Horror: The Haunting of Hill House, Lovecraft and More

Multiple Horrors

We didn’t begin with Shirley Jackson or the Haunting of Hill House this week. My sons and I started our email conversation about an article in the LA Review of Books on how authors are reimagining H. P. Lovecraft. The article discusses the racist elements in Lovecraft’s work and what modern writers try to do to correct the stories. (You can read the article here.)

Because I like to read some of the same stuff that my kids have read—I like talking to them about their reading experiences—I had once listened to an audiobook collection of Lovecraft stories. I was walking in a wilderness area as I so often do. It was a weird combination of a sense of balm (the oaks, pine and deer) and a sense of foreboding. I remember that Lovecraft had mad world-building skills. I remember cold spaces, spooky and empty and yet fill of ancient alien beings . And then I pretty much forgot most of the details of all of the stories because I’m at the age where I do that. If the work isn’t in the top ten percent of my all-time reading or if I am distracted (“Squirrel!”), I don’t usually reconsider it.

Can It be Corrected?

The article about the inherent racism of Lovecraft’s work started a conversation about whether works of literature—even the pulp fiction that Lovecraft wrote, could be corrected. They had some interesting answers.

“I agree that Lovecraft’s stories are rooted in xenophobic fears. A lot of people try to deny that, but they’re so deeply integrated that there isn’t much left if you try and wish them away.”

“If you want to reclaim art for yourself, you’ve got to make your own, and show your own themes to be as aesthetically powerful as your opponents’, not ‘fix’ art using Anglo-Saxon moralizing from the top down.”

I tend to agree with the last statement—that someone writing to fix serious issues in works of fiction ends up with a little didactic morality tale. It’s best to abandon that project and start with a fresh idea. As my eldest son pointed out, “The aesthetic power precedes any moralizing or rationalizing about it, and so art that’s made in this way will usually turn out pretty bad. . . . The sanitization of Lovecraft has no artistic impulse.”

Reimagining Horror

But what if the impulse is not to sanitize, but simply to try to recreate the emotional power of the work?

My son mentioned that John Carpenter’s The Thing is based on Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.” “The connection is so loose that it’s no longer recognizable as cosmic horror, but it’s basically a perfect movie because it plays by its own aesthetic rules. Re-Animator is a similar case, but with comedy.”

Reimagining The Haunting of Hill House

I had to make the connection here to the Netflix 10-part series I am currently watching.

https://youtu.be/G9OzG53VwIk

It’s based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House and has the same title. Yet it is a story that honors the original while deeply departing from it. If you’re unfamiliar with the novel, here’s an overview I wrote several years ago on the School Library Lady blog: 

The Haunting of Hill House is creepy in the best sense. Jackson is known as a master of horror and plot twists. If you’ve read her short story “The Lottery,” you’ll have an idea of what she can do with the unexpected, the shock factor.

Here, four young adults are selected by Dr. Montague, an occult scholar who wants his research taken seriously, to spend a few weeks in Hill House. The house is reported to be haunted, and no one who has rented it has ever stayed more than a few days. Nonetheless, they always give rational reasons for leaving, as if they think people will find them crazy if they admit to the haunting.

Of the four young people, Eleanor, grabs the attention of the reader immediately. She has had to care for her ailing, unappreciative mother until her mother died. She is bound to her sister and her sister’s family and must share a car with them. Eleanor, who has been selected to stay at Hill House because she had a documented event with poltergeists in her childhood, feels that the trip will be a chance to break free of the patronizing behavior of her sister and her sister’s husband. When they refuse to allow her to take the car, Eleanor drives off early in the morning before anyone else wakes. The reader wants her to escape, and cheers her through her trip toward the house.

Once she arrives, she befriends the others. It looks like she is finally going to get what she desires from life. But Hill House isn’t haunted in the traditional sense of having ghosts. It is a personality of its own—and it wants Eleanor. Though all the others see the evidence of this, they pull away from Eleanor, accusing her of creating some of the frightening and bizarre episodes.

And for someone as fragile as Eleanor, dealing with the house alone is more than a challenge.

The Haunting of Hill House is pretty short—a few hundred pages—and Jackson doesn’t waste your time with extraneous detail. What starts as a very ordinary trip and an opportunity to find friends ends in spine-chilling creeps.

What Netflix Gets Wrong–and Right

In the Netflix series, the group of ‘investigative’ adults have been replaced by a family with five children who are living in the house in order to flip it. Both the novel and the series deal with the psychology of the characters and how the past evoke responses. In the case of the novel, the main character’s past is the basis of her response to the house. In the TV series, the characters’ past experience with the house is the basis for their behavior after they get out of the house.

What is lost is that the book’s character is an adult woman who is single, unwanted, and infantilized. It’s clear she’s trying to assert herself, beginning with taking the car (which belongs half to her and half to her sister) when she has been explicitly commanded not to. But, of course, since this is horror, the result is disastrous.

The adults in the TV series are trying to assert themselves too—often against one another in sibling rivalries—but the story loses the portrayal of the treatment of women and what I believe is the author’s feminist message.

In the TV series, the parents appear sort of loopy and negligent for remaining in the house when the kids are clearly traumatized. (Just as for the reader of the novel, the viewer can’t tell which experiences are real and which are imagined.) Also, the series has many ghosts. While the theme that the house itself is malevolent is maintained from the novel, the series tosses in too many jump scares that push away from this thesis. 

So both the novel and the series are good. (Well, actually, the novel is great.) Ultimately, though, the series is an entirely different story. The fact that the house is identical to the one in the story or that some of the characters have the same names doesn’t mean a lot. It’s just a nod to influences, which I think all creative work is. Maybe that’s all a writer need do. It’s probably what you should do.

The Haunting of Hill House is Brilliant because Shirley Jackson is Brilliant

Reading the work of Shirley Jackson is a great exercise for writers, not only of horror, but for those seeking to accurately portray the psychological states of their characters—so I assume, all writers.

Here’s a wonderful article in The Guardian that discusses why The Haunting of Hill House is brilliant. You can use this after you’ve read the book to help you think about your own work. A little taste:

“Jackson was the first author to understand that ‘houses aren’t haunted – people are’, says [Joe] Hill. ‘All the most terrible spectres are already there inside your head, just waiting for the cellar door of the subconscious to spring open so they can get out, sink their icy claws into you,’ he says. ‘In the story, the house toys with the minds of our heroes just like the cat with the mouse: with a fascinated, joyful cruelty. Nothing is more terrifying than being betrayed by your own senses and psyche.’

“[Andrew Michael] Hurley says: ‘The menace of the house is subtle and insidious and when it does appear, you realise that it was there from the start. Hill House is far more than just a “haunted house” story. Quite what it is, or what it means, is as changeable as the house itself.’”

If you’re like me and have to wait long minutes between Trick or Treaters on Halloween, take the time to introduce yourself to Jackson’s work—then pat yourself on the back for getting some author work done.

Try a Few Jackson Short Stories

The New Yorker freely offers stories from old issues. Recently it highlighted three Jackson shorts in a newsletter: “The Lottery” from the June 26, 1948 issue. While “The Lottery” was read widely in high schools a few decades back, it no longer is. If you’ve missed it, it’s a must for how to create horror out of the absolutely ordinary, out of a clear, promising day. (The story resulted in more mail than the New Yorker had ever received about a work of fiction.) 

If you’re already familiar with “The Lottery,” try “Paranoia” from August 5, 2103 or “The Man in the Woods” from April 28, 2014.

For more on the best of horror, Electric Literature put out a list of ‘spine-tingling horror’ that includes a description of each choice, and, of course, includes The Haunting of Hill House. 

Finally, as you ready to write your own scary story, The Writer Magazine has lots of tips here.

Happy Halloween!