My favorite monsters

Halloween is close at hand, a time when I trot out some of my favorite cinematic and literary horrors.

In the former category is almost every fright film made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and ’40s, black-and-white gems like Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula,” Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” Lon Chaney Jr.’s “Wolf Man” and a boatload of sequels, mostly of lesser quality. They exude atmosphere — crackling bolts of lightning, cobwebbed castles, foggy marshes — and practically define the iconography and conventions of the horror genre.

On the literary side, my tastes run further afield. Many of the early works of Ray Bradbury, especially the short stories “Night Fever” and “The Jar,” eschew the creaky staircases and midnight settings of the Universal front. In the same vein (pun intended), Richard Matheson modernized many of the traditional conventions of horror in the 1950s by finding a pseudo-scientific explanation for vampirism (“I Am Legend”) and placing stories on passenger planes (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and highways (“Duel”). Stephen King picked up the torch — not to march on Baron Frankenstein’s castle — and shredded nerves with rabies (“Cujo”), a mutated flu virus (“The Stand”) and psychotic fans (“Misery”), to name just three.

But a short novel I read every year — both because I assign it to students and because it never fails to make me think as well as shudder — is Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Originally published in 1898, the novel avoids most of the conventions the cinema would enshrine as standards decades later and anticipates the psychological suspense that drives modern horror.

Like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” “The Turn of the Screw” is a frame story, beginning on Christmas Eve in an old house where revelers gather to tell ghost stories, a mostly British tradition at Yuletide that I wish would catch on here in the States. The discussion ’round the fire turns to one-upmanship, and a guest notes that ghost stories involving a child give an already frightening subject an additional layer of terror.

“If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,” he says, “what do you say to two children?”

The story that unfolds from this observation is purportedly from the manuscript of an old governess who, as a young woman, is placed in complete control of two orphans on a rambling country estate. James never gives the governess a name, but allows her story to unspool in first-person, creating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and distance that serves the tale well.

In short order, the governess becomes convinced the children are being haunted by ghosts of their former governess and valet, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, who were having an affair in the months before their deaths.

For years after the novella’s publication, it was accepted as a quintessential ghost story. But critics soon began digging beneath the surface, questioning the mental state of the children’s second governess, who claims to have saved the two from demonic possession by these spirits. Do the ghosts exist, or are they figments of her imagination?

In a parallel interpretation, critics have found much in James’s portrait to support a reading of catastrophic class differences, as the affair between the first governess and the valet required the crossing of several social strata. Further readings have looked at the novella as a prototypical feminist text, a study in sexual repression and possible pedophilia involving multiple characters, living and dead.

While some of these analyses range far afield, they can all be supported, more or less, by the ambiguous — and, to my mind, perfect — narrative techniques that James employs, which allow multiple readings without decisively refuting any.

And the final pages, when little Miles and the governess are alone in the house, fending off what she believes to be the Quint’s final attempt to corrupt the boy’s soul, are among the creepiest in literature. James’s ending, soberingly final, allows readers to see the governess as either hero or villain.

For his part, James stolidly maintained that he had written a traditional ghost story, and that alternate readings should be viewed with suspicion. But writers are notoriously reticent to discuss what their work “really means,” and even when they make such pronouncements, their opinions should be taken with a degree of skepticism. Once a work is published, its interpretation belongs no longer to the writer, but to the audience.

And “The Turn of the Screw” is a many-layered delight, one that thumbs its nose at the conventions ascribed to “traditional” horror stories (including my beloved Universal movies), becoming all the more frightening because its monster, if one even exists, lives not in the attic or the basement, but in the human heart.


If this column inspires you to read “The Turn of the Screw,” I’d love to hear your interpretation. Email me at chris.schillig@yahoo.com or tweet me @cschillig on Twitter.

This was originally published in October, 2015, but I'd still welcome comments today.