As the Lights Flicker
Healing thru horror, self as home improvement project, and of course Kim Petras
Haunting myself is a full time job. A lot of lesser demons have vied for the position (ghouls, vampires, succubi & once even a type-a banshee) but ultimately if you want something done right you’re just going to have to do it yourself.
What is it that the husband first says when introducing the haunted house to his family? “It’s a fixer upper, but it’s got good bones.” I am obviously interested in the bones, but as of late I have also found myself wondering about the fixing up. Namely, how to do it right—how to get to the other side of a haunting with grace and most of my sanity intact. How to shimmy through the sentient hallways of the past, when there is always so much to grieve, when “[we] acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death, and the land is a stained altar stone” (Annie Dillard).
When he heard I was writing this essay, a friend in law school put me onto the court case Stambovsky v. Ackley. In the suit, the plaintiff filed to rescind the contract on their newly purchased house on account of the sale intentionally obscuring the property’s “unnatural” reputation. In 1991, the New York Supreme Court declared of 1 La Veta Place, “As a matter of law, the house is haunted.” Other than the court’s unhinged use of ghost puns, the case became noteworthy for its invocation of the doctrine of caveat emptor, translated from Latin as “let the buyer beware.”
I slept with the closet light on, every night, for almost twenty years (there are few territories more haunted than the bedroom of a high school girl). Even now, on bad nights, I wrap myself in a hallowed thread count and quiver in certainty that something…moves…beyond my ability to sense or track it. The earth’s crust is made up of oxygen, silicone, aluminum, iron, calcium and ghosts. It is not a ratio I am particularly fond of.
I think here of local sculptor Randy Morrison, who used to live next door to me in the repurposed orphanage, chiseling gargoyles from stone in a strange and probably sentient attic. Mostly when I am thinking about Randy Morrison, I am thinking about a random interview he did in 2010 in which he casually self-identified as “ghostproof.” How, Randy? I need to know exactly how.
I’m not the only one. To be alive in the 21st century is to get very good at being haunted. Caveat emptor af then, to anyone born on this complicated rock, where seemingly no matter what path we follow we are made to move on unhallowed ground.
Two years ago, around this time, I had the good fortune of finding a treasure whilst warming my wee paws against Twitter’s perennial dumpster fire. A group of writers I admired had put out an open invite for the Spooky Boos Book Club, a monthly meet-up oriented around the celebration and interrogation of queer, especially femme horror. For a girl who once wrote in her diary, “...I am having the urge to tell my Tinder date that I am full of fear, always and of everything…” I thought that maybe a book club about non-normative terror could be…a better outlet?
The very first book we read was Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (and as far as story time goes, I mean, total banger). Among the novel’s many teachings, I learned that horror stories are much more expansive than terrible masked mascs or white incels with chainsaws. I discovered that the genre was full of, if not happiness, then some level of what appears to be healing, especially for femme protagonists. I’m thinking here of Midsommar, Teeth, and maybe even Coraline. Yes—it is brutal to survive, and sweet.
From Hill House: “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.” It is possible, the book eventually posits, to make a haunted house a home. I began to wonder what it felt like to lean into the arms of a haunting, to forgo exorcism in favor of something slower and more empathetic. For instance, what does it sound like, on a fundamental level, to have discourse with darkness?
As was the case with the Spooky Boos, I first encountered Kim Petras’ TURN OFF THE LIGHT project in the depths of lockdown (a classic case of the vibe calling the kettle black). Kim’s mission was to make an album that could heebie-jeebie all year round, even in the long exposure of summer, when the whole northern hemisphere is sick with light. (I have yet to find a time or situation when pressing play on this libretto of absolute nightmare feels wrong. I listen to it when I shop for groceries.)
By any metric, the album did well. TURN OFF THE LIGHT absolutely deserves the critical praise it garnered given its expert production and richly bloodied poetics. These conditions aside, a “Halloween” album is able to achieve commercial success not because the mass market is macabre, but because there is (and has always been) a ribbon of the macabre in the masses. Even in broad and holy daylight we feel it—politically, environmentally, racially, financially, psychologically—the teething of uncanny phantoms upon us as we perform the motions of basic survival.
I have recently devoted some time to the concept of hauntology, a syllabic mule of “haunting” and “ontology”—haunting being a good & prolonged lurk, and ontology being the study of the nature of existence. (Forgive me Father 4 I am abt to Bring Up Derrida) Originally used to describe the undead specter of communism milling about Europe at the end of the twentieth century, Mark Fisher, scholar of punk futurisms, revived the concept of hauntology in 2014.
Fisher writes, “What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate…” Colloquially speaking, hauntology suggests that the construction of the present moment is built from the modge podge of extinct futures, that, at its core, the act of living in the present is a compulsory performance of mourning for those realities which have not come to pass (and never will).
Mark Fisher’s version of hauntology suggests that to inhabit the present is akin to wandering through a graveyard. Every day, as we wake up and stretch our arms in what little light happens to fall upon our faces, we become specters/spectators in our haunted mansion of a world, built long before our time on a latticework of canceled possibilities and undead futures. Let the buyer beware: the present is itself unfinished business, and every single one of our names is written on that lease.
On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in Judaism, I rewatch my favorite episode from the final season of Buffy, in which our slayer player has some bant with newly vamped psychology major Holden Webster. Buffy is laid out on a grave like it’s a f***ing therapist chair (if this isn’t canonic behavior I don’t know what is!!!) and she’s sharing a rare and hard-won moment of vulnerability.
For seven seasons, Buffy has ricocheted between heaven and hell and high school and back, and all that apocalyptic pinballing has left her with a sad omniscience. In order to save the world and become a true heroine, she’s had to move through shades of her own monstrosity. Right before she drives a stake through his heart, Holden diagnoses her: “You do have a superiority complex. And you’ve got an inferiority complex about it.”
From track fifteen in TURN OFF THE LIGHT, “I'm the greatest God created / I'm a sickness, I'm contagious.” As is the case with Buffy’s superiority-inferiority complex, the diametric power of Kim’s album is funneled through a conduit of its own darkness, its unflinching ownership over its own queer corruption. I think of demonic Megan Fox, burning her tongue with a Bic lighter and declaring very simply into the receiver, “I am a God.” I think of Glinda’s impossible question, “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” And I want to tell her, “Yes. Neither. Both. I am both.”
Before the blood starts surging from between its creases, I feel like the wallpaper in a haunted house can be…charming? It is inside this tight braid of beauty and violence that moments of affect most often develop; the house’s temporally embedded pain deepens when juxtaposed against the lost aesthetics of the future it had once hoped to inhabit.
It is this hauntology of the self I am wondering about, the abdicated possibilities and regrets that circle us and leave us stranded in the middle of our lives, feeling both a little proud and a little ashamed. Our pasts are transformed into ghost stories, and over and over, we get really good at telling them. They are stories about doing things better, or doing things different. They are stories about business left unfinished or otherwise conducted messily at the expense of those we hold closest, and now perhaps, not at all.
At some point, as the light in my closet burned & burned, I began to suspect that I was sleeping under my own bed. My therapy sessions were in constant conversation with the hauntology of my own spirit, my mistakes undead, my regrets proliferating. I’ve never met a mirror that didn’t already have a demonic subletter grinning back at me.
In one of the campiest, most brutally vulnerable odes to remorse, Zac Efron shatters his reflection—and I mean he absolutely obliterates that shit—during “Bet On It” in HSM2. “How will I know if there's a path worth takin'? / Should I question every move I make?” his character Troy Bolton sings, “With all I've lost, my heart is breakin' / I don't wanna make the same mistakes.” Maybe Derrida would have liked it, maybe not. It’s hard to say.
Despite my bias, I do think that Troy actually looks possessed [by regret] in this scene. Someone clearly overcorrected for color in post, giving his eyes the neon green Pantone of poltergeist on vyvanse. He moves too in a sort of quickened and rhapsodic way; the ghosts of his bad decisions drive his body ecstatically across the golf course at high noon, and somehow, I could not relate more.
Of the lesser haunted behaviors I engage in, one of my very favorites is bringing a blankie to the park and lying down on it. I roll on my back & open my mouth and the light just sort of pours right in (Katie might call this a “snake meal”). I’m on the yellow blankie when a friend of mine tells me about the choices and the doors. He tells me about this sensation of shrinking multiplicity inside himself—that as his choices accrue over time, the more doors he feels slamming shut, as potential realities loudly shutter themselves against the path he’s chosen. “I’ll never be a marine biologist,” he specifically remembers telling his college roommate. These are the moments of slammage.
And I hear them too, especially in an A24 way, because in haunted houses doors are quite prone to slamming themselves shut in the dark when nobody with a pulse is around to push them. Of course there is something unquiet at play; we’ve got so many undead possibilities whooshing around and only so much real estate for them to share. Over the years our choices amass, but the square footage of our spirit remains ever-fixed, and the space fills.
When we’re haunted by ourselves, it can be a hopeful experience. (“Buffy, I’m here to kill you…not to judge you.”) Ideally, the concept of unfinished business is informative; it suggests something of a ghost’s purpose, their raison d'etre. By conveying such messages and cauterizing the frayed cycles of self-actualization, there is opportunity for the making of peace, and maybe even one’s ability to rest in it.
The stakes of hauntings such as these are deep, and intimate; they help us understand the ways in which our bodies have both brilliantly defied and simultaneously recreated legacies of violence. If Mark Fisher is correct in that we’re irrevocably haunted by lost futures, then like…let them? An unhaunted house has a newborn’s memory; without the right kind of unfinished business it lacks a vision for itself, for a future that is better and more just than its past. These are the blueprints for the proverbial fixer-upper.
I’m not positing that we need reservoirs of trauma to haunt us into our growth edge, only that the past makes noise whether we want it to or not. And noise is music and noise is data and if the spirits are intent on saying something, we probably ought to try and listen. Because the past will never RIP, no matter how sweet the roses we lay at its headstone.
In a freshly minted essay on queer ghost stories, Nell Stevens writes, “Ghosts don’t feel fantastical to me. They seem like the most straightforward way to speak about absence and potential, about uncertainty and transgression.” If “as a matter of law, the house is haunted,” then maybe haunting becomes a puzzle of interpretation, a matter of locating more user-friendly ouija boards.
All the women I might have been—all the women and their pocketfuls of unspent choices, rattling around like loose change—perhaps it is they who haunt the closet of my childhood bedroom. They are gathering still—those beautiful and doomed versions of myself questioning, questioning, questioning whether I am who I’m supposed to be. Their unfinished business, I think, is to get me to grieve for them, and in doing so, help me come to terms with the person I am today, in this precise and singular moment.
This October, I am getting busy. I am lounging with Buffy on a headstone, learning how to feel whole not just in spite of but because of my transgressions. Like Kim, I am attempting to wield my own darkness as a navigational tool around every wrong turn (track four!). I am plunging my hand into my own reflection alongside Troy Bolton. And I am with my sweet friend on the yellow blankie, in the full path of the sun, unslamming doors. My therapist is even helping me ghostproof myself (to the degree that such a thing is possible).
The fact of the matter is this: I want something that all people want, and it is not unique or original at all. I want to sleep deeply. I want to sleep a sleep that is deep and undisturbed and life-affirming. I want to sleep with the lights off, in the dusking house of my own skin. It is a beautiful and quiet hope.
So it goes. The nights keep rolling in. I don’t actually have a closet anymore, nor a lightbulb to burn inside of it, even if I wanted to. Save the sneaking leak of the moon, I sleep in the dim, ever in the company of choices made and unmade. One day maybe I’ll wear a t-shirt that says “I Survived the Haunted House of Myself and All I Got Was This Stupid Sense of Inner Peace.” We’ll workshop it.
I am beginning to understand “final girl energy,” why the beauties with french braids and buzzcuts walk towards the attic, the basement door, the ink-dark woods, even as the whole theater, the whole world, screams that they ought not to. Y’all. They just want their damn houses back. They are, as Shirley Jackson claims, in the tough business of defying their own boundaries and illuminating the ferocious topography of their souls.
We flick the light switch, sometimes for fun and sometimes for survival. Either way, as the light comes and goes and comes and goes, we discern in that flicker the architecture of our hauntings, our longings, our tucked away dreams. But we need not identify as a cemetery of lost selves, not now, not this month. There is no real reason to mourn at a time when the spirits sing their loudest, and any number of lost possibilities might rise from the grave.