I arrived home from Las Vegas to find the fledgling miasma of unease hanging in the air. Two days ago, videos began circulating on pro-Ukranian Telegram channels of a Russian soldier, most likely one of Pytor’s “stalkers”, somewhere near the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Per Svoboda, who sent me the link via email:
( more )Sestos yelled over the rattling drone of an engine approaching six-figure mileage. “Look, trust me, I think I killed it. You can shoot them. We just need to find them.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m saying this seems insane.” Hero pinched the bridge of her nose. In that moment she regretted everything, regretted letting Leander drag her across the country when she was eighteen, regretted ever meeting Sestos, regretted piling into the car in a literal monster hunt. The bad choices always piled on top of each other, every successive regret foreclosing a life where she hit middle age and opening an equal number of early graves. After a while, she had come to ignore the shrinking voice of reason as it tugged on her shoulder with every wasted day.
“We’re all going to see one. We’re going to kill one. And we’re going to tell everyone.” Sestos repeated, more to himself than to the other two. Thank god for that homemade felony of a silencer, otherwise the half-dozen shots that Sestos put through the backyard fence would have sent half the cops in Los Lunas to their door.
( more )The synchronicities of the past week have proven too uncanny to ignore. The autopsy of the split-head man, as I had come to call him, had momentarily drawn my attention away from XDPH, until I recalled I recalled the notes in Hero’s fMRI data: anomalous activation of the amygdala and pineal gland.
Out of habit I checked her charts again; despite the passage of weeks since her disappearance, someone in the ER, another explorer who had found himself as drawn to her as I, had left a small note: past cEEG data resembles a nightmare? PGO waves suggest sleep, but she was awake at the time. No explanation.
It was another week before I found a specialist who would respond to my emails. Dimakis Katzouros, a doctor of experimental psychosomnology at the University Of Nevada, provided an alternate explanation:
( more )Something in the forgotten and phosphor-lit corners of the CDC has started to sing in distant and dreary tongues. Men with government haircuts strut sharply down the halls of the NMU hospital, requesting copies of copies, swabbing sink drains, diverting my bodies from the morgue. The chief of medicine told us it was nothing, just test runs for when the next SARS-CoV hits.
For a few days I began to believe the lies; it was just CDC exercises, just a week where tension hung in the air like a bad idea. Perhaps the universe wasn’t so large after all. Then a body showed up at the morgue.
( more )Sestos popped a tab of Aella and downed it with an open can of Red Bull jammed into the center console. He made a face that suggested the drink had spent more time in the car than he assumed.
Hero’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the wheel. “It’s your plug, man. Is that really necessary?”
“They’re everywhere.” He said with a tone that landed somewhere between childhood awe and addict paranoia. He handed another pill to Leander. Hero sighed heavily.
They pulled off of main street and into a decaying corner of Bosque occupied by chain-link fences and pre-recession era Ford pickups nesting in dirt lawns. Hero parked on the curb and cranked the parking brake. She made some comment about keeping the two in line but it was too late, Sestos was up in the stratosphere.
( more )As Borisovich continued his siege into the gardens of my psyche, my friend from Kazakhstan put me in contact with Dr. Marek Svoboda, sociologist at Charles University, and a specialist in UFO cults. Via email he was able to illuminate some of the darker corners of Pytor’s Cult:
( more )Hero stuffed a towel down the bathroom sink before filling it with water and dunking her head under. The cold water gnawed her cheeks, shocking some recalcitrant fragment of her animal brain into submission. It was always momentary—that stinking creature in her head slinking off to dry itself, never leaving, never ceasing. On cold nights it would return to maul her thoughts.
( more )Pytor Borisovich’s Manefesto, Countering The Magnetospheric Censorship Complex, opens with the following:
( more )Woe to the Earth, its perdition awaits! Our species committed the zeroth sin: We voiced utterances from tongues of rotting metal; those heretical syllables sounded across the cosmos, giving shape to a rotting squall and initiating the penetration of the magnetospheric complex.
Sestos awoke at three AM, showered, and downed 200mg of Modafinil and 70mg of methylphenidate with a can of Red Bull and a protein bar. He had packed a bag the previous night—boltcutters, night vision goggles, a hand-drawn map, and a Beretta M9 fitted with an oil filter suppressor. Just in case.
( more )Sometimes I awake in the long valleys of the night, and feel as though a beast planted by god is attempting to break free from my skin; subterranean hands born in the churning deep of the soul rise from their oceanic hovels to wrap around my ribcage, testing the bars that imprison them. Dread itches in my fingertips.
( more )God beamed an eight-hundred milligram excursus on the writhing of shadows directly into Leander’s brain, between the eyes, and he was suffering. His mouth was as dry as New Mexico itself, his skin no less hot, and he laid spread out on a ratty, dog-eaten couch while he waited for the spectral insectoids outside his window to come in and spear him on their tusks. Grasped by a powerful and silent horror, he wondered what rotting seas could have begot the crawling phantasms that vermiculated from his walls, filling the dark spaces of his rented suburban home normally ruled by ants and cardboard boxes. With great effort he leaned forward, grasping for his vape pen.
( more )“The suburbs are a site of psychic death.”
Sestos spun around on a socked foot to fill a small beaker from the kitchen sink while he delivered his monologue—rehearsed from his bed the night before—to his disinterested roommates. “The godhead of alienation spreads across the properties like a plague, her children imprisoned in badlands of over-manicured lawns and sidewalkless streets. The quaint anachronisms of low-cut wooden fences hide the underlying violence of suburban property law: There’s always a man with a gun, hiding behind Venetian blinds, behind the tinted windows of an unmarked Ford.”
( more )My Jon Doe lifted himself from the heavy shackles of death and let the crows carry him to my house. After a dinner that arrived in a Styrofoam box and a few hours of unpleasant dreams, I awoke in the harsh daylight hours—I was still rendered nocturnal by my work—to see him stumbling across my bedroom, his gait torpid with rigor mortis. He was as he appeared to me the previous night, completely naked, a white sheet veiling his head, wearing a beard of coagulated blood that ran from chin to navel. He clambered onto the foot of my bed, where I lay forced onto the mattress as if held by an insurmountable weight; he gazed at me with unseeing eyes, gaped jaw visible against the linen pressed to his face. He raised his arm and pointed to his left, as if asking for something out of his reach. The suffocating weight released itself from my chest and I flailed out of my sheets, but he was gone.
( more )Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14
As an adolescent I would awake in the nadir of the night to find odd notions not my own pressed into the cheek of my mouth; alone in the umbra of my sleep, when the stars hanging in the New Mexico nights would blink like countless lambent eyes, a silent diplomat of Mareritt would come into my bed, tilt my head up with the first three fingers of one hand and open my jaw with the thumb of the other. Into my mouth would go this notion, and many others with successive nights. Each was a bitter chant, a drumbeat of questions that would not brook rejection.
One morning over breakfast, my grandmother told me that the haunting of ideas has dogged the women of our family since the reign of Eric III, when an unwed mother steeled a dagger with the blood of a loon and thrust it into the gut of our oldest patriarch, sending his sons into the past and his misfortune into the future. Ideas, she said, are deaf to the words of mercy and grief—one can only yield to them, as the forest does a fire. This story is one of those notions, perhaps the oldest and the bitterest, its narrative skeins returning to me in the night to weave sails that catch not on the wind, but on the breaths of the mind.
( more )Forty-two years after it started, the life of Nabû-zuqup-kēna unraveled under the Babylonian sun, returning to the cool waters of the Tigris in a spray of crimson. The man in question, a priest who hung his head before the idol of Marduk, heard a distant god whisper to him in a dream, a god whose name passed into history before mortal men laid the first bricks of Ur. After this fitful vision, Nabû-zuqup-kēna copied seven words onto a clay tablet moistened with the urine of a virgin sow, covered the tablet with another layer of clay to serve as an envelope, then sent it north on the back of a horse. His oneiric promise was thus fulfilled. The priest, hearing nothing but the bruit of the first three words calling him to the desert of his ancestors, used a stolen blade to peel the skin from his chest and sever the sanguine cords of his beating heart, as one would pluck a pomegranate from a tree.
Outside Sippar, at the borders of the Babylonian kingdom, the tablet demanded new custodianship. The young messenger dropped it onto the bricks of the city gate, shattering the unfired outer envelope. Sunlight cut deep shadows into the next three words, syllables that owed their heritage to a thousand dead scribes, to the first merchants and their tallies, to the laments for Ur wailed at a mourning moon in the languages of antiquity. The messenger extended his tongue from his mouth before falling chin-first onto a rock as to sever the organ from his head. He swallowed the resulting blood, then ran through the streets of Sippar before impaling himself upon the horns of a bull.
A priestess, Šima-ilat, saw the grizzly death unfold and covered the tablet with a linen cloth before placing it under her arm. Šima-ilat, one-third a woman and two-thirds a demon following a night in her adolescence when the northern winds clawed their way into her spine, heard the tellurian words whisper to her like the tuneful cry of a shorebird. How could something so wicked sing such honeyed songs?
She knew she should cast the thing into the Tigris, but its chant was too loud, her curiosity too desperate. She had to witness it. After reading the seventh word, the remaining third of her soul carved by Ištar fled from her liver and drowned itself in her stomach, taking her voice with it. She stumbled past the city gates, and flung herself upon a priest; Šima-ilat then bit off the fifth finger of her left hand, split the bone between her teeth, and used the shard as a stylus to press her prophecy into clay. The priest, reading words glazed by blood, did not know if confusion or horror came to him first.
Above the meek cradle of the Earth, Šamaš, daylight and justice incarnate, pulled himself from his divine throne and mournfully threw a lion's hide over the sun. Somewhere in the north of the world, a million tongues tasted the terroir of Šima-ilat's fear. They draped themselves in a shroud of tears before pouring down the mountains.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.
- Marx
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to
awake.
- Ulysses
In vain did Sedna soak a knot of flax in seawater and nail it to the space above the door with a sliver of stone cut from rock shears hidden under virgin snow. Mizar, being the youngest of the Elders, and thus the least likely to fear the night in which Siātu bites the soft flesh of her heart in the cold, found Sedna’s superstition piteous and stated such dreams were fallow and without the fruit of meaning. When her nightmares persisted, Ceres told her that no Ghost had ever spoken of Siātu, and thus all the ink in the world could not explain her visions. She continued to pray for the remittance of her haunted dreams.
( Read more... )Note: Contains spoilers for Martyrs, The Ring, Demonlover, Red Rooms, Possessor, Feardotcom and Suicide Club.
In the 2008 French horror film Martyrs, protagonist Anna Assaoui finds herself kidnapped by a cult of aging gentry and bourgeoisie socialites who believe in divine enlightenment through pain; the head of the cult, known only as Mademoiselle, subjects Anna to a regimen of of beatings, deprivation, torture and abuse in the hope that she will become a kind of divine witness—literally, a Martyr—who, in her final moments, will transmit her knowledge of the afterlife to the cult and its adherents.
At the end of the film Anna is flayed alive, and whispers the sacred knowledge of her enlightenment to the Mademoiselle. With the secret revealed to her, the Mademoiselle tells no one else, and instead takes her own life.
We have all become witnesses. Spend an hour scrolling on TikTok. Cat videos. Clips from Twitch of streamers reacting to the new KSI song. People arguing about the election. Discourse about Halsey's new album. Footage of a Palestinian man burning alive in a hospital. A Woman with a pet raccoon. Talk of North Korea and Wold War III.
Go On Reddit. Visit the porn subreddit, see porn. There's a subreddit for people to post pictures of their badly-made meals. Laugh at someone's catastrophically overcooked brownies. Go on the news subreddit, it's North Korea, Russia, and Ukraine again. There's at least three subreddits specifically for the Ukraine war; see a helicopter tumble to earth in a ball of flame. See a Ukrainian soldier alone in a ditch eat his rifle, his helmet tumbling across the dirt, head jerking back with a quick spray of red. See a drone drop a grenade on a Russian, his skull splitting in two like a watermelon. Have you ever seen a person with half a head? Go back to the food subreddit, see someone's dangerously undercooked chicken. You don't laugh this time.
The nightmares of the modern world are no longer filtered through journalists or hidden behind gonzo VHS snuff tapes. The era of Faces Of Death is far behind us, as old and innocent as the rest of our childhood memories. When the computers in our pockets can show us every detail of war, death, rape, and genocide, all uncensored, where does that leave horror cinema? What can be more horrifying than this? We begin to make films about what it means to be a witness, of course.
Traditionally, horror about technology falls into two camps: we create a new thing, and that thing comes to destroy us, or we create a new thing, and it becomes a vector for pre-existing evil. The former gives us Frankenstein, Mimic, M3gan, and countless monster films, while the latter has given us Poltergeist, The Ring, One Missed Call, Demonlover, Feardotcom, Pulse, and numerous others.
With the arrival of the internet came a whole new generation of corresponding horror films. Some, such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's magnum opus Pulse, and Jane Schoenbrun's unsettling thesis on online adolescence We're All Going To the World's Fair, deal with the loneliness and alienation of the internet. Others, such as Demonlover, Suicide Club, and Feardotcom, are instead more interested in the horror of what we might find on the internet—and what happens when it finds us. For the purposes of this discussion, those latter three are worth examining in detail.
Demonlover and Feardotcom, both from 2002, are remarkably similar films. In Olivier Assayas's tense and postmodern Demonlover, a pair of ruthless and conniving corporations battle to monopolize the flow of hentai into the European market. The rules of corporate espionage fall apart when protagonist Diane De Monx discovers that one of the hentai sites is a front for an interactive torture porn business. The film's final half hour passes in a dreamlike haze of paranoia, murder, and intrigue, until Diane ends up in front of the torturer's camera. In the critically panned Feardotcom, a group of NYPD detectives trace a number of unexplained deaths to a snuff film website—and anyone who views the website will die 48 hours later. After visiting Feardotcom themselves, they race to find the website's source: the vengeful spirit of a serial killer's first victim, spreading her rage and suffering through the wires.
Sion Sono's Suicide Club, from 2001, bridges the thematic gap between the clades of internet alienation horror, and evil website horror. A rash of blood-soaked suicides in Japan catch the interest of police detective Kuroda and hacker Kiyoko. Their respective investigations lead them to a mysterious website, populated by red and white dots, representing the victims. The catch? The dots appear before the suicides happen. As they struggle to close in on the bizarre organization behind the website, death closes in on them: Kiyoko is kidnapped by a fame-obsessed rock star who considers himself to be the head of the "Suicide Club", while Kuroda's family, and finally Kuroda himself, all die by their own hands. It should be noted that there's a similar thematic angle in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse: A grad student's research project, where dots bounce around on a computer screen. If two dots collide, they disappear, but a dot will never stray too far from another; the dots serve as a metaphor for the film's core idea of loneliness among both the living and the dead. To Sono and Kurosawa alike, there's something strange and tragic in seeing human life as pixels on a screen.
This was the state of our anxieties about the internet in the early 2000s; we were afraid of what we might find lurking on the dark corners of the web, and what might find us. This makes sense, as it's an extension of a common narrative device in horror. Someone must first discover the monster, and the monster discovers them. Characters knowingly travel to the haunted woods, perform the seance, visit the haunted house, take possession of the cursed object, and then suffer the consequences.
It's not the early 2000s anymore, though. The internet is no longer a new and mysterious frontier. There is no more fear of what we might find, because too many of us have found it. So, horror is beginning to move on. The horror is the experience itself.
Brandon Cronenberg's 2020 film Possessor is one of the best sci-fi horror films of the last ten years. At the center of the tragedy is Tasya Vos, a corporate assassin whose employer has a unique set of technologies that allow her to remotely pilot another human being, usually selected to be someone already close to their intended target. However, as Tasya's emotional state begins to deteriorate, her own psyche starts to clash with the psyche of the man she's piloting.
Possessor is a film about voyeurism and emotional invasiveness in the social media age. Tasya doesn't merely puppet a random stranger, she lives their life, experiences their heath problems and addictions, sleeps with their partners, and inhabits their body as if it was her own.
While Tasya is piloting the body of Collin Tate, low-level employee at a Facebook-esque tech company, Collin's friends discuss his job combing over and categorizing footage from webcams, an obvious parallel to Tasya's own, more direct, form of voyeurism:
"I feel like a certain type of mind must get off on violating people's lives like that. I mean, seriously, how much pussy do you see at work everyday?"
"Well, I can only imagine the stuff he sees over there. I jerk off every day in front of my webcam so that Zoothroo knows which brand of vibrator I'm using."
This level of invasiveness is paralleled in the debrief Tasya's manager gives her before she plugs in to Collin's body:
"Tate's girlfriend is 'Ava' not 'Ahva'. His irritable bowel syndrome has intensified, so moderate to severe pain in your lower right abdomen will be considered normal."
In another scene, we see Collin, piloted by Tasya, at his work. He clicks through webcam feeds, watching people going about their lives, getting undressed, having sex, while he selects images of curtains for AI categorization. The camera cuts away from the webcam view and onto Collin's face as he selects the next feed. Collin staggers away in horror, disgusted by whatever it is the camera is showing him. Tasya becomes increasingly erratic, enacting violence with numb, chaotic brutality as her time in Collin's body extends into dangerous territory. By the end of the film, everyone is dead, and Tasya is a shell of her former self.
Possessor warns us that we are seeing too much of other people's lives, and they see too much of ours, and the result is destructive to everyone involved. This message is far from theoretical. We have created a small army of Tasya Voses, and Facebook is now paying out to content moderators who were diagnosed with PTSD. What do we even make of a nightmare such as this? Is the human spirit simply an abyss into which no one should delve? Is social media just an inherently bad idea? Possessor does not have a philosophical answer, but it has a more direct suggestion: Do not look. Your gaze was not meant for the mind of another.
2023 saw the release of the Quebecois Red Rooms, a profoundly disturbing psychological horror that aims at both the social media age and true crime. The films opens on the trial of a serial killer, Ludovic Chevalier, AKA le Démon de Rosemont, a man who filmed the rape, torture, and murder of three young women, and put the footage on the internet. However, we quickly realize that the film isn't about Ludovic himself, but his groupies, the two women so obsessed with Ludovic that they sleep on the streets so they can be first in line to attend his trial. Clémentine is manic, and resolutely believes in Ludovic's innocence. Kelly-Anne's motives and emotions are far murkier.
The narrative core of Red Rooms are the snuff films themselves. The viewer never sees them, but we see the reaction of those who do. People collapse in the courtroom. Screams of horror. In one of the most gripping scenes in the film, we learn that Kelly-Anne has a copy of one of the snuff films, and she watches it with Clémentine. We see their faces, bathed in red from the computer monitor. Kelly-Anne's expression is as blank as always, but Clémentine's shifts through anguish, disgust, and terror. Tears roll down her face. The act of witnessing is too much for her, and she leaves for home the next morning.
Red Rooms derives much of its tension from Kelly-Anne's behavior, she's a near-perfect execution of the "monster with motives we cannot comprehend" trope. The film's horror—the scenes that stick with the audience hours after the credits roll—all derive from the act of witnessing. We do not see the footage, because that's not the point. The point is what it does to us.
Possessor and Red Rooms are both members in a nascent clade of technology horror: through the internet we are witnessing what we shouldn't, and it's driving us mad. We are traumatized and broken, and we cannot look away.
Alienation is also a theme in both of these movies: Red Rooms draws a parallel between Kelly-Anne and Lady Shalott, the character from Tennyson's poem of the same name, who lives alone in a tower on an island. Collin Tate spends his working days with a VR set strapped to his head, completely isolated. By the end of the film, everyone close to Tasya Vos is dead.
In an act of hubris or pretense, I'm calling this genre Doomscrolling Horror: films where the source of fear is the alienation, anxiety, trauma, and mental distress associated with the age of algorithm-driven social media and surveillance capitalism. Although not a film, Black Mirror is an important predictor of this genre, particularly the series pilot The National Anthem, where the prime minister is forced to sodomize a pig on national TV, while the entire population watches on in disgust.
Demonlover comes remarkably close to predicting the nightmare 20 years ahead of time: the film ends with Diane De Monx trapped in the torturers' chambers, but we zoom out to see her on the computer monitor of a high school student. He pays a few dollars to send his requests to the website's producers, then returns his attention to his chemistry homework while she awaits her fate on his monitor. It is a normal day for a normal suburban family.
To quote Bessel Van Der Kolk's The Body Keeps The Score:
[Two researchers] had repeatedly administered painful electric shocks to dogs who were trapped in locked cages. They called this condition "inescapable shock." [..] After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating.
What a perfect metaphor for the petty atavism of Twitter, Reddit, and the rest. Broken and pathetic creatures, whimpering, defecating, trapped only by ourselves and our trauma. The Russian man with half a skull. Revenge porn. Civilians burning alive. The door is open. We do not run. Why? To an outsider we must seem insane.
In a scene from the 2002 horror film The Ring, journalist Rachel Keller tracks down the only living guardian of Samara, the ghostly girl who created the cursed VHS tape that kills its viewers. He tells her:
What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it. Spread it like a sickness.
Rachel soon realizes this is a clue—Samara created the tape to force her anguish upon the world, and spread it.
Welcome to hell. Are you a Samara, Tasya, or Clémentine? You see a cop shoot a man fifteen times in the back. Is the cage locked? A corpse in the mud in Donbas. Is the cage locked? The Gaza strip reduced to ruin. Is the cage locked? Is the cage locked? Is the cage locked?
For reasons I cannot fully explain, I've been watching one of those ghost investigation shows on HBO recently, possibly because I find something charming about the gonzo inanity of the whole genre; I think everyone should spend at least twenty minutes of their time watching gormless television hosts bark orders at a spirit box. Jokes aside, one of the first episodes took place inside an abandoned asylum, and it reminded me of something that's been on my mind for a bit.
Parallel to the usual Blumhouse offerings and art-horror of the last few years, something else has been going on: horror films about asylums. I've noticed a few of them over the years, but after I saw the Korean found-footage horror film Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum last year, I started to notice the pattern. Asylum Horror (as I rather presumptuously call it) is defined by two qualities:
Examples include: Grave Encounters (2011), Session 9 (2001), Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018), Shutter Island (2010), Gothika (2003)
Note: Spoilers follow
That last qualifier is what makes these films interesting. Sensational depictions of mental illness are legion across decades of horror, and Asylum Horror does not separate itself from these films by setting alone. The things these films want us to fear is not the other, but the ever-present danger of becoming the other.
Observe:
In the (quite good) indie horror flick Session 9, Gordon and his asbestos removal business win a contract to clean up an abandoned asylum. The job quickly turns sideways—money and deadlines are tight, Gordon is desperate for money, tensions flair, temp workers disappear, erratic behavior spreads throughout the laborers like a creeping miasma. After a spasm of violence, the film ends with a shot of Gordon, hunched over in a rotting inpatient room, talking to no one.
In the found-footage horror Grave Encounters, the cynical, overworked crew of a ghost investigation TV show spend the night in an infamous haunted asylum. To their surprise, the ghosts are real—and after the "patients" tear through cast and crew, the film ends with the show's host strapped to a bed, about to be lobotomized by spectral orderlies.
In Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, a group of Twitch-savvy social media personalities set out on a mission to live stream their exploration of an abandoned asylum. Their excursion ends as one would expect, with the final girl strapped to a wheelchair as she's pulled helplessly across a hallway by forces unseen.
In Gothika, a psychiatrist working at a criminal asylum wakes up to find herself on the other side of the bars; the police have accused her of a murder for which she has no memory, and the same ghostly entity that drove her to kill may be her only hope to escape the asylum.
Although not strictly horror, Scorsese's Shutter Island follows a similar formula: a sullen and brooding detective finds himself on a remote island host to a criminal asylum. He arrives with the goal of finding a lost patient, but after days of dead ends and creeping unease, the truth is revealed: he is one of the patients, and his unorthodox roleplay-therapy appears to be failing.
There's this great quote from Clive Barker where he describes the conservative bend that most horror narratives have:
"Horror fiction tends to be reactionary. It's usually about a return to the status quo—the monster is an outsider who must be banished from the sanctum."
Asylum Horror runs this in reverse: the other is not banished, and instead we become the other. It should be noted that in Gonjiam and Grave Encounters (and perhaps Gothika, depending on how you interpret the film's muddled symbolism), no one "goes insane" in any psychological sense. The fear that many of these films tap into is not a fear of disability, of losing our grip on reality, but a fear of being marked as such. After Halle Berry's character is imprisoned in the asylum in Gothika, another patient—previously one of Berry's own—walks up to her and says:
You're invisible now.
What a terrifying act of violence, to be rendered invisible by forces that exist utterly outside of one's control. Madness, in Gothika's case, is not merely a misapplied medical diagnosis, but state of social being decided and enforced by courts, lawyers, policemen, guards, psychiatrists, experts, nurses, metal locks and surveillance cameras. What a vast and unknowable work of creation, like Lovecraft's Cthulhu, or Blair Witch's Maryland woods.
The real-life horror that these films pull from is hardly obscure. In fact, Session 9 is even kind enough to give us a hint, in the form of a primary shooting location: Danvers State Hospital.
Danvers is one of the most famous state-sponsored asylums to come out of the 1800s and early 1900s, but it siblings are many. Willowbrook state school in Staten Island, opened in 1947 and closed in 1987, serves as a typical example; the asylum would make it into national news after TV reporter Geraldo Rivera aired a half hour special about the grim conditions at the Willowbrook in 1972, and he would later go on to win a Peabody for his work. Willowbrook was the stuff of Tartarus, and the horrors inside defy quick description, but it was said rates of hepatitis among inmates neared 100%.
Rivera's description of the asylum's neglected children could be the opening page to any Blumhouse script:
"Dropped on the floor, naked and wrapped in their own feces, they made a noise, pitiful, more like a poorly howl that is impossible forget. This is how it looks, so that you can hear, but how can I describe to you the smell that ravaged this place? It smelled of dirt, disease, and death."
In the 2009 true crime documentary Cropsey, which discusses the asylum at length, director Joshua Zeman interviews a Staten Island resident who articulates the connection between Willowbrook and Staten Island's long-held reputation as a dumping ground:
"When you look at a place like Staten Island, it was viewed as a dumping ground for all kinds of things. The Fresh Kills Landfill, which took all the city's garbage. Eight million people's garbage, dumped in Staten Island. The farm colony was a place where people went who had tuberculosis. Willowbrook warehoused thousands of people and left them there. It was a dumping ground. Why would you dump them in Staten Island? Because that's where you dump things."
Willowbrook is exceptional in infamy but not in cruelty. You can find horror of equal measure in any of the nineteenth and twentieth century state asylums—take for example Northern State Hospital, which served my hometown of Seattle from 1912 to 1973. Institutionalization implies that one is in some way unfit to manage one's own life and affairs, but that did not stop researchers at the University Of Washington from injecting a number of patients with radioactive iron isotopes in the 1950s.
This institutional violence is reflected in the genre: the lobotomies (discussed and depicted) in Grave Encounters and Session 9, the overuse of chemical restraints in Gothika, and the imagery of physical restraints and institutional dehumanization in Gonjiam. Most of these films are also host to more "traditional" forms of horror—bodily violence and psychological torment inflicted by supernatural or human agents, torture, death, and so on. However, the asylum as an institution, and the violence it inflicts, always stands in the foreground, an instigator of the more individual acts of violence. In one of the most tense scenes in Session 9, one of the characters performs a mock lobotomy on his coworker with a chopstick, saying:
"The Ice Pick method. Insert a thing metal pipette into the orbital frontal cortex and enter the soft tissue of the frontal lobe. A few simple, up and down jerks to sever the lateral hypothalamus. All resulting in a rapid reduction of stress for our little patient here. Total time elapsed, two minutes. Only side effect? Black eye."
A similar monologue takes place within the first five minutes of Grave Encounters, as TV host Lance Preston introduces the asylum to his viewers:
"Friedkin was a Harvard trained neurologist who was head physician here from 1937 to 1948. He had gained some notoriety because of his work in experimental brain surgery. He was a major advocate of the lobotomy. Under Friedkin's supervision there were about 140 lobotomies. On August 15, 1948, six patients broke out of their rooms and stabbed Friedkin in his office."
In the opening to Gonjiam, the narrator connects the asylum to different, but equally institutional acts of mass violence specific to Korea:
"There are numerous rumors around Gonjiam asylum. Some say it was built on the place where the Japanese brutally murdered and buried the Korean resistance so that nobody could trace the bodies. Or it was the national torturing facility in the 60s and 70s, disguised as an asylum."
Lobotomy, torture, chemical restraint, imprisonment, morally dubious science experiments, and the other acts associated with the asylum in these films may be carried out by individuals, but they do so at the behest of the asylum, an institution that, almost by definition, operates with the approval of the state, and society at large. This fear of the asylum is not a fear of an individual, group, or other, but a fear of society and its mechanisms of control.
An alternate interpretation would be that these films do not tap into a fear of the asylum, but a fear of karmic vengeance. After all, a very small part of these films are devoted to the protagonist "joining" the inmates. As with many found footage films, we spend the lion's share of the runtime in Gonjiam and Grave Encounters watching a camera violently whip around while characters flee from a variety of ghostly shades. Should we not view this as a fear that we, in some way, are responsible for the sins of our forefathers, and that we will be haunted by the ghosts of those wronged by past generations?
For contrast, a familiar example of karmic vengeance would be the tired "Indian Burial Ground" trope found occasionally in American horror. The ur-example in cinema is the is the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, wherein doting suburban housewife Kathy Lutz discovers that her haunted upstate New York home was built on Shinnecock burial ground. The root of these fears is undeniably different from Asylum horror; the audience watching The Amityville Horror is not made to fear the idea that they, in some way, might be colonized next. The film does not end with Katy Lutz reincarnated as a Shinnecock girl torn from her family and thrown in a 1800s New York residential school. The fear of the so-called "Indian burial ground" is a fear of retribution, not a fear that you, dear viewer, are staring down the barrel of the next Round Valley Massacre.
Sublimating fears of political authority isn't new for horror; When Evil Lurks deals with government apathy in the face of chaos, Crimes Of The Future with collective violence as a response to individual abnormality, Immaculate and The First Omen with a fear of childbirth without Roe V. Wade, [REC] subtly hints at the moral bankruptcy of the catholic church, Martyrs with bourgeoisie exploitation, Await Further Instructions with hopelessness in the face of authoritarianism, as well as Frontière(s) and Get Out with white supremacy, just to name a few. In this way Asylum Horror isn't particularly distinct, separated only by the obviousness of its anxiety about institutional power; perhaps one can imagine pregnancy as horror without mentioning the supreme court by name, but the horror of the asylum cannot be separated from institutional violence.
In 1974, as the battle over whether or not homosexuality would be considered a mental illness was raging hot, a June issue of The Gay Liberator magazine describes an altercation between activists from the Arbor Spring Gay Conference and the American Psychiatric Association:
All day before the evening workshop, more than 150 participants from the National Gay Conference had attempted to lobby the psychiatrists against their most violently oppressive practices: electroshock, chemo-therapy, aversion therapy, and other forms of behavior control; and in favor of more human attitudes toward gay sexuality. But many gay women and men expressed disappointment with the psychiatrists' response. [..] One psychiatrist, for example, commented that heterosexuals are "more advanced" psychologically than gay people, but that he saw no reason why a gay person could not "be happy in a less advanced stage of sexual development." Meanwhile, the psychiatrists' convention center was jammed with colorful commercial displays of the latest developments in behavior control.
Outside of cinema, the long spectre of the asylum looms over much of media, although I would argue that the most famous is Gotham's Arkham Asylum, another fictional institution that might owe its heritage to Danvers, by way of Lovecraft. After The Joker escapes Arkham in the Alan Moore's 1988 comic The Killing Joke, he tells Batman: "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy." The Joker was right, although perhaps in more ways than Alan Moore realized. Lunacy is a category—if you don't put yourself in it, someone else might.
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