The mundanity of horror
IMAGINARIUM : An Alternate History oF Art
Welcome to Imaginarium: an alternate history of art. A podcast where we delve in to the most obscure parts of art history.
Hello dear listeners, I’m your host Nadjah, and in this podcast, we try to shed light on less studied parts of the history of art and visual culture. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about haunted houses and the horror of mundanity, when the ordinary turns monstrous. and absolutely terrifying. The world of the home and daily life is one of comfort and homely charms : the hearth, the refuge, and where people go to resource and rest. The idea of the domestic ideal is one that has a stronghold in everyone’s psyche, because it is such a universal concept to need a shelter, a protected place where you do not have to always be on your guard. Something that the genre of horror is one that always tries to dismantle and subvert. The ordinariness and mundaneness of every daily life feels safe and comfortable, and it is when this illusion is shattered to reveal the horror behind, that fear truly strikes in our hearts. The artists and storyteller that know best how to weave the horror and the terrifying comfort of it, are the ones that manage to create an extremely compelling story that is both so scary and yet, so familiar. It is the contrast between the comfortable beginning and the horror that is to strike that creates the real terror.
I just want to give some trigger warnings before we get into this episode, as we’re talking about horror in the domestic setting and haunted houses, i will be broaching, albeit very lightly as the focus will still be on visual arts and storytelling, the topics of domestic abuse and violence, trauma and terrific acts. I do not intend for this episode to be a heavy one, but these topics will still be important to cover because they are at the basis of the concept, however if these subjects are ones that are difficult for you, please the important thing is to take care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode !
The visual look of horror has changed and evolved a lot, it truly got refined through the years, after all, so often we take the time to read or watch a horror book or movie from ages past, it barely elicit any sort of true fear in us, it does not feels scary to us when they and yet, there is something primal about the way horror affects us all. I think it is about the knowledge, horror is about what we do not understand and what we do not know. Horror as a genre in art and literature is something that is incredibly vast and broad, fear is something that can be so personal and yet so universal. so I really want to focus on horror that seems domestic and intimate and mundane. I want to see how the ramifications and the comforts that defines the beauty of daily life and the mundane and how these ordinary days and normal moments can be turned into an absolutely horrifying nightmare.
Home is where it all starts, isn’t it ?
It’s where our first memories are often created, and the need for shelter and for a space that is ours is a human right, and having that space violated and invaded can be absolutely terrifying. It is definitely a traumatic event, and a lot of horror media, be it books or movies, do base their premise on this very narrative of your house no longer being your own anymore. Of the space you occupy suddenly having a strange presence walking in it unbeknownst to you. Anyone who has their house broken in and burglarized knows exactly how extremely unsettling this can be, even if no physical violence has been committed against you, the simple act of invading this space that is your home, is already traumatic enough. This happened to my household when I was maybe 20 or 21, and despite the losses being only material, for some reason our thief on top of stealing laptops, game consoles, my jar of work tips from my minimum wage pastry shop part time job, and some jewelry, decided to also take a few tomatoes and some cheese from our fridge, and while this is an anecdote I can laugh about now, it was so unnerving to deal with back then, and it took some time to simply feel safe again in my own home. And this is this feeling that the genre of horror does explore quite often.
The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story written in 1892 that explores this concept of the ordinary turning into the one thing that torments you, and has been illustrated and depicted countless of times. This story explores the idea that the safest place in your life suddenly turns on you. That your house becomes the place that is now unbearable to be in, and yet you are trapped, with no way of escaping. The story is a very short one and efficient one when it comes to communicate that feeling of dread and mounting tension as the protagonist finds herself slowly drifting toward madness and hysteria as the ending approaches.
When the story was published in the New England Magazine in the issue of January 1892, it was illustrated by John Henry Hatfield, a professional artist whose three black and white illustrations accompanies well the claustrophobic ambience the story gives off, and enhanced the feeling of anxiety and foreboding that the story brought to the reader. The late victorian ink illustrations have a distinctly gothic and yet realistic style, and that art style will grow to be closely associated with horror and the gothic. As these kind of illustrations have graced the pages of works such as Dracula or the Picture of Dorian Gray which were seminal works of fiction that were very much in the general zeitgest of the second half of the 19th century, where gothic horror and the occult were extremely popular. In the yellow wallpaper, the image in itself of this yellow wallpaper becomes a prominent visual motif that truly defines and communicates the horror of the story. It is a mundane element, after all, it is just a simple wallpaper, in a color that is generally associated with happiness, sunniness and hope. Yellow is the color of daisies and sunflowers, it’s a color that represents joy, and yet, this ordinary object has been turned into the source in itself of the horror. It becomes a symbol of the way the main character is stuck in her room, while everyone around her is pretending she is just fine, and only needs to rest and stop being so hysterical. This story is a good example of how the domestic sphere, and more importantly, domestic abuse, is intimately linked with horror.
When it comes to visual art, horror can take many forms. Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya in 1819-1823, was a piece of art that is absolute terrifying and might have seemed like the stuff of nightmares to the audiences of the time. This painting was an adaptation of an original myth and story that tapped into primal fears and horrors in the heart. I think now, when we look at art like the kind that Francisco Goya was creating, it is easy to be desensitized to that painting and his sketches, but to the average viewer of the time, so around the late 18th and early 19th century, those images were totally horrifying, and were a type of art that felt extremely new during those years. He started off as a painter to the Spanish Royal Family, however toward the latter part of his career, his art started getting progressively darker and moodier, a reflection of his own mood and temperament. This period of his art would climax in the Black Paintings, from 1819 to 1823, where he would paint oil paintings on the walls of his house, using art as an emotional outlet. The art of the romantics is one that really started to bring out horror as a subject of art in paintings in western art, after all, these artists were looking for the thrills of emotions and passion, and horror evokes very strong emotions in people.
It is also during the 19th century, that the figure of the ghost, rises to even more importance in the general culture. After all, what does the ghost represent in works of art and fiction ? Sometimes a ghost will be about a literal manifestation of the formerly living, however, a ghost story is never truly about a ghost, not really. A ghost is a manifestation of memory, of something that is dead but has no idea it is dead, about the past that is still influencing the present, and traumas that have never healed. As Guillermo del Toro has said in his 2001 movie The Devil’s Backbone: “‘What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and time again? An instant of pain perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time like a blurred photograph, like an insect trapped in amber.’” it is one of the reasons why I love Del Toro’s stories a lot, it is because he deals with past pains and traumas and the ways these can manifest under the shape of ghosts. Everything can be about ghosts, but ghosts are never really about ghosts, in the end.
The 19th century is also the time where the conventions of how ghosts are pictured in art are getting set in stone, being more than spectral terrifying entities, but looking more human and graceful, as in works of art such as spirits by George Roux in 1885, which is a painting that I adore and would definitely describe as haunting, and encapsulates the way ghosts start to appear in the popular media toward the end of the 19th century, as a misunderstood and tragic figure, instead of only being a character designed to bring fear to the audience. The ghost has always existed, I think in folklore and myths, however the way that the ghost is now understood and pictured visually in the general culture is something that has been established over time, and the 19th century was a period that was rich with ghosts. With the development of technology in arms and weapons, more and more armed conflict ended in absolutely terrifying and ghastly bloodshed. And when so many people would never come back home, and there was no body to be buried, there was an empty space where someone should have been. An empty space that grieving people will fill with a ghost that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Stories of ghosts and paranormal encounters always spike up after tragic world event where many lives are lost, when there is a space that is now empty.
Art and horror always intersect, after all, horror is very much one of these genres that people have always gravitated toward, there is a cathartic feeling to seeing what is in the shadows and to face, in a safe setting of sorts, what truly lies beneath the darkness, and to deal with the very horrible realities of life. Horror media can be a way of processing how terrifying life can be, merciless and cruel. From the anxieties around death and life, the genre of horror is, at its core, extremely human, and comes to a truth of human nature that is, more often than not, deeply hidden and vulnerable. The things that terrify us often become less so once they have a visual or physical form that one can see, and is possible to face and confront, something that is hidden and unknown to us will often be that much more scary.
The topic of horror is a deeply personal and subjective one, and what one is afraid of is often a reflection of one’s personal story and character. Not two people will be afraid of the same things in the exact same ways. Personally, I absolutely love the concept of horror, but I will admit I am a definite scaredy cat when it comes to watching movies with a lot of gore and jump scares so I don't watch a lot of it, and because of that, my appreciation goes more toward gothic and atmospherical horror. The ones that are deeply insidious and pervasive, where something feels wrong. This is why gothic horror and gothic romances can be as terrifying as they can be, without any outright violence and blood, it’s about the claustrophobic atmosphere and the oppressive nature of interpersonal relationships. Of course, there is nothing bad about the more gorey and jumpscarey type of horror, im just too sensitive for it most of the time haha, I do love it conceptually though, which is why I try to force myself to watch one quote unquote real actually scary horror movie a year, but no more. And always in the middle of the day with the lights open and people in the room next to me.
The writers, filmmakers, artists, any creative really, who truly know how to manipulate and shape their art as to truly terrify people are the ones that understand that horror touches something innate and almost primal in every human being. Nonetheless, something that will terrify someone will barely evoke feelings of discomfort in someone else, however, the elements of gore, blood and the use of shadows are often good visual cues of horror. A good use of negative space, contrasts and dark colors are often an efficient visual shortcut to being able to showcase and communicate certain feelings. After all, the genre of horror is one that has pretty strong genre conventions, visually and narratively, however, it is in how those conventions are subverted that a lot of the fun lies, doesn’t it ?
PART II: THE HOME : The horror in the mundane
Why is the home such a key figure in horror, especially in the form of home invasion horror and haunted houses. The home is comfortable and safe, you know where everything is, how to close that faulty window just so, and it is most importantly, secure and harmless. Until…it is no longer the case. The haunted house is such a ubiquitous staple of the horror genre now, but it can be pertinent to ask oneself why and how it came to be one of the most universal and pervasive element of horror fiction. From the classic Shirley Jackson book « Haunting of Hill House » to all the ghost stories in fiction or even people relating their own experiences with what they consider to be ghostly or supernatural entities, the haunted house is a main staple of horror, gothic romance, and ghost stories. The architectural presence of the actual house, with maybe one window where light appears, is one that is extremely strong, and the house becomes a symbol of more than just a place of residence but of safety and the representation of privacy, of the familiar, the domestic and the status quo. The haunted house is so efficient at scaring us, because the safe space becomes now dangerous and unknown.
I have to say that haunted houses and ghost stories are my favorite ones, which is why I chose this subject, it definitely has to do with my love of the gothic in general, after all women on the covers of the 1960s gothic romance do spend a lot of time running away from these houses where something is seemingly off. If you want more information about this, I have spoken in length about gothic romance illustration in episode 03 of the first season of this podcast, so please do not hesitate to go back and listen to that one if you are curious ! There is nothing more terrifying than a space that you consider to be your home, your safe haven, slowly but surely being the source of your downfall. Haunted houses are often more than just a house, after all they are a mirror that reflects different types of malaise, of familial secrets, of abuse, sexual repression or desire, just to name a few ideas that are explored in the genre of haunted house horror. The relationships between members of the family, the way abuse and the scars of the past can create such an unstable way of living, as feelings and memories are being suppressed and ignored. Sometimes the haunting is the ghost of a tragedy past, reflected and projected onto the people coming to live in this house, after all, a home is startlingly intimate.The horror in domestic settings is often a way to unravel domestic violence and familial abuse, and the haunted house is simply a visual shortcut to this concept. The domestic is at the center of our lives, the place where we go to sleep, when we are at our most vulnerable, where we can be happy and be joyful and be miserable and be content and tend to all of these mundane tasks that compose our lives. Even if we are not a person who stays at home much, even if we are constantly on the move from place to place, the idea of home is one that is absolutely essential to the comfort and happiness of people.
The haunted house is a good starting point for stories about people, about the ways all of us are messed up, and the ways our closest relationships, the ones we live with, are also the ones susceptible to go … slightly amiss and awry. The house is a symbol, but it is also the visual representation of a lot of things gone wrong, sometimes, as Shirley Jackson puts it « Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. »
There is this concept that permeates horror media that houses can be alive, that they can be, in themselves, evil or benevolent. That they have a personality, that they can be rotten to the core, or that something so evil and so horrific happened in that space, once, however long ago, that the place retains and grows from the memory of that horrific act. I mean this is the core concept of the haunting of hill house by Shirley Jackson, which is one of the quintessential examples of the haunted house. I would even argue, that that particular haunted house is a template for the way most haunted houses are written or pictured in media nowadays, consciously or not, it just has permeated so entirely our understanding and visualizing of haunted houses that it has become one of the quintessential haunted houses. The house being on the top of a hill, for example, becomes a visual shortcut to the haunted house, it isolates it from the rest of the houses, make it look dreadful.
Lewis Barrett Lehrman is an artist whose spooky houses illustrations are an absolute visual delight. I love when an artist obviously loves a specific subject, and will repeat this subject again and again, until the point of having absolutely mastered that topic. His illustrations are marvelous in the ways they condense and distill all of the ways we think about haunted houses in a visual manner. Often looking foreboding and eerie, and standing on a hill or a cliff, overlooking the viewer, this composition manages to render the subject of the piece even spookier. Lewis Barrett Lehrman is someone whose art is standing at the intersection between architecture and horror, I think he just really liked painting scary houses and I love this for him. He even had set up an online presence in 1999 called The Haunted Studio, for people to be able to commission spooky haunted houses, which seems to have lasted until 2014, that I can seem to track. Most of his illustrations of haunted houses fall within the same artistic style, being a visual reminder of the understood codes of the haunted house. It is often depicted in the full moon on a dark cloudy night, and the way the house seems to sprout right out of the earth, as if the house was an organic matter and not a man-made construction, but truly something that has its own free will and agency.
Gothic romances are a very good example of the way the domestic is intricately linked with horror, after all, in so many of these covers, the heroine is running away from a distant and foreboding house. She is in her nightgown, her hair is loose in the wind while she is running away holding a single candlelight, the house or the manor is in the background, a terrifying presence and the symbol of that new fractured reality. The castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole in 1764 , arguably the starting point of gothic romances is a story with the castle at its center, where the building in itself becomes a moving character of the story.
The haunted house or, just the oppressive gothic house, is often very prevalent in what could be called women’s fiction and horror, as women’s historical and expected place in the house as homemakers and how they had so little financial freedom. This type of horror can often be an exploration of women’s oppression and stories, as they were stuck at home, almost as if being imprisoned in an infinite of confinement. It can be about the complicated feelings of new motherhood, of no longer feeling like your own person nor having the freedom to do the things you want to do when you want to do them, or the feelings of isolation and solitude that can creep up during one’s life. The haunted house trope is one that is rife with potential when it comes to the unraveling the deepest patterns of the human psyche.
Stories of haunted houses are full of the physicality of haunted houses, of the architectural horror that they bring to the table. One of the best feature of a haunted house its the way the architectural layout of it often, if not always, becomes a central part of the horror. The house becomes a labyrinthine maze of horror in which survival is often not promised at the end. There is only to think about all of the scary manors and houses whose stairs creaks, where secret passages lead to unseen horrors and dangers, which have doors leading to absolutely nowhere, and closets with actual skeletons. Those architectural and physical elements become a driving force in themselves, the house becomes a main character of the story, with its own idiosyncrasies and particularities, sometimes houses are so peculiar in their nature that it feels as if they have their own identity. Because, truly the difference between a house and a home is the love that it contains, and once that love is gone, it is only a building, and becomes the source in itself of anguish and misery. It is no longer a home, but turns into a vessel of horror and suffering.
Haunted houses exist in all forms, as the small residential family house, the decrepit manor over the cliff, the country house in disrepair that symbolises the fallen aristocracy and the tarnished shine of poor nobility, the abandoned castle, all of these buildings are the center of the haunted house, these stories often use the house as their main, if sometimes not only, setting. So it, the building bears the weight of history, as I simply don’t think haunted house stories work very well in brightly constructed apartment complexes, but also, more often than not, they bear the weight of a family, of intermingled relationships and complicated feelings. Because one thing this genre of horror is very good at doing is the family secrets, and all of the ways in which those closest to us mess us up so deeply, on purpose or not, and the way abuse, emotional or physical, co-dependency, depression and anxiety can be heightened and explored in those narratives. Each house is an archetype in itself, the shape of it being what will lead and move the story forward.
PART III : The mundane in horror
The mundane is often made horrific and terrifying, however, the opposite, when seemingly horrific are made to be ordinary somehow, to an almost boring or comical degree. Those stories like Addam’s Family where the presence of horror and monsters is treated as the norm. Of course you sleep in a coffin and there is blood everywhere and there is a body-less hand scattering around, and I would mention Welcome to Night Vale in this category as well. The use of horror tropes and convention is made mundane, ordinary, almost banal. All to underscore more efficiently the true horrors of reality, such as corporate monopolies and the cruelty of capitalism, just to name a few elements. Horror is used in such a way to show that those visuals of gothic and horror can often be simply an ornament in those stories. Sure there are people eating librarians, however the true horror is in the lack of care people have for each other, it is the cruel overtaking of a corporation over the whole town, it is war and the wounds it inflicts.
Jessica Hayworth is the lead illustrator for Welcome to Night Vale, and I will link her page in the description down below as she is a currently working artist at this time of recording, and while I usually talk about older art and artists, I think it is important to support current working artists. Her personal work as well as the work that she did for the well known and amazing fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor is absolutely marvelous. Welcome to night vale was my first foray into podcasts, back when it barely had 15 episodes out and when the medium in itself of podcasting was still a novelty (even tho, podcasting is basically just radio repackaged, isn't it ? i love podcasting tho but we need to speak the truth). I will admit that I will be the kind of annoying person who says that they were there when it first started, after all I must have been 17 or 18 when I first listened to it, and it’s been a decade now. And for several years, it was the only podcast I listened to, and so it has a very dear place into my heart. I think their particular flavor of horror is absolutely delicious. Its making the horror and the absolutely terrifying a simple mundane part of life ,
Their lead artist, Jessica Hayworth is currently, at time of writing the script at least, doing a complete illustration for each new episode of the podcast, her illustrations and her style go well with the narrative of Welcome to Night Vale, because once again it's this blend of horror and the mundane. Hayworth uses lighter and pastel colors, as well as saturated hues to convey the feeling of something being just Slightly off. Instead of using the more conventional visuals of horror, with colors and aesthetics that are very much designed to terrify and scare the viewer, she has more of a eerie and slightly unsettling vision of horror. Of something just being somewhat wrong and odd, which definitely fits the whimsical horror of Welcome to Night Vale. The lines are clean and the colors are vibrant, and yet that uncanniness is clearly communicated through the images.
That slight uneasiness and ominous feeling that a weird house where the stairs creak in the night gives off is definitely well articulated in the paintings of Serbian contemporary artist Dragan Bibin, whose art revels in the slightly terrifying and deeply unnerving. It is the type of art where there is truly nothing overtly scary in it, and yet, with the use of those very dull and dark colors, the low contrast and the use of the architecture and the darkness that makes you try to peek beyond the door in which no light is reflected back. I will post some of these works of art on my social media, but it is incredibly efficient at being absolutely creepy and genuinely spine-chilling.
The use of architectural details and and features enhances the feeling of claustrophobia, disquiet and uneasiness. The concept of the mundane and the ordinary is one that permeates horror and makes it all the more efficient and powerful at scaring the audience. After all, it is at the intersection of your daily life being absolutely obliterated by the shadows that can lie beneath, that the true horror endures. And this seems absolutely terrifying to me in all the ways imaginable. I think horror can be easy to bear when it feels senseless and distant. After all, a mysterious cloaked figure going around the neighborhood murdering and stabbing people can definitely be extremely terrifying, otherwise, all the iconic slasher movies of the1980s and 1990s would not exist, however, horror that is closer to home, where the violence and abuse is being wrought by people who are close to you, by those who are supposed to love and care for you, isn’t that infinitely more terrifying ? I think it is.
On this, my darling listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of Imaginarium, I hope it was fun and we’ll meet again next month for a new episode and a new deep dive into another lesser known subject of art history and visual culture. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so on patreon @ patreon.com/nadjah. Otherwise, talk about it to anyone you’ll think will like it. And as the youtubers say, like and subscribe, and give us a good rating if you enjoyed. As always, all the relevant images will also be on all of our social platforms @ imaginarium_pod on instagra m as well as on twitter. This podcast was written, narrated and produced, by yours truly, Nadjah. On this, I wish you all a very lovely day, evening or night, and I hope to see you again very soon.