The Haunting Of Hill House Analysis

Oh the Horror: An Examination of the Mind in the Horror Genre
“Books are a uniquely portable magic,” said famed horror author Stephen King. Horror, especially, is a portal inside the mind. While most associate horror with blood, gore, and the supernatural, the true meaning of horror is to serve as a portal to the psyche of the author, the characters, and the first audience of the work. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House are paragons to the importance of understanding these psyches and the intentions and values of the author. In analyzing Dracula, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Turn of the Screw, the three parts of the conscious brain, the opinions and beliefs of the

His lust for humans, for both food and sex, portray the basic human instincts through a monstrous character. Dracula stops at nothing to feed and is known as a perseverant hunter of all things flesh. “My friend.—Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night. At three tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. Your friend, Dracula” (Stoker 4). Dracula’s charmingness and, in a sense, sleaze, in order to get Jonathan to come to the castle are illustrated from this quote very early in the novel. He is open and plainly fine with doing what he feels he needs to do in order to get what he needs. Whenever he feels extra corruptive, Dracula finds himself using young women as sex objects not only for himself but, to lure in other prey. “She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said:—‘Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry or you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!’ There was something diabolically sweet in her tones—something of the tingling of glass when struck-which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words

The most obvious and apparent reference is when Dracula, and the rest of the vampires, are directly described as demons and oppositions to God. “At least God's mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep—as a man” (Stoker 134.) Stoker contrasts God to the monsters and implies that everything given by God is better than anything offered by Dracula. In addition to smaller references, allusions to crusades, saints, and Jesus himself are common throughout the novel and are used as a comparison to their current situation in their fight against their devil, Dracula. “Thus are we ministers of God's own wish: that the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more. Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise; and like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause.” Van Helsing compares the quest of their team to that of a crusade where Dracula himself is the villain that needs to be slain. Curiously, the inclusion of highly religious elements might have been what attracted mainstream audiences to the novel. “Dracula is highly