There’s a long and storied history of tales of American academics becoming unmoored far from home. J.M. Tyree’s The Haunted Screen is an impressive entry in this literary lineage: its protagonist is dealing with the erosion of his marriage and a the echoes of a past relationship, even as he muses on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. There’s also a possibly malevolent presence lurking in the woods and a sense that several characters know more than they’re letting on; it’s a concentrated dose of heady musings and travels into the uncanny. I spoke with Tyree about writing the book, the ways film can inform literature, and the nature of haunting.

There’s a lot going on in The Haunted Screen, from the narrator’s fraught relationships past and present to the moodiness of the German setting to the allusions to Vertigo. Was there one element that arrived before any of the others?

Yes, for me, writing fiction starts with a voice – a tone, a timbre, a mood, or whatever you want to call it. The craft is pure vibes. I hear the voices of the characters and try to follow them wherever they lead. Sometimes I have an auditory sensation like a hallucination that begins with overhearing their dialogue, or the voice of the narrator. That sounds weird but it’s true. The intellectual stuff about film history comes in later and hopefully doesn’t feel too much like Movie Trivia Night. The nerdiness has to arise out of the characters’ own compulsions, like the narrator’s study of Hitchcock and his troubled ex-mentor’s obsession with German horror films from the 1920s. I wanted to keep trivia from taking over. A lot of detours into film productions were cut.

More broadly, what was the history of writing this book? Did it evolve in any ways that surprised you?

So I wrote the first draft by hand in a small A6 notebook while traveling around Germany. I wanted to create a story that would fill exactly one notebook, with no outline and no plan or structure. In other words, the novella had to fit within those pages, from beginning to end. Imposing this arbitrary limit on the length, and writing by hand, really helped to free the process. Recommended! As far as surprises go, the big one was about the ending. I wanted to maintain the tension for as long as I could over the possibility that there might be something supernatural going on. Or at least something *more*, something mysterious and unresolvable out there. Because this is fiction, I can explore this provisional space without making claims about what’s real.

In the decades since Vertigo was released, there have been a number of memorable works that draw inspiration from it. What led to you cross-pollinating aspects of it with the very non-San Fransican setting here?

You’re right, and I did take inspiration from films and novels that expand on the themes and geography of Vertigo. Especially certain “Hitchcoctions” that challenge Hitchcock’s abusive views of sex and gender and try to swim against the evil currents of his cinema in various ways. I think of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (set in England and Venice), Zulawski’s Possession (set in a divided Berlin), Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique (set in Poland and France) and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (set in Scotland and Spain), all films about doubles. I did live for several years in San Francisco, about a block away from the Mission Dolores, where, in Hitchcock’s film, Carlotta Valdes is buried. But writing Hitchcock-fuelled fiction about San Francisco would have been paralyzing for me, whereas in Germany I felt more free to harness the mood of dislocation in a dreamlike or nightmare world where the past is always present. I guess the dream-logic goes something like this: Hitchcock, who trained as an apprentice filmmaker in Germany, filmed Vertigo in California, and, in the process, merged San Francisco into a larger imaginary Black Forest that covers the whole world. When Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) gets dizzy looking down the staircase of the church tower in fright at the end of Vertigo, I also see the shadow of the vampire (Max Schreck) from Murnau’s Nosferatu ascending towards him, floor by floor.

One of the running themes of The Haunted Screen is the narrator being told by various Germans that he should pursue some sort of extramarital or non-monogamous liaison. Did you see this more as a source of humor in the book or a broader comment on national attitudes about sex?

Very interesting question, not that I’m recommending infidelity! But it’s true that in America a kind of dour finger-wagging puritanism about sex forms an alliance between moralizing liberals and conservative religious believers. I read bizarre screeds on social media from viewers and readers who clutch their pearls or cry “degenerate!” whenever they see sex in movies and books. And if non-monogamy is depicted as being endemic to human nature, so much the worse, right? Too bad, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, James Baldwin, and Graham Greene, sucks to be you! Joking aside, this anti-art reactionary energy of our era baffles me. Horror works to resist this purity drift now, as it did in the 1980s. I do think that horror provides a space where adults can gather to talk. My view? This genre remains an odd niche at the multiplex and on the bookshelf where grown-up stuff reaches audiences.

I wouldn’t call the narrator of this book unreliable, but his perceptions do seem to become unreliable at certain points. Were there any challenges in terms of figuring out what a baseline reality for this book would be?

Definitely. One of the advantages of writing fiction in first person is that you can play with this unreliable element of storytelling. This is also a legacy I hope to honor from Expressionism, whether that’s an Edvard Munch painting like The Cry/The Scream or the 1920s German films of Wiene (Cabinet of Dr Caligari) or Murnau (Nosferatu again!). In Munch’s work, an interior state of mind bleeds into the landscape – there isn’t any way to access an unfiltered view. In first-person fiction, you can warp things in somewhat similar ways, especially when the character is aware that they might be hearing things or seeing things. Thinking through Expressionism helped me to create a tension in my novella regarding the actuality of these apparently supernatural happenings. These might or might not be in the mind of the narrator but this makes them real for the character, and, to me, that’s all that matters. For the reader, this places them in an adjacent spot to the character, contemplating whether more things are possible than are dreamt of in our understanding of the universe. (This is what the Todorov called “the fantastic.”)

You’ve now written or co-written two books that draw inspiration from cinema. What draws you to combining disciplines like this? 

There’s a mini-tradition of film history in horror fiction that I love, stretching back to Theodore Roszak’s Flicker and Ramsay Campell’s Ancient Images, which I think was the first hardcover novel I ever purchased for myself from the Waldenbooks in the local mall. Horror movie fiction also includes cool contemporary novels like Stephen Graham Jones’s Demon Theory, P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout, Gemma Files’s Experimental Film, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate, and Paul Tremblay’s new book Horror Movie, which I’m enjoying right now. I admire these writers although like them I want to do my own thing. For me, fiction about film should highlight some of the things that literature can do which mainstream movies *cannot* accomplish. Especially effects related to voice and scenes in which talking happens without much action, or extended backstory excursions. In a movie, this normally would result in a voiceover, which is generally a big no-no (unless you’re Terrence Malick), or a flashback, which might feel unnecessary or tedious. Less so in a novel. Fiction lives on after its death (as the most culturally important art form, that is) by continuing to flourish as an unkillable parasitical vine, one that grows at night in the graveyard of the movies. Or something like that…

Are there any qualities you’ve seen in particular films that make them especially good for inspiring literature?

Love this question. I don’t know why but certain images from certain movies mean as much to me as my own memories of real life. (That was the basis of my coauthored fiction collection, Our Secret Life in the Movies, with the poet Michael McGriff, which is turning ten this year.) For me it’s the images themselves, almost more so than the plotlines (which can be silly at times). A good example comes near the opening of Dario Argento’s Inferno, his companion film to Suspiria, both loosely inspired by Thomas DeQuincey’s opiated vision of three “Ladies of Sorrow” in his classic book Suspiria de Profundis. Entering a strange building at night, Argento’s poet character Rose (Irene Miracle) drops her keys in a flooded cellar that looks like a ballroom. As she swims down to retrieve her keys, the camera follows her underwater and explores this strange and terrifying dream-space in which, the viewer feels, anything at all might happen, none of it good. This is what Hitchcock called “pure film,” which conveys its meaning with little to no dialogue. I cannot remember much about the film, but this scene from Inferno, like the opening cab ride through the German forest in Suspiria, could form the basis of an anthology of fictional retakes that I would love to write or read. I want to create an alternative story that exists on a tangent line from the film. Argento did this with DeQuincey and I don’t see any reason why new fiction couldn’t claim back the “Ladies of Sorrow” from the movies. (Fritz Lieber took the same source in DeQuincey as a springboard for his novel Our Lady of Darkness a few years before Argento’s film.) The process of adaptation ping-pongs back and forth in interesting ways between literature and film. Art that’s made from the odds and ends of other works of art – I see many like-minded writers creating good stuff along these lines as a kind of uncoordinated hive.

Photo: Ben Walters

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