In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.
But wouldn’t it be a stone drag if you were settling in to
relax in your sanctuary and the walls started bulging unnaturally or bleeding
even more unnaturally? Wouldn’t it simply ruin your night if that thing you
haven’t even finished paying the mortgage on yet sucked your precious little
daughter into the electrical system or made you want to pick up an axe and chop
up your precious little son?
Monsters come in all shapes, sizes, and smells, but one
thing that unites the mass of them from werewolves to robots is that they
somehow resemble organic beings. One of the few exceptions is the monstrous
house. The fact that it has no arms or legs or teeth makes the monster house
highly unusual and really very wrong (though not completely beyond anthropomorphization, as we shall see). The fact that a house is such a mundane
thing, a thing intended to protect and comfort, makes it highly insidious, especially when it turns against the children who dwell in it, as it so often does.
First of all, we must distinguish the monster house from the
haunted house. In a haunted house, the monster is some form of ghost. It may
make the windows rattle or the chairs fall over, but that ghost is the central
threat, not the place it chooses to haunt. That would be like blaming Dracula’s
castle for the vampire’s poor behavior, which would be unfair to a perfectly
fine castle. The nasty things a ghost does can be accomplished by any
breathing, visible asshole. Ghosts or other such entities may be responsible
for making a monster house monstrous, but a true monster house takes on a life
of its own; it is the threat.
The first truly enduring monster house remains the
definitive one. Published in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of
Usher” largely passed over specifics to dwell on off putting descriptions of
the title building. The unnamed narrator approaches the house, and it instantly
casts its spell on him, bashing him with waves of depression and unease. He has
not even interacted with its weird inhabitants before getting a very strong
sense that the House of Usher is a bad place. He even emphasizes its inherent
monstrousness by trying to describe it in anthropomorphic terms, noting its
“vacant and eye-like windows.”
Is it the house that has seemingly poisoned Roderick and
Madeline Usher, both of whom suffer from odd maladies such as Roderick’s
intense aversion to sound and his sister’s general malaise and tendency to
lapse into catatonic states? Is it responsible for the subtextual moral decay
of the siblings, whose relationship may not be entirely platonic? As the
narrator drifts through the foreboding house, it reacts violently to the
presence of one who might uncover its strange and dirty secrets. It begins
cracking in disapproval. When the ultimate abomination comes to
light—Roderick’s premature burial of catatonic Madeline—the house has a total
nervous breakdown. As the short story’s title spoils, the House of Usher
falls—quite literally. The building collapses, claiming the poisoned siblings
as its victims while the narrator manages to escape the domestic tomb. In a perversion of home security, the house would rather self-destruct than allow its family’s ugly secrets come to life, even if that means wiping out the family in the process.
