(Un)mapping Phasmatopia, Part 2
Where the wild things are.
Before moving on to a full exploration of “phasmatopia,” we should pause at the threshold, and think through the idea of a haunted house.
Even in our rational, secular society, we retain the idea of ghosts and haunted places. Folklore around haunts and hauntings has stayed with us for a reason. Even if we don’t believe that these things are really real, they’re worth exploring, because they tell us something about how we experience the world.
The archetype of the haunted house—like the house I described in Part 1—is one of the most recognizable boundary markers between the mundane world and the domain of the Immaterial. A haunted house perfectly circumscribes a liminal space. It’s an artificial structure that’s fallen out of human life. Such a place exists outside of the present: it’s no longer keeping up with the linear arrow of clock time, the bubble of stability that moves at human speed.
But it hasn’t stopped existing, either.
A haunted house is a place where the past and the future blend in uncomfortable ways. Here, the past is not a theoretical fixed point that exists, inert, only in time-gone-by. The past is still unfolding. It bleeds into the future. Buried things burst forth. Old memories take on new resonance, become substantial, start to spread.
The house is becoming something else, outside of our direction. And once something falls out of life—away from the present, outside of our dominion—there’s not much we can do to control it.
Haunted houses, traditionally, are presented as intrusions. They're a form of spiritual corruption. A haunted house is a place where a taboo has been violated. Often, someone has died, violently or suddenly. This injustice has reverberated through the fabric of reality and opened a rift into the spirit world. The place is cursed.
In Gothic fiction, these events are almost always viewed from the perspective of a modern person—someone venturing out from the safety of civilization, into a remote, rural, wilder part of the world. The horror they experience comes from finding the laws of nature upended. They enter a place of metaphysical disorder, where the tools and safeguards of the material world are ineffective.
Some stories end with the protagonists restoring order by correcting the original injustice1. But not always. Sometimes, the civilians are unable to adapt to the reality of the haunting; they succumb to the darkness, by going crazy, dying violently themselves, or otherwise being spirited away.
These stories frequently draw their morality from Christian theology. The taboos that have been violated are the natural laws of a well-ordered cosmos, which are indistinguishable from God’s laws, which must be put to right. Priests are often introduced as allies. Proper Christian burial for the ghost's human remains is a common remedy. Human characters of Gothic horror are portrayed, either implicitly or explicitly, as God’s deputies in the material realm.
The protagonists’ resistance to metaphysical danger depends on their own spiritual purity. Good people are given the opportunity (presumably by God) to do the right thing and lift the curse2. Those who are coded as “sinners," meanwhile, are the most susceptible to the effects of the curse; they often die while making a noble self-sacrifice to restore order—if they aren't totally consumed by the darkness.
The Shining is a familiar template for this. In both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film, the Torrances are normal people. They are summoned from an ordinary existence within civilized society, and brought to a remote, rural, wild place. When they arrive, unaware, the Overlook Hotel is already in an advanced state of spiritual decay. The building’s construction desecrated an indigenous burial ground and created the initial catalyst for the curse. Since then, the hotel has played host to an intergenerational conga line of sinners. Gluttons, adulterers, sodomites3, and murderers have all added their own succession of violated taboos to the haunting. The hotel itself has become a malevolent entity. And Jack Torrance is no saint: the conflict centers around his struggle to resist his own dark impulses, as the Overlook manipulates him into destroying himself and his family.
At the climactic moment of King's novel, Jack is given the "substitution theory of atonement" option, and sacrifices his life to destroy the hotel. In Kubrick's film, Jack is too corrupted by his own sins: he loses his soul to the Overlook, and becomes part of a metaphysical superorganism in a dimension beyond linear time4. The book ends with the curse being lifted; in the film, the curse persists. However, in both cases, the way the curse affects the characters depends on their individual morality.
Other traditions outside of Gothic horror aren’t so concerned with giving humans a sporting chance.
When it comes to folklore that hasn’t been screened through Christian theology, the “J-horror” phenomenon from the early 2000s provides an easy comparison. Americanized versions of Japanese horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge introduced Western audiences to yūrei—the restless spirits of Japanese folklore—and specifically onryō, the vengeful ghosts brought forth by traumatic deaths.
Many of the haunted house tropes are still present in these stories: hauntings are still the result of a violated taboo, originating in a specific place and demanding some form of human intervention. But what made these J-horror movies so effective was how thoroughly they broke the customary rules of Gothic horror.
For those who weren’t impressionable teenagers when these movies first hit theaters, and haven’t had them seared into their memories for the past two decades5—both movies center on female murder victims coming back as onryō, supernatural manifestations of pure hatred. Like the ghosts of Western culture, the onryō in these movies were incorporeal (although definitely in a more visceral way than a translucent figure in historical clothing) and maintained a connection to the place where they died. Just like Gothic horror, the protagonists of The Ring and The Grudge were plucky outsiders drawn into an investigation of these supernatural mysteries. American audiences, seeing these movies for the first time, could be forgiven for thinking that they were watching a typical ghost story with some aesthetic upgrades.
Oh, how wrong we were.
The Ring and The Grudge were absolutely terrifying for Western audiences because the established guardrails of Gothic horror were completely blown away. For one thing, the ghostly vengeance of J-horror was totally amoral: the victims in these stories weren’t necessarily bad people, or even connected to the original atrocity that produced the curse. They were just regular people—trying to do the right thing, by the lights of modernity—who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and died horribly as a result. And unlike many Gothic horror stories, J-horror’s hauntings are completely unbound by physical space.
Frequently, in Gothic horror, escaping the haunted house means safety. There seems to be a metaphysical Geneva Convention that prevents bad spirits from pursuing you beyond a certain boundary. Gothic ghosts are firm believers in the authority of residential zoning. If you can make it over the surveyor’s line—get both feet firmly planted in the mundane world—the ghosts can only shake their spectral fists at you and go back inside, to wait patiently for their next victim.
This is absolutely not the case in the J-horror movies. The ghosts in The Ring and The Grudge are hideously mobile. Not only will they scorn the confines of the structure they’re haunting—they'll cross the yard and the street, along with international borders, oceans, and time zones. They will fly economy class to come after you. They will turn your television—that faithful servant of modernity—into a metaphysical Trojan horse of terror. They will show up in your bed, in the safety of your own previously-unhaunted home. Nowhere is safe6.
Seeing these movies for the first time was like watching a vampire movie in which crucifixes, garlic, and holy water are useless for protection7. They raises the uncomfortable prospect that—according to the lore—these things could be real, but the rules and the boundaries that supposedly keep us safe are just human inventions. Maybe there is no hallowed ground. Maybe the ghosts aren’t just stuck in the spooky house at the end of the road. Maybe they can go wherever they want, whenever they choose.
The unconfined hauntings of the J-horror movies are a survival of older forms of folklore, where the domain of the immaterial is more than just an intrusion within the well-ordered world that humans have built. There is no clean separation between “our” world and “their” world. In fact, there might not be any separation at all.
This understanding is not limited to ghost stories: it also comes through in old fairy tales. Unlike today’s Disneyfied versions, the originals were never intended to build up the self-confidence of precocious princelings. They were frightening on purpose. Death and dismemberment were reflections of everyday life; they were dramatized to teach kids how to live in the real world—which, crucially, was not the world within the confined zones of safety that humans had built for themselves.
The real world was out in the forest, up in the mountains, out beyond the palings. Nobody was quite sure what was out there. In those places, the rules—and the rulers—were different. If you forgot your place, you might not make it back to tell the tale.
The moral of those old stories, then, was not about being a good person. Morality is a human institution. Those stories were about a world where humans exist on the periphery, where you had to think fast and keep your wits about you in order to survive.
Similarly, the horror stories that come from those places—the kind of folklore that inspired the J-horror movies—are about people who forget how to live in the real world. It’s not the horror of seeing people fall away from God, like in Gothic horror; rather, it’s the horror of unavoidable consequences. The victims in these stories put too much faith in the boundaries of the civilized world: they thought were safe in their apartments with the blankets pulled over their heads. They thought the modern world was the only world, until they stumbled into something ancient and eldritch. They forgot the old covenants.
Horror in those older stories comes from realizing that we’ve mistaken the balance of light and shadow. The entire world isn’t a radiant landscape, illuminated by the benevolence of a Creator-Father and the scientific genius of His children, with a few stubborn patches of shadow scattered across it. Our world is a circle of flickering torches in a shadowed landscape of fog. If we step outside that ring of light—or if the torches burn out—we’ll be in the primeval darkness that never really went away, with the things that have always existed there. And some of them have been watching us.
From that perspective, haunted houses aren’t an intrusion of something that doesn’t belong in our world. They’re a re-assertion of something that has always been there. The haunted house is a place that’s being reclaimed, reverting back to terra incognita. It’s returned to the jurisdiction of the Otherworld. The old rules from that wider, wilder place are back in effect, and humans should tread carefully—just as they should in all places outside their domain.
Now we’re getting into phasmatopia proper.
And even though we’re most familiar with the domain of the immaterial from horror stories, it doesn’t have to be horrifying.
Interestingly, what we think of as the modern formulation of Gothic horror—the civilian encountering a shrouded ghost with clanking chains, moaning about unfinished business, which the mortal must help them resolve—goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
This same formulation can be found in modern slasher movies, which are essentially free-range Gothic horror from a materialist perspective: rather than an ethereal ghost, the curse manifests as a physical (but nevertheless undying) creature, punishing the wicked and thwarted by the righteous.
Please note that this is the morality of the story, not mine. Gluttons, adulterers, and sodomites should be allowed to mind their own business without getting absorbed into the consciousness of an evil, sentient building. (This will be one of the main planks in my campaign platform when I eventually run for office.)
The film sacrifices Dick Halloran (coded as a bit of a sinner himself) to save Danny and Wendy, the two innocents. Halloran doesn't appear in the New Year's Eve photo with Jack and the other cursed guests at the end, which implies that he was virtuous enough to ascend into a better afterlife, even though he was too Black sinful unlucky to survive until the end of the movie.
I was a freshman in college when I first saw The Grudge, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I drove home from the theater with the dome lights on in the back seat.
The Ring was particularly effective because it deliberately (and shockingly) subverted the tropes of Gothic horror. The film performed a masterful head-fake by presenting audiences with the old Gothic "laying the ghost to rest with a proper burial" happy ending—and then ripping it away. Just when you thought the curse had been lifted… the handsome boyfriend slowly spins around in the chair with THAT FACE. The main character is forced to play by the curse’s rules and spread it even further. There is no redemption for the survivors. Cut to credits. Brutal.
Also, instead of daintily biting its victims on the neck, the vampire pulls their heads clean off, like the ring tab on a White Claw.
I was also terrified by The Ring when I saw it in high school, never saw The Grudge. I hadn't thought about the differences between "J-Horror" and the Western Gothic type of horror, but I can definitely see why it contributes to the scariness of the movie--the ghost was everywhere, not only where it was supposed to remain confined! It does seem like horror stories are one of the only settings in modernity where the immaterial can be encountered. Looking forward to your future explorations of other ways to engage with and incorporate the immaterial!
On a note unrelated to this post, I recently read The Firekeeper's Daughter, a page-turner YA novel about a young Ojibwe woman living in northern Michigan. While not a major part of the plot, her tribe uses tobacco in ceremonial practices, which made me think of your piece on the orenda of tobacco. It's a great read, if you have the time.
Nice essay. I think that horror reveals truth. https://theveilapoem.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-horror-of-romance.html