On Vanishing Land, the Eerie and English Hauntology

In a 2015 article in The Guardian Robert Macfarlane argued that the English tradition of the “eerie” was enjoying a renewed vigour among the writers and artists of the British Isles. Through literature, song, theatre and film these devotees of “occulture” turned an eye to the sinister aspects of the green and pleasant land, unearthing the “skull beneath the skin of the countryside” in “an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism.” Working from Mark Fisher's 2016 study The Weird and the Eerie, this paper first seeks to differentiate the aesthetic mode of the eerie from other closely-related horror affects (such as the weird and the uncanny) and then examine the role the eerie plays in mediating the anxieties of a post-industrial, pre-Brexit Britain, giving voice to existential uncertainties, political dissension and fears of environmental collapse. The horror fictions of M. R. James and Arthur Machen are examined in relation to scientific developments of the nineteenth century, with the eerie in their work found to be a manifestation of the anxieties brought about by the erosion of humanity's preeminence in the world. In contrast to this Victorian anthropocentrism, the work of J. G. Ballard, Jeff VanderMeer and Gary Budden embraces the eerie as a means of further eroding the conceit of anthropocentrism and, particularly in the latter two, challenging capitalist ideologies and disrupting narratives of xenophobia through radical notions of belonging.

Green Letters, 2018

This unpublished essay explores the way the frequently noted association between horror and fascination is tied to the eeriness or uncanniness that arises in the experience of place and landscape. Central to my argument is the idea that the real connection between horror and fascination is founded in our essential embeddedness in place – an embeddedness that is sometimes manifest in a form of melancholia (most obvious in the experience of nostalgia), but in its more extreme forms carries over into a horror from which we are nevertheless unable to turn away.

Memory Studies, 12 (3), 2019

Any knowledge production of place, including a 'haunted' site, is a gathering of engagements which include elements of perception, performance, architectural setting and physical condition, and memory. This knowledge acquisition is a process, not a set or assemblage of definitive data elements.

Framing Fear, Horror and Terror through the Visible and the Invisible, 2016

The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place’, is very much at home in the genres of the ghost story/film and mainstream horror. Rumours of wrong-doing and regrettable histories survive even the ruins they dare speak of, and to speak about a haunting is to necessarily and reluctantly discuss lived space. Any ghost story in fact is a story about occupancy, a lived place and its ghost/s, now bereft but not altogether unoccupied (and therein lies the perversity of a ‘filled’ absence). This paper seeks to assess the ways in which narratives of haunted houses are essentially foregrounded by topography and architecture, taking at its premise lived space as being central to a haunting. Using the dialectical approach to space/place as found in Michel de Certeau, this paper redefines the concept of topography (space-chartering) in terms of character-appropriation (or the haunting) of space and how geographic/urban space further opens up into narrative space. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) will be analysed to demonstrate how haunted houses narratives build, sustain and suspend terror through their topography. It will also be argued that occupancy, possession and the vying for haunted space are ambivalent in this film, and that ultimately, spatial interactions are political.

2019

This paper will explore the use of the English landscape as a source of sublime horror, particularly through a shift in perception from idyllic to ominous. Where Peter Hutchings has indicated the importance of the 'uncanny landscape' as a fairly stable location for wrestling with modernity, this chapter will investigate those moments of slippage from the sublime as pleasure and wonder to the sublime as horror. Examples will be drawn from productions such as Glorious 39 (2009), Lark Rise to Candleford (2008-2011), The Living and the Dead (2016) and the Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-1978, 2005-6, 2010, 2013) productions. Non-British productions such as Picnic at Hanging Rock present the invasion of regimented European behaviour into a natural environment that absorbs, rejects and destroys the merely human. However, in the British example, what is central is that this is an already tamed and largely human-formed landscape which suddenly reveals the underlying power of the nat...

2013

The production of space is a view of landscape as a process of creating and negotiating social interactions within particular spaces. What remains of past productions are the traces and vestiges, as cultural expressions or 'signs' of these productions. A 'performance excavation' works with what remains of these past productions. Fieldwork involves a recovery of what remains as sensorial materializations of these past productions. This becomes an analysis of archaeological 'haunted' space.

2012