Strangers At The Door: The Northern Numinous
What modern horror owes to northern Europe - confrontation, chaos, abominations
In my absence I have been working on an extended project of original research, which I am now excited to start sharing with you. Over a series of articles I aim to explain my theories about why Western masking traditions and the Western face is so different from other cultures. Using horror masks as the focus, we will explore together the metaphysics of the European face and mask, skin and pain, horror, the sublime, identity and the self - starting with Greek serenity and culminating in digital AI horror. I truly believe that this is a new contribution to the way we think about the face and the function of horror as a genre. I sincerely hope you enjoy.
As for the Harii, quite apart from their strength, which exceeds that of the other tribes I have just listed, they pander to their innate savagery by skill and timing: with black shields and painted bodies, they choose dark nights to fight, and by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish; in every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered.
-Tacitus, Germania, in Orchard, 1997
***DISCLAIMER*** - this piece contains images of real historical injuries/disfigurement and graphic horror from film/games, you have been warned!
In my last article we covered a specific facial mood and style, a phenomenon we could dub ‘the southern serene’. In contrast to this classical and harmonious depiction of humanity as aloof, calm, perfectible, smooth and idealised - we turn to northern, barbarian Europe. The early Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Celtic imagination of the face is strikingly different to the southern approach. This is a world of shape-shifting, hybrids and transformation. A world where the supernatural threatens to erupt, chaotically and violently, and people respond with traditions of joyful confrontation and boundary-crossing.
The classical world also contained ritualistic excess and transformation, often referred to as Dionysian, but I argue that this differs from northern traditions in some fundamental ways: firstly the Dionysian is a mode of group-based, ecstatic dissolution rather than confrontational intrusion; secondly the classical world managed this ecstasy through public or semi-public seasonal festivals, rites and theatrical performances. Hopefully these differences will become apparent as we explore some examples.
The core features of this ‘northern numinous’ style I really want to emphasise are its unstable and transformative nature, and its intrusive, liminal and confrontational feeling. Its the difference between a licensed music festival where the crowd dissolves and unifies in the dance, and the illegal pop-up rave, as masked revellers confront the police and descend into mischievous chaos. Its Trick-or-Treat instead of Carnival, a home invasion versus the gallows, the arbitrary metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa and not the cosmic logic of Ovid. Its not Gothic, its not the uncanny - the northern numinous is a blood-curdling scream in the depths of a forest, the leering of demonic gargoyles, a man sprouting tusks and attacking his family. Raw, primal, aggressive, circling-the-house, being-chased-up-the-stairs. Run, run, run as fast as you can!
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I think I smell the scent of a placenta.
-Stay Wide Awake, Eminem
Exhibit A: Medieval & Early Modern Grotesque
Motifs: eruption, distortion, chaos breaches reality.
The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500) is a triptych painting by Hieronymus Bosch which never fails to reward another examination. Generations of students have shook their heads wondering how a Renaissance Dutchman could have created such surreal and disturbing scenes - but Bosch was not alone. The ‘northern grotesque’ stretches from the ever-changing vines and dragons of Norse wood-carving well into the Renaissance period, with its peak being reached between AD 1400-1600. Artists include the Limbourg Brothers, Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien and Cornelis van Haarlem - to name a few. Many of their paintings require patient, close-up observation to see just how detailed and horrifying they really are - for here is truly a realm of surreal, nightmarish images. Snarling, laughing demons swirl around monstrous human-animal hybrids. The grotesque explodes into the world, gaping maws open wide, human war and death and pain are distorted by the presence of this other, chaotic world. There is no harmony, only monstrosity.
Exhibit B: Folk Masks & Confrontational Rituals
Motifs: intrusion, confrontation, transformation.
The south may have riotous Carnival and public festivities, but in the north the atmosphere was different. Midwinter was the season for mischief as well as fire. Britain has a long tradition of ‘mummers’ or ‘guisers’, groups which disguise themselves in ad hoc folkish costumes and masks, who might perform a religious play, or who might knock on your door in the night and invite themselves in to play dice. In Central Europe the Krampus monster and Perchten winter spirits intrude into village life during midwinter. Schiachperchtenlauf sees masked youths running and fighting with sticks, while the Krampus might beat you with a birch rod for misbehaving. Even today violence simmers and sometimes breaks out in the Alps during the processions.
Mummering, Mari Lwyd, Soul Caking, Mischief Night, Schimmelreiter, Guising and many others all take part in this motif to some extent- small groups, disguised, knocking on doors, making mischief, fighting, gambling, drinking, confronting. Authorities disliked these games and activities so much there were laws passed against mask wearing, sword dances, against mummering. These masks were often rough and homemade, from sack, cloth, linen, straw and hair, or mummers simply painted their faces black with charcoal. This is not a crowd losing themselves in anonymity, this is a group of masked people confronting a group of unmasked people, often on their doorstep - an intrusive act by transformed people, often with a threat of trouble if their demands were not met. A neighbour who owed you money may have a pound of flesh taken, as you sport a rough sack mask and inhale when you speak to hide your identity. Will you let them in? What if you do, what if you don’t?
shameful things could happen during this rural saturnalia when normal social constraints were relaxed and everything was turned upside down. It was not only a time of making merry, it was potentially a time of reprisal, of setting things straight, of settling old scores. There was a lot of drinking. Things could get rough. People were afraid of strangers.
-Mumming and disguising, politicworm
Exhibit C: Disease & Disfigurement (The Diseased Face as Mask)
Motifs: face as moral boundary, identity reshaped by external forces.
In AD 643 the Lombard King Rothari declared in his series of law codes, the Edictus Rothari, that those afflicted with leprosy were legally dead. The walking dead (tamquam mortuus). Their property was confiscated and sold, they would die twice - once socially, as displayed by their disfigured face, and second physically. In parts of France lepers were compelled to attend their own funeral mass, dig their own graves and lie down in the cold earth - without a face, you cannot really be alive.
Western facial metaphysics are not so committed to uncleanliness in the caste or ritual purity sense, rather the face is a reflection of the individual - in the Christian medieval era the face was a moral boundary, and as the scientific revolution and secularisation re-imagined it - the face became a reflection of psychological character - physiognomy, criminal deviancy.
Disease has always had the power to deform the face and force the morality or character of the sufferer to become visible. Leprosy was the dominant such example during the European Middle Ages. Lepers were pariahs, but Christian Europe developed a conscience about this suffering, and developed leprosaria hospitals, the Order of St Lazarus, specialised medical and palliative care. “Dead to the world, but alive unto God”. However, Europeans never lost their fear of facial deformities and diseases, including the later plagues and waves of scarring smallpox. To have one’s skin eaten away by a corruption, of the flesh and soul, made one a vessel of sin - one’s own before God or some shameful hereditary mark (physiognomic or eugenic). The face becomes a mask of sorts, even as lepers hid themselves away behind veils, their former identities and social selves obliterated by this evil, a divine punishment for their own wickedness?
Exhibit D: The Industrial Grotesque
Motifs: modernity reshaping the face; identity erased by mass trauma, masks.
British industrialisation was a violent beast. Children scalped and maimed by spinning machines, trapped in chimneys, hundreds of boiler explosions scattering debris and scalding steam through narrow streets. Fumes of carbon disulphide, lead paint - match girls screaming as the phosphorus ate away their mouths, bones glowing in the dark - the neurotoxicity of mercury for felt-making, mad as a hatter - a teenager collapsing, convulsing, foam in her mouth, eyes and nails bright green, the arsenic dust on her fingers finally killing her. All these horrors and more reached their apex during World War One, a civilisational seizure which ground millions of men into the mud, their bones annihilated into fertiliser.
This war, and the ever-expanding industrialisation of the West, gave birth to the gas mask. A blind, insectile second-skin, one which strips the identity of its wearer away while promising survival in a poisoned landscape. The face came under attack everywhere, from poisoned gas - blistering and peeling - molten metal, glass, shrapnel, barbed wire, chlorine, blinding. Modernity arrived with a new demonology of fields and forces: x-rays, radiation, gas clouds, radium jaw, bomb blasts, fire from the sky, pesticides, microwaves, radar, phosgene, air pollution. The demons of old at least went after the sinful, within these satanic mills there was no preference. Cold, arbitrary, meaningless. All the while humans were forced into new skins to stay alive, donning hazmat suits, welding masks, respirators, protective goggles, and the face itself was blurred out and replaced with haunting ocular frames and protruding tubes.
The industrial grotesque was also external, intrusive, confrontational, but it required that humans join with it. Bullets and shrapnel lodged into bodies, plaster masks made from the mangled faces of soldiers, broken gargoyles with metal legs, napalm fused with clothing, xenomorphic-looking tumours, visceral fat hoarding forever-chemicals. Industrial injuries were nothing new of course, Roman mines were death traps and Tudor gunpowder stores might decide to explode. But modernity was more than a wound to the face, it was the mass, anonymising and inhuman forces which stripped man of his presentable self and re-applied new skins, new visages, new components. Facial trauma from war and mechanised labour deformed and twisted the human beneath into a mockery of god’s image, with no rhyme or reason. Facing your enemy on the battlefield was one thing, but methane seeping out from the coalface into a sweating tunnel and igniting from a candle held by a rake-thin colliery child? Boris Korchilov donning a raincoat and gas mask to cool down the faceless nuclear tabernacle powering K-19, sweating blood within minutes, his eyes sightless after an hour of agonising tissue inflammation? These fates were measured by sieverts, emission factor coefficients, ppm, better hope you have enough air in that tank?
> Competion_Owl53: This has got to be the most horrific way to go, and unlike Byford Dolphin these guys had to wait it out before they died. Absolutely appalling.
> No-Work-10: True, I just hope that they were all already dead when the surface removed the blind flange of berth 5.
Exhibit E: Eruptive Modern Monster Faces
Themes: monstrosity emerging through the face, not behind it.
Contemporary horror art has altered the traditional relationship between the face and its beholder. Stability has been replaced with rupture. The face used to present divine beauty, symmetry, or morality, or the grace of god - if outwardly disfigured then a mask would disguise. Modern horror instead uses the face as an unstable mask, out through which a monstrosity emerges. We can call this the ‘eruptive face’. Digital film technology and AI can make this possible in a way previous filmmakers would have found impossible. Faces can be smoothed out, but contain multitudes. Chthonic tentacular feelers, rows of unrolling, unfurling teeth, like a Russian doll, nested in the vast empty interior of the Face «then erupting forth in the confrontational moment». Huggy-Wuggy, the xenomorph, the Demogorgon, Skeleton Man…
Exhibit F: Techno-Mutation Grotesque (Games & Sci-Fi)
Themes: machinery as numinous, flesh invaded, face overwritten.
We saw in the last piece that the serene southern face belongs to a lineage of futurism, with sci-fi smooth android faces representing the triumph of Greece and Rome amongst the stars. The northern numinous offers a different vision altogether - grimdark, mutation, techno-grotesque. Bosch at Passchendaele. An eternal nuclear Ragnarok. This ‘techno-grotesque’ is an obvious child of modernity, with its concerns about genetics, nuclear proliferation, planetary scale war, the priority of the machine over the human, as life becomes a mere number. The inversion of natural life is inevitable here, since the environment is inhospitable and the ontologically bounded human is assaulted both externally and internally. Biohazardous waste, parasites, radioactivity, infections and xenomorphic agents threaten the body by penetrating the skin, sometimes rendering the skin defenceless by silently seeping through the pores, other times violently transforming it. Mutations, hybridity with machines or aliens, life-support for massively traumatic injuries, sometimes the body horror of transplanting conscious scraps of flesh into steel, or the obliteration of bodily integrity by forcibly remoulding the human into a receptacle, fungal node, appendage, spore, tool. Violation, hybrid, morph. Finally the techno-grotesque also offers a twisted theological vision reminiscent of Grünewald or Bruegel, as portals open into hell, the dead rise again and long-buried gods of chaos come laughing to the surface. Think Dead Space, Annihilation, Warhammer 40K, Alien, Quake II, Half Life, Hellraiser, Event Horizon and The Hills Have Eyes.
the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god, our mother’s eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father’s ribs, still studded with our egg sacs
-Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy
in summary_final
The case studies presented above are snapshots into a total world of numinous terror, one with its own shared metaphysics and aesthetics. A world I argue belongs to the cultures, literature, imagination of northern European. The contents of this shared bestiary include:
Horror is eruption, and not serenity, disorder not violent re-ordering
The face is the major site of transformation
Chaos is external, not psychological, interiority is fear
Identity is unstable and porous, becoming rather than being
Bodies are reshaped, transformed by external forces (disease, aliens, wilderness, machinery, spirits)
Liminality: the mask acts ‘between-states’, a portal and not concealment
Confrontation on the threshold, will you let them in?
With these motifs and anchors in place we can now turn to how they have played out across modern horror, how they have been imagined and re-imagined, and how they are transforming with the merge from analog to digital to AI.
Modern Horror, a legacy of the Northern Numinous
The rich dark soil of this northern realm provides artists with one of the most fertile sources of inspiration for contemporary horror - the motifs of intrusion, strangers, confrontation, animal-hybrids, chaos, the Inhuman, grotesquery, violation of the body, the breaking of the face, the anonymity of war and more.
Films like The Thing, The Fly and An American Werewolf in London capture the unspeakable feeling of a human being forced against their will to become something else entirely, their bodies stretched and deformed until the last vestige of the self - the face - is eventually lost. Folk-confrontation in Kill List, Wicker Man and The Strangers taps that ancient northern fear of others outside, a feeling which never dies, simply repurposed now through doorcam videos, security footage, GPS trackers - we will never shake off the dread that someone is coming inside. Mummers on your doorstep. Midsommar, The Ritual, The Witch, Lamb. Deep, old forces stirring in the wild, the northern forest and mountain hauntings.
Animal and other forms of monstrous hybridity are so deeply rooted in berserker stories, men wrapped in bear cloaks, tusks on helmets (úlfhéðinn, svínfylkingar, Torslunda, Gutenstein, berserkergang hólmgangumaðr jǫfurr hamask ᚲᚢᛖᛞᚢᛚᚠ!!), it makes sense that so many horror monsters or victims suffer or embrace this chaotic flux - be that a mask (Saw, Creep), an intrusion (Donnie Darko), a transformation (Men). Chaotic unstable forms abound in the works of Francis Bacon, David Lynch and video games like Bloodborne and Dead Space. The face becomes liminal, it loses fixed identity and meaning through diseased corruption, sightlessness, multiplicity of holes, protrusion of teeth, melting of flesh and the grafting of metal. The container of myself, being inside my own skin and flesh, is ruptured traumatically. Both pre-modern and modern images of terror play with this sensation - then scenes of eternal damnation, chewed up by the ravenous gobs of the underworld, now scenes of barbed wire Brusilov barbarity, empty glass eyes breathing through gas. (Trench Tales, Ad Infinitum)
While classical futurism became scientific optimism and progress in science fiction, the northern vision is cyclical and apocalyptic in tone. Science brings progress yes, but progress in making earth a hellish place. Threads, Fallout, Dying Light, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, The Last Of Us. Perhaps the superlative genre of this eschatology is ‘Grimdark’, a world-building format of endless war with no relief, suffering without redemption, horror without catharsis. In true northern numinous style grimdark is a collage of aesthetics, taking Western history and breaking it on the wheel, revealing jagged bones made of high medievalism, torn skin from the Somme, pulped flesh of Gothic fantasy.
There are too many films and games to list in this combined style of scientific pessimism, the grotesque, industrial fusion and diseased-hybrid-mutation. Chernobyl, The Hills Have Eyes, Silent Hill, The Descent, Scorn, Necrophosis, Agony, Apsulov: End of Gods. The power of the divine and the scientist become mirror images, unleashing monsters which feed on human terror, all of which find their apotheosis in the face and the mask - that most sacred and fragile of boundaries.
The gears crank on, and AI promises us more in this vein. The tale of Loab as a digital glitch, an intruder into our smooth systems of image generation, prefigures one direction of this technology - AI as portal. What remains to be seen is how the face will respond. AI conjures up faces as hollow masks, devoid of meaning beneath. An empty form with an artificial skinsuit, wearing our likeness but to no end - a void, the mouth opening unto eternity like a Shepard tone scream.
Why the Northern Numinous will endure
The northern numinous is horror’s oldest and most visceral vision of chaos. Modernity gifted it electricity, radiation, metal, and now digital smoothness.
What lurks outside will never die, and what threatens the body and face will always torment us. The Northern Numinous dredges up our most animal terror of being devoured and transformed and grafts it onto cultural mannequins. Masked strangers, eruptions of madness, twisted nightmares and the obliteration of selfhood, facial integrity. How could we ever conquer this, masks simply hide the gnawing disease. Are we alone?
**NEXT TIME**
Expect a bonus feature focused on the gas mask, the most enduring face of modern horror…
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