Location within horror fiction is undoubtedly important. Location serves as a tool to create atmosphere and can be used as a way for the writer to convey emotion and theme without it coming straight from the psyche of the protagonist. This can be achieved, for example, with pathetic fallacy: using weather to indicate mood or create foreshadowing stirrings that something is not right. Location in horror ‘creates the ambience and the expectation, of terror.’[1] Yet, location in horror goes further than writer’s techniques and creepy exposition, it plays into our cultural fears and stimulates us psychologically.
Location in horror fiction uses elements of Freud’s “uncanny” to unsettle us, this is most evident in the use of “ordinary” settings. Using locations that we see in our day to day life allows us to project the fictional fear onto tangible locations we encounter, keeping the fear we had felt an ongoing occurrence. The “uncanny” comes into play by establishing a suspicion within our homes, our workplaces, and the pillars of our society as ‘what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.’[2] The ‘familiar’ is, in a way, as equally terrifying as the ‘not known’: we know the boundaries of those places and the idea that there is something invading that comfort of it being familiar, is threatening to everything we hold dear. It is, in some ways, akin to someone breaking into your house: a line has been crossed and now lurking at the back of your mind is the dread it might happen again, whenever you lock your doors or go to sleep.
‘Roundabout’[3] by Muriel Gray uses an “ordinary” location but twists our expectations of that location. Roundabouts are a fleeting location; we rarely step foot on them, and we barely engage with them physically. Roundabouts also have the ominous quality of being both isolated while also very exposed, though not in a way that is meaningful, so if something horrific occurred on one, who can say if anyone would catch a glimpse of you there. ‘Roundabout’ is masterful in its use of location as in imprinting horror onto this uneventful location, we have no other lasting impression of it. This means the next time we look to them and see a small wood we think of ‘The Dark Thing’ that resides within and can’t help but feel unnerved.
When something is not right with our surroundings and that fear is played upon, it can unnerve us to no end as ‘Our daily physical surroundings play an important role in creating order, meaning, and stability in our lives, and the cultural rituals that make up the very fabric of social and religious life have historically been inseparable from the physical spaces in which they transpire.’[4] When we defile our physical surroundings with horror, we are removing ‘order’ and ‘stability’ and instead replacing it with new meaning that may work against everything our culture suggests about that space. An example of this is places of care[5] such as hospitals as seeing this location as somewhere hostile makes us remove rationality: the white walls of a hospital are no longer seen as clean and instead are uncomfortably sterile, calculating, unnatural and not human.
References
[1] ‘Setting and Description in Horror Fiction’. Last modified March 19, 2020. http://www.writersdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/Setting-And-Description-In-Horror-Fiction-Extended-Short-Story-Workshop.pdf
[2] Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. 2004.
[3] Morris, M. (ed). New Fears: New Horror Stories by Masters of the Genre: 1. London: Titan Books. 2017.
[4] Francis T. McAndrew. ‘The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out’. Last modified October 7, 2019. https://www.academicstudiespress.com/asp-blog/how-places-creep-us-out
[5] Matt Elphick. ‘Horrific Locations’. Last modified February 18, 2020. https://winchester.instructure.com/courses/10147/pages/week-6-horror-and-location-matts-groups?module_item_id=510705
Hope You Like Horror 