What Scares Me

 I am not easily scared.

I write about horror for most of my scholarly work, and have finally acknowledged that, stopped feeling ashamed by it (thanks weirdo elitist academia), and love the work I do.

I have been scared by only a handful of things in my 44 year old life:

• A Girl Scout sleepover late night VHS viewing of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street
• The first season of American Horror Story
• The Haunting of Hill House 
• The Haunting of Bly Manor

It took me a bit to finish Bly Manor this weekend mainly because I could not watch episodes before bed and even WITH watching something else in the hours before bed I still was careful to shut the bedroom closet, eyed the dark hallway with a sense of unease, and was leery of turning my back to dark corners. Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights, it was all the same feeling, the same unsettling.

I could not have told you exactly what I felt uneasy about or what fear tickled the back of my brain, but it sat there, coiled, dark, unsettling.

Like I said, I don't scare easy but I felt haunted all weekend and it got me thinking about the other rare times I'd felt this way. I felt it when The Haunting of Hill House came out, but I also felt it the first season of American Horror Story, and I started turning over in my mind what these things had in common.

One thing that struck me was that for all of these, by the end of each story, there is nothing scary at all about any of these things. By the end of each the total narrative, the explanation, the history, has been revealed, laid out, and that reveal removes the shadows. 

Season one of American Horror Story ends when Ben (Dylan McDermott), Vivien (Connie Britton), Moira (Frances McCoy), and the other ghosts of the house have created a life for themselves. They decorate the house for Christmas, a perfectly normal scene, even with Tate (Evan Peters) still on the outside, still waiting for Violet (Taissa Farmiga) to forgive him. 

At the end of The Haunting of Hill House, the Crains family retunrs to Hill House to try and save Luke, who is destroyed when he seeks to destroy the house, ensuring no one else is lost to it. But Nell, the sister who was also destroyed by the house when she died by suicide, unable to escape the trauma of her haunting by the house.

In each of these stories the characters are haunted and traumatized by the events of their past, both their individual pasts and the generational pasts of their families and homes. All of these narratives convey this through flashbacks to the past, connecting these traumatic experiences. These flashbacks serve two purposes, they terrify us with the initial event, like the terrifying presence of the Bent-Neck Lady in Hill House, but they also eventually serve to explain the terror, reveal the source.

What makes these narratives terrifying is the idea that we can be haunted, dogged, incapable of escaping the events of our past. The idea that it does not matter where you go, what you overcome, what you accomplish you can never escape these terrors, these horrors, is itself a terror. Yet each narrative reveals a logic, an answer to these horros. In each story the answer is the story itself. AHS, Hill House, Bly Manor, each spends their episodes, their seasons revealing the stories behind the horror. The ghosts, the dead, those left behind and the traumatized, each have their story told and once their story is told they are no longer a horror, or rather they are still recognized as a horror, as a traumatic experience, no one in these stories is erasing or retconning the events of their past. Rather each set of families, characters, is only freed from the haunting effects of their past, their experienced horrors once they have had the chance to tell their stories.

Ben learns the truth about the ghostly inhabitants of the house and it is that and not any of his other actions that enables him to fix his family.

The Crains face the truth of each of their collective horrors, coming together to face the truth, and only once they've done that does Nell save Luke, and in doing so save them all.

Carla Gugino as the literal storyteller reveals the ultimate truth of Bly Manor, and in telling Dani's story tells the story of Viola, and how the ghosts of Bly came to be. Dani's acceptance of Viola's story frees the ghosts, and ensures no more will be created. The Storytellers narrative also frees Henry and Owen.

What each narrative seems to tell us, the lesson, seems to be that revealing and facing the past, learning from the stories of the past, is the only way to move forward. So why are they so scary, so haunting, if at the end we know it ends up okay? The ghosts that haunt these houses are horrifying in different ways. In AHS ghosts were created by dismemberment, death by suicide, self-immolation, and their actions, their forms of death, their trauma, for many of them is written on their bodies, the cause of the terror, the horror, their appearance evokes in others. In Hill House, both Nell and Olivia who died by suicide show evidence of their actions in their haunting, and the ghost of Abigail Dudley cannot leave the grounds she's killed on.  Bly Manor is haunted by ghosts who have forgotten their narratives, their names, their origins, seen in the wiping of their faces, the loss of their identity.

Perhaps these ghosts are terrifying because it is so easy to see how they are haunted by their lives, their actions. For many the cause of their own terror, which now terrorizes others, is written on their body. Their bodies then become the object lesson, and since so many of these ghosts are denied their own voice, their bodies are the only way their story can be told. Once the origin of their trauma has been revealed only THEN are they free, and are the inhabitants free of their haunting.

Even if we suspect that the endings will end up okay, the single episode narratives, the hauntings, the terrors are all still horrifying. We can say we understand that there's nothing under the bed, hiding in the dark doorway, waiting for us to turn out the light to get us, but knowing that and feeling that are different things. I still held my breath as I turned out the lights. I still didn't want the closet door open. I FELT the possible presence, threat, even if I KNEW it was irrational, not real. 

And maybe the reason why we're scared is because we've learned that personal traumas follow us, haunt us, keep us from doing certain things, living our lives. Maybe there is no dismembered ghost waiting to strangle us as soon as we turn off the light, but lights on or not WE are still left with our own personal horrors. We carry our traumas, our experiences with us, in the light and in the dark. The dark is not a comforting escape, it does not provide a respite, there is no hiding. Not all of us wear our own horrors on our skin as warnings or horrific narratives told to others. 

The end of each of these narratives either safely contains their ghosts and traumas or exorcises them. By the end of each the terror and horrors have been revealed and are not a source of fear. AHS shows the beginning of a new life for the family, Hill House finally frees the family members to move on from those events, and Bly Manor ends up freeing the ghosts, Flora, Miles, Henry, and ends up a love story.

It should be comforting that there is a way out of the trauma, a way through these experiences, a map for living a life free from horrors and terrors. But if that was truly true then we wouldn't jump at shadows, check under the bed, or not be able to sleep, right? Shouldn't KNOWING a thing make it easier? Yet somehow it is not. The ghostly shadow is still terrifying. The jumps real. The feelings of unease, of fear, is darker, deeper, and tickles that lizard part of our brain.

Maybe it's because we know that trauma is real, we experience it, it haunts us. It is real and we carry it with us each day.

Happy endings and resolutions on the other hand seem harder to believe in.