Settings and characters, while usually considered separately, can be the same. Often this is a technique used in horror where the setting itself is evil and attempting to thwart the protagonists. There is a difference between a location that is haunted and a location that is a character, although that line can appear a bit blurry.
I’m going to mostly talk about antagonistic locations (the Hill House and the Overlook Hotel), but I’m going to touch briefly on the more difficult to determine protagonist or positive character locations. The first that come to mind are:
The castle in Howl’s Moving Castle
Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series
With a runner up of:
The Enterprise from Star Trek
Each of these locations have been shown to have, at some point, a bit of a mind of their own. Most of the time these locations attempt to aid the protagonists and are spoken fondly of by the characters within the story. If the personality of these locations is removed, then there is a marked change upon the story or plot. It is the same with antagonistic locations, which most often seem to be houses or hotels (forests are a runner-up).
SPOILERS BELOW (THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE AND THE SHINING)
“Mom says that a house is like a body. And every house has eyes and bones and skin. A face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach.”
SETTINGS AS antagonistic CHARACTERS
Home is meant to be safe. It’s the resting place where we can return to and know that nothing more is supposed to happen to us. Or at least, that there is a room we can return to that no one is supposed to harm us in. Sometimes in life, unfortunately, that is untrue. In fiction, it can be a particularly horrifying or unnerving feeling when the home isn’t safe for the character.
Hotels have a similar sense of safety. They are meant to be a safe haven during travels, a place where you don’t have to worry while you rest. Finding out that the hotel is, in fact, trying to kill you puts quite the damper on any trip.
Subverting expectations of safety can illicit a strong reaction from the reader, especially when done well. Both the Hill House and the Overlook Hotel are two exceptionally well done character locations. They destroy the inherent sense of safety that a home and hotel are supposed to have. They relentlessly pursue their goal to the detriment of the protagonists.
Antagonistic locations v.s. a haunted location
A malignant location is an actively antagonistic place. It may attract ghosts or supernatural attendants, but those are tools and not the primary force behind issues at the location. The malignant force of the location is separate from any malignant souls.
Eel Marsh House, from The Woman In Black written by Susan Hill, is a creepy manor. It is a sad, depressing place and terrifying to boot but not because of anything inherent to the house. Terrible things have happened there, but those terrible things were not caused by the house. Instead, Alice Drablow does horrific things to the people and especially the children that she chooses to come in contact with. The spiteful ghost of Ms. Drablow, if it were to permanently leave Eel Marsh House, would leave the house utterly devoid of character. Eel Marsh would not continue to kill children.
The Overlook Hotel, on the other hand, is absolutely a hellish location that desires to destroy those within its walls. The malignant presence that is the Overlook Hotel would not be banished if you were to get rid of all of the ghosts. The Overlook would simply bide its time and end up creating more ghosts. It is a malicious, dangerous presence that can’t simply be pinned down to one ghost.
the HILL HOUSE (a show of subtle malignancy)
Hill House of the Netflix series collects ghosts within itself. While some of those ghosts attached themselves to the Crain family, and they actively haunt away from the house it is with the intention of bringing the Crain’s back. While we don’t know what keeps all of the ghosts at the House (as the workmen have clearly been there for many, many years before the Crains and some of the other ghosts), we are introduced to many of the ghosts who were collected and seek to collect other ghosts in the same way. In particular, the main perversion we are shown is how possessing someone can masquerade as love. It is the theme that ties both the show and the novella.
love and possession
Fear, love, and possession are the triple threat method the House uses to try and collect the people. It is a needy, possessive, and petulant place that seems to want to hoard its inhabitants as best it can, without necessarily feeling malicious or malevolent towards those living there. Building that into a house instead of a person can be difficult, but Shirley Jackson and the show writers did an excellent job of it with dialogue (the oft-misunderstood ‘telling’). There is this uncomfortable feeling of characters talking around each other, as if they are on two different wavelengths completely, in Shirley Jackson’s short story. In the adaptation, the actors are given emotional monologues that suck you into the emotion you’re supposed to be feeling. Both of these are excellent methods of setting the mood. They bring an insidious undertone into the characters from the house itself not found elsewhere. The house has a presence, an aura, a character, and a feeling that comes through clearly. It amplifies the desire to love, to nurture, to care into the negative versions of those desires—possession, domination, control.
BLATANT, OVERT MALIGNANCY: THE OVERLOOK hotel
“How I wish you were fear...”
Everything about the Overlook Hotel is perverted in a cloud of dark malignancy. Nothing feels safe because nothing is—from the hedges outside to the ghosts within, the Overlook Hotel leaves nowhere for you to be comfortable. It is a place that captures a family for the winter and plays with them until it devours them. The ghosts are the crumbs left behind, not the malevolence itself.
Stephen King is a master of locations as characters for horror. I wholeheartedly recommend reading The Shining and Duma Key, but if you must pick one then pick The Shining. The Overlook Hotel masks itself behind ghosts, malignant creatures, and psychological tricks to push the Torrance family over the edge.
The Unseen Using the Seen
To write effective locations as characters, you have to excel at both building thematic, emotional settings and know how to write puppets. The Overlook Hotel is a puppet master, with many strings tied to many tools. Each tool has its own different feel, but they all come from a common emotion (malice). Some are more insidious than others (such as the ghost who persuades Jack to ‘correct’ Danny and Wendy), others overtly so (the hedge lions), but with each, you can feel the influence of the Overlook Hotel. That consistency is key.
LEARNING FROM NATURE: PLANTS, THE OFT OVERLOOKED
There is also a masterful feeling of the Overlook Hotel and Hill House as pitcher plants. They catch the caretakers and the families, then digests them through malice or possessiveness. Plant analogies for creating locations as characters can be excellent to keep in mind, as that can help you consider the more primal aspects that help to create these fearful interactive characters.
Plants, mushrooms and fungi, are excellent to look at when deciding to build a location as a character. These are living aspects of our world that are so often overlooked, yet have huge impacts on the world around them. Researching predatory plants, or the so-called nervous system of mycelium is an excellent way to learn how to create a location that can honeypot without a haunting.
-L.J.
Author of The Dying Sun, Book 1 of The Gods Chronicle.
Pedantic Scribe of the ‘Scribe’s Journey Podcast’
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
“It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn’t Danny who was the weak link, it was him. He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped.”