Copyright
2018 by Gary L. Pullman
In horror stories, as in
other types of fiction, setting may be, and often is, more than
merely time and space. A setting may provide a situation, evoke
atmosphere, supply a context, suggest a character's inner world, or
imply a metaphor.
In Luis Llosa's Anaconda
(1997), the Amazonian rain forest provides the situation
upon which the film's plot is based: the search of a documentary film
crew for the Shirishamas, a lost tribe, which is replaced by their
hunt, under the leadership of Paul Serone, a Paraguayan snake hunter,
for a giant anaconda. The documentary film crew's expedition, which
is hijacked by Serone, allows the plot of Llosa's movie's to unfold
in a new direction, one involving horror and suspense far beyond that
which the documentary crew might otherwise have encountered,
including murder, humans being used as live bait, and multiple
attacks (most fatal) by the giant reptile.
Alejandro AmenĂ¡bar's
2001 film, The Others,
takes place immediately after World War II. With her young children,
Anne and Nicholas, Grace Stewart has retreated to a remote country
house on one of the Channel Islands. She hires a trio of caretakers
who mysteriously appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Soon after, Grace
and her children discover that the house is haunted—or so it
appears. Throughout their stay, Grace orders her servants, Bertha
Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and Lydia, to keep the curtains drawn; her
children, she explains, suffer from photosensitivity and cannot bear
direct sunlight.
The
darkness, like the heavy fog that often obscures the yard and the
woods beyond the estate, create an atmosphere
of dread. Symbolically, the darkness may represent ignorance
(specifically, that of Grace and her children concerning their true
state of existence); the fog, confusion and an inability to
understand clearly; and the woods, the wilderness of nature, both
human and otherwise. These elements of the setting, like the large
house in which mysterious events transpire, create a disturbing
atmosphere that adds to the movie's horror and suspense.
The
vast Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
(1980) provides a context
for the film. The isolated hotel represents the emotional distance
that the caretaker and would-be novelist Jack Torrance maintains
between himself and others, including his wife Wendy and their son
Danny, just as the cold weather, the ice, the snow, and the drifting
fog represent Jack's cold nature. His emotional coldness isolates him
from himself and from those whom he claims to love. Although,
outwardly, he can appear to be an amiable person, as he does during
his interview, he is, in fact, a deeply disturbed man who's given to
rage and violence.
The
hotel's rambling corridors, its many closed doors, and its emptiness,
like the remote, isolated landscape surrounding it, provide the
context that allow viewers to understand Jack's true character as
someone who is irrational. Outwardly, he, like the Overlook Hotel,
seems sane and stable; inside, both the hotel and its caretaker are
mad and anything but stable. The hallways seem to lead in all
directions, but go nowhere, returning back upon themselves; the
closed doors to the rooms are locked, providing no access; the vast,
empty chambers available to Jack and his family echo with their
footsteps. The hotel and Jack mirror one another so well that it's
difficult, if not impossible, to say for certain whether the hotel is
haunted or its “ghosts” are hallucinations produced by Jack's own
madness.
In
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Edgar Allan Poe's remote
mansion doubles as an outward representation or expression of the
inner
world
of Roderick Usher's tormented mind. Its fall, at the end of the
story, reflects the “fall” of Usher into madness, although his
insanity clearly occurs some time earlier, perhaps before the
incidents of the story itself take place, as his madness causes many
of these incidents. Poe himself suggests that Usher's madness
precedes the incidents of the story; his narrator's description of a
disturbing crack in the front wall of the house reads:
Perhaps
the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely
perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building
in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it
became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
As
Kevin J. Hayes, the editor of The Annotated Poe,
points out, “Many readers note the corollary between this barely
perceptible but nonetheless worrisome fissure and Roderick Usher's
broken, increasingly unstable mind. They are a source of considerable
tension in the story” (99).
Even
the furnishings of the house, Hayes observes, suggest a relationship
between the House of Usher and Usher himself: “Roderick's weird,
creepy painting of an underground vault, illuminated by a sourceless
light, offers a glimpse into the terrible, frightening
terminus—madness or despair—into which the artist has fallen.”
It
is Usher, of course, who commits the insane act of entombing his
sister Madeline alive in the house's family tomb, but it is inside
the house that Usher commits this despicable deed. Throughout the
story, the house and its estate depict the inner world of their
owner's mind, a mind “fallen” into the madness that besets it.
As
pointed out in a previous
post, the cave explored by the characters of Neil Marshall's The
Descent (2005) is a metaphor
for the uterus. In descending into the womb-like cave, the feminist
female spelunkers are exploring their sexual selves, exploring
womanhood itself, but female sexuality and womanhood as they are
viewed through the lens of extreme feminism:
The
contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb.
Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix),
and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As
the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife
and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As
subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which
causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent,
both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine
months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her
best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the
birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s
narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the
women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is
involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in
fact, buried them alive.
Since
this metaphor is explored in detail in the previous post, there's no
need to revisit it further in this post.
Clearly,
setting need not be limited merely to representing a particular place
at a specific moment in time. Skillfully employed, setting can
represent or evoke, among other things, a situation, an atmosphere, a
context, a character's inner world, or a metaphor.