Primary Sources:
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, 1959.
The Haunting of Hill House.” The Haunting of Hill House, Netflix, 12 Oct. 2018, www.netflix.com/title/80189221
Secondary Sources:
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Goodwin, John. “The Horror of Stigma: Psychosis and Mental Health Care Environments in Twenty-First-Century Horror Film (Part I).” Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12045
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Handley, Sasha. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. Routledge, 2007
Hallsworth, Djuna. “Making Visible the Incomprehensible: Ambiguity, Metaphor, and Mental Illness in “The Haunting of Hill House.” Streaming Mental Health and Illness: Essays on Representation in New Media, June 2024, ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381769179
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2013
Mancine, Ryley. “Horror Movies and Mental Health Conditions Through the Ages.” American Journal of Psychiatry Residents’ Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2020.160110
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Academic Journal:
- Horror Studies
https://www.intellectbooks.com/horror-studies
Keywords:
- Horror
- Supernatural
- Trauma
- Mental Illness
My ideas for my senior thesis aim to explore the intersection of supernatural and horror elements with themes of trauma and mental illness in literature and film. I was originally inspired by the show-adaptation The Haunting of Hill House directed by Mike Flanagan. This series was adapted from the novel of the same title by Shirley Jackson (1959). In watching the series, there were so many aspects of horror that clearly represented mental illness and trauma. I noticed the layers of this and was so intrigued by the level of detail that spoke these representations.
Horror often portrays characters who are dismissed as “crazy” for their supernatural experiences, usually being put in institutions by an ignorant society, despite their experiences being real. What stands out in Hill House is the ambiguity between supernatural events and the characters’ psychological states. It’s often unclear whether what we’re seeing is a true supernatural phenomenon or the result of a character’s mental deterioration. Sometimes it really is supernatural and sometimes it is not and sometimes its both things at once. Regardless, this overlap is exactly what I want to analyze for this thesis. I want to ask “Why does the author/director want us to question what we are seeing? Why is it significant whether we are seeing either or even both at once? How would this be portrayed if it were in film/written literature? Why are these differences important?”
To further investigate these questions, I talked to Professor McDermott, who encouraged me to look into psychology studies and texts because those would be best for understanding the aspects of mental illness and trauma throughout time and the perception of them. I decided to research the texts by Caruth, Van der Kolk, and Hermann as a framework for understanding trauma and how it often distorts reality.
Additionally, horror has been used to represent trauma and mental illness for centuries. By analyzing The Haunting of Hill House novel (1959) and its 2018 series adaptation, I can explore how trauma and mental illness are depicted while taking into account the societal contexts of both time periods.I also wanted to research other periods of horror, so I added texts that discussed horror in different centuries as well. I thought that there might be good comparisons in Goodwin’s “The Horror of Stigma: Psychosis and Mental Health Care Environments in Twenty-First-Century Horror Film (Part I)” and Handley’s “Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England” because these focus on two different time periods depicting horror.
On top of this, these depictions also translate so diferrently from literature to film. Professor McDermott also suggested that I look at pieces on Adaptation. He pointed me towards Linda Hutcheon’s “A Theory of Adaptation” and several other texts. Using these texts, I want to explore how watching a character on screen go through a supernatural experience or exhibit symptoms of mental illness engages the viewer through visuals and sound that aren’t available in written literature. Yet, the experience of reading and identifying with a character going through these things has elements that are also difficult to translate into film. Their inner thoughts are more intimate and provide a more focused lens into understanding the mental states of the characters.
Overall, I have a basis of questions for my thesis and a plan to find the different aspects of answers to these questions. My keywords have both “Horror” and “Supernatural” because these two things often don’t mean the same things, and I want to explore that as well. While my other keywords, “Trauma” and “Mental Illness” often coincide with one another, the depictions of both of these in written literature and film are often portrayed very differently, so I want to also focus on the differences between those and the way that they are in partnership with Horror and the Supernatural in my primary texts.