Editor's Note

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME SOMEONE WALKED OVER YOUR GRAVE?

I have taken to watching horror movies lately; some classics, such as The Exorcist, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Don't Look Now, Rosemary's Baby, the lyrical Ghost Story; but most recently The Haunting, a Hollywood blockbuster starring Lili Taylor and Liam Neeson. I had high hopes for this film, as it was loosely based on a novel by Shirley Jackson called The Haunting of Hill House. Nightmare visions, psychic phenomena, supernatural occurrences, hallucinatory uneasiness - these are entryways to a heightened perception of reality and to a consequent deeper apprehension of the self as a creative subject. I desperately want to be scared, and I salute the makers of The Haunting for trying to scare me: I for one miss the almost continuous sensation of vulnerability - and correspondent access - that I had, as a child, to the realm of secular mysteries. Drugs are another way, of course, and madness is a possible route, but how much more manageable, and usually temporary, to allow what is always there to simply have access to you? It is so much fun to be haunted by a figment. To take a shower alone in your apartment and, while rinsing your hair, eyes screwed shut, imagine that something horrible - you pick the grotesque face, the cause of its hunger - is with you in the room. To elaborate on the black branch of the elm across your window. My disappointment, then, at The Haunting's gross mismanagement of fear is only in proportion to the hopes I had for it. The movie is a failure: it is neither scary nor campy - it is, in fact, completely humourless - and relies entirely on special effects for its forays into the imaginative territory of visualization. What does the ghost of a murdered child look like in 1999? Well, I'll tell you: it looks like a bulbous, unwieldy, liquidy, computer animated, static object of sentimental excess. One gazes upon it not in horror or pity but in a distended state of disbelief that is truly the exact opposite of the suspension of disbelief. As any six year old knows, the most convincing effects are those seen printed on the backsides of the eyelids, or eyes half-open and out the corner of the eye, or materialized out of absolute darkness. We desperately want to be scared, and then we want desperately not to be scared anymore; to be righted, like a tipped lamp, that the light of security may be restored. The trope of horror involves an active conjuring - the investigation of a haunted house or a graveyard - and then a lapse into passive reception, in which the undead we have disturbed rise before us and we must believe in them; and then a final return to the light of original day: The normal day. This structure of reason is mimetic of the arc of writing: I actively destabilize myself in order that I may see an image, or listen to the unreason of a particular string of words; then I return myself to the vocabulary and logic of the un-artificial - of other people, of world order - of that which must not be in my control. Somewhere inbetween these poles of desire for affect there is a moment of agency in which the sounds of words and their various order and disorder have an uncanny authority, a desperate exigency. I am haunted.