I am pleased to have come to hauntology some years after its fall from the general consciousness of the underground. Not only does it feel particularly (if a tad preciously) hauntological to be so after the fact, it also means there’s been a thinning of the crowd. Not in the sense of elitism, mind you. I am a latecomer, after all, which can tip easily into obsession and compensatory know-it-allism that I want to avoid. Quite the opposite. It’s the shedding of pedants and rule-makers and those more concerned with definitions and the tiresome gatekeeping that seems to be a grim inevitability with even the most interesting and theoretically forward-thinking of subcultures (and hauntology manages to be both forward-thinking and backward-gazing simultaneously). For a subculture to thrive, it needs to be given time to grow naturally, rather than simply exploding onto the larger stage in a fleeting, jarring flash of popularity, as so often is the case today.
As author William Gibson said, “subcultures were once the place where society went to dream”—but now the media plucks them too soon to fill its (and our) voracious, insatiable appetite for content.
Descriptions of hauntology fall back on a set of by now well-worn phrases and examples. My own description will be no departure from this norm. Like genre, such tropes, forming almost a folklore of their own passed down from one interested party to the next, are useful, as long as they don’t atrophy into a rigid, enforced code. My favorite explanations comes from A Year in the Country, one of the inspirations for my starting Suburban Pagans. Hauntology describes “a small cultural plot of land where you can go to dream.” And it explores the “loss of some kind of utopian progressive, modern(ist) future that was never quite achieved.”
You could call the approach "remembering as an act of creativity," or perhaps remembering as an act of imagination. The memory is certainly disconnected from our reality. A reflection of reality, then, in a mirror that has been maintained with somewhat dubious care, allowing a film to form, the surface to warp slightly, so that what we see is askew and all the more disturbing for how much of it we recognize despite its unreliable reproduction. Like someone has sneaked into your room and replaced every piece of furniture with an exact replica but missed the placement of one or two pieces by an inch or two. Like a well-dressed man you've never seen before standing next to you at a bus stop, who leans over and says, reassuringly and without apparent cause, "Don’t worry about anything. It's all under control."
Or, as Cate Brooks puts it, “Everything's fine, but there is something not quite right about it.”
Brooks is the creative mind behind the Advisory Circle, one of the cornerstone musical acts of the record label Ghost Box. Founded in 2004 by graphic designer Julian House and producer Jim Jupp, Ghost Box became one of the most successful chroniclers of the eclectic music genre, hauntology. Like folk horror, it's a keenly British creation, though also like folk horror, it has since grown beyond the green and pleasant land of old Albion. Similarly, hauntology quickly grew its knotted roots beyond music, informing film, graphic design, photography, writing, and other mediums of artistic creation.
The soil from which hauntology grew was fertilized with the hazy memories of British youth now grown, trying to recall some fragment of entertainment from childhoods that spanned the post-war years through to the 1980s. It was a curious era for British entertainment, and particularly for British children's television, which became obsessed, especially in the 1970s, with supernatural tales and strange apocalyptic science fiction stories in which the unseen and mystical would seep into the cracks of mundane modern rural and suburban life.
Some of the programs produced in this time remain beloved, if sketchily recalled, classics and form a sort of canon of weird British children's entertainment: The Stone Tape (1972), Children of the Stones (1977), The Changes (1975), Penda’s Fen (1974), the series Sapphire and Steel (1979), the "Quatermass" films, and The Owl Service (1969), among others. It's no accident that these programs which helped form the hauntological foundation also pop up time and again in lists of the best and most influential works of folk horror.
Mixed into this stew of shows was quite a bit of periphery accompaniment: the experimental electronic soundtrack music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, British folk rock and psychedelia, horror and weird fiction writers like Arthur Machen, children's songs, and strangely horrific "Public Information Films" that traumatized a generation with their grim, lo-fi depictions of children dying gruesome deaths for transgressions such as swimming in a pond or trespassing on a substation to retrieve an errant frisbee.
Whatever ingredients may have been in the mix forming the memory, one thing that made it truly hauntological—a term coined by French critical theorist Jacques Derrida (with whom I have a contentious relationship forged in having to read his book, The Postcard, in a freshman literature class in 1990) in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx—is that the memory needed to be, to some degree, incorrect. Hazy. In many cases, more of an overall impression of a thing than an accurate memory of the thing itself. The hauntological reference comes from a time when we depended on the experiences and memories of children, of ourselves as children, attempting to remember artifacts from a time before the globe-spanning instant digital recall of today existed to check our more inaccurate flights of mental fancy. That's why the music that is made and placed under the porous canopy of hauntology rarely sounds exactly (or sometimes anything) like the music that inspired it. It is that music, half-remembered and recreated through a modern filter.
I liken it to a conversation I had once long ago with a friend, in which we were trying to remember if a certain actor was dead. That conversation wound late into the night and meandered into myriad territories that, were one unable to retrace the complete trajectory of the conversation and its asides and tangents, would seem utterly disconnected from the initial subject. Today, that conversation would last less than a minute. Is so-and-so alive? Let me Google that. The answer is yes. Factual and to the point, but hardly a full night's fun and utterly lacking in entertainment value. What's more, thirty years later, we both still remember and talk about that conversation. I doubt in thirty years I will remember that time I googled whether or not Jacques Derrida was still alive.
Further Thoughts
A quartet of articles and reviews I wrote over the years about the intersection of British folk horror and science fiction for the Cultural Gutter.