The Gothicism of American Gothic: Episodes 1-6

Note: The following is an import from my old Macabre Republic blog: in a series of posts, I covered the 22 installments of the 1995 CBS series American Gothic. More than mere episode guides, the posts explored the American Gothic qualities exhibited by the show.

Episode 1: (Pilot)

The opening-credits sequence features a voiceover from Sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole). Even as he discourses about the American Dream, Buck strikes an ominous note: “For those who follow my lead, life can be a paradise.  But for those who don’t, it can be a mighty rough road.” Apparently this sheriff wields plenty of influence in the small town of Trinity, South Carolina, and has no qualms about abusing his power.

In the first scene (set in an isolated rural home), protagonist Caleb Temple is trying to celebrate his tenth birthday, but his father Gage spoils the paltry party. Incensed by his daughter Merlyn’s ceaseless chanting (“Someone’s at the door”), he proceeds to attack her with a shovel. The 16-year-old Merlyn has been traumatized into an autistic-type state by something she witnessed a decade earlier (and which is revealed at episode’s end: the rape of her mother by Buck).

Gage is obviously not in his right mind, and later claims that his violent actions were somehow directed by the nefarious sheriff. Perhaps the accusation is not that far-fetched, considering that Buck is the one who finishes off the wounded Merlyn by breaking her neck. Mercy killing or sinister murder? The ambiguity here points to the duality of the Buck’s character. At once charming and chilling, he is the quintessential Gothic hero-villain.

Duplicity is a trait displayed by other characters as well. By day, Selena Coombs is a sweet-seeming grade school teacher; by night, she’s a cunning nympho in cahoots with Lucas Buck.

American Gothic sports a heap of dead relatives and skeletons in the proverbial closet. Dr. Crower, an alcoholic, has lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. Caleb’s cousin Gail was orphaned when a fire (deliberately set?) claimed the lives of both her parents. And Caleb’s mother ostensibly committed suicide ten years earlier by jumping out a window (or was she pushed by Buck, who was there at the time?).

The most memorable moment from the first episode finds Buck whistling the theme music to The Andy Griffith Show while approaching Gage’s jail cell (where he then tries to force the man to sign documents granting the sheriff legal custody of Caleb). The parodic whistling serves as the perfect indicator that Trinity is no bucolic Southern town–it’s Mayberry with a very dark underbelly.

 

Episode 2: “A Tree Grows in Trinity”

The second episode of the series draws on a pair of Gothic hallmarks: fearful flight and cruel imprisonment. “A Tree Grows in Trinity” picks up where the series premiere left off: with Caleb on the run from Sheriff Lucas Buck (after setting his own house on fire to escape him). Caleb’s desperate exodus leads him first into a cornfield, where he almost collides with a decidedly devilish scarecrow.

Eventually Caleb hides out in an abandoned hunting lodge, but is shocked to find that the place is already occupied. What at first seems a monstrous figure is actually a tied-up, traumatized man. As the episode unfolds, viewers learn that this is Rafael Santo, a Miami reporter who has been missing for months after coming to Trinity to investigate the “Bermuda Triangle of tourism.” He is now held captive in the lodge after running afoul of Lucas. Perhaps even worse, he serves as the personal sex slave for the sheriff’s lascivious sidekick Selena.

Coroner Curtis Webb is engaged by Lucas to perform a rudimentary autopsy of Caleb’s sister Merlyn (and to ignore the evidence that the girl died at the sheriff’s hand). The ghostly Merlyn, though, opposes such machinations, dubbing Webb’s tape recordings with the message “Someone’s at the door.” She also freaks out the coroner when her corpse’s head (now wide-eyed and turned to the side) somehow appears out from under the sheet that had been covering it. Merlyn’s final touch is the bloody injunction scrawled on the autopsy room door: “Don’t bury the truth.”

Buck later expresses his displeasure with the coroner’s handling of the autopsy by leaving the severed head of Webb’s pet goat Eli inside the refrigerator stationed on the front porch of the family home–a sinister riff on a memorable scene from The Godfather.

The episode, though, best lives up to the show’s title in the scene where Caleb spies a pair of cemetery caretakers arranging the wooden markers at the graves of his father and sister. Teapot and her daddy Harlan are quintessential hicks, in both costume and demeanor. Harlan jokes about the adjacent burials (“Just because he killed her don’t mean they can’t share the same worms”), and the chortling, overalls-wearing Teapot teases her daddy about his misspelling on Gage’s grave marker (“REST IN PEASE”). American Gothic seems quite conscious of its art-world namesake here, as the figures of Teapot and Harlan could have stepped right out of a Grant Wood painting. All that’s missing from the scene is the iconic hay-fork, and it would be no real surprise (based on the way the series has developed thus far) to see such a tool used pointedly in a future episode.

 

Episode 3: “Eye of the Beholder”

In the third episode of the series, Lucas shows just what a devilish Buck he is, going to ungodly lengths to make sure he is appointed Caleb’s legal guardian. First, the sheriff tries to discredit Dr. Crower (with whom Caleb wants to stay) by causing a patient to have an epileptic seizure while on the operating table for a simple gall-bladder procedure. Then Lucas coerces anesthesiologist Dan Truelane to speak against Crower at the upcoming custody hearing by acknowledging the doctor’s past drinking problems.

The two-faced Lucas sends an ostensible wedding present to Dan and his recent bride Cheryl, but the ornate looking glass he gifts them with has some supernatural qualities. Cheryl ends up enthralled by her reflection, and turns uncharacteristically libidinous. The sheriff assures Dan that he will get his old wife back if he does he part to support Lucas’s case at the hearing. Unable to bear Cheryl’s strange behavior, though, Dan destroys the mirror in a fit of fury–and Cheryl’s own face is somehow simultaneously disfigured (shades of Dorian Gray).

Having also worked his charm with Judge Halpern, Lucas figures the custody hearing is guaranteed to be decided in his favor. But the judge throws him a curveball by decreeing that Caleb will go live at Loris Holt’s boarding house (a multi-storied manse that happens to built on an old graveyard). Incensed by this turn of events, Lucas warns of retribution. Soon thereafter, Halpern drops dead after spotting a raven peering in his window. This judge will be presiding in Trinity nevermore.

“Eye of the Beholder” captures one of the essential elements of the American Gothic: the disparity between public persona and private nature, between surface appearance and ulterior motive. Lucas might strike a good ol’ boy pose, but he’s really bad news for the townspeople. And his determination to bring Caleb under his wing hardly stems from altruism; he’s carrying out a personal agenda rather than performing a civic duty. God help Caleb if he ever ends up raised in the sheriff’s sinister image.

 

Episode 4: “Damned if You Don’t”

In this fourth episode (with a fatalistic title pointing to the no-win situations that Sheriff Buck presents to the townspeople of Trinity), American Gothic once again proves that is well aware of its literary heritage. The episode introduces “Wash Sutpen,” whose first and last names harken back to the characters of Wash Jones and Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. The echoing of Faulkner’s novel continues with the revelation that Wash Sutpen murdered the “fellow who was taking liberties” with his teenage daughter–recalling Wash Jones’s scything of Thomas Sutpen after the latter insults the honor of Jones’s daughter Milly. Actually, though, Wash Sutpen has gunned down the wrong man; the real culprit was his employee Carter Bowen, who takes over Sutpen’s junkyard business when the latter is sent to jail (how’s that for small-town intrigue?). At the time of Wash Sutpen’s violent outburst, Sheriff Buck helped cover up Carter’s lechery; now he expects a favor in return (he wants to hire Carter’s sexy 15-year-old daughter as a personal assistant). When Carter refuses,the Machiavellian Buck reintroduces (the allegedly paroled) Wash Sutpen to Carter’s family.

The Bowen junkyard is like an automotive graveyard, with rusted hulks (including, fittingly, a hearse) littering the grounds. While visiting the place, Gail Emory stumbles upon the Gothic ruin once driven by her late parents. Ever since returning to Trinity, Gail–a reporter by trade–has been determined to look into the circumstances surrounding her folks’ deaths years earlier, and when she proceeds here to search the abandoned vehicle, she discovers a mysterious key inside a magnetized box adhered beneath the glove compartment.

The battle between good and evil is one of the show’s most overt themes, but American Gothic also makes its points in more subtle ways.  In the cleverly-arranged closing scene of “Damned If You Don’t,” Sheriff Buck stands in the junkyard orchestrating his latest devilish deal. A derelict bus looms over his shoulder in the background, and the one-word sign above the back window makes clear the type of service this vehicle once provided. This was once a “CHURCH” bus, but its days of transporting the faithful throughout Trinity have long since passed.

 

Episode 5: “Dead to the World”

The fifth episode of the series presents three different storylines. First, Caleb prepares to enter an archery competition at a local carnival. As always, Sheriff Buck insinuates himself in Caleb’s affairs, buying him a state-of-the-art bow & arrow and instructing him about the use of psychological warfare. “It’s not who you are, it’s who people think you are,” the sheriff tells the boy. He’s lecturing about having swagger, but Buck also sounds the American Gothic theme of duplicity–the gap between appearance and reality, public persona and inner character. Meanwhile, Buck’s lover Selena prevents Boone Mackenzie (Caleb’s best friend and chief rival in the competition) from practicing his archery by keeping him after school under the pretense that he needs to work on his penmanship. You know matters have really gotten sordid when even your grade-school teacher has a hidden agenda.

In the second storyline, Deputy Ben deals with some domestic strife involving his ex-wife and young son. Barbara Joy is physically abused by her current husband Waylon Flood, who also bullies his stepson. Ben tries to deal with the tyrant man-to-man, but Sheriff Buck tilts the playing field by using his powers to force the cabinet maker to fall onto his own table saw.

The main thrust of the episode, though, comes from Gail’s investigation of the seeming murder of her former childhood friend Holly Gallagher by Buck. The flashback scene opening the episode shows Buck deliberately driving Holly’s car off a bridge after she threatens to expose his “dirty little secret”–the fact that he is Caleb’s real father (Holly works at the hospital where Caleb’s mom died, and she assists her boyfriend Buck by stealing the file containing Caleb’s birth record). But as Gail digs up the ten-year-old dirt (and literally has Holly’s rusted vehicle dredged up from the river bottom), she discovers that Holly didn’t die in the accident. Having suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation when the car went underwater, Holly has been hidden away in a sanitarium for the past decade. Her mother Janice, a cosmetics saleswoman, has quite a gift for concealment. Unwilling to accept that her “perfect little girl” is now an invalid, Janice (with Buck’s help) leads the townspeople of Trinity to believe that Holly died tragically. Talk about dirty little secrets…

 

Episode 6: “Potato Boy”

This episode of American Gothic actually never aired during the show’s 1995 run, perhaps because it is rife with sexual innuendo (a lonesome Selena gets frisky with ten-year-old Caleb during an after-school lesson in her apartment). Also, religion is debased throughout: a dead bug floats belly-up in a basin of holy water; a church looks like the setting for a splatter movie after a priest spills blood-red wine all over during communion; Sheriff Buck (providing voiceover) also wonders if one the prim and proper churchgoers is “a screamer or a squealer.” Yet anyone who has read The Monk knows that the negative portrayal of religion is a traditional feature of the Gothic.

The Potato Boy of the episode’s title is a Boo Radley-type bogey that has captured the imagination of Trinity’s children. Rumor has it that the boy is the bastard child of creepy Old Man Warren and the young woman he imprisoned and impregnated. She died delivering him, since the boy allegedly weighed 30 pounds at birth  He was also wretchedly deformed (no eyes; giant claws for hands) and thus has been kept locked away in the moldering Warren house ever since. Turns out, the Potato Boy is inside, and he is disfigured, but he has a beautiful soul. In another example of the episode’s coupling of religion and the grotesque, the Potato Boy is given an angelic voice (which he uses to belt out church hymns).

The episode shows that Trinity is populated with secret sinners. The school teacher is a harlot; the local psychiatrist is a pedophile; the priest is a dope fiend (who doesn’t practice what he preaches when it comes to Christian forgiveness: he’s disowned his wanton daughter, Selena, banishing her from his church [how a priest has come to have a daughter is a question the episode skirts]). And of course, the sheriff is the most duplicitous figure of all. But give the devil his due: Lucas Buck makes a good point when he advises Caleb, “Be careful what you see in a man’s eyes. It might not be the truth.” In Trinity, South Carolina, the windows to the soul tend to be darkly shaded.

Precursors to Terror: Seven Influences on Dan Simmons’s Arctic Gothic Novel

Dan Simmons is one of the most literate and culturally-astute writers of genre fiction, and in his 2007 novel The Terror (a supernatural recasting of the fate of the Franklin Expedition), he proves as allusive as ever. Here are seven examples that can be dug out of the ice:

1.“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)
The icebound plight of The Terror parallels the dead calm plaguing the ship in Coleridge’s poem (which the crew believes to be a supernatural entrapment by an angry Spirit from the Antarctic “land of mist and snow”). Also, just as the ancient mariner’s troubles traces back to his sacrilegious slaying of an albatross, the Franklin Expedition perhaps curses itself by slaughtering polar bears as it makes its transgressive foray into the Arctic. Late in the novel, Simmons reveals that shamans have promised the God Who Walks Like a Man (i.e. the Tuunbaq, who has adopted/adapted the shape of the white northern bear) that “they would honour it by never fishing or hunting within its kingdom without the monster-creature’s permission.”

2.Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Shelley’s frame story (often abridged in film versions) intriguingly features an icebound ship stalled in its quest to discover the Northwest Passage. Captain Walton’s predicament reinforces the theme of Promethean overreaching, and the advice he receives from a dying Victor Frankenstein (“Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries”) applies just as readily to Sir John Franklin in Simmons’s novel.  Frankenstein‘s tale of the reckless creation of a hulking monstrosity that rebounds troublingly on the creator also aligns with the mythological backstory of the Tuunbaq that Simmons sketches towards the end of The Terror.

3.”The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe (1842)
Poe’s story is worked overtly into the plot of Simmons’s novel: crewmember Richard Aylmore, having read it in Graham’s Magazine five years earlier, uses it as the basis for the color-coded apartments he sets up during the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale. Alas, just as the ghastly embodiment of the Red Death crashes Prince Prospero’s festivities, the mauling Tuunbaq adds some dire fireworks to the New Year’s Eve celebration. Both Poe and Simmons furnish haunting reminders that ultimately there is no refuge from terror.

4.Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
Simmons immediately invokes Melville by employing a passage from Moby-Dick as the epigraph to The Terror: “This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors that they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.” Moby-Dick also swims into the narrative itself, such as the scene when Sir John Franklin (a vainglorious captain bent on career redemption rather than revenge) entices the crew with the Ahab-like promise of golden reward for the killing of their adversary. Much like the captain of the Pequod, Franklin dooms his ship’s crew (save for a sole survivor) with a series of bad decisions. Surely it’s no coincidence, either, that in his death scene, Franklin suffers an injury that doubles Ahab’s unmasting by the whale: he has his legs torn off by the Tuunbaq. Side note: Simmons (perhaps unwittingly expressing an anxiety of influence) has written an essay in which at once admits to rereading Moby-Dick while writing The Terror and vociferously distances himself from Melville’s novel.

5.Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
Simmons’s treacherous, renegade caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey, compares with the Conradian antagonist Kurtz. Just as Kurtz notoriously supported the Suppression of Savage Customs–“Exterminate all the brutes!”–Hickey orchestrates a fiendish massacre of friendly Esquimaux. Hickey also sounds echoes of Heart of Darkness in his descent into madness and presumed rise to godhood, and his “terrified” final pronouncement recalls Kurtz’s dying cry of “The horror! The horror!”

6.Nosferatu (1922)
Simmons closes his novel with a curious scene: Captain Crozier returns to The Terror, only to find it inhabited by an ostensibly dead figure with rat-like teeth and “long brown gingers and too-long yellow nails.” Both in appearance and situation, this seeming vampire suggests Count Orlok (who, after decimating the crew, forms the solitary occupant of the “death-ship”) in the influential German horror film. Simmons’s notion of a supernatural evil drawn to haunt a bad place also calls to mind Stephen King’sSalem’s Lot (whose film version offers a vampire that is a clear Nosferatu-homage).

7.The Thing from Another World (1951)
The Terror “is dedicated, with love and many thanks for the indelible Arctic memories, to Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, Dewey Martin, William self, George Fennerman, Dmitri Tiomkin, Charles Lederer, Christain Nyby, Howard Hawkes, and James Arness”–respectively, the cast, screenwriter, director, producer, and title character of the classic science fiction/horror film The Thing from Another World (based on John W. Campbell, Jr.’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”). “The thing on the ice” (as it is repeatedly referred to within Simmons’s novel) hails from the Spirit-World rather than another planet, yet lays a similarly nightmarish siege on the protagonists’ base of operations. (In a recent interview, Simmons offered further comment on the personal appeal of The Thing.)

The Terror: Definition of?

There is so much to like about The Terror, AMC’s just-completed historical horror series centering on the ill-fated quest to locate the Northwest Passage. Time and again, viewers are treated to stunning visuals (those long-range and overhead shots of the icebound ships are nothing short of sublime). There’s nightmare fuel to burn: grisly images of amputations, postmortems, scurvy-plagued faces, cannibalized corpses, dismemberings and savagings by a mammoth monster. The show is also stocked with incredible performances: Ciaran Hinds as the pompous and incompetent Sir John Franklin; Jared Harris as the tormented yet honorable Captain Crozier; Paul Ready as the aptly-named anatomist, Dr. Goodsir; Adam Nagaitis as the cretinous, Kurtzian caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey.

Ironically, though, for a show concerning a protracted struggle to survive, The Terror often feels rushed. Key scenes from Dan Simmons’s epic novel (e.g. the death of Sir John) flash by too quickly, too incompletely. The creature’s attack on ice master Thomas Blanky, one of the most extensive and suspenseful chapters in the book, is hardly allowed to play to its harrowing extreme. At the same time, certain plotlines are overemphasized: in the latter episodes, political upheaval (the battle between splintered camps after the voyagers abandon ship) eclipses both the monstrous threat of the Tuunbaq and the grueling ordeal of an overland trek (the way the men are so casually dressed, one might almost forget they are crossing terribly frigid terrain). For those familiar with Simmons’s The Terror, the abridgment/alteration of the narrative is severe. In a ten-episode series, surely there was space for a more faithful adaptation.

Perhaps the biggest misstep here is that the show presents too little of the Tuunbaq. The creature appears much less frequently than in the novel, and as a result, much of the tension is sacrificed. Sense of the crews’ frightful plight, their years-long subjection to sudden and spectacular attack by an Arctic terrorist, is undermined. When the Tuunbaq does show up on screen, he looks clearly computer-generated (and to me at least, strangely cute). He seems like a polar bear on steroids, not a sly and malicious entity of supernatural evil. By presenting the Tuunbaq as an almost tragic Inuit figure, the series undercuts both his mythological grandeur and his role as daunting adversary.

Make no mistake: AMC’s The Terror is a riveting drama, and well worth watching. I can appreciate the fact that adapting Simmons’s beast of a novel–which places innumerable characters in inhospitable environments–is no easy task. And naturally, changes are always necessitated by the translation of fiction into a visual medium. Nevertheless, the reworking of the source material here is so radical, it strikes me as an act of hubris: the show’s creators suggest they can take Simmons’s original story and tell it so much better by following an ever-diverging route. While an impressive effort, The Terror, much like the Franklin Expedition itself, falls regrettably short of the ultimate glory it might have achieved.

 

Canine Surprise: Stephen King’s “Laurie”

Stephen King’s latest short story (posted–without previous notice–as a free download at the author’s website) opens with the gifting of the eponymous mutt to a grieving, elderly widower by his sister. Mid-scene, Beth mentions to her brother Lloyd that “dogs die in cars. Especially little ones.” That is exactly the fate of the Jack Russell terrier Biznezz in another canine-centered King story, the Carveresque “Premium Harmony,” which leads one to wonder if “Laurie” will unfold in a similarly minimalist and irony-rich vein. On the other hand, since this is Stephen King we are talking about, there’s also the possibility that the gruesome chaos of Cujo could erupt. No small part of the fun of reading “Laurie” is the uncertainty of just where the tale is heading. King ultimately delivers a wicked curve, resulting in a suspenseful–and somewhat bloody–climax. The narrative works as both a chilling bit of realistic horror (to which the Florida setting is essential) and a heartwarming account of the developing bond between owner and pet. Hardly a shaggy dog story, “Laurie” rewards Constant Readers with a fine, unexpected treat.

Mob Scene: The Night of the Hunter

The classic 1955 crime/horror film The Night of the Hunter not only evinces a German expressionist style throughout but in its climactic mob scene also evokes a German (or at least generically European) village setting from a Universal monster movie. After the widow-seducing, serial-killing con man and thief “Reverend” Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is finally arrested, Icey and Walt Spoon (a couple that previously seemed plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting) bring disorder to the court during Powell’s trial via cries of “Lynch him!” and “Bluebeard!” Looking suddenly scraggly-haired and haggish, Evelyn Varden’s Icey channels Una O’Connor as the vociferous angry-villager Minnie in the Frankenstein movies. She comes across, though, as more of a pathetic than comedic figure; Icey apparently has had a few on the rocks when she drunkenly disturbs the dinner of the “poor orphans” following the trial. The children (who’ve spent a good portion of the film being chased by Powell) are forced to flee the restaurant as a torch-, tool-, and furniture-wielding lynch mob takes to the streets.

The turn by first-time filmmaker Charles Laughton (who co-starred with Boris Karloff in Frankenstein-director James Whale’s The Old Dark House, and who was married to The Bride of Frankenstein herself, Elsa Lanchester) back to Universal horror is unsurprising here yet also curious. The iconography proves somewhat disorienting, as The Night of the Hunter‘s West Virginia locale promptly transforms into a back lot rendition of a European village. This mob scene is also disconcerting in its recasting of the film’s hitherto-wholesome supporting characters: as the Spoons stir up a bloodthirsty rabble, they are reduced to a level of dubious morality that marks them as ultimately not all that different from Mitchum’s criminal minister. With all these vigilante-justice-seekers afoot, the film’s title could easily–and troublingly–be pluralized.

List Resistance

So I was browsing on my phone recently, and Google clued me in to an article on the Publishers Weekly website: “10 Scariest Horror Stories.” Naturally, I clicked right on over. Now, I understand that any compiled list is inevitably subjective, and part of the fun is seeing what the selector actually chose and had to say about those items, so I don’t want to be too contentious here. But what I read did bother me. Writer/scholar/editor Victoria Nelson (who admits that the bulk of her list is culled from the classic volume Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural) exhibits a strong bias towards late-19th/early-20th Century British fiction. The implication, then, is that the scariest stories were written long ago, and seldomly by American writers (H.P. Lovecraft and C.L. Moore are the two exceptions cited by Nelson). There’s no hint here of Stephen King or Peter Straub, let alone Laird Barron, Jack Ketchum, Glen Hirshberg, Stephen Graham Jones, or Joyce Carol Oates. Perhaps the issue is ultimately one of false advertising: the superlative article title “10 Scariest Horror Stories” suggests comprehensive consideration (“…Of All Time”), but the headnote to the list does qualify that these are simply “10 scary stories recommended by Nelson.”

I’d have to devote some more thought before compiling my own list of the 10 Scariest Horror Stories (American or otherwise), but if anyone has specific pieces they would vote for, feel free to leave a comment below.