Capitalism: A Horror Story

To be fair and spell out one of my biases at the outset of this post on my thoughts about Jon Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story, I've long been skeptical of the idea of "Gothic Marxism" for a reason this book does little to dispel: it seems like either an attempt to make Marxism "sexy" or to align someone's taste in entertainment to their avowed political ideology. Perhaps it tries its hand at both at the same time. The concept of Gothic Marxism often feels like a manifestation of the impulse to rebrand your politics as "cool" and to politically justify your fandom.

The book's vision of "the Gothic" mellows and becomes diffuse as it proceeds, eventually transforming into a catch-all category for the various horror films and texts it analyzes. However, Capitalism: A Horror Story doesn't excel at illustrating how the Gothic, or horror more generally, is necessarily a Marxist mode. This is an especially vexing omission in light of several authors under discussion being notably not radically left-wing in their politics yet somehow still existing under the book's political purview. For example, Ann Radcliffe was a champion of the middle-class bourgeoisie; the polite moralizing of her "Gothic Romances" and her status as an upwardly mobile middle-class woman whose ascendance was deeply entwined with the rise of capitalism evidences that. As another example, despite his belief in home rule for Ireland, Bram Stoker was a monarchist and supporter of the British Empire--two facets difficult to reconcile to claims of Marxist potential within Gothic authorship. In general, the linkage between "Gothic" and "Marxism" does not feel natural or self-evident.

The book's desire for Gothic Marxism to possess a transcendental, utopian political value also strikes me as odd and feels like something that can only be conjured by avoiding the material conditions that made the Gothic, and horror more generally, a viable commodity in terms of cultural production. This seems like something a Marxist account would want to explore in detail, but those concerns are largely left dangling. 

My biggest complaint with the book is stubborn insistence that horror is essentially a "hopeful" genre. I have taken a screenshot of a relevant paragraph so that you can judge the book's rhetorical position for yourself. This desire for a hopeful utopian turn does, in fact, cause problems when the book tries to use the cited fictions as political examples. You can read the ending of Dracula as hopeful--but it is hopeful about the continuation of British patriarchal power. Dracula features a collective that defeats evil--but it is a collective of elite imperial agents reinscribing Western superiority over foreign otherness. 

On the other hand, the ending of Frankenstein is hard to read as anything but Romantically bleak; it is far more apocalyptic than utopian in both tone and intent. 

However, the chapter on witches best illustrates the major flaw in the book's utopian argument: it dearly wants figures of monstrosity to be positive, nearly messianic, figures of resistance to capitalism, but as such it is ill-equipped to deal with the actual monstrosity of the figures it valorizes. Take its analysis of The VVitch as an example. It reads the witches in the film as liberatory and the ultimate event of Thomasin joining the coven as a political act, which may be, but it does not--and perhaps cannot--grapple with the fact that the witches in the film are actually figurations of evil by almost any standard. A baby is stolen and is mashed up into a flying ointment by one of the witches; another child is seduced in the woods and returned only so that he might die a horrible death in front of his helpless family. The climax of the film also problematizes the anti- capitalistic reading of its context. What is it that Thomasin is offered by the Devil? Butter, a pretty dress--she is offered commodities. I somehow think Marx wouldn't approve.

What this means is that many textual elements have to be ignored to get where the book intends to go. The same problem occurs in the offered reading of Frankenstein; the monster's body is a "site of politics," which again is certainly true, but that site of politics is fraught and contradictory because the monster puts its body to use by killing the innocent. I suspect this complication is uncommented on because that would countermand the hope of utopian change through the symbol and cypher of monstrosity. 

Capitalism: A Horror Story ultimately leaves the reader empty-handed. The utopian project of the book wants us to believe that there is revolutionary hope in monstrosity, in horror, in darkness--but even if that is an unmined possibility, what are we to do with that epiphany? As with other books of this style, there is no roadmap forward provided. 

This is particularly galling because in one of its chapters two horror film franchises are criticized for being unable to move beyond the ideological confines of neoliberalism to imagine something better. And yet, this presentation of Gothic Marxism similarly suffers from an inability to realize its utopic dreams in anything approaching concrete terms. How does an embrace of the monstrous usher in a much-deferred revolution? What praxis flows from the disturbed burial ground of the Gothic? Where does the "radical imagination" touted on the book's move from dark dream to attainable action? By the end of the book, questions such as these remain unanswered. 

The Horror of Hook House

As part of this year's Halloween gaming offerings, I ran Kids On Bikes for folks on my Discord. I used the scenario in the second-edition rulebook, but I swapped the setting out for something Edweirdian: the kids were all residents of an orphanage looking into the disappearance of one of their fellow foundlings--a boy named Hieronymus. They knew he had been dared to enter Hook House, an abandoned home on the hill thought to be haunted. 

Here's what they had gathered before setting foot in the house: twenty years ago the house was owned by the Hook family, who were prominent back in the day. However, when the town's mines closed they went broke and had to live in this smaller house on the hill. The family consisted of a mother, son, and father, but there were always rumors of another child--who may have been hidden away due to being mad or deformed. The family was killed by an intruder or intruders--and the murderers were never caught. 

Characters

Pellinore Bonnet-Price aka Pell-Mell

Vincent Lazarus

Artemsia Grimmsby

Flossie Greenspurn

Cedric Mortimer-Shaw aka Ceddy

Lester Mire

Events

The kids abandoned their bikes on the front lawn of Hook House as a thunder storm threatened to break overhead. They found that the front door was unlocked, so they stepped inside into the foyer. The air smelled stale; dust coated every surface. They took note of the closet in this room, as that is where Mister Hook was supposedly found--beheaded. They also found a scrap of fabric on the floor that was embroidered with a large H. They recognized this to be part of Hieronymus's rucksack. 

Suddenly al the doors in the room slammed shut and their flashlight began to flicker. Gathering their courage, they opened the closet. One of the floorboards inside was cracked; wedged into the gap was a small iron ball--pitted and rusty. 

Through the glass in the door leading to the next room, they could see a family portrait of the Hooks, a roaring fireplace, and stately objets d'art, but when they opened the door the room proved to be empty. In this room they acquired a poker, an ash shovel from beside the fireplace, and a cryptic note. 

The dining room was scarcely better, as there was a rotten food smell wafting from the kitchen. Using the cryptic note as a guide, the kids spent some time figuring out which chair each family member sat at to take their meals. When they stood in the spots the family members had occupied, they could feel an icy grip on each of their necks. 

The kitchen was a room of damp, crooked cabinets, mold, and flies buzzing around a sludge-filled sink. However, they were able to recover the three cups the family used in life--a cracked wineglass, a chipped teacup, and a broken child-sized glass. Using the poker, the kids could tell that there was something hidden in the sludge in the sink, but the poker wasn't up to the task of dredging it out. A dented pot, the last of the family's cookware, proved useful for bailing the sludge out so they could retrieve the item--a key!

Before they left this floor, Vincent, Ceddy, and Artemesia arranged themselves so that one kid was standing in each family's members spot at the dinning room table, each holding that family's member's favored drinking vessel. This caused them to be momentarily possessed by the ghosts of the family, each of whom vented their anxieties about what happened that fateful night.

The key from the sink allowed they to unlock the door headed up to the next floor. When they passed a broken widow in the staircase they could see that the world outside was lit by broad daylight. Since the house looked down upon the town, it was in full view--but it appeared that they were looking at the town as it was twenty years ago. They also noticed clumps of fur snagged on the windowsill. 

They decided to explore the door with a sign on the handle proclaiming it to be "Harrison's Room." This was clearly the son's room, as the rug was strewn with wooden horse toys and lead soldiers. The mattress had been slashed open as if someone had searched for something inside of it. They also noticed a nail in the window frame, around which was tied fishing line that snaked outside. They pulled something up by tugging on the line, but could not see the object through the window. Inside of simply opening the window, they smashed it and hauled the tin pail attached to the line inside. Vincent cut himself in the process. 

Inside the pail was a rubber ball, some jacks, and a diary marked "Top Secret." The diary had several entries detailing Harrison's adventures with a friend named Charlotte; however, toward the end of the diary the writing became frenzied and frantic until it devolved into crude symbols. In fact, the symbols lifted from the page and resolved themselves in the air, forming a knife, a series of cubes, and a small key. 

They went to the water closet next. A cracked mirror hung over the sink, which clouded up--and caused Cedric to have a phantasmagorical hallucination. They could also hear a young girl's voice seemingly coming from the drain; she said, "It’s dark down here" and "I’m lost and hurt." They confirmed that the voice was Charlotte's; she claimed that the Hooks had put her down there because "bad men" from "the other place" were coming to the house--when they got there, these bad men killed the Hook family. The kids were justifiably skeptical of this account. When Flossie got mouthy with Charlotte, water erupted from the tub and knocked all the kids from the room and back down the stairs. 

Once they recovered and ventured back upstairs, the kids explored the parents' bedroom. There was a strange curio cabinet in this room holding a variety of elements on little stands with placards. Pell-Mell deduced that if the elements were placed in the right order, they would spell out KNIFE CUBES. (Groan.) When they did so and closed the cabinet's door, all the elements dissolved, ran together, and reformed into a small key. In his haste to get his hands on the key, Vincent burned himself on the still-hot metal. 

This key allowed them to open the trapdoor in a closet to pull down the stairs and ascend to the house's attic. However, when they entered the attic they found that they were no longer in the house at all--they were in a rainy, gray park they knew well from in town. The stairs had also vanished behind them. Since they already knew the park's layout, they knew they were near an infamous well in which a child had drowned years ago--for some Edweirdian reason, the well had never been sealed. 

They went to have a look at it and saw that Hieronymus was curled up in the fetal position beside it. Unfortunately, as they approached to wake him, thick ropes of wet hair emerged from the well, entangled them, and pulled them into the watery depths. 

When the kids awoke, they found themselves shivering and sodden in an unfinished basement. Their was a Victorian washing machine--the kind powered by a hand crank--from which Charlotte's voice emerged. She begged them to turn the crank to release her from the machine. They did so, and from the machine a thin sheaf of skin, hair, and fabric slopped down into the tub. Charlotte reformed herself and emerged from the machine. 

The door to the basement washroom began to thump and rattle as something on the other side was trying to break down the door. Whatever it was did not have proper hands to simply turn the door handle. Their act of altruism paid off, as Charlotte agreed to aid them to get past the creature--which Charlotte confirmed was one of the beasts the "bad men" had used to kill the Hook family. 

Lester had a very bright idea--since they knew from their misadventure in the attic that Charlotte could conjure illusions, they had her use her power to create an illusion of the kids standing against the far wall. They opened the door, giving the creature a nice look at the illusory kids. While it hurtled past to get at the false kids, they ran down the now-clear corridor, with Charlotte in the lead to show them the door out. 

Traversing the doorway felt like pushing through a veil of cold water--indeed, they saw fish made of teeth swimming in the "other place"--but when they exited it they found that they had just left the front door of the house. Gathering their bikes, they rushed to the real park, where they found Hieronymus huddled by the well. They gathered him, and Charlotte, and snuck back into the orphanage--a plan to get Charlotte taken on as a foundling already brewing in their heads.

Krevborna Threate Film Festival

This fall I did a Krevborna Theatre Film Festival for the folks on my Discord, streaming about one movie a week through September and October. To add a little fun to the proceedings, I made Krevborna's resident goth queen, Serafina, the "horror host" for the event. I had fun writing up little pun-laden teasers for each of the movies in Serafina's voice. I even drew a little picture of Serafina that I could slap on top of a Gothic backdrop to announce each movie in advance.

The only criteria for selecting a movie for Krevborna Theatre was that it had to have atmosphere similar to the setting. For posterity's sake, and so I don't repeat any movies if I do this again next year, here's what we watched:

Hands of the Ripper

Brotherhood of the Wolf

Captain Kronos--Vampire Hunter

I Sell the Dead

The Pit & the Pendulum

Black Death

Blood From the Mummy's Tomb

The Ghosts of Gallhart

We're back to our Savage Krevborna campaign with a Halloween-themed session!

Characters

Aria, a paladin struggling with her true nature

Heck, an affable revenant looking for answers

Panthalassa, a necromancer with a missing arm

Garazi, up and coming witch with a bird familiar

Willard Corn and King Beebo, a farmer and his monkey (?)

Events

With the departure of Daytona, and the relative safety afforded by Hemlock Hollow, the party had a bit of downtime to rest, recuperate, and run various errands. Garazi went to Adrian Vergara's house to return his calling card case and ask for a favor. She was surprised that her knock on the door was answered by Ilyona, the girl who had been melded with a tree outside of Borza. Ilyona explained that Adrian had offered her a job as his maid; when Garazi took her aside and asked if Adrian was a good master, the girl appeared genuinely happy with her current employment.

Over tea, Garazi brought up the compendium of death gods and grave spirits that they had found and needed translated. Adrian felt confident he could make a workable translation; Garazi directed him to focus on the entry for the Nightmother and the entry about revenants. She also produced the sheet music for the Hymn of the Nightmother but, being an unmusical sort, Adrian could not make heads or tails of it. As he walked her to the door, Adrian promised to visit her family's farmstead when he had a translation in hand.

Meanwhile, Panthalassa and Aria visited the Ushers to return the two masks they had recovered from the cemetery. This time, they were met at the door by a stoop-backed old woman who seemed blind. As before, they were lead to a parlor--but this one was littered with poorly maintained taxidermy. Panthalassa asked again whether the Fraternitie du Cadavre could have any motive for stealing her arm in particular. This Usher had a theory: if the Fraternitie was intent on creating an avatar of the Nightmother capable of raising the long dead, they would need specific body parts for its construction. Specifically, the woman said that six different arms would be required: the arm of "Everyone's Child," the arm of "The Grandfather" the arm of "The Soldier Boy," the arm of "The Preacher Man," the arm of "The Spinster," and the arm of "The Wretched." Additionally, such a working would require the "heart of The Widow," the "teeth of the Concubine," and the womb of The Mother."

The old woman assumed that Panthalassa's arm was the arm of "Everyone's Child."

Panthalassa was concerned about the sustainability of the Usher's vigil over Madeline, especially since the Usher woman they were talking to kept coughing up things that squirmed in the handkerchief she expectorated into. Panthalassa attempted to link her mind with that of the "sleeping" Madeline Usher; she saw a vision through the other woman's eyes--walking the halls of an ancient school where the instruction was presided over by a devil.

On the night before Halloween, Heck and company had been invited to dinner by Helena Graymalk, the matriarch of the Graymalk clan of witches. They were shown in by Ivara Graymalk, one of Helena's many daughters. Unlike her sisters, Ivara dressed very primly, more like a school marm than a witch. Some members of the group noticed that Ivara seemed to be searching Heck's face for something.

Understanding that Heck's condition as a revenant meant he had significant gaps in his memory, Helena told him that he had once been a powerful warlock in his own right and had been the leader of a coven adept at converting pagans to the worship of the Devil. Heck had met his demise at the hands of Grigori Trask and his witchfinders; Helena suspected that a member of Heck's coven had betrayed him. When asked about revenants, Helena admitted that most revenants returned to the grave once their vengeance had been attained, but also dangled the intriguing notion that some revenants persisted in their second life if they found a reason to continue living. 

Additionally, Aria's questions about her status as a creature made of song were answered by Helena as best she could. She conjectured that Aria may want to seek the Needle of Golgotha in the mountains, a structure said to enable communication with the elder gods of the Outer Dark.

Beebo announced that he wanted to go to the Skarnesti Circus. What on Earth could a monkey want at the circus?

During the course of dinner, Helena commended the group on the services they had provided by springing Coraline for Kholograt and saving Lorelei and her sisters from death in Borza. As such, she felt that she owed the group several favors. One of those favors was cashed in immediately: the group asked Helena to scry to the locations of Grigori Trask and Panthalassa's missing arm. Helena asked them what their plans were for Halloween night. Since they seemed to be in search of answers, she offered them a possibility: they could venture into the Forest of Loss, a popular place for suicides where the boundary between the living and the dead was especially thin on Samhain, because many people had reported finding the answers they were in search of in that unhallowed stretch of woods. Helena told them that if they did venture into the Forest of Loss on Halloween they should be wearing masks so that the spirits of the dead would not recognize them as the still living.

Upon venturing into the Forest of Loss on Halloween night, the group was quickly surrounded by a fog that separated them from the other groups in the woods. When they emerged from the fog, the found themselves cresting a hill overlooking a small village lit by jack o' lanterns and carved gourds. The first building on the path leading into the village was an eatery serving soup and dumplings. From the way the dumplings fell through the faces of the two elderly people "eating" at a table outside--only to plop back into their bowls--the group correctly ascertained that they were now among ghosts. The proprietor of the shack, a woman named Danila, knew that she was deceased, though she cautioned that not everyone in village was aware that they were specters. 

She also informed them that the town was caught up in a conflict between two vengeful women--Kestra at the old farmhouse and Sadira of the House of the Maiden. There was a third woman, the Widow, but she had somehow escaped being trapped in the cursed village of Gallhart. According to Danila, all three women were brought to Gallhart by a sorcerer named Valton Blakely. Blakely intended to sacrifice the women and use their body parts to construct an avatar of the Nightmother to--all to resurrect one of Krevborna's tsars. This eerily reflected the supposed goal of the Fraternitie du Cadavre. 

The group decided to explore the Widow's house first. They found it dark, but the front door was unlocked. Inside, everything was neat and tidy. There was a family portrait above the fireplace showing a man with dark hair parted in the middle, a tall woman with blonde hair and a beatific smile, and a young boy whose looks favored his mother. In the attic, they found trunks of clothes belonging to the man and the son; presumably, both had died and their things had been put out of sight.

The Widow's cottage was near a pagan shrine, so the group decided to poke around in there as well. The shrine had been vandalized; the altar was purposefully smashed, the ceiling was staved through, and the place had clearly received no visitors for many years. 

The party's next stop was the House of the Maiden. The building smelled of incense and was lit by a number of paper lanterns glowing with a macabre green light. The door of the House of the Maiden was answered by a slim woman whose hair was held in place by lacquered hair sticks. There was a series of pigeonholes behind the desk in the entrance room; each pigeonhole held a single cloth doll. Nine of the dolls were turned to face the back of the cabinet--only three faced forward. From this detail, the group correctly guessed that the House of the Maiden was a brothel and that the dolls signified which girls were currently "occupied" and which were currently available.

Abetta, the House of the Maiden's procuress, showed the group into the common room. The most notable "fixture" of the room was a nude woman suspended from the ceiling by fine thin threads. A woman with straight black hair, wearing a gossamer robe decorated with chrysanthemums, was playing a balalaika. This woman was introduced as Sadira. Sadira reiterated the facts of her conflict with Kestra at the farmhouse; the crux of the matter was that Kestra had stolen her teeth, a fact she underlined by removing her dentures. She had no real reply when asked why she and Kestra did not join forces against Blakely, who seemed to be the real cause of their woes. Ultimately, the group agreed to venture into the farmhouse and steal back Sadira's teeth with the reward of "a secret only the dead know" hanging in the balance as their payment. 

Kestra's farmhouse was surrounded by a metal fence, the gate of which creaked as they opened it. Similarly, the porch's boards moaned as they traversed them. There was a pitcher, its glass surface dotted with condensation, on a small table by the door. Aria tasted it and confirmed that it contained sweet tea. Garazi sent her familiar into the house to scout around; the bird reported that there was a strange sliding metal door just off the living room. 

The group crept in; predictably, the metal door made an awful racket as Heck slid it open. Just then, one of the other doors in the house crashed open and two figures, one a man in stained overalls and a pumpkin obscuring his face and the other a woman in a babydoll dress wearing a goat head mask, came barreling toward them. The man bore a sledgehammer and the woman held a cleaver in one hand and a butcher's knife in the other. The battle that followed was fraught, especially when a third participant--this man clad in Napoleonic uniform and his face painted like a clown--entered through the front door and began firing a pistol and swinging a cutlass. A few members of the party were injured, but ultimately they were able to kill their foes--even after a botched spell from Panthalassa briefly reanimated one of their attackers!

They then searched the house. The room beyond the sliding metal door was an abattoir, complete with human torsos hanging from hooks. They found the personal affects of their three attackers, including four unlabeled glass vials full of unidentifiable liquids. The darkness in the cellar proved impenetrable by the light of their lantern, but they could see two large yellow eyes shining in the shadows. They had found Kestra.

Kestra admitted that she had Sadira's teeth in her possession, but was equally uninterested in the question of why they hadn't joined forces against Blakely. However, Kestra added that she hated Sadira because the woman had stolen her womb--which she wanted back. In fact, she made an offer of her own: if the group got her womb from Sadira, she would give them a secret known only to the dead and tickets to ride the last "iron beast of the Vlaak." 

We'll see how they resolve this next time.