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.
Home invasion is a subgenre of horror stories which even horror fans tend to fear. When ‘The Evolution of Horror’ (one of my favourite podcasts) covered Home Invasion, almost everyone who sat down with host Mike Muncer seemed trepidatious: ‘this is my least favourite type of horror film’ was a common refrain.
The podcast series opened with what in context became a particularly ominous sound effect: a doorbell ringing and a door creaking open. This seemed to distil what lies at the heart of the genre, the plausible threat of someone sinister entering your home. We’re not straightforwardly dealing with the Other in these stories, you’re less likely to meet supernatural terrors or alien invaders than thieves or sadists looking to pass an evening at your expense. This is a genre that taps into the primal fear of whispering ‘what was that?’ as you bolt upright in bed.
Films like Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) gained notoriety for their brutal sequences of home invasion. The remorseless ‘droogs’ of Kubrick’s film embody social fears of ultraviolent youths with nothing better to do than cause chaos and pain. Funny Games depicts a suburban family being terrorised by the chillingly motiveless Peter and Paul whose campaign of cruelty begins with them overstaying their welcome after they knock on the door asking for eggs.
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) took this theme even further in an allegorical retelling of Genesis from the perspective of the Earth. God, in this version, is a narcissistic author who takes his wife’s domestic labour for granted and allows a pair of strangers (first Man and then Woman) to stay in her beautiful house because he enjoys the praise they heap upon his works. As more and more of these ‘fans’ appear, the house is treated with greater disrespect and we feel her agony with every broken object and burst pipe.
Edward Gorey’s illustrated books are mostly set in spacious, finely decorated houses ripe for the invading. As we learned last week, Gorey’s adult characters are often impotent in the face of peril. Sickly, melancholic, and too embarrassed to call the police when something goes wrong, they seem as fragile as the elegant ceramics balanced on each piece of spindly furniture.
Enter, The Doubtful Guest:
Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest (1957) is a masterpiece of restrained horror where a small (and admittedly extremely cute) creature appears in a family’s life one day, makes himself a nuisance, and then never leaves.
Like every good home invasion, the book begins with a ringing doorbell:
“When they answered the bell on that wild winter night, there was no one expected-and no one in sight.”
After rushing inside the Guest immediately succumbs to an inexplicable malaise:
“All at once it leapt down and ran into the hall, where it chose to remain with its nose to the wall.”
Thus begins a reign of terror. The creature bites into the plates at breakfast, steals the horn from the gramophone,
“At times it would tear out whole chapters from books, or put roomfuls of pictures askew on their hooks.”
It has a terrible habit of blocking the drawing-room door (although only on Sundays) and even gets in the way when it’s sleeping.
The family seems incapable of doing anything other than suffering through the ordeal.
“It came seventeen years ago-and to this day it has shown no intention of going away.”
There are two common versions of where Gorey got the idea for The Doubtful Guest. One is that the creature is a projection of his own eccentric personality, a vision of how Gorey imagined he came across to his hosts. The Guest is likewise an awkward introvert plagued with strange fixations, and the little canvas shoes and winding Harvard scarf are surely a send up of Gorey’s own distinctive style.
The other interpretation (and I see no reason why they can’t both be true) is hinted at in the book’s dedication to Gorey’s friend Alison Lurie. She recalled telling Gorey about the horrors of parenting a toddler:
“I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.”
The Guest is the same height as a small child, and the vacant nonchalance with which it drops people’s belongings in the pond seems very like a toddler causing needless chaos.
The fact that it stays for seventeen years without leaving also seems to capture the impact of a child upon the civilised members of a household. This aspect of the text prefigures the much less sinister Quentin Blake tale ‘Zagazoo’ where a couple is visited by a creature that mutates through various developmental stages in the form of animals, including a rampaging toddler-like elephant.
Blake’s story has a happy ending where Zagazoo turns into a nice young man ‘with perfect manners’ and the old parents turn into happy pelicans. Gorey’s tale ends in a state of purgatorial torment where no one, not even the dead-eyed creature, seems capable of feeling anything but misery. Gorey tried and failed to persuade his publisher to market this as a children’s book, although you could once get your very own cuddly Doubtful Guest to lie in tureens and obstruct doors. I desperately want one…
What’s your favourite home invasion horror? You can read the full version of The Doubtful Guest here. Next week we encounter an animated mystery, but 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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My favorite home invasion scene is the party in Weird Science.
That little guy?? Adorable.