The Horror at the Window

In horror fiction, the window is the locus where the transparency of architecture as a signifier of CULTURE comes into contact and clashes, in a conceptual aporia, with the horror of the abhuman and (super)NATURE. The logical geometry of the window frame and the reassuringly mimetic transparency of the pane are challenged and often reversed by the morphic capacity and ontological uncertainty of the horrific body in transit and transformation, seen behind or outside a window. The thing on the glass threshold could be the restless spirit at the casement seeking admission into Wuthering Heights; the apparition of Jekyll/Hyde, exhaling ‘abject terror and despair’ before his window is ‘instantly thrust down’; the vampire creature of Croglin Grange, prying the lead from the window frame in his victim’s bedroom; or, finally, the embers eyes of the possessed Regan MacNeil, superimposed in the film montage on her eerily lit bedroom windows (The Exorcist). The sentence that possibly captures the unspeakability of the horror at the window appears in The Novel of the White Powder: ‘I had glanced up at the window of my brother’s study, and at that moment the blind was drawn aside, and something that had life stared out into the world.’ Placing the horror at the window, in short, signifies and ostends the epistemic and hermeneutic (perma)crisis horror literature responds to.