Setting: More Than Merely Time and Place

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 Amenábar'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.