I am also a we—social contagion in modern horror
‘There is no such thing as disunity.” –The Empty Man, 2020
—
Fam I have been feeling a little sick the past couple days don’t worry it is not COVID I took a test and PASSED. I am soldiering on though as this week’s newsletter is an absolute must not because of stuff happening in Congress or whatever, but because it is Halloween. That’s right, it is time for another Haunted Palace, in which we plumb the depths of human terror so if you have a heart condition or bladder or bowel control issues, you might want to skip this one. It’s going to get scary.
For a quick recap, in last year’s installment we talked about the horror of your environment turning against you in a little ditty called The Uninhabitable Beach House, and in the very first Haunted Palace, we ventured to the Arctic to feel the frigid, howling terror of humanity’s unceasing urge to explore. This year, we’re going viral, but not in the way you might expect. Ahead are spoilers for The Empty Man, Midnight Mass, Block Island Sound, Satan’s Slaves, and the video for the Radiohead song “Just,” but I will give you a heads up before the worst spoilers.
‘I am also a we’
There was a short-lived science fiction TV series called Sense8, created by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski with writing credits by award-winning novelist David Mitchell. As the credentials suggest, it was a great show, but it never really caught on, probably because it was super weird, almost aggressively earnest, and also maybe a year or two ahead of growing tolerance for fluidity of gender and sexuality. The basic concept is that there are these eight characters living all over the world and they have this psychic connection, so they feel each others’ sensory experiences and emotions, can communicate with each other, and lend each other their unique skills (you know, like computer hacking skills, martial arts, good driving, etc) depending on whatever they are going up against.
There is this line featured prominently in the second episode, which also serves as the episode’s title: “I am also a we.”
It’s deployed in a literal sense at first, as one of the characters Nomi, a trans woman played by Jamie Clayton, is describing the strength she draws from solidarity in the queer community, knowing that she is not acting alone. But it becomes kind of a mantra for the whole show, as the eight main characters act as both individuals and one entity. Thematically, and you may get where this is going, it applies to all of us. Because all of our actions are guided by and bring consequences for people around us, we are all simultaneously an I and a we.
It’s such a simple, beautiful notion and I get kind of weepy if I think about it too much, and this sense of unity is played, to my recollection, as nothing but a form of power and exuberance in the show. It is a celebratory notion that shatters the day-to-day illusion of isolation.
But lately, during my annual mainlining of a very different kind of genre fiction, I have been seeing a recurring portrayal of a film negative version of this idea. That is, the terror of being a we, both for the fear of the I’s dissolution, and a fear of the power of the crowd. In The Empty Man, for example, barely audible whispers compel masses to annihilation. In Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, we see faith-as-disease drive a tight-knit community to burn itself down. In Block Island Sound, signals from the sky turn salt-of-the-Earth Rhode Islanders into puppets who sacrifice their progeny to the sea.
A chill hang in The Empty Man, 2020
—
This is an idea within the horror genre that has deep roots, and is historically a portrayal of an invading other. In mid-century America, during Cold War and Red Scare hysteria, it featured in many horror movies and books, most notably Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
In this modern iteration, however, I think something else is going on. It feels less like xenophobia or paranoia about the threat of socialism, although our cups runneth over with both. I’d say it’s more the product of a growing feeling of vulnerability as global crises make our interconnectedness impossible to ignore and strain the tension between the individual and the collective. Our nerves are exposed, and people are feeling a general unease at the I’s loss of primacy, and how the we might turn on us in the face of societal decline.
‘At one time we were one; we will all be one again‘
The Empty Man, a 2020 film based on a comic by the same name, was marketed as a teen urban legend story, and didn’t do very well upon release, but got a second wind on HBO thanks to word of mouth. As such, it is far from what I expected. A horror epic (overlong and overstuffed, to be honest) that mutates into like three (four?) different movies, the best way I can describe it, thematically is what if Buddhism but evil.
The premise is that a formerly dormant psychological contagion that is spread through whispers and thoughts makes its way from a cave in Bhutan all the way to Missouri, where—very roughly described—it spawns a doomsday cult that is turning young people to suicide when they come to the conclusion that there is no self. “I came to tell you, I found something so wonderful and so freeing, and it’s helped me to realize that nothing can hurt you because nothing is real,” moody teen Amanda tells our main character James.
The cult, although not explicitly, worships a perversion of Buddhist concepts, that we are not separate from everything else in the universe and only the release of ego can end suffering. “There is only the great, binding nothingness of things. At one time we were one, we will all be one again,” says Stephen Root, stealing the show as always in the role of cult leader. But they take this belief to a nihilist conclusion, and we learn [SPOILER] that the protagonist is not even a person, but a tulpa, an imagined creature willed into being and controlled by the cult. “You’re not your own man, you’re our man,” Amanda reveals at the end. “And isn’t that really what you want in the end anyway? So just let go.”
The terror of the self as a puppet is the concept at the core of Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a pessimist philosophy book by horror writer Thomas Ligotti, who says that our deepest fears derive from the reality, which we mostly ignore, that we are simultaneously conscious beings and automatons activated by some ceaseless animating imperative.
As a species with consciousness, we do have our inconveniences. Yet these are of negligible importance compared to what it would be like to feel in our depths that we are nothing but human puppets—things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were.
Fun stuff! That same feeling in our depths is represented in The Empty Man, but with the twist that the abyss the main character stares into is generated by the crowd—spread through ideas transmitted by this cosmic force they call The Empty Man. It all reminds me of that amazing Radiohead video [spoiler for a 25-year-old music video] where the man is lying frozen on the sidewalk and a growing crowd begs him to tell them why he is stuck there, and when he does, they too must lie on the sidewalk with him.
The Empty Man gives us a similar terror of the dissolution of the ego, instigated by other people. If you think you know who you are and why you do what you do, in other words, think again.
This may remind some of you about a couple of past issues on the idea of behavioral contagion. The economist Robert H. Frank argues that governance must take into account, not self interest as our chief motivating factor, but social factors that can yield positive or negative outcomes. Look at the statistics on the behaviors of the people in our web of social connections, and you’ll see that individual actions are strongly influenced by community, contrary to Americans’ frontier values of independence and self-reliance. In biology too, we see a growing field of study that entire species are subject to needs and offerings of other species in their ecosystems.
Just as in the case of “I am also a we,” this can be an invigorating concept, seeing the individual as part of a great continuity. It reflects Rousseau’s idea that we gain our freedom and humanity by joining with others to decide how we all want to live, rather than as a servant of instinct and self-interest. But this can also be a source of tremendous anxiety for the ego. If I am also a we, then what if I am not even an I at all?
Submission to a higher power
While The Empty Man‘s social contagion occurs through cosmic thought waves, in 2021’s Midnight Mass, it occurs through something that will be far more familiar to many of us—church.
I will say up front that your mileage will vary with Mike Flanagan’s work. I think he’s a master of using horror as emotional metaphor, but his apparent belief that his audience is far too dumb to figure out that metaphor on our own makes long stretches of his shows borderline-unwatchable exposition.
Nevertheless, his work always packs a punch eventually, and the last few episodes of Midnight Mass really do pay off, [SPOILER] and he pulls together this brilliant allegory of a small Catholic church on an island fishing village that, in an attempt to return its residents to their imagined glory days, converts them all into bloodsucking vampires. This is carried out by a well-meaning priest, brilliantly overacted by Hamish Linklater, who starts slipping the congregation vampire blood in the communion wine.
Father Paul that is clearly not an angel that is a vampire bro.
—
The great thing about Midnight Mass, if you survive the unceasing monologues trying to pass as conversation, is the portrayal of participation in community as a powerful and necessary act, but one that if tainted can lead its participants to carry out horrific acts. It’s the dual nature of unity, which brings salvation and self-forgiveness to our main characters, but also [SPOILER] leads a lot of nice people to drink rat poison, be resurrected as vampires, and burn all their neighbors’ houses down.
I feel like I don’t even need to specify all of the ways we have watched the destructive impulses of a poisoned community unfold in our own lives during the past few years. But we can start with white men marching with tiki torches chanting “you will not replace us,” an authoritarian mob attacking the Capitol based on the gospel of a stolen election, online right wing radicalization, and the refusal of basic public health measures during a pandemic, heavily correlated with political ideology.
The many crimes of organized religion are also well documented, although I am usually not all that interested in fiction about conflicted devotees or disgruntled takedowns of the church. But I was moved by the way Midnight Mass handles faith, respecting it in many different forms as a path to love and healing.
Being part of a community requires that faith, whether religious or not. The most selfless and often the most difficult acts people take—forgiveness, trust, non-violence, service—all involve some kind of risk to the individual. In that sense, being in right relationship with the people around you is, whatever your belief system, a form of submission to a higher power, something bigger than you. That act is so strong and so powerful, but it also requires vulnerability, and when tainted can bring disastrous outcomes.
Disaster poisons the crowd
So assuming I’m right that there’s this underlying anxiety surrounding the relationship between the self and the communal, you won’t be surprised to hear that I think a big part of what is driving it is the background din of global crisis, specifically public health and climate crises. One thing Midnight Mass has in common with the indie horror film Block Island Sound, and last year’s featured fright The Beach House, is that the horror takes place amid environmental chaos. And for some reason, filmmakers’ go-to indicator of environmental chaos is dead animals. [CW: dead animals]
In Midnight Mass, one reason the island community is in such a state of degradation is that some years ago there was an oil spill that poisoned the surrounding waters and destroyed fish populations. There’s also a wild cat infestation on the island that takes an unsettling turn when, as part of the vampirization of the town, the entire population is wiped out, leaving dead cats littering the beach. In both cases, there is a looming sense that the natural state of the island is in disarray.
In Block Island Sound, which takes place on an actual island that we once went to on vacation in the off season and it honestly was a little scary, there’s an otherworldly presence that is driving main characters to black out, wander off in the middle of the night, and bring animals out to the sea on a fishing boat where they inexplicably disappear. There are also mass die offs of fish and birds.
Our main characters are in a similar state of financial vulnerability as the villagers in Midnight Mass, and there’s the same sense of a natural order thrown into disorder. And again, the main characters are turned into puppets by some kind of alien communications from the sky, at one point blamed on the offshore wind turbines that the real life Block Island Sound is regionally known for.
Part of the horror of the film is intergenerational menace. The original villain is the main characters’ father, a craggy-faced oaf who, upon his death, returns as a terrifying spirit from beyond, compelling his son to carry out the same bizarre behavior that led to his demise.
[SPOILER] Eventually the son turns on his young niece, in a puppet-like state, taking her out on the Sound where she will inevitably go the same way as all of the missing animals. This familial violence combined with environmental collapse reflects another fear that runs through all of this horror of social contagion, and that is, how are we going to treat each other when the world that we are familiar with starts to fall apart?
Climate scientists have always been clear that, scientifically, we have the capacity to beat climate change. What they express far more concern about is how humans will behave in response to the growing threat. There is strength to be found in the communal, but how might crisis poison the crowd?
We know from COVID that an environmental threat can turn us into both heroes and monsters. It became almost immediately clear how group behavior gone haywire could directly impact our own fates. Climate change has already brought about tremendous unity and strength, and in other cases, horrific treatment. I think that’s an unspoken backdrop in a lot of horror right now—how we will treat each other when things start to get bad.
—
From watching these movies or reading these little reviews, it may be tempting to see all of this as an anti-collectivist message, that the moral is, see you can’t listen to other people or next thing you know you are kidnapping your neighbor’s dog or you find out you’re just a tulpa created by a doomsday cult. But I think it’s more complicated than that.
I read it more as a global extension of another long-running horror trope—the Freudian concept of the uncanny, or if we want to be fancy the German unheimlich, which means something along the lines of “not home-like.” Basically when something is similar to a familiar or beloved entity, but in a slightly fucked up way that makes it extremely unsettling.
I will reference one more movie I watched recently which is Satan’s Slaves, an amazing Indonesian horror film in which a Satanic cult is trying to steal away the family’s youngest son, who is this adorable little kid who everyone loves so much. A scholar tells them that the cult will be unable to take the child away so long as the family’s love for each other remains strong, and they all hold him close and refuse to give him up.
His friends are demons.
—
That seems to work, but then late in the movie [SPOILER] there is a twist and the scholar is like oh shit I translated something wrong, actually your son is not even your son he is the son of Satan and he’s going to stab you and then happily run away with the cult. And the family’s love for him is wrecked in this devastating way.
These stories of social contagion are like that story on a grander scale. It’s an uncanny version, not of familial love, but of love for humanity. The strength and joy in community, poisoned.
—
Listening
As is tradition, here is my Spooky Scary Spotify playlist which gets a few tracks added every year. Please enjoy:
—
Watching
Drawing October’s scary movie binge to a close this weekend, and if you did not get enough from the above, all of which I would recommend my cranks aside, here are a bunch more. Some really good ones this year. Here they are in order of best to worst:
- Satan’s Slaves
- Malignant
- Tragedy Girls
- Autopsy of Jane Doe
- The Empty Man
- Freaky
- Conjuring: Devil Made Me Do It
- Sleepwalkers
- Block Island Sound
- Nightmare on Elm Street 4
- Midnight Mass
- Black Christmas
- Interview with the Vampire
- Nightmare on Elm Street 3
- V/H/S 94
- Super Dark times
- Classic Horror Story
- The Wind
- Strangers: Prey at Night
- Body Bags
- Summer of 84
—
Reading
I feel like horror fans and non-horror fans alike will enjoy the short stories of Argentinian journalist and author Mariana Enriquez. Her Things We Lost in the Fire was one of my favorite books the year it came out and the same can be said of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed this year. She writes about teenage misbehavior, political violence, superstition, and much more. The horror of social contagion looms very large in many of her stories.
—
That’s what I got for this year Scoobies. I hope you enjoyed it and you recover from your shuddering before too long. If you celebrate the dark arts, have a nice Halloween tomorrow. Give out some candy, play some spooky music, watch a scary movie.
For most of our relationship, Jamie never watched scary movies with me because when she was little she saw The Shining and was so scared she had to sleep on her brother’s floor for like a month. But then all of sudden she decided she wanted to try to watch some scary movies. So we gradually started watching them, and I usually stuck with kind of artsy, tasteful stuff but she said I like these movies but you know what, none of them are very scary. She asked me to come up with some truly scary movies to watch this weekend. So I’m breaking out the big guns and last night we watched Terrified, which scared the shit out of me but she was like, not very scary sorry.
She says it’s because she’s been watching gross murder shows as her form of relaxation for so many years, but I think I just have to find the right poison. Might try The Exorcist or get into some Takashi Miike if I’m desperate. Otherwise I don’t know it’s possible she might be an actual murderer I guess I’ll find out either way.
Boo!
Tate