Child Neglect, Secret Rituals, and a Sacrifice for the Insect God

Horror Moments, Edward Gorey Edition

My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Edward Gorey here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.

Little Millicent Frastley, a child of ‘not yet five’ has been bundled away into a motorcar by creatures that have left her nursemaid sprawling in a state of hysteria, covered in a ‘brownish juice.’ What has become of her? As we read “The Insect God” we follow Millicent’s final fateful journey.

In the last couple of articles in this series of horror moments, we’ve deviated slightly from the type of story for which Edward Gorey is best known. This week we return, with a flutter of sinister wings, to a tale that is very much a ‘classic’ of his canon. It’s got all the Gorey tropes: an Edwardian setting, meticulously detailed crosshatched windows into a shadowy world, bloodless and impotent adults fretting and fainting as children succumb to extreme misfortunes, and darkly hilarious rhyming couplets to tell us the morbid tale.

It’s the little things in “The Insect God” that bring the most wicked delights. The fact that the shadowy silhouettes in the car are clearly giant grasshoppers pretending to be human, the fact that the embarrassed Frastleys have tea before they call the police, the way the insect mansion is ‘streaked with a luminous slime.’

Nothing can be done for poor Millicent herself, whom not even the reader sees again after she’s been bundled into the carriage. Her abductors ‘work themselves up to a ritual crime’ but then a final panel bluntly explains her fate:

“They stunned her, stripped off her garments, and lastly, they stuffed her inside a kind of pod: And then it was that Millicent Frastley was sacrificed to THE INSECT GOD.”

As ever with Gorey, the ridiculous is juxtaposed with the unmentionable and the final crime happens off-page in our imaginations.

Like the Gashlycrumbs, ‘The Insect God’ does have the air of a cautionary tale even if there isn’t much that Millicent herself could have done to avoid being kidnapped. It’s true that she accepts the tempting offer of cinnamon rolls (classic stranger danger), but since she was found ‘nibbling grass’ this is perhaps just a sign that she had been left to go hungry by her nurse and was thus easy to coax with food. The nurse has been missing for some while since the child was last seen playing ‘alone by herself on the edge of the park’ and ‘there was no one with her to keep her from straying away in the shadows and oncoming dark.’

The state of the nurse when she is found might indicate that the creatures have somehow intercepted and incapacitated her. But was she really set upon by the insects or does this all symbolise a real-world kind of negligence? Are the details, ‘eyes askew,’ ‘extremities rubber’ and clothing stained ‘with a brownish juice,’ all indicative of an alcohol-induced stupor? Is this whole story a cautionary tale, not for children but for adults and particularly adults who have delegated the care of their children to employees? The figure of the compromised caregiver looms large in the literature Gorey knew and loved, from Dickens’ drunken midwife in Oliver Twist to the neurotic governess of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

Note how the baby of the family watches events in the Frastley household from an unheeded position on the floor, seemingly left to fend for itself. Note also how unwilling the bourgeois family is to call in the police and admit they’ve lost their daughter.

The way the black motorcar pulls up beside Millicent reminds me of the gothic hearse-like carriages of Dracula and its Nosferatu variants. Millicent is dressed in white just like Thomas Hutter in the 1922 Nosferatu. In both stories, the character who is picked up and swept away in the apparent luxury of a refined mode of transport is conspicuously vulnerable. The car is a clue that whatever has preyed upon Millicent wears the trappings of aristocracy, just like the gothic vampire.

Left, from Nosferatu (1922) and right, from The Insect God.

Once inside their mansion with its ‘ballroom,’ ‘mirrors’ and decorative ‘hangings,’ any vestiges of humanity slip away entirely amd all these fine furnishings are besmeared with their strange slime. The whole story seems to be channelling legends about wealthy elites who turn into monsters behind closed doors.

It has been suggested that the story of Bluebeard was inspired by the real fifteenth century French aristocrat Gilles de Rais who had a reputation for sexually assaulting and murdering kidnapped children. Rais’ story doesn’t quite line up with the Bluebeard myth where it is wives who are dispatched, but both figures are part of the ‘rich people are up to something nasty’ subgenre of folklore. There are still many who believe in Satanic rituals happening behind elaborate closed doors; Gorey himself fleetingly glances at the possibility of child sexual abuse in the suggestion that Millicent is stripped before she is devoured.

Here, it’s worth turning to the outrageously strange 1989 film Society in which an American teenager discovers that the wealthy family who have adopted him are actually part of an elite cult of monsters who devour ordinary human beings. Behind closed doors, he observes them ‘shunting,’ an event every bit as ‘slimy’ as the frenzy of the insects, where the rich folk likewise ‘work themselves up to a ritual crime’ and blend and meld their bodies together in a sort of fleshy soup. It’s ridiculous, but also faintly insect-like, they dissolve like caterpillars in a chrysalis, reshaping and remaking themselves as their true forms emerge. Their victims are dissolved and absorbed like a fly caught in a Venus flytrap, and the sexual overtones are unmistakable in this orgy of greed and violence.

Screenshot from Society (1989)

We’ve always told stories about what the very wealthy are up to behind closed doors and our imaginations have often made outlandish scenes every bit as silly as the shunting in Society and the frenzied sacrifice in The Insect God. The everyday reality of abuse is often far more mundane, like a neglected baby left crawling on a richly patterned carpet, or a child left to nibble grass as her caretaker steals off for a drink.

Next week, we explore one of the most hair-raising horror sub genres with Gorey’s take on home invasion. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are published on Thursdays and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.

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