Author David Griffiths on creating a sound-world in Gothic Fiction
You might think this is extremely weird of me: I watched Psycho with my ten-year-old son the other night.
He’d been nagging me. Apparently, he was ‘old enough to watch some real horror movies now’ and his mates had teased him about not seeing Stranger Things and Predator. Dad, meanwhile, had been insisting the lad start gently with horror movies and watch Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as an amuse-bouche.
Warily, I consented to an upgrade, deciding that if he was going to be traumatised by movies (as I had been at the age of ten) then it would be something classy and elegant and cool which did the traumatising. We watched Janet Leigh scream and scream in the shower … yet it wasn’t that scene that creeped him out.
Remember the end of the movie? When Norman Bates has been arrested and Hitchcock’s camera follows a policeman down a corridor. The policeman is carrying a blanket to give to Norman, and an off-screen voice can suddenly heard saying, ‘Thank you.’
That voice isn’t Norman’s. It’s Mother’s. It’s the last voice you’ll hear in the movie. And … it is so wrong. Norman Bates isn’t Norman anymore. His mother has taken over his soul. Our nightmare is complete.
Gothic fiction’s sound-world is its signature. The importance of sound in creating atmospheres is obvious. The cry of a crow, howling winds, rolling thunder, Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking violins as the knife plunges down through the shower curtain. Think about Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, with its steadily thumping heartbeat beneath the floorboards, and you’ll know that the same is almost as true on page as it is on screen.
Since the age of Gothic Romance, disembodied, monstrous or uncanny voices have populated terror literature’s soundworlds. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho features voices and whispers that come from nowhere. The Bronte sisters set a standard for the description of uncanny, disembodied voices in Gothic literature. Cathy’s ghostly cry in Wuthering Heights (“Let me in – Let me in!”) has become an emblem of Gothic haunting. Every reader of Jane Eyre remembers Grace Poole’s chilling laughter without having actually heard it.
And this is the key. For a Gothic writer, the creation of a ghostly voice is a peculiar trick of ventriloquism. Gothic writers are lucky, though, as they can let their reader’s imagination do most of their work for them. Sound is transferred from an unknown source in the story, through words on a page (which are mute), into the reader’s imagination, which interprets the voice according to its own personal fears, prejudices and experiences.
While attempting to create ghostly voices of uncertain origin for my own novel, I forgot this fact: Grace Poole’s laughter is all the more creepy because it is doubly removed from its alleged origin – first through its ghostly disembodiment, second because the reader doesn’t actually hear it. The reader only guesses what this imagined laugh would sound like. The reader’s personal fears will fill in the gaps, shape the sound of the voice. There’s no need to over-write because the writing of sound and voice is extremely hospitable to the uncanny.
I could have saved myself trouble. I agonised over my ghostly voice in my novel. I’d been trying to write ambiguous ghosts, in the tradition of The Turn of the Screw. My teenage protagonist’s mother had died. He’d gone to live with his uncle, a professional stage medium, and the teenager, who’d been illicitly taking his uncle’s anti-depressant medication, believed he’d inherited his uncle’s gift because of the voices he’d started to hear (which may or may not have been side-effects of the tablets).
The problem with this was that when I started describing the voices I wasn’t sure if I was over-doing it. Ann Radcliffe describes terror as characterised by ‘obscurity or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events … horror, in contrast, nearly annihilates the reader’s responsive capacity with its unambiguous display of atrocity.’
This corresponds perfectly with Stephen King’s idea that to truly horrify the reader one must ‘open the door’ on the horror and graphically show the atrocity lying behind it. ‘Terror’, meanwhile, involves leaving the door shut. Gothic readers are left to imagine what lies beyond.
The Gothic soundworld is incredibly useful as a tool for helping the imagination achieve this kind of terror. The uncanny voice penetrates and cuts through all other sonic elements, most of which often add up to little more than atmospherics.
The thing to remember, though, is that Mrs Radcliffe and the Brontes weren’t working particularly hard when they described their uncanny voices. The atmosphere that they’d built prior to transcribing their ghostly utterances was undoubtedly painstaking – stillness and extreme silence usually are part and parcel of the tension they create – but the voice itself is left to the reader’s imagination.
The effectiveness of uncanny voices can assist with even the most excessive and visually grotesque horrors. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist springs to mind. Regan McNeil’s voice becomes monstrous as she is possessed: a hybrid of human, demonic and animal noises. (In the film version, Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, who provided the voice insisted on being tied up and semi-suffocated during the voice-over recording process, which shows how seriously she was taking it.)
But such voices don’t always emerge from as clear a source. The voice can be produced offstage as it emanates from a mysterious ‘other’ place, which lies beyond the sight of the audience. This is the dynamic that creates obscurity and ‘terror’, and it means keeping the door shut tight, which is what I ultimately decided to aim for. The ambiguity of the uncanny voice and its unknown source is what helped me pose the question I’d been wanting to ask my readers: Is this paranormal business actually happening at all? Or is my poor grief-stricken, lonely teenager merely imagining it?
That’s a tough tightrope to walk. But if I have managed to get you to strain your ears for a minute or two and listen to the strange and uncanny voices of the Gothic novel, then all I can add is this:
‘Thank you.’
(c) David Griffiths
About How to Hear Ghosts by David Griffiths:
In the wake of his mother’s death, 16-year-old Ollie is thrust into the world of his uncle, Dominic Quinn, a renowned stage medium. Communing with the dead runs in Ollie’s family – or so he believes. But as he starts to hear voices in his head, he must confront the possibility that they are no more than a spiral into hereditary madness.
Haunted by the mysterious letter that plagued his mum’s final days, Ollie embarks on a quest for answers. With the help of one of his uncle’s mysterious books and the support of his classmate, Hannah, Ollie delves into the secrets surrounding his mother’s past.
But as he navigates the blurred line between reality and the paranormal, he must face a daunting question: will it make him famous like his uncle, or dead like his mother? In this gripping young adult novel, Ollie discovers that sometimes, the most terrifying ghosts are the ones we carry inside.
Order your copy online here.
