You're invisible now: Asylum Horror

[heya_baru]

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:

1. The majority, or entirety, of the film must take place in an old-school asylum.
2. At some point in the film, the protagonist (literally or metaphorically) becomes a patient in the asylum.

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.