Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (3 page)

In the economic and social upheaval following the war, German studios produced a number of supernatural fantasy films that reflected the doubts and fears obsessing European audiences. Americans, in the boom years of expansion and material prosperity, spurned such subject matter. Their mystery movies and the horror pictures of Lon Chaney offered realistic explanations.

It was not until this country faced its own financial depression that the supernatural finally found a degree of acceptance. Radio shows like
Lights Out
and
Inner Sanctum
gained popularity, largely with the young. And it was their response that insured success for the horror films that became regular fare in the thirties; their king was Kong, Count Dracula their dark and noble lord. Frankenstein’s monster served as surrogate for their own self-image as unwanted outcasts, victims of authority figures in a competitive society where their elders maintained rigid control.

But the majority of the audience still rejected such fantasies in favor of other forms of escapism; “screwball” comedies involving the exploits of “madcap heiresses” and wish-fulfillment sagas of lowly shop-girls or poor-but-honest young men who rose to riches. Even the gangster films catered to such visions; their anti-heroes shared the common goal of attaining fortune, even by unorthodox methods. The American Dream had yet to die, prosperity was just around the corner; individual effort, aided by scientific advances, would still bring success. Doubters and dissenters might read the new “proletarian literature” or even espouse the cause of communism, but they continued to believe in their own power to remold the world to their heart’s desire. Like the conservative upholders of the status quo, they continued to firmly reject the bogeymen and bugaboos of the supernatural.

World War II decimated American Dreamers and dissenters alike. Those who survived were faced with terrifying truths. Vast power
can
fall into evil hands—the world
can
be destroyed—science, armed with biological and nuclear weaponry of its own creation, is not our savior but an omnipresent enemy.

There was a growing distrust of every ideology in the age of “ism”—fascism, communism, militarism, sectarianism, McCarthyism, racism, terrorism, even misguided idealism, proved no protection against corrupt leadership. In the light of such attitudes the movie monsters of the thirties frightened no one in the forties. Even Abbott and Costello could easily outwit them. Their place was taken by mad scientists, prehistoric beasts, or creatures from outer space. Such menaces came in many forms, but with a choice of only two motivations—to take over the world or to destroy it.

Nevertheless, the hero usually managed to triumph in the end. The world could still be saved after all, and for a time this message was reassuring.

But revelations of personal insecurity continued to rise in the decades that followed. Depletion of natural resources, spiraling inflation, religious warfare, governmental and industrial corruption, political assassination, street crime, mass murder, and drug addiction grew and flourished. No heroes appeared on the scene to offer succor or solutions.

Like the turmoil and upheaval that preceded the return of the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft’s fiction, the world seemed to be preparing for its final fate now that “the stars were right.”

And it was then, in doubt, dismay, even in despair, that many turned to the one “ism” that still remained.

Exorcism.

Graffiti proclaimed, “God is dead.” And a television comedian capped the concept with an explanation for subsequent behavior patterns—“The Devil made me do it.”

Black humor, perhaps, but many a true word is spoken in jest. And when the book and film of
Rosemary’s Baby
appeared, heralding the literal rebirth of Satan on earth, its satirical thrust was blunted by recognition of a growing reality. Cults dedicated to witchcraft and Satanism had indeed become popular and the acknowledgement of Evil as a tangible presence gained adherents. Materialists still scoffed but some of them began decorating their cars with bumper stickers announcing that “Richard Nixon is Rosemary’s Baby.” Again, the avowed intent was humorous—but behind the jokes could be sensed a genuine desire to personify the source of man’s misfortunes. Satan became the scapegoat. And exorcism—that ancient, half-forgotten ritual to rid us of our demons—suddenly captured the imagination and attention of the masses.

Viewed in retrospect,
The Exorcist
was scarcely a literary landmark, and the film that followed was illogical and prolix. Few members of the audience could clearly explain the origin of the demon, why this entity took possession of a child, or exactly how it met its final fate. Nor was their interest a religious one. The spectacle of a little girl whose face was transformed by makeup into an unreasonable facsimile of Harpo Marx’s “gookie” grimace, spewing obscenities and green pea soup or rotating her head a full 360°, seemed the chief attraction.

Nevertheless, it was clearly stated that the Devil made her do it. And the statements of box-office receipts convinced both filmmakers and publishers that doing it was profitable. Hell had become a hot property.

Now the Devil popped up again, together with his deputy demons, in a spate of fiction and film;
The Exorcist
spawned a sequel,
The Omen
became a trilogy,
The Sentinel
and a score of others advanced the notion that the Evil One was alive and well and living in your local drive-in theater.

If the Devil lives, then it would seem that other evils flourish in his wake. And so they did. Vampires rose again to refresh themselves with a sanguinary nightcap; not to be outdone by the undead, the dead themselves awakened from their graves for a midnight snack of sheep intestines that convincingly substituted for human entrails. Hirsute werewolves followed suit and a seemingly psychotic mass murderer was solemnly identified by a psychiatrist as “the Bogeyman.” Ghosts, ghouls, succubi, and incubi infested earth, and even in outer space
The Alien
incubated in a human breast, emerging to create catastrophe for cat lovers on a spacecraft.

Explicit violence increased in a series of “spatter films” and the butcheries depicted in many horror novels could be described as hackwork in every sense of the word. Grand Guignol degenerated into not-so-grand gross-out.

All of which was a far cry—or shriek—from the perils presented in the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Or was it?

Consider the phenomenon of exorcism, this time from the viewpoint of the artist rather than the audience. Most writers who choose to work within the horror genre do so to exorcise their own fears by exposing and expressing them to an audience. In childhood such writers are usually gifted—or cursed—with a hyperactive imagination. As adults they translate early dread of pain, death, and the unknown into fictional form; what frightened them, they reason, will also frighten their readers. Drawing upon a common cultural heritage of myth, legend, and fairy tales, they employ a technique of conveying their visions in terms of convincing reality.

The success of such efforts depends upon learning ways to involve the reader emotionally and inducing what has been called “the temporary suspension of disbelief.” It is not easily attained, and the offerings of apprentice authors in the horror field tend to be derivative and overblown.

Lovecraft was no exception to the rule. In earlier tales he often relied on the excessive use of adjectives rather than the power of suggestion, with disastrous results. But gradually he learned the value of restraint and of a more realistic approach. Refining his style, he also refined his method.

Generally speaking, most fiction can be divided into two categories, both dependent upon establishing the credibility of the supposed narrator. In simple terms, that narrator is presented as either wiser or less knowledgeable than the reader.

In the first instance, the device is used to convince the reader that anyone as intelligent as the author must know what he’s talking about and is obviously telling the truth. Belief in the narrator leads to belief in the story.

The alternative approach is perhaps best illustrated in Ring Lardner’s story “Haircut.” Here the monologue of an ignorant small-town barber unwittingly reveals to the reader more than the narrator himself is aware of.

Lovecraft’s inspiration was to combine both of these techniques into one.

His narrators are usually scientists or scholars of a high intellectual order who address the reader with obvious authority. At the same time they exhibit an equally obvious flaw—not stupidity per se, but an overcautious tendency to voice unreasonable reservations regarding the fantastic facts they so convincingly and objectively present. As a result the reader soon becomes convinced that what they doubt is actually a dreadful reality. And when, at the end of the story, the narrator is forced to recognize the existence of what lurks behind his hints of horror, the reader shares the ultimate terror of truth.

The source of a writer’s personal fantasies is to a great extent colored by what he reads or views during his impressionable early years. Today’s fictioneers and filmmakers often come late to an acquaintance with literary traditions. Their youthful influences were more often the science fiction films and the comic books of the fifties and sixties. As a result, a great deal of what they present as horror relies on crude and explicit violence. Dwelling on gruesome detail in print and utilizing special effects for shock on the screen, they opt for the easy out of evoking nausea and revulsion instead of genuine fear. Even their lighter efforts, involving the renascence of “superheroes,” betray an intellectual dependency on the comics of their childhood. As such, their efforts find greatest favor with juvenile audiences today.

Lovecraft had a thorough grounding in the classics of the genre, presented in their original form. In this lies the enduring strength of his own work, and its continuing power to capture a mature following after a half-century of change and chaos.

In “Supernatural Horror in Literature” he wrote, “Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulses will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck may glimpse.”

Couched in this florid prose, Lovecraft intended to present an explanation of why horror fiction appealed to certain types of readers. And in so doing he unconsciously revealed his own reasons for writing—as attempts to come to grips with a lifelong fear of the unknown.

What he said about the readers of fifty years ago is still valid. In a time of turmoil there is a widespread intimation—not based on hereditary impulse but on today’s realities—that the evils abroad in the world may come from without as well as from within ourselves. While we may consciously reject his cosmology as absurd, a part of us finds in it a chilling confirmation of secret fears.

At the time Lovecraft created it, the “Cthulhu Mythos” and its threat of Elder Gods rising and returning to rule over earth could be easily dismissed as merely a paranoid fable of the future. Today there is a growing suspicion that this future may become our present.

If so, H. P. Lovecraft has indeed bequeathed us a heritage of horror.

The Rats In The Walls

On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labors. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my ancestors, I let no expense deter me. The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line.

With this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the crown, nor had the accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or regain his property. Shaken by some horror greater than that of conscience or the law, and expressing only a frantic wish to exclude the ancient edifice from his sight and memory, Walter de la Poer, eleventh Baron Exham, fled to Virginia and there founded the family which by the next century had become known as Delapore.

Exham Priory had remained untenanted, though later allotted to the estates of the Norrys family and much studied because of its peculiarly composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly. This foundation was a very singular thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of the precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked a desolate valley three miles west of the village of Anchester.

Architects and antiquarians loved to examine this strange relic of forgotten centuries, but the country folk hated it. They had hated it hundreds of years before, when my ancestors lived there, and they hated it now, with the moss and mould of abandonment on it. I had not been a day in Anchester before I knew I came of an accursed house. And this week workmen have blown up Exham Priory, and are busy obliterating the traces of its foundations.

The bare statistics of my ancestry I had always known, together with the fact that my first American forbear had come to the colonies under a strange cloud. Of details, however, I had been kept wholly ignorant through the policy of reticence always maintained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbors, we seldom boasted of crusading ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope left before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son for posthumous opening. The glories we cherished were those achieved since the migration; the glories of a proud and honorable, if somewhat reserved and unsocial Virginia line.

During the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole existence changed by the burning of Carfax, our home on the banks of the James. My grandfather, advanced in years, had perished in that incendiary outrage, and with him the envelope that had bound us all to the past. I can recall that fire today as I saw it then at the age of seven, with the Federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the negroes howling and praying. My father was in the army, defending Richmond, and after many formalities my mother and I were passed through the lines to join him.

When the war ended we all moved north, whence my mother had come; and I grew to manhood, middle age, and ultimate wealth as a stolid Yankee. Neither my father nor I ever knew what our hereditary envelope had contained, and as I merged into the greyness of Massachusetts business life I lost all interest in the mysteries which evidently lurked far back in my family tree. Had I suspected their nature, how gladly I would have left Exham Priory to its moss, bats, and cobwebs!

My father died in 1904, but without any message to leave to me, or to my only child, Alfred, a motherless boy of ten. It was this boy who reversed the order of family information, for although I could give him only jesting conjectures about the past, he wrote me of some very interesting ancestral legends when the late war took him to England in 1917 as an aviation officer. Apparently the Delapores had a colorful and perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son’s, Capt. Edward Norrys of the Royal Flying Corps, dwelt near the family seat at Anchester and related some peasant superstitions which few novelists could equal for wildness and incredibility. Norrys himself, of course, did not take them so seriously; but they amused my son and made good material for his letters to me. It was this legendry which definitely turned my attention to my transatlantic heritage, and made me resolve to purchase and restore the family seat which Norrys showed to Alfred in its picturesque desertion, and offered to get for him at a surprisingly reasonable figure, since his own uncle was the present owner.

I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my plans of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two years that he lived I thought of nothing but his care, having even placed my business under the direction of partners.

In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession. Visiting Anchester in December, I was entertained by Capt. Norrys, a plump, amiable young man who had thought much of my son, and secured his assistance in gathering plans and anecdotes to guide in the coming restoration. Exham Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks’ nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.

As I gradually recovered the image of the edifice as it had been when my ancestors left it over three centuries before, I began to hire workmen for the reconstruction. In every case I was forced to go outside the immediate locality, for the Anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place. This sentiment was so great that it was sometimes communicated to the outside laborers, causing numerous desertions; whilst its scope appeared to include both the priory and its ancient family.

My son had told me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits because he was a de la Poer, and now I found myself subtly ostracised for a like reason until I convinced the peasants how little I knew of my heritage. Even then they sullenly disliked me, so that I had to collect most of the village traditions through the mediation of Norrys. What the people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I had come to restore a symbol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally or not, they viewed Exham Priory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves.

Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing them with the accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted, and there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybeleworship which the Romans had introduced.

Inscriptions still visible on the subcellar bore such unmistakable letters as “DIV . . . OPS . . . MAGNA. MAT . . .” signs of the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens. Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest. Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not end the orgies at the temple, but that the priests lived on in the new faith without real change. Likewise was it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it subsequently preserved, making it the center of a cult feared through half the heptarchy. About 1000
A
.
D
. the place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened populace. It was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman Conquest it must have declined tremendously; since there was no impediment when Henry the Third granted the site to my ancestor, Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in 1261.

Of my family before this date there is no evil report, but something strange must have happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference to a de la Poer as “cursed of God” in 1307, whilst village legendry had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the castle that went up on the foundations of the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade would seem the veriest tyros, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearances of villagers through several generations.

The worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct heirs; at least, most was whispered about these. If of healthier inclinations, it was said, an heir would early and mysteriously die to make way for another more typical scion. There seemed to be an inner cult in the family, presided over by the head of the house, and sometimes closed except to a few members. Temperament rather than ancestry was evidently the basis of this cult, for it was entered by several who married into the family. Lady Margaret Trevor from Cornwall, wife of Godfrey, the second son of the fifth baron, became a favorite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the Welsh border. Preserved in balladry, too, though not illustrating the same point, is the hideous tale of Lady Mary de la Poer, who shortly after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and his mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what they dared not repeat to the world.

These myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition, repelled me greatly. Their persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors, were especially annoying; whilst the imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forbears—the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.

I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains; of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave’s horse had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day. These things were hackneyed spectral lore, and I was at that time a pronounced skeptic. The accounts of vanished peasants were less to be dismissed, though not especially significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying curiosity meant death, and more than one severed head had been publicly shown on the bastions—now effaced—around Exham Priory.

A few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt more of the comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the belief that a legion of batwinged devils kept witches’ sabbath each night at the priory—a legion whose sustenance might explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats—the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion—the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village homes and brought curses and horrors in its train.

Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion, with an elderly obstinacy, the work of restoring my ancestral home. It must not be imagined for a moment that these tales formed my principal psychological environment. On the other hand, I was constantly praised and encouraged by Capt. Norrys and the antiquarians who surrounded and aided me. When the task was done, over two years after its commencement, I viewed the great rooms, wainscotted walls, vaulted ceilings, mullioned windows, and broad staircases with a pride which fully compensated for the prodigious expense of the restoration.

Every attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced, and the new parts blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations. The seat of my fathers was complete, and I looked forward to redeeming at last the local fame of the line which ended in me. I would reside here permanently, and prove that a de la Poer (for I had adopted again the original spelling of the name) need not be a fiend. My comfort was perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exham Priory was mediaevally fitted, its interior was in truth wholly new and free from old vermin and old ghosts alike.