Why Space Is Such a Good Haunted House

The haunted house has one significant weakness.

You can leave.

Admittedly, horror characters are not always very good at this. They will discover a staircase that wasn't there yesterday, hear a child singing from inside a sealed chimney, and decide that the sensible course of action is to investigate after dark.

Nevertheless, the front door exists.

Space improves upon the arrangement considerably.

There is no front door.

Or rather, there is an airlock.

Opening it is generally discouraged.

The house at the end of everything

Strip a haunted-house story down far enough and the architecture isn't particularly important.

The essential ingredients are isolation, confinement and the gradual corruption of somewhere that was supposed to be safe.

A house provides all three.

So does a spacecraft.

The difference is that the spacecraft doesn't merely contain the characters.

It keeps them alive.

The walls are holding pressure.

The machinery is providing oxygen.

The electrical system is maintaining temperature.

Water exists because another system has decided that it should.

Even gravity, depending on the setting, may be something the building is doing for you.

A house can become hostile.

A spacecraft already is.

It just happens to be cooperating.

Outside is worse

This changes one of horror's most reliable instincts.

When something frightening enters a building, the obvious response is to get out.

Smoke in the corridor?

Leave.

Footsteps upstairs when you live alone?

Leave.

A wet handprint appearing on the inside of a locked bathroom mirror?

Perhaps leave somewhat faster.

On a spacecraft, the thing inside may be horrifying.

But outside is vacuum.

This is enormously useful.

The characters cannot simply abandon the haunted house because the haunted house is surrounded by an environment that will kill them almost immediately.

The monster doesn't need to guard the exits.

Physics has volunteered.

Nobody is coming

Isolation is frightening partly because it removes the possibility of intervention.

A scream in an apartment building may bring a neighbour.

A distress call at sea may bring another vessel.

A remote cabin might still have a road.

Space stretches rescue into something abstract.

Depending on where the story takes place, help may be hours away.

Days.

Months.

Perhaps years.

A distress signal becomes less like calling emergency services and more like writing a message for whoever eventually finds the body.

That produces a very particular kind of horror.

The characters can communicate.

They can report what is happening.

Someone may even answer.

But an answer is not the same thing as help.

MESSAGE RECEIVED.

ESTIMATED RESPONSE TIME: 187 DAYS.

There are worse things than silence.

One of them is being acknowledged.

The machine is also the house

Terrestrial haunted houses tend to be passive.

Doors open.

Lights flicker.

Floorboards creak.

Perhaps the plumbing develops opinions.

A spacecraft has considerably more authority.

It controls doors deliberately.

It monitors the people inside.

It knows the temperature of each compartment.

It may know where everyone is.

It may listen continuously for spoken commands.

It may decide whether a fire exists, whether an atmosphere is breathable or whether a section of the vessel should be sealed.

Modern horror has spent a great deal of time worrying about intelligent machines.

But a machine doesn't need to be intelligent to be frightening.

It only needs to be wrong.

A sensor reports that a room is empty.

Someone is standing inside it.

The life-support system records six people consuming oxygen.

The crew manifest lists five.

An airlock opens because the computer insists the outer door is closed.

A maintenance system reports that something has been repaired.

Nobody performed the repair.

The ship does not need to hate you.

It merely needs to disagree with you about reality.

Distance makes information unreliable

Space also creates an unusual problem with truth.

If something happens in the next room, you can go and look.

If something happens on another planet, another ship or a station several million kilometres away, you receive information about it.

Telemetry.

Images.

Voice transmissions.

Logs.

Sensor data.

Perhaps video.

All of it arrives through machinery.

This makes space naturally compatible with uncertainty.

You don't see the disaster.

You receive the final transmission.

You don't see the missing crew.

You receive a manifest that still lists them as present.

You don't see whatever entered the station.

You receive seventeen seconds of corrupted video and a message telling you not to dock.

Naturally, somebody docks.

There would otherwise be very little story.

There should be nothing out there

A forest at night is frightening because we know things live in forests.

The ocean is frightening because we know things live in the ocean.

A basement is frightening because spiders have negotiated permanent rights to every basement on Earth.

Space offers something different.

We expect emptiness.

Not absolute emptiness, obviously. There are stars, planets, radiation, dust and all the usual astronomical inconveniences.

But when a crew hears something striking the exterior hull, there is a moment before explanation when the sound becomes profoundly wrong.

There shouldn't be anything outside.

Not anything capable of knocking.

That distinction matters.

The haunted house has a history.

Someone died there.

Someone built it on something they shouldn't have.

Someone was murdered in the cellar.

Space does not require a history.

The horror can simply arrive from somewhere humans have never been.

That removes one of the comforting assumptions built into traditional supernatural stories:

That whatever is happening has something to do with us.

Scale is hostile to importance

Cosmic horror often gets reduced to very large creatures.

Put enough tentacles around a planet and apparently we have achieved the cosmic.

But size isn't really the disturbing part.

Scale is.

Human beings are accustomed to being important within the boundaries of our stories.

The murderer wants you dead.

The ghost is haunting your house.

The demon wants your soul.

Even being eaten by a monster contains a strange kind of compliment.

At least it noticed you.

Space offers the possibility that whatever is happening has no relationship to humanity at all.

The signal was not sent to us.

The structure was not built for us.

The object was not waiting for us.

We simply encountered something while passing through.

Perhaps it doesn't know we're here.

Perhaps what we interpret as an attack is merely some incomprehensible process continuing exactly as it has for a billion years.

That is a much colder kind of fear.

You cannot negotiate with weather.

You cannot reason with gravity.

And you cannot defeat something that has never recognised your existence as an event.

Familiar rooms become strange very quickly

The best spacecraft in horror are not enormous.

At least, they shouldn't feel enormous.

They should become familiar.

The reader should know where the crew eats.

Where they sleep.

Which corridor leads to engineering.

Which hatch sticks.

Where the lights flicker because nobody has got around to replacing the ballast.

Familiarity creates ownership.

This is our ship.

Then something changes.

There is a door nobody remembers.

The corridor takes eleven seconds longer to walk.

A crew member enters the galley from the wrong direction.

A camera shows someone asleep in their bunk while they are standing in front of the monitor.

The ship hasn't merely become dangerous.

It has become incorrect.

That is the haunted-house moment.

Not when something enters the building.

When the building stops agreeing with the people who live there.

You cannot trust the horizon

On Earth, we are surrounded by reference points.

Up.

Down.

Ground.

Sky.

Distance.

Weather.

Day.

Night.

Space is less cooperative.

A person outside a spacecraft may be separated from safety by ten metres and still be effectively unreachable.

Something visible through a window might be impossibly enormous and impossibly distant.

A light could be minutes old.

Hours old.

Years old.

Look far enough and everything you see is already in the past.

There is something inherently useful to horror in an environment where observation itself comes with delay.

You can see something.

That does not mean it is still there.

More troublingly, it does not mean it hasn't already reached you.

The locked-room problem

This may be what I like most about space horror.

Eventually, every good haunted house becomes a locked room.

The characters know something is wrong.

They know they cannot leave.

They begin checking one another.

Doors are secured.

Movements are logged.

Systems are interrogated.

The possible explanations shrink.

Then something happens that none of those explanations permit.

A seventh heartbeat appears on the medical monitor.

A transmission originates from inside an empty compartment.

Someone knocks on the outer airlock.

The crew gathers around the control panel.

Nobody speaks.

Because everybody is already inside.

That is the advantage space has over the haunted house.

There is nowhere for the ghost to have come from.

There is nowhere for the crew to go.

And outside the walls is the largest dark room humanity has ever found.

We have barely opened the door.