Geography of Horror

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 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 time, as Woodward puts it, “within the reach of the left arm of Christ” (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 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.