I’ve tried to explain Kitty Horrorshow’s
Anatomy many times. I’ve gone for the literal approach- “it’s
a game where you pick up cassette tapes around a house and listen to them in the kitchen.” That, shockingly, doesn’t turn many heads. I’ve also tried the hyperbolic. “It’s the single scariest game I’ve
ever played.” This is true, I absolutely mean that. But inevitably people look at the game, look
at me, and go, “this?” Here’s what I’ve settled on. Anatomy is when you were a kid, and everyone
else had gone to bed and you were the last one downstairs. It’s when you looked up, realized that it
was your job to turn the lights off, and realized that this meant being alone in the dark of
your living room for excruciatingly long seconds. Anatomy is the terrified sprint I did up the
stairs after switching off the last lamp, unsure of exactly what I was running from,
but absolutely confident that the dark living room was no longer a safe space. But in Anatomy, there are no covers to jump
under. Even worse, Anatomy tells you that those covers
were never safe to begin with. “In the psychology of the modern civilized
human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house.” These opening lines of Anatomy acutely describe
the themes at play here, and differentiate it from other brands of horror. There are no ghosts of dead ancestors in the
game, no werewolves or vampires or zombies. As a matter of fact, there’s no one else
at all. There’s you, and there’s the house. The number of stories about “haunted houses”
might as well be infinite, but I want to make a crucial distinction here. There are many many stories about houses that
are haunted by something. These are ghost stories, poltergeists, slashers. In those stories, the house is simply a house,
unfortunately built on top of a graveyard or inhabited by people who decide to murder
each other. And all that, while supernatural, is pretty
distinctly human. Human emotions, left behind after a traumatic
event. Human customs of disrespect, like building
a house on a graveyard, reaping the consequences of their blasphemy. These are the haunted houses that can be easily
replicated, made into a halloween thrill or a ride at the state fair. If a house is haunted by something, then that
something can jump out at you and yell “boo!” But there’s another kind of house. And while this kind may have provided a stage
for violence, death, and insanity from humans, those acts were symptoms, not the cause. Some houses just...reject humanity. The totality of the game “Control” takes
place in a labyrinthian expanse of concrete and bureaucracy. This building is home to the fictitious government
agency “The Federal Bureau of Control,” and at first glance appears far more corporate
than most haunted locales. But this place isn’t called “Brutalist
Office Number 34” or “The Pentagon.” It’s called The Oldest House. And once you start thinking about Control
as taking place in a haunted house, things start to click into place. The Oldest House is a bizarrely elusive building-
despite being in the middle of New York, it can only be found by someone specifically
looking for it. The Bureau of Control didn’t build it, nor
do they have the knowledge to recreate it. The Bureau calls the oldest house “a place
of power,” a location “acted on by paranatural forces.” And in a way, I find this terminology almost
cute. They’re assigning words to things to things
they truly can’t understand, trying to tie a logic to a place that is, by every definition,
illogical. They found a haunted house and set up a government
agency in it, but at every turn, they’re just reminded how little they know about where
they’ve placed themselves. There is a staggering level of documentation
in Control, every phenomena recorded, every quirk of time and space written down. But paradoxically, this volume of data just
shows how little the bureau actually knows. It all just reads as grasping at straws. “We observed this event. It could mean this. Or it could, uhh, not.” About halfway through the game, you find a
man staring at a fridge. He calls out to you, panicked, “I can’t
look away! Unless someone has eyes on it, it changes!” He’s been looking at this fridge for about
24 hours. This is not an agency that’s in command
of the situation. This is a bunch of people who have trapped
themselves in a house, and tried to convince themselves that this was their plan all along. In Leviticus 14:37 (sorry it’s just very
hard for me to say a line like that seriously), okay, so Leviticus 14 is all about leprosy. What do you do if a guy gets leprosy, and
you don’t have modern medicine, and you don’t really know what leprosy is? Well, apparently you shave and get clean,
smear yourself with lamb’s blood and olive oil, and hope. That’s all well and fine. But then it gets weird- weirder. Because in 14:37, it describes what to do
when a house gets leprosy. A house! It describes a kohen, basically a rabbi, coming
to the house and inspecting it. And he shall look at the lesion. Now, [if] the lesion in the walls of the house
consists of dark green or dark red sunken looking stains, appearing as if deeper than
the wall, And then we go on to describe what to do with
a leprous house- you scrape its walls, you abandon it for days, and if the lesions return
after all that, Now, [if] the lesion in the house has spread,
it is malignant tzara'ath in the house; it is unclean. And then you’re supposed to demolish the
house- there’s no coming back from that. In literal terms, this is probably black mold,
which is dangerous and is cause for vacating a house. But I’m fascinated by how its portrayed
here. The house itself is personified, and malignant. It’s leprous. And like leprous people in that day, it’s
dealt with by excommunication. There’s this notion that there’s something
“alive” about the house, but the only way they knew to deal with it was just wait
for it to die. And houses don’t die easily. They just wait. What happens to a house when it is left alone? It becomes worn, and aged. Its paint peels, its foundation begins to
sink. It goes for too long unlived in. What does it think of? What does it dream? There’s no subtle way to put this; the house
in Anatomy hates you. And maybe it hates you, Henry. But moreso, it just hates humanity. It hates that you, as a collective, have left
it to rot. They hate that you, collective, brought it
into existence just to let it suffer through neglect. It may grow angry. Its basement may fill with churning acid like
an empty stomach, and its gorge may rise as it asks itself through clenched teeth, “what
did I do wrong?”. It may grow bitter. It may grow hungry. So hungry and so bitter that its scruples
dissolve and its doors unlock themselves. Haunted houses are almost universally abandoned,
at least temporarily. How many stories include a family moving into
a lavish manor that’s, for some reason, not been lived in for years? Typically the way the causality flows is they
were haunted, so they were abandoned. But I love the idea of the inverse. They were abandoned. And because of this, they are haunted. There’s a Yokai in old Japanese mythology,
one called a Mokumokuren. If you’ve played Nioh or Sekiro you’ve
probably run into them, sentient paper walls and umbrellas, with at least one eye and a
nasty attitude. What’s interesting about mokumokuren is
how they come about. They’re not just random goblins that decide
to move in. They’re borne from neglect. If a household object sits alone long enough,
damaged and ignored, it gets feisty. And then it grows eyes. Control spells this out about as plainly as
it can. You’re not in the young house, the spritely
house, the house that was just built and can’t wait to share itself with people! You’re in The Oldest House. How long has this house sat empty? How has it dealt with the centuries of silence? There is perhaps no better expression of this
theme of abandonment than the opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It’s one of the most effective openings
I’ve ever read. No live organism can continue for long to
exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed,
by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against
its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand
for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met
neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood
and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. But how does a house, angry and haunted, express
itself? What can it do when it’s not full of ghosts,
not echoing forgotten humanity, but emoting in a different dimension altogether? The answer is that the house’s structure
itself starts going wrong. Wrong in ways that feel impossible. In Hill House, the architecture constantly
seems to fight its inhabitants. They can barely walk to the kitchen without
getting lost in the downstairs, a labyrinth of concentric circles, with doors that never
stay open and unexpected turns in every corner. Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the
room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which
left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction
a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than
the barest possible tolerable length Anatomy does this much more overtly- in subsequent
playthroughs, as the house starts to degrade, things “break” in a very game-y sense. The mirror is sideways in the bathroom, plates
sit well above the surface of the table. Dark lines seep in through the walls. This concept is taken to the absolute extreme
in the shifting walls of Control, which move in front of our eyes. As Jesse goes through the Oldest House, she
finds sections of the building she can reclaim. When she does, enormous blocks of concrete
retreat into the walls, settling into a somewhat predictable pattern. But what if Jesse had never came? What if the walls had been allowed to just
continue growing, swallowing up the hallways and lobbies until there was nothing left? In Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a
man- Will Navidson- discovers that the house his family moves into has been allowed to
grow unchecked for quite some time. He first notices this in a minor, but impossible,
architectural anomaly. His house is very slightly larger on the inside
than the outside. He measures again and again- the outside of
the house is 32 feet, 9 and three quarter inches. The inside is 32 feet ten inches exactly. This shouldn’t be true, this can’t be
true, and yet Navidson can’t find any other explanation. That quarter inch soon becomes the least of
his obsessions. A few weeks after their move, a door appears
in his living room, a door that definitely hadn’t been there before, a door that- given
its position- should lead directly into the backyard. It does not. Instead, the door opens onto a dark, cold
hallway, one that stretches far into the impossible depths of the house. Remember the house with leprosy? With the lesions in the walls? Let’s revisit that passage for a second,
because the translation is Now, [if] the lesion in the walls of the house
consists of dark green or dark red sunken looking stains, appearing as if deeper than
the wall, Deeper than the wall! Thousands of years ago, in a story about a
house with a human disease, we’ve got an example of the exact same kind of impossible
dimensions. Now listen. I know there are a number of ways that line
can be taken, some that are more logical, some that make more real-life sense. But I just can’t let go of this idea of
physics-defying architecture. Hill House, with its malicious rooms and confounding
layout. The Oldest House, growing cement like a tumor,
smothering itself. The house on Ash Tree Lane, with its miles-long
hallway. A house malignant, boiling with leprosy, with
lesions deeper than its walls. There are countless things we can’t control
in life- the weather, who we love, the actions of our nations’ leaders. Maybe for that reason, it’s all the more
important that we feel in control of where we live. If we don’t feel at ease in our own bedroom,
kitchen, bathroom, then where would we? And it's hard to appreciate these things while
they’re normal. A living room is just a living room, a hallway
is just a hallway. They provide comfort by being exactly what
we expect them to be. Only when they change, when they go through
the insidious mutations described in these stories do we realize just how much trust
we put in our houses. In the hauntings of Hill House and Anatomy,
the least safe places of all are the bedrooms. “this is where they want me to sleep,”
Eleanor thought incredulously; “what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners?” The stories force us to consider just how
vulnerable we are in our house, how intimate our connection has to be to where we sleep. Each night we shut our senses to the world
for hours at a time, says Anatomy. Anything might stand beside us, watch us,
keep us company until dawn, and we would never perceive it. We can only pray that the house will not let
such things carry on as we sleep. For our house to turn against us, it’s more
than just an immediate danger- it’s a betrayal. There’s even a recurring motif of being
consumed by the house, like we’re willingly placing ourselves in the jaws of a beast and
relying on the beast to not eat us for another day. Jesse worries that the Oldest House will swallow
her alive, Eleanor feels she’s “a small creature swallowed by a monster.” As Anatomy points out,
When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth. And yet, what I find most interesting about
these houses is that they’re just irresistible to us. Eleanor leaves her life behind specifically
to go to Hill House, and ultimately decides she’s never going to leave it. Jesse spends years looking for the Oldest
House, reflecting that- despite everything- it feels like home. Anatomy actually shuts itself down over and
over again. You make the decision to keep going back,
to revisit the house, to walk down that dark hallway one last time. In the end of Navidson’s story in House
of Leaves, he commits himself completely to the dark, impossible hallway in his living
room. Taking just a bike and a cart full of supplies,
he rides into the hallway for hours, days, weeks. He travels hundreds of miles. He submits completely to the house- he has
no map, no sense of direction, no plan. He simply goes, in one of the most inhospitable
environments imaginable. It’s almost always a plot point that these
houses are old- an ancient manor, an ageless labyrinth, a building literally named The
Oldest House. And though theoretically we know that all
of these must have been built by people at some point, but at the same time, they couldn’t
have been, right? In both House of Leaves and Control, it’s
even made explicit- these are by all accounts older than human civilization. I said at the beginning that these houses
weren’t haunted by anything, not ghosts or ghouls or gremlins. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Despite all their efforts to the contrary-
their impossible architecture, their threats of betrayal, their lesions in the walls- we
keep coming back. We keep exploring them and charting them and
trying to bend their distinctively un-human design to our will. These houses are haunted- they’re haunted
by us. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed
itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting
itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against
the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant
to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a
house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
