The Trick of the Grimoire

Horror Moments Mini-series, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared Edition

[Spoilers: the Evil Dead franchise, Hereditary (2018)]

‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Mondays. Catch up with the recent Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here. Don’t forget to subscribe!

Anyone who has been following Dr King’s Curiosities for a while will already be familiar with the word ‘grimoire’ which comes from the Old French ‘grammaire’ or ‘grammar,’ essentially, an instruction manual of magic. Grimoires have an incredibly sinister reputation and they pop up all the time in horror films when there is need for a character to carelessly read some Latin aloud and unleash a dangerous occult force from a scary-looking book.

There’s a great tongue-in-cheek version of this in the horror/comedy Evil Dead franchise when the extremely stupid protagonists open and mess around with a book called ‘The Necronomicon Ex-mortis’ that is bound in human flesh and has a screaming face on the front cover.

The Evil Dead is riffing on Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon, a frightening tome which supposedly contains the means of summoning the Old Ones. I can’t find a good source to confirm whether or not it’s true but supposedly pranksters have added a ‘Necronomicon’ entry into numerous rare book collections from Yale University Library to the Vatican.

When sculptor Gage Prentiss created a tribute to Lovecraft in 2019 he chose to depict the author holding the Necronomicon which is open to reveal a groping tentacle emerging from within. The photographs below were taken by David Lepage who writes more about the hidden details of the statue here. Grimoires in horror seem to lure their victims with promises of power, even when the monstrousness of what lies within is plain to see.

True grimoires are far less fearsome than their horror movie counterparts and are very rarely bound in human flesh. One way in which they do deliver on their reputation is their use of symbols, particularly those which list the sigils associated with particular demons. Usually horror makers are too superstitious to use real sigils and typically make up their own, but there are some exceptions, most notably in Hereditary which borrows the imagery of the demon King Paimon from The Lesser Key of Solomon (to dubious narrative effect.)

In last week’s horror moment, I noted the use of arcane symbols in the Family episode which mimicked the mats seen in Hereditary. In fact, symbols like this pop up throughout the tv incarnation of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, becoming more conspicuous as we approach the final episode in the series when, perhaps, their meaning will be revealed.

In the final episode, ‘Electricity’ (which has another banging song) we discover that Yellow Guy’s slow-witted personality is in fact being caused by low batteries. When he has them changed, he suddenly regains his intellect and starts asking existential questions about the whole bizarre situation: why are the three of them perpetually trapped in their colourful house? Why are they constantly pestered by anthropomorphic objects trying to teach them things? And where does that staircase in the corner lead?

It's at the top of the staircase that he meets Lesley, an extremely sinister woman who speaks with the softness of a primary school teacher one moment and the screeching yell of an abuser the next. She looks like Frankenstein’s attempt to build a CBBC presenter from old parts of children’s toys. She seems to know everything about our characters, and even to have orchestrated all the strange goings on in their lives through her dollhouse replica of their home.

“Batteries can be replaced But some things stay the same No matter how we twist and turn We’re still dancing in chains.”

This is the episode which is playing most directly to that specific kind of fan who enjoys knitting complicated theories together about what all these metanarrative shenanigans mean. We seem, finally, to be on the brink of discovering what the creators of DHMIS have been cleverly hinting at the whole time, especially when Lesley gives Yellow Guy a book which will supposedly explain everything, and it’s a book that looks very much like a grimoire:

If we were in any doubt about those ubiquitous symbols having occult significance, here they are on a tome of hidden knowledge. All we need to do now is read…but Yellow Guy’s grimoire is destroyed before we get the chance, to the lamentation of YouTube and Reddit.

For me, what’s most fun about this episode is the way that it parodies the possibilities of the grimoire, the idea that the hidden secrets of reality are within reach if we could only obtain the right book and decode its arcane symbols. It’s fun to theorise about the clues left throughout the series, but the point of them all seems to lie precisely in the joke of fooling us into thinking we can figure them out. Where horror franchises usually riff on the supernatural dangers of black magic books, DHMIS plays a far crueller metatextual trick. Look! We’ve made you make a half-hour YouTube video…but you didn’t really think it would be that easy to discover the occult truths of this little universe, did you?

One tantalising final detail of this episode is that Lesley’s room is not the top floor of the house, there is a final staircase leading to another level. Will we ever be allowed to climb that high? Perhaps a second series will reveal it all… but I doubt that very much.

Next week, we round off this mini-series of horror moments with a glance at the television within this television show where some disturbing scenes are playing out. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!

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