House of Leaves

This is not for you. – prologue, House of Leaves

Mark Danielewski’s Y2K-era House of Leaves is the cult horror equivalent to that other literary apotheosis of Generation X, Infinite Jest. Capitalizing on the era’s early internet culture and fascination with “found footage” tropes, House of Leaves is most famous for its labyrinthine structure. Johnny Truant, a down-and-out tattoo parlor worker bee in LA (does it get more Gen X? Yes, it does. He sojourns in Seattle.), is called over frantically at 3am to the apartment of his best friend “Lude.” A la Toni Morrison, person-names are very important here. Lude’s upstairs neighbor – a mysterious blind, elderly man named Zampanò – has passed away, and Lude is compelled to enter his apartment. Once inside the apartment and upon smelling a strong odor – not bad, just “sort of human” – Johnny now falls under the spell of compulsion as he discovers in a corner a massive stack of papers and detritus that he removes from the apartment. The papers are the beginnings of a scholarly manuscript describing and critiquing a massively influential and important documentary-turned-horror film, The Navidson Record. This film, created by the famous photographer Will Navidson of National Geographic fame, took the world by storm, showing as it does an inexplicable horror such that it is unclear if the footage is real or a hoax. Navidson’s reputation strongly argues against a fake. Entire schools of thought have developed around the meaning of The Navidson Record, and Zapanò’s is to be the definitive compendium. The manuscript is thoroughly footnoted, with an extensive bibliography, with commentary by major film and literary critics, with references to university film studies centered on the documentary. Johnny cannot stop arranging the manuscript into book form – Rime of the Ancient Mariner meets The Evil Dead. And he frequently adds his own footnotes and commentary to the manuscript. So the “structure” of House of Leaves is such that Johnny is compiling Zampanò’s manuscript of Navidson’s documentary-horror film. And there are mysterious, omniscient “editors” who with mercifully rare interpolation add even further comment. However, Johnny soon discovers that there is no evidence such a film, a person named Navidson, or any of the references or commentaries have ever existed. Why would Zampanò do this? How did he do this? Regardless, Johnny himself cannot stop – he must continue the manuscript, and his continuing of something which is obviously the product of a disturbed mind leads to his own insanity.

Whatever the merits of the book, I do find it interesting to consider HoL a generation later, in which strangers on the internet routinely are similarly compelled to extensively comment and compile (screenshots are the new bibliographies) upon other strangers’ writings about things that quite possibly have never existed. And occasionally these people go insane. House of Leaves, if nothing else, inchoately prophesied in its doomed house on “Ash Tree Lane” in which the inside is larger – and infinitely so – than the outside of the house, the phenomena of doom scrolling and trolling and that the Panopticon ever expands as it ever closes in.

The Peripatetic Monstrous

In the Poetics Aristotle identifies two fundamentals to the plot of tragedy: peripety and discovery. Peripety – pronounced with the same syllable stressings as “discovery” – is something like a substantial change to a person, thing, or context. Discovery is, well, a discovery or finding of a substantial fact that was previously hidden within the seemingly mundane. Aristotle intriguingly argues that peripety – and thus the emotional impact of tragedy – is most powerful only when occurring upon discovery. A rebuke to juvenile post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy and the deus ex machina dream sequences of laziness or lack of talent. This obviously brings us to Fright Night. Contemporary horror gets a bad rap these days, but the problem (poorly understood and thus jumbled in a heap of bad critical jargon) is generally the “contemporary” as opposed to the “horror.” It would be like reading Fifty Shades of Gray and believing this is a prooftext against the novel simpliciter. Regarding “contemporary horror” this blog hops on a hobby horse battering nearly all things of the adjective while donning the helmet and considering with sympathy the noun properly understood. Fright Night makes a nice test case. Stylistically, FN is excellent. The vampire is immediately, inexcusably, and unapologetically evil – a sexual deviant, a murderer, a grotesquery, a liar. “A liar from the beginning…”. Upon – inadvertently, yes – discovering the vampire’s evil Charlie is ripped from the act of his own debauchery and intriguingly for the remainder of the movie loses complete interest in such sin as his knowledge of the abyss of depravity of the vampire grows. And the powers of holy water and crucifixes are quite real. The foreboding dread is excellent, as Charlie pleads with literally everyone of the mortal dangers they face. As we’ve noted before, horror pulls the scales from the eyes of Tiresias while slamming them upon everyone else. But then again this is a vampire movie of 1985 what do you expect? Unfortunately despite its truly wonderful stylizations – seriously it’s wonderful – FN fails as great art precisely along Aristotelian critique. Discovery, occurring within minutes of the opening, is divorced from a non-existent peripety. Thus jump-scare and “inevitability.” Fortunately The Lost Boys would learn from these earlier mistakes.

Back To The Future

And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life-or while the machine is recording-will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience…The fact that we cannot understand anything outside of time and space may perhaps suggest that our life is not appreciably different from the survival to be obtained by this machine. – The Invention of Morel

From the Hopi Indians – terrifyingly shown in The Endless – to Nietzsche, purveyors of the “Eternal Recurrence” myth make strange bedfellows. Morel, seeking an immortality from eternity, hops right in with them. Morel has invented a machine which “films” every moment of a crew of vacationers to a deserted, dangerous island for a week. Once the filming has completed, it will then project – repeatedly – the entirety of that which has been filmed. In other words, every single second of the vacationers’ week on the island will be repeatedly projected onto the “screen” of the island over and over and…. An inverse of the much later The Matrix, Morel’s invention captures the total physical essence of those who pass within its lens. Thus and delightfully anti-Cartesian, this projected totality of physicality cannot exist without soul – and neither can those who have been filmed as their souls are ripped out of them and transmogrified into the projected images. A fugitive to the island, fleeing a life sentence behind bars, is startled when, after safely landing, the vacationers suddenly “show up.” He hides, fearing discovery; however – and not understanding any of this – he falls in love with a beautiful vacationer. He bravely reveals himself to her, and she walks away. He speaks to her, and she “ignores.” He makes her a beautiful gift. She unthinkingly walks over it. When he finally understands the horror of the eternal recurrence, he first desires to study her – repeatedly as the movie repeats every week. He learns her every move, her every word, her every decision. He can explain everything about her. But does he really know her? No. Despairing, he chooses to join them in the movie and flips on the machine to film; and his soul is slowly torn out of him as he joins the images. Of all the wonders of heaven the Holy Ghost has revealed, perhaps the most “terrifying” is that the blessed will both know and be fully known. We won’t be explained – no therapy needed in heaven. We will be known. It is only terrifying this side of purgatory. On the other side of that arduous mountain, every single thing about you will be loveable. Inconceivable.