horror, page 34 of 64

The first time I read The Turn of the Screw, I hated it. I hated the over-stuffy prose, which seemed to be hiding a good ghost story behind thickets of Victorian verbiage so tangled the only emotion to get through was the most insistently hysterical. The characters seemed nothing more than embodiments of the era’s most conventional attitudes: the oh-so-angelic children, the distant, paternalistic gentleman-employer who of course knows best about everything, the loyal housekeeper with an unquestioning faith in her superiors, and the governess, a wide-eyed innocent country parson’s daughter on her first adventure out into the world…

And then, on a recent re-read, I realised this was, of course, the point. The story, told by the governess (that country parson’s daughter on her first adventure into the world) is infused with her hysterical insistence that things be as the Victorian world liked to pretend they should be, precisely when they’re revealing themselves to be the opposite. Those thickets of Victorian verbiage are her way of trying to keep a destabilised world in check, a world in which children aren’t little angels but human beings (and so can seem, at times, like devils); a world in which distant paternalistic gentleman-employers don’t know best, but simply don’t care; a world in which some servants aren’t so unquestioning and loyal.

I suppose what wrongfooted me on that first read was I expected The Turn of the Screw to be a ‘straightforward’ ghost story (which was the only type I’d read, at the time). By this I mean a story in which a normal world is invaded by the supernatural. To make this sort of ‘straightforward’ ghost story work, you need characters who are straightforwardly normal, whose very normality acts as a baseline to which the abnormality of the supernatural can be compared. But The Turn of the Screw isn’t of this type. It is, I’d say, one of the first truly modern ghost stories, whose characteristic is that they tangle the supernatural with the psychological to such a degree it’s impossible to unravel the two.

The Turn of the Screw is the famous example of a ghost story that can be read entirely psychologically (the governess, coming apart at the seams, hallucinates ghosts as an expression of her own super-heated repressions) or supernaturally. As someone who doesn’t like their ghosts to be explained away, but who also likes the fantastic to feel psychologically significant, I prefer to read it as the perfect meeting of haunters and haunted — a pair of ghosts who, though real, fit exactly into the dark cracks of an unhinged, still-living mind. The governess, in The Turn of the Screw, is as much a monster as that ‘horror’, the dead manservant Peter Quint, only she’s a monster of the opposite extreme: Quint is ‘much too free’; the governess is as tight-laced and primly judgemental as any inexperienced, over-romantic Victorian pastor’s daughter can be. And whereas Quint is transgressive of all boundaries — between the classes, between the sexes, between adult and child, and, now, between life and death — the governess insists on everything being filed way into the absolute, binary opposites of her age: people are either ‘gentlemen’ or they are ‘horrors’, children are ‘angelic’ and innocent or ‘corrupt’. While eight-year-old Flora is at first ‘the most beautiful child I had ever seen’, she is, at the end, ‘hideously hard… common and almost ugly’.

It’s the governess’s relationship with the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, that’s key to both her personality, and my own initial reaction against the novel. Once the governess realises she can, effectively, bully Mrs Grose into agreeing with her, she’s constantly finishing Mrs Grose’s sentences, forcing her own (often wild and illogical) interpretations on what Mrs Grose has seen, heard, or suspects, as though they were the only possibilities:

‘He was looking for someone else, you say – someone who was not you?’

‘He was looking for little Miles.’ A portentous clearness now possessed me. ‘That’s whom he was looking for.’

‘But how do you know?’

‘I know, I know, I know!’ My exaltation grew. ‘And you know, my dear!’

This is what I found so repellent about the book that first time I read it — the governess isn’t merely hijacking Mrs Grose’s point of view, she’s hijacking the reader’s too. No room is left for any doubt that those infamous horrors, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are seeking to corrupt the children, and that the children are willing accomplices. And, while the governess herself freely corrupts Mrs Grose with her own hysterical insistence, she knows she can’t put words into the children’s mouths. The Turn of the Screw becomes a battle with silence — with, in a way, a sort of tortured social propriety, in which the only way to find out if something awful has happened to the children is to suggest that awfulness, but to do that is to potentially ruin what is (to the governess’s mind) most valuable about them, their innocence. So they must be made to speak without prompting, and the more they refuse to do so, the more the governess, in her twisted way, takes the children’s silence as proof of their corruption. Silence, in The Turn of the Screw, becomes a palpable thing, identical both with the ghosts (‘the silence itself — which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength — became the element into which I saw the figure disappear’) and with horror, too:

‘Not a word – that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, that child!’

The governess herself is bound to silence: by the children’s uncle, who wants someone to look after his niece and nephew and not bother him, but also by her society, that expects women to have no voice, and children to be ‘seen and not heard’. Miles’s expulsion from school is because of his saying unspecified ‘things’ (and he later steals a letter, from the governess to the uncle, which was itself an attempt to break a silence). Words are how innocence is corrupted. But, at the same time, confession — breaking silence — is linked with salvation:

‘I’ll get it out of him. He’ll meet me. He’ll confess. If he confesses he’s saved.’

The governess exists in a weird duality with the ghosts. She first sees Quint standing in the tower where she was standing some time before; when she next sees him, through a window, she feels compelled to go outside and stand where he stood, looking in, like two chess pieces chasing one another round a board. She sees Miss Jessel at the foot of the stairs, crying, then later finds herself in the same place, in the same turmoil. When she sees Miss Jessel sitting at the teacher’s desk of the schoolroom where she herself usually sits, the words she comes out with — ‘You terrible, miserable woman!’ — could be her own judgement of herself. Quint is the shadow image of her over-romanticisation of the children’s uncle; Miss Jessel is an image of her own possible ruin. The governess’s utter inability to see herself for what she is (those windows she keeps seeing Peter Quint through could be acting as mirrors), her inability to break a silence she shares with herself, are what makes her monstrous.

Like the other great horror stories that came out at the time — that embarrassment of graveyard blooms from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and H G Wells’ science-fictional horrors, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau — The Turn of the Screw gets its power from a new awareness of how our inner lives can entangle us with dark powers, creating far more complex relationships with the horrific and supernatural than merely that of fear. The end of the Victorian era thus saw the creation of a set of stories that have proved fertile for more than a century of ongoing adaptations and reimaginings. Thanks to Freud and co., those Victorian times came to symbolise, in a way, repression itself. The governess of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is perhaps, then, the perfect Victorian monster, so deeply does she embody the strictures, mores, prejudices, idealisations and judgements of what we now tend to look on as an over-straitened age; but she also presents a rich portrait of human self-blindness that continues to be relevant well into the present.

In a strange way, Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom reminds me of the Lewton/Tourneur Cat People from 1942: both centre on a human ‘monster’, whose monstrousness was passed onto them by a parent (Irena in Cat People inherits her mother’s lycanthropy, Mark in Peeping Tom is the creation of his biologist father’s constant experimentation with fear); both try to escape their curse when a new relationship (Irena’s marriage, Mark meeting Helen) reminds them of all they’re missing by not being ‘normal’; and when they fail to become ‘normal’, both lapse with renewed vigour into their monstrousness, with tragic results. In both cases, the still new-seeming sciences of psychiatry and psychology utterly fail to help (in Cat People, the lascivious Doctor Conway tries to seduce, rather than cure, Irena; in Peeping Tom, the police bring in a psychologist, but he’s more interested in the ‘extravert’ film director, than the introvert killer who comes to him for advice). The main difference, of course, is that Peeping Tom’s Mark is not a supernatural monster, but one created by human means. In him, the cold, experimental eye and camera of his father has become a symbol of the abuse he suffered as a child, and which, like so many of the abused, he takes up in adulthood as his only way of dealing with a world he’s been made utterly unfit for.

Mark’s goal in life is to complete the documentary his father was working on, and so show the ultimate results of Doctor Lewis’s experiments on his only child: that it has made him into a serial killer, intent on filming the moment of terror as it appears on his victims’ faces before they die. In a way, this is Mark’s only way of getting revenge on a father who, though dead, is still a dominating presence (his initial response to being asked who owns the house he lives in is that it’s his father’s, even though he’s long since inherited it).

I feel Peeping Tom is the wrong title for a film that’s not really about voyeurism: Mark isn’t hiding behind his camera, he’s using it as the only way he knows of interacting with the world. The camera completes him; its lens is the perfect metaphor for his own disconnection from the world of normal human relationships. (Something heightened by the fact that Mark, an English boy born in the house he’s still living in, is played by the Austrian Carl Boehm, his accent as much a signifier of social alienation as it is for the Serbian Irena in Cat People.)

The only person to see through Mark is Helen’s blind mother, played by Maxine Audley, who sleeps in the room beneath Mark’s cinema, and hears him watching his silent movies every night. She instantly dislikes him — a man shouldn’t creep around in his own house.

Peeping Tom is infamous for effectively ending Michael Powell’s career, after the British critics tore him and his film apart — not because he so explicitly mixed psychological aberrance, cinema, and the saucy-minded prurience of early 1960s Britain, but because he dared to invite his audience to see that his lead character wasn’t just a monster, and perhaps thereby see themselves in him. The film’s sin was not to exploit its audience’s prurience (film critics of the time were surely used to that), but to see beyond it.

Something I learned from Michelle Paver’s Arctic ghost story, Dark Matter, is that the word ‘haunted’ derives from the Old Norse ‘heimta’, meaning ‘to bring home’, and the Old English ‘hamettan’, ‘to give a home to’. Which adds a certain significance to the words of her protagonist, Jack Miller, as he writes in his diary:

‘I never expected this, but I feel at home here. I love Gruhuken. I love the clarity and the desolation. Yes, even the cruelty. Because it’s true. It’s part of life. I’m happy.’

Gruhuken is an isolated spot on the Arctic coast, where Jack Miller has travelled as part of a scientific expedition (ill-fated from the start, as accidents and bereavements prevent two of its five members from reaching it). For four of the five — public school friends Gus Balfour, Algie Carlisle, Hugo Charteris-Black and Teddy Wintringham — it’s something of a jolly adventure, but for middle-class-and-failing Jack Miller it’s a last chance. Stuck in an eight-year Slough of Despond since the pre-World War II financial slump meant that the best he could do with his degree in physics was land a place as a stationer’s clerk, Miller is perhaps on the edge of contemplating suicide, which may be why he feels so at home when he finally reaches the bleak Arctic (‘That first sight of it. Like a blow to the heart. The desolation. The beauty.’): it looks like the world feels to him. But by the time he reaches it, his resentment has started to thaw, as he finds something in the rather boyish expedition leader, Gus, to like, even admire, despite his own bitterness at Gus and co.’s cheery acceptance of their own privilege.

Of course, it can’t last. Gruhuken is haunted. Like Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall, Paver solves the two main problems of the haunted house story: she’s got her mixed bunch of people to her ghost-friendly, isolated location, thanks to their embarking on this scientific expedition to a land where it becomes solid night for four months of the year, and where they’ll be too remote from the nearest human settlement for immediate help; and she’s going to keep at least one of them there no matter what, as Jack Miller feels this is his only shot at fixing the dreary despair his life has slipped into, a feeling that mixes inextricably with a need to win boyish Gus’s admiration — plus, of course, a rational man’s sense that an ordered life and a strict routine ought to be all he needs to keep him from going doolally.

The Arctic is established as a place that brings out the bleakly practical, if not the basely savage, in man. We see Algie skin and gut a still-living seal, then talk casually about bashing out the huskies’ back teeth to stop them chewing through their leashes. This is a world on the brink of the Second World War, which will be full of man’s (industrialised) savagery to man, but human nature’s no different here, far away on the Arctic coast, as Miller begins to sense. A man came here some time ago, and ‘He was ugly, and he had that abject manner which brings out the worst in people, particularly men.’ As such he might be an exaggerated image of Miller’s own idea of himself, downtrodden and feeling that he deserves what life has thrown at him; while the rage he senses emanating from the thing that lingers in Gruhuken could well be his own resentment towards what life has done to him. Ultimately, you’re only ever haunted by yourself; you bring your own ghosts with you, that’s why you feel so at home.

Like so many modern ghost stories, here the haunted are surrounded by scientific paraphernalia — usually this is deliberately for the sake of detecting the ghost, as in, for instance, Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972), or 2011’s The Awakening. In Dark Matter, the scientific equipment is for taking measurements related to the weather, and nothing to do with the ghost at all, but it’s perhaps significant that Miller’s final descent into all-out terror begins when an accident destroys his last remaining timepiece, Gus’s travel clock, which simultaneously breaks his connection to Gus, the civilised world, rationality, and time itself.

It’s the descriptions of the Arctic that really make Dark Matter work. It really feels like a land of extremes, so wild and bleak and inhuman it might be as far as away Mars, and just as inhospitable — where a single mistake, like forgetting to light a lamp, or knocking one over, can lead to a stark and inevitable death. The one thing I can’t get out of my head, though, is the ‘bear post’ — a relic of a previous encampment, it seems to embody everything the book’s about, from Algie’s rather casual cruelty to animals, to other men’s un-detailed cruelty to one of their own kind (‘When men know they won’t be found out, they will do anything.’). Never fully explained, this brutally simple object accrues far more horror than even the ‘gengånger’ — ‘the one who walks again’ — with its ‘wet round head’ does.