Everyone gets nervous. Everybody worries. Whether it’s jangled nerves the first day before a new job or nights spent years later worrying whether that job is going to pay the bills, nervousness and worry will happen to everyone. Eventually. Indeed, it could be said that worrying - the ability to imagine threats that might harm us, even unlikely ones, and then plan how to avoid them - is a defining aspect of our humanity. Nervousness and worry, and the technologies we’ve developed to minimise them, have got us to where we are today.
It’s ok to be nervous.
It’s ok to worry.
As long as, at some point, it stops.
Anxiety is often considered to be synonymous with nervousness or worry. Common dictionary definitions even describe anxiety as “a feeling of worry, nervousness or unease” and when considering acute anxiousness - short-term unease focused on a definable event or thing - this is broadly correct. Yet the feeling of acute anxiety soon dissipates once the source of worry is no longer present, often to be replaced with a sense of relief or even elation.
Chronic anxiety, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. Chronic anxiety, or Generalised Anxiety Disorder, is what the UK’s NHS describes as “a long-term condition that causes you to feel anxious about a wide range of situations and issues, rather than one specific event”. They continue by stating that “people with GAD feel anxious most days and often struggle to remember the last time they felt relaxed”. The American Psychological Association adds that “people with [GAD] usually have recurring intrusive thoughts or concerns. They may avoid certain situations out of worry”. Not only this but the weight of GAD can lead to further issues such as chronic fatigue, the sense of inadequacy and fraudulent self-identity known as Imposter Syndrome, and a host of physical symptoms “such as sweating, trembling, dizziness or a rapid heartbeat”.
In some cases, GAD can lead to suicide.
It’s often difficult to help non-sufferers understand what it is like to live with a mental illness as one of the main failings of modern attitudes to our health in general is that visible symptoms are prioritised over the non-visible. This often leads people to assume that if they can’t see an illness then the illness must not really exist. Yet, in the case of anxiety the external symptoms listed above actually give a useful insight into the internal experience of suffering from GAD. Sweating, trembling, dizziness and a rapid heartbeat are all symptoms of an experience that many non-sufferers will understand; fear. In fact, the word anxiety is cousin to the German word for fear, Angst, and they both share a root in the Latin angere, meaning to bind, to cause pain, or to torment. To suffer from GAD, at its most elemental, is to exist in a near-constant state of fear. Worst of all, it’s not fear of any specific thing. It’s not a fear you can fight or flee from. It’s fear that suddenly rises, like a cold mist, from the pit of your stomach and up to your chest where it clamps an icy claw onto your heart. In archaic Latin, angere also means to strangle and that, in a word, is how it feels to suffer the worst bouts of GAD; it is as if your ability to function in the world - to breath, to choose, to think - is being strangled until it withers and dies.
Yet fear, surely, is part and parcel of horror? Why would someone, someone like myself, who suffers with this persistent fear be at all interested in horror? The reason, I think, is complex and it’s something I’ve only recently been able to think about fully.
Horror, to a very large degree, is about the fear of death. Not necessarily about dying, although that is often a common theme, but all the trappings of death. The restless dead, the returned dead, the will-not-stay-dead. Even insanity, another major theme of horror, could easily be considered a death of the self, if not of the body. The problem is, I have to admit, that death doesn’t frighten me. Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn’t frighten me in horror stories. It’s unpleasant to dwell on how one might be killed, yes. It’s unpleasant to think of mouldering corpses. It’s unpleasant to think of being driven mad. Yet, in horror stories, that unpleasantness is the entire point. The unpleasantness, when limited and accepted, becomes enjoyable. And I do find horror hugely enjoyable.
By being enjoyable, however, it can no longer frighten me.
It’s ok to be nervous.
It’s ok to worry.
As long as, at some point, it stops.
Anxiety is often considered to be synonymous with nervousness or worry. Common dictionary definitions even describe anxiety as “a feeling of worry, nervousness or unease” and when considering acute anxiousness - short-term unease focused on a definable event or thing - this is broadly correct. Yet the feeling of acute anxiety soon dissipates once the source of worry is no longer present, often to be replaced with a sense of relief or even elation.
Chronic anxiety, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. Chronic anxiety, or Generalised Anxiety Disorder, is what the UK’s NHS describes as “a long-term condition that causes you to feel anxious about a wide range of situations and issues, rather than one specific event”. They continue by stating that “people with GAD feel anxious most days and often struggle to remember the last time they felt relaxed”. The American Psychological Association adds that “people with [GAD] usually have recurring intrusive thoughts or concerns. They may avoid certain situations out of worry”. Not only this but the weight of GAD can lead to further issues such as chronic fatigue, the sense of inadequacy and fraudulent self-identity known as Imposter Syndrome, and a host of physical symptoms “such as sweating, trembling, dizziness or a rapid heartbeat”.
In some cases, GAD can lead to suicide.
It’s often difficult to help non-sufferers understand what it is like to live with a mental illness as one of the main failings of modern attitudes to our health in general is that visible symptoms are prioritised over the non-visible. This often leads people to assume that if they can’t see an illness then the illness must not really exist. Yet, in the case of anxiety the external symptoms listed above actually give a useful insight into the internal experience of suffering from GAD. Sweating, trembling, dizziness and a rapid heartbeat are all symptoms of an experience that many non-sufferers will understand; fear. In fact, the word anxiety is cousin to the German word for fear, Angst, and they both share a root in the Latin angere, meaning to bind, to cause pain, or to torment. To suffer from GAD, at its most elemental, is to exist in a near-constant state of fear. Worst of all, it’s not fear of any specific thing. It’s not a fear you can fight or flee from. It’s fear that suddenly rises, like a cold mist, from the pit of your stomach and up to your chest where it clamps an icy claw onto your heart. In archaic Latin, angere also means to strangle and that, in a word, is how it feels to suffer the worst bouts of GAD; it is as if your ability to function in the world - to breath, to choose, to think - is being strangled until it withers and dies.
Yet fear, surely, is part and parcel of horror? Why would someone, someone like myself, who suffers with this persistent fear be at all interested in horror? The reason, I think, is complex and it’s something I’ve only recently been able to think about fully.
Horror, to a very large degree, is about the fear of death. Not necessarily about dying, although that is often a common theme, but all the trappings of death. The restless dead, the returned dead, the will-not-stay-dead. Even insanity, another major theme of horror, could easily be considered a death of the self, if not of the body. The problem is, I have to admit, that death doesn’t frighten me. Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn’t frighten me in horror stories. It’s unpleasant to dwell on how one might be killed, yes. It’s unpleasant to think of mouldering corpses. It’s unpleasant to think of being driven mad. Yet, in horror stories, that unpleasantness is the entire point. The unpleasantness, when limited and accepted, becomes enjoyable. And I do find horror hugely enjoyable.
By being enjoyable, however, it can no longer frighten me.
What frightens me is the horror of anxiety.
Not the horror of death, but the horror of life.
Not the horror of death, but the horror of life.
To try and explain this I want to talk to you about my favourite horror film. In fact, I want to talk to you about the best horror film; Robert Wise’s 1963 classic, The Haunting. Wise’s film was adapted from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House, published in 1959, but I’m going to concentrate on the cinematic version as, rather than the more explicitly supernatural source, I feel that it talks very strongly about the experience of suffering from long-term anxiety.
The film tells the story of four individuals, their stay at Hill House - “built ninety-odd, very odd, years ago,” we are told in the prologue - and the things that happen to them there. The main protagonist of the story is Eleanor Lance, who has been invited to the house by Dr John Markway, an investigator into the paranormal, to take part in an exploration of the “evil old house”. Eleanor came to Markway’s attention as a prospective assistant due to poltergeist activity she experienced as a child. They’re joined by the psychic Theodora - “just Theodora,” as she insists to Eleanor - and Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner.
The four soon realise, through a series of increasingly unsettling events, that they are not alone in the house’s skew-walled corridors.
Yet it is not the events that are important to the film but rather how those events are experienced and interpreted by Eleanor.
The National Institute of Mental Health lists a number of symptoms of GAD: restlessness, irritability, tension. Combined with the “intrusive thoughts” of the APA, a dose of anxiety-related Imposter Syndrome and anxiety’s tendency to cause disturbed sleep this could almost be a biography of Eleanor.
We first meet Eleanor as she is unsuccessfully trying to borrow her brother-in-law’s car, the only way she can get to Hill House. Eleanor’s sister, Carrie, refuses to allow it because, as she announces with some foreboding, “there’s a very good reason Mother was afraid for you to go anywhere”. Carrie isn’t convinced by, or perhaps doesn’t care fore, Eleanor’s explanation of going on holiday. Tensions rise and Eleanor’s niece even mocks her in a sing-song voice for blinking, a sign of stress. Eleanor flares into anger and, ultimately, steals the car. Eleanor’s irritability is stirred up again as she arrives at Hill House to find her way blocked by the sinister Dudley, caretaker of Hill House. Throughout the film Eleanor is quick to snap at other characters or mutter about them behind their backs. She even drives her car at Dudley as he begrudgingly opens the house’s gates. Eleanor has spent her adult life looking after her invalid mother, who has only just recently died. The trip to Hill House is the escape from her previous existence she feels she’s always been denied - she confesses to Theodora that “I’ve been waiting all my life for something like this to happen” - and any barrier slows that escape. Her tension and irritability is justified by Eleanor as being part of her restlessness, her destiny to become something more than she is. As the NHS definition of anxiety tells us, she can’t remember when she last felt free of worry.
Yet this is simply a fantasy.
She stayed with her mother because she couldn’t bring herself to decide not to and, ultimately, she will stay in Hill House for the same reason. Both situations, bound up with death as they may be, are easier for Eleanor to accept than building a life in the real world. Eleanor’s frustration and irritation is created not by the people who she believes block her way but the blocks she herself puts in her own way.
This is one of the terrible ironies of anxiety; those suffering from anxiety both want and simultaneously absolutely do not want to take action, to change their lives, to do something worthwhile. Anxiety is a great, inner turmoil between conflicting drives that rends and tears at the sufferer’s mind.
There is little more exciting for the anxious than the thought of some future event, one which will finally see the sufferer recognised for what they are. There is little more relieving than those events being cancelled. Eleanor’s first thought, once she finally sees Hill House, is to call the whole thing off and leave.
Interestingly, The Haunting reflects Eleanor’s experience of this turmoil through the film’s dialogue.
Group dialogue is often confused. Characters talk over each other, with conflicting aims forefront in their minds. Equally, at times of heightened excitement, they are often talk while facing away from each other, at differing depths in the shot or while reflected in mirrors. Eleanor is no small part of this; although nervous and unsure she is a full part of the group, talking freely and sometimes aggressively. She is faltering in her social interactions, however, and she finds her minor missteps frustrating; she’s surprised and wrong-footed when Theodora refers to her as “Nell”, the diminutive form her family use, until it’s explained that Nell is a common shortening of Eleanor.
Eleanor deals with this in the same way she deals with all conflict; by retreating from it. The Eleanor who interacts with the others in Hill House is only part of her personality, a brittle mask. Much of what we learn of her true thoughts and desires comes not from external action but from an internal monologue presented as voiceover. In these thoughts Eleanor repeatedly mulls over events that are happening and how she will deal with them, interspersed with idealised plans for the future. There’s little apparent order to her thoughts, however; plans are dismissed as unfeasible as quickly as they are summoned up and she worries that she’s reaching beyond her allowed station. For anxiety sufferers, this scattering of mental processes is immediately recognisable. Many people with anxiety find planning inordinately difficult because they are constantly fending off unconsciously generated intrusive thoughts - often thought of as referring to thoughts of violence, either against others or oneself, intrusive thoughts are more properly any which are unwanted or which cause unnecessary distress - that derail the conscious process of planning.
Eleanor’s monologues also reveal another damaging effect of anxiety; Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome is complex but, at root, it is the persistent belief that you are not worthy of the situation you find yourself in - whether that be a job, academic accomplishment or even friendships - despite demonstrable evidence that you are. The anxiety of being an imposter also brings with it the threat of being found out, denounced and ridiculed. Oliver Burkeman’s short article in the Guardian newspaper considers the idea that Imposter Syndrome stems from the sufferer comparing how they feel with how others appear, especially people the sufferer may look up to. For me, this is a key insight into anxiety as a whole. Anxiety makes the sufferer over-analyse their actions and thoughts, yet they don’t see this over-analysis happening in anyone else. This apparent otherness generates a feeling of alienation, of imposterism, which then itself becomes melded into the cyclical process of over-analysis.
This manifests in Eleanor as a constant belief that the rest of the group don’t want her at Hill House, that she doesn’t deserve to be there, despite having been specifically invited by Markway. Markway’s expression of concern for her well-being after the first night in the house, for example, is taken as a hint that she should leave and she constantly frets that she will be left behind when the others are exploring the house.
Reading this, you might well feel that anxiety sounds pretty exhausting. That’s because it is. The constant grind of over-thinking thoughts you can’t fully control and running through various, increasingly unlikely scenarios which justify the belief you are utterly unworthy is horribly draining. Yet, just as this mental activity tires the sufferer it also often prevents proper sleep, or even sleep at all. Sleep itself becomes a trial - long hours where the mind free-wheels without even the routine distractions of daytime to occupy it - and then a time of dread. Eleanor evens claims to sleep on her left side because she “read somewhere that it wears the heart out quicker”.
The Haunting illustrates this sense of exhaustion by having some of the house’s most extreme manifestations occur at night. Perhaps the film’s most well-known scene comes during the first night. A terrible pounding echoes through the house, terrifying Eleanor and Theodora, but unheard by Markway and Luke. The spectral pounding re-occurs on the third night, accompanied by strange howling, and this time the entire party hear it. Yet the most terrifying scene, for me at least, happens on the second night.
Eleanor wakes in the middle of the night to hear indistinct mumbling and laughter coming from the walls of her room. She reaches out to hold the hand of Theodora, who is sleeping in the bed next to her, as the laughter fades into the sobbing of a child. Theodora squeezes her hand tighter and tighter, which Eleanor interprets as fear. Despite her best efforts, Eleanor is overwhelmed with terror and cries out, coming to full wakefulness. It is at that point we realise that Eleanor is not in her bed but has, at some point, moved to lie on a chaise longue. Theodora is asleep on the other side of the room, much too far away to hold Eleanor’s hand.
With rising terror, Eleanor comes to understand the consequences of this revelation.
“Whose hand was I holding,” she gasps.
This is the crux of the film, in my opinion. Eleanor starts to realise that the hand she was holding was that of Hill House. She starts to realise that someone, something genuinely does want her to star. She doesn’t have to return to the living world that terrifies her so.
What interests me - and frightens me - most about The Haunting is how the film blends the traditional horror of death with the anxiety-horror of life. The events of the film are not an all-in-the-mind delusion - Jackson was apparently very clear to Nelson Gidding, who adapted the book for film, that her story was supernatural - and all the characters do experience things, both alone and together, which are inexplicable. They all encounter the “preternatural”, to use Markway’s phrasing. “Suppose the haunting is all in my mind?” asks Eleanor. Markway replies; “Well you can’t say that because there are three other people here”. This confirms that it’s not just Eleanor who experiences the terrors of Hill House. Both Luke and Markway are led out of the house by the apparition of a dog-like creature and they also hear the pounding on the third night. More obviously, even cynical Theodora is scared of the things she is hearing and feeling, often more thoroughly than Eleanor. Her psychic abilities allow her to sense the presences that lurk in the house but also, crucially, sense when they have left. Theodora knows that the supernatural events are real but Eleanor knows they have intent, an intent that is focused on her. “Oh, God, it knows I’m here,” she exclaims at one point.
Eleanor isn’t irrational or deluded. The source of her anxiety is evidently real. There is something inexplicable happening in Hill House but, crucially, her anxiety is also based on fact to at least some degree; Markway is using her to prove the house is haunted whilst Luke uses her to prove it isn’t, and even Theodora seems to delight in belittling Eleanor out of boredom. Although it may feel like it to the sufferer, anxiety rarely springs from nothing. It is more that the minor troubles and inconveniences, the disappointments and embarrassments that everyone experiences at some point take on far greater significance, far greater longevity.
Markway attempts to calm Eleanor by pointing out how pointless it is to be scared of noises in the night; “Were you threatened?” he asks. His error is that he doesn’t understand what “threat” means to Eleanor. The anxious mind creates threat, building it around a speck of worldly concern as a pearl accretes around grit.
Ultimately, Eleanor accepts the attention of the house over that of her new friends and becomes one of the spirits who linger inside its walls; “we who walk here walk alone,” she explains in the film’s epilogue. This is easily interpreted as Eleanor’s suicide but I can’t help but read it slightly differently.
Eleanor has always had a purposed in life, even if she hasn’t realised it. She cared for her mother for eleven years and her presence in Hill House helps Markway with his investigations. She has always resented this purpose, though, and is terrified of being defined by it, trapped by it. In one key scene Luke discovers writing on a corridor wall which is revealed to be the words HELP ELEANOR COME HOME. This understandably terrifies Eleanor and it’s easy to assume that the phrase is intended to be yet another demand for help from her now-dead mother; “Help, Eleanor! Come home!”
What if it isn’t, though?
What if the phrase is a plea from Hill House? What if it’s asking Theodora, Markway and Luke to literally help Eleanor come home?
This is perhaps a stretch but in the final act of the film Eleanor rushes through the house, no longer afraid. “I want to stay here”, she announces. “I want to stay here always. I will not be frightened or alone anymore”. She eventually declares “I’m home, I’m home”.
I read this not as Eleanor simply accepting death but more subtly rejecting the fear that life has held for her. She chooses a different way to live, one which may not be comfortable or even comprehensible to the others. It’s notable that the Eleanor who narrates the film’s closing lines is calm and unhurried, a far remove from the Eleanor who was wildly terrified of being “sent back” to the real world.
This is why The Haunting is my favourite horror film. It’s a chillingly effective haunted house tale, complete with bumps in the night and sinister shadows, but it also understands how I often experience the world.
I am always frightened. Always. I find life horrifying, in its truest sense; the choices and the indecisions, the confusing noise of it all, petrify me. To quote Anne Radcliffe, the vast expanse of possibility that entails being alive “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates” my ability to hold my own sense of self together. I am not outwardly shy - public speaking is, perversely, something I enjoy greatly - but I am an introvert, like Eleanor, in the sense that I find social situations draining and bewildering. I constantly doubt my value and my worth, convinced that I am only begrudgingly tolerated even despite evidence to the contrary. Thoughts flutter in my mind like bats in the night, frustratingly near-visible.
I am so very, very tired.
Yet, thankfully, my experience of anxiety is relatively mild. I am not suicidal and so I like to hope that Eleanor isn’t suicidal either, not in her heart. I find life frightening but not hateful, not as long as the sun still shines and my wife still smiles. Even Eleanor smiles as she admits her love of collecting buttons. The Haunting reminds me that being frightened isn’t the worst thing in the world, as hard as that might be to remember that when anxiety holds my hand in the night.
Hill House isn’t a place I would like to stay, not in the way that Eleanor stays, but I certainly visit from time to time.
The film tells the story of four individuals, their stay at Hill House - “built ninety-odd, very odd, years ago,” we are told in the prologue - and the things that happen to them there. The main protagonist of the story is Eleanor Lance, who has been invited to the house by Dr John Markway, an investigator into the paranormal, to take part in an exploration of the “evil old house”. Eleanor came to Markway’s attention as a prospective assistant due to poltergeist activity she experienced as a child. They’re joined by the psychic Theodora - “just Theodora,” as she insists to Eleanor - and Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner.
The four soon realise, through a series of increasingly unsettling events, that they are not alone in the house’s skew-walled corridors.
Yet it is not the events that are important to the film but rather how those events are experienced and interpreted by Eleanor.
The National Institute of Mental Health lists a number of symptoms of GAD: restlessness, irritability, tension. Combined with the “intrusive thoughts” of the APA, a dose of anxiety-related Imposter Syndrome and anxiety’s tendency to cause disturbed sleep this could almost be a biography of Eleanor.
We first meet Eleanor as she is unsuccessfully trying to borrow her brother-in-law’s car, the only way she can get to Hill House. Eleanor’s sister, Carrie, refuses to allow it because, as she announces with some foreboding, “there’s a very good reason Mother was afraid for you to go anywhere”. Carrie isn’t convinced by, or perhaps doesn’t care fore, Eleanor’s explanation of going on holiday. Tensions rise and Eleanor’s niece even mocks her in a sing-song voice for blinking, a sign of stress. Eleanor flares into anger and, ultimately, steals the car. Eleanor’s irritability is stirred up again as she arrives at Hill House to find her way blocked by the sinister Dudley, caretaker of Hill House. Throughout the film Eleanor is quick to snap at other characters or mutter about them behind their backs. She even drives her car at Dudley as he begrudgingly opens the house’s gates. Eleanor has spent her adult life looking after her invalid mother, who has only just recently died. The trip to Hill House is the escape from her previous existence she feels she’s always been denied - she confesses to Theodora that “I’ve been waiting all my life for something like this to happen” - and any barrier slows that escape. Her tension and irritability is justified by Eleanor as being part of her restlessness, her destiny to become something more than she is. As the NHS definition of anxiety tells us, she can’t remember when she last felt free of worry.
Yet this is simply a fantasy.
She stayed with her mother because she couldn’t bring herself to decide not to and, ultimately, she will stay in Hill House for the same reason. Both situations, bound up with death as they may be, are easier for Eleanor to accept than building a life in the real world. Eleanor’s frustration and irritation is created not by the people who she believes block her way but the blocks she herself puts in her own way.
This is one of the terrible ironies of anxiety; those suffering from anxiety both want and simultaneously absolutely do not want to take action, to change their lives, to do something worthwhile. Anxiety is a great, inner turmoil between conflicting drives that rends and tears at the sufferer’s mind.
There is little more exciting for the anxious than the thought of some future event, one which will finally see the sufferer recognised for what they are. There is little more relieving than those events being cancelled. Eleanor’s first thought, once she finally sees Hill House, is to call the whole thing off and leave.
Interestingly, The Haunting reflects Eleanor’s experience of this turmoil through the film’s dialogue.
Group dialogue is often confused. Characters talk over each other, with conflicting aims forefront in their minds. Equally, at times of heightened excitement, they are often talk while facing away from each other, at differing depths in the shot or while reflected in mirrors. Eleanor is no small part of this; although nervous and unsure she is a full part of the group, talking freely and sometimes aggressively. She is faltering in her social interactions, however, and she finds her minor missteps frustrating; she’s surprised and wrong-footed when Theodora refers to her as “Nell”, the diminutive form her family use, until it’s explained that Nell is a common shortening of Eleanor.
Eleanor deals with this in the same way she deals with all conflict; by retreating from it. The Eleanor who interacts with the others in Hill House is only part of her personality, a brittle mask. Much of what we learn of her true thoughts and desires comes not from external action but from an internal monologue presented as voiceover. In these thoughts Eleanor repeatedly mulls over events that are happening and how she will deal with them, interspersed with idealised plans for the future. There’s little apparent order to her thoughts, however; plans are dismissed as unfeasible as quickly as they are summoned up and she worries that she’s reaching beyond her allowed station. For anxiety sufferers, this scattering of mental processes is immediately recognisable. Many people with anxiety find planning inordinately difficult because they are constantly fending off unconsciously generated intrusive thoughts - often thought of as referring to thoughts of violence, either against others or oneself, intrusive thoughts are more properly any which are unwanted or which cause unnecessary distress - that derail the conscious process of planning.
Eleanor’s monologues also reveal another damaging effect of anxiety; Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome is complex but, at root, it is the persistent belief that you are not worthy of the situation you find yourself in - whether that be a job, academic accomplishment or even friendships - despite demonstrable evidence that you are. The anxiety of being an imposter also brings with it the threat of being found out, denounced and ridiculed. Oliver Burkeman’s short article in the Guardian newspaper considers the idea that Imposter Syndrome stems from the sufferer comparing how they feel with how others appear, especially people the sufferer may look up to. For me, this is a key insight into anxiety as a whole. Anxiety makes the sufferer over-analyse their actions and thoughts, yet they don’t see this over-analysis happening in anyone else. This apparent otherness generates a feeling of alienation, of imposterism, which then itself becomes melded into the cyclical process of over-analysis.
This manifests in Eleanor as a constant belief that the rest of the group don’t want her at Hill House, that she doesn’t deserve to be there, despite having been specifically invited by Markway. Markway’s expression of concern for her well-being after the first night in the house, for example, is taken as a hint that she should leave and she constantly frets that she will be left behind when the others are exploring the house.
Reading this, you might well feel that anxiety sounds pretty exhausting. That’s because it is. The constant grind of over-thinking thoughts you can’t fully control and running through various, increasingly unlikely scenarios which justify the belief you are utterly unworthy is horribly draining. Yet, just as this mental activity tires the sufferer it also often prevents proper sleep, or even sleep at all. Sleep itself becomes a trial - long hours where the mind free-wheels without even the routine distractions of daytime to occupy it - and then a time of dread. Eleanor evens claims to sleep on her left side because she “read somewhere that it wears the heart out quicker”.
The Haunting illustrates this sense of exhaustion by having some of the house’s most extreme manifestations occur at night. Perhaps the film’s most well-known scene comes during the first night. A terrible pounding echoes through the house, terrifying Eleanor and Theodora, but unheard by Markway and Luke. The spectral pounding re-occurs on the third night, accompanied by strange howling, and this time the entire party hear it. Yet the most terrifying scene, for me at least, happens on the second night.
Eleanor wakes in the middle of the night to hear indistinct mumbling and laughter coming from the walls of her room. She reaches out to hold the hand of Theodora, who is sleeping in the bed next to her, as the laughter fades into the sobbing of a child. Theodora squeezes her hand tighter and tighter, which Eleanor interprets as fear. Despite her best efforts, Eleanor is overwhelmed with terror and cries out, coming to full wakefulness. It is at that point we realise that Eleanor is not in her bed but has, at some point, moved to lie on a chaise longue. Theodora is asleep on the other side of the room, much too far away to hold Eleanor’s hand.
With rising terror, Eleanor comes to understand the consequences of this revelation.
“Whose hand was I holding,” she gasps.
This is the crux of the film, in my opinion. Eleanor starts to realise that the hand she was holding was that of Hill House. She starts to realise that someone, something genuinely does want her to star. She doesn’t have to return to the living world that terrifies her so.
What interests me - and frightens me - most about The Haunting is how the film blends the traditional horror of death with the anxiety-horror of life. The events of the film are not an all-in-the-mind delusion - Jackson was apparently very clear to Nelson Gidding, who adapted the book for film, that her story was supernatural - and all the characters do experience things, both alone and together, which are inexplicable. They all encounter the “preternatural”, to use Markway’s phrasing. “Suppose the haunting is all in my mind?” asks Eleanor. Markway replies; “Well you can’t say that because there are three other people here”. This confirms that it’s not just Eleanor who experiences the terrors of Hill House. Both Luke and Markway are led out of the house by the apparition of a dog-like creature and they also hear the pounding on the third night. More obviously, even cynical Theodora is scared of the things she is hearing and feeling, often more thoroughly than Eleanor. Her psychic abilities allow her to sense the presences that lurk in the house but also, crucially, sense when they have left. Theodora knows that the supernatural events are real but Eleanor knows they have intent, an intent that is focused on her. “Oh, God, it knows I’m here,” she exclaims at one point.
Eleanor isn’t irrational or deluded. The source of her anxiety is evidently real. There is something inexplicable happening in Hill House but, crucially, her anxiety is also based on fact to at least some degree; Markway is using her to prove the house is haunted whilst Luke uses her to prove it isn’t, and even Theodora seems to delight in belittling Eleanor out of boredom. Although it may feel like it to the sufferer, anxiety rarely springs from nothing. It is more that the minor troubles and inconveniences, the disappointments and embarrassments that everyone experiences at some point take on far greater significance, far greater longevity.
Markway attempts to calm Eleanor by pointing out how pointless it is to be scared of noises in the night; “Were you threatened?” he asks. His error is that he doesn’t understand what “threat” means to Eleanor. The anxious mind creates threat, building it around a speck of worldly concern as a pearl accretes around grit.
Ultimately, Eleanor accepts the attention of the house over that of her new friends and becomes one of the spirits who linger inside its walls; “we who walk here walk alone,” she explains in the film’s epilogue. This is easily interpreted as Eleanor’s suicide but I can’t help but read it slightly differently.
Eleanor has always had a purposed in life, even if she hasn’t realised it. She cared for her mother for eleven years and her presence in Hill House helps Markway with his investigations. She has always resented this purpose, though, and is terrified of being defined by it, trapped by it. In one key scene Luke discovers writing on a corridor wall which is revealed to be the words HELP ELEANOR COME HOME. This understandably terrifies Eleanor and it’s easy to assume that the phrase is intended to be yet another demand for help from her now-dead mother; “Help, Eleanor! Come home!”
What if it isn’t, though?
What if the phrase is a plea from Hill House? What if it’s asking Theodora, Markway and Luke to literally help Eleanor come home?
This is perhaps a stretch but in the final act of the film Eleanor rushes through the house, no longer afraid. “I want to stay here”, she announces. “I want to stay here always. I will not be frightened or alone anymore”. She eventually declares “I’m home, I’m home”.
I read this not as Eleanor simply accepting death but more subtly rejecting the fear that life has held for her. She chooses a different way to live, one which may not be comfortable or even comprehensible to the others. It’s notable that the Eleanor who narrates the film’s closing lines is calm and unhurried, a far remove from the Eleanor who was wildly terrified of being “sent back” to the real world.
This is why The Haunting is my favourite horror film. It’s a chillingly effective haunted house tale, complete with bumps in the night and sinister shadows, but it also understands how I often experience the world.
I am always frightened. Always. I find life horrifying, in its truest sense; the choices and the indecisions, the confusing noise of it all, petrify me. To quote Anne Radcliffe, the vast expanse of possibility that entails being alive “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates” my ability to hold my own sense of self together. I am not outwardly shy - public speaking is, perversely, something I enjoy greatly - but I am an introvert, like Eleanor, in the sense that I find social situations draining and bewildering. I constantly doubt my value and my worth, convinced that I am only begrudgingly tolerated even despite evidence to the contrary. Thoughts flutter in my mind like bats in the night, frustratingly near-visible.
I am so very, very tired.
Yet, thankfully, my experience of anxiety is relatively mild. I am not suicidal and so I like to hope that Eleanor isn’t suicidal either, not in her heart. I find life frightening but not hateful, not as long as the sun still shines and my wife still smiles. Even Eleanor smiles as she admits her love of collecting buttons. The Haunting reminds me that being frightened isn’t the worst thing in the world, as hard as that might be to remember that when anxiety holds my hand in the night.
Hill House isn’t a place I would like to stay, not in the way that Eleanor stays, but I certainly visit from time to time.
Daniel Pietersen is a writer of fiction and critical non-fiction, concerned with the theory of horror and related areas. He is a regular contributor to Sublime Horror and Dead Reckonings and lives in Edinburgh with his wife and dog.
