War, 54

194 

INDEX

W Wan, James, 13, 46, 100, 102, 106, 107, 107n5 Wandering Jew, 63n6 Warwick, Alexandra, 16, 160 Waters, Sandra, 7 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 26, 58, 61, 138 West, Ti, 121 West of Everything–The Inner Life of Westerners, 81 Westphal, Bertrand, 21, 22n1 Wieland, 10, 11, 58, 60–62, 75, 90 Wiese, Andrew, 113, 120 Wilde, Oscar, 162 Wind, The (2018), 11, 84

Winthrop, John, 27 Witch, The (2015), 4, 6, 11, 70, 71 Wood, Robin, 7 Woodward, David, 126–128 Y “Young Goodman Brown,” 11, 59, 65, 71, 80, 125, 126, 134 Z Zahler, Craig S., 11, 83, 84 Zarchi, Meir, 73, 75 Žižek, Slavoj, 77n15, 98