The New
Every state is the backdrop to at least one great horror film, some better than others.
A Reddit post nearly a decade old listed Indiana’s most famous horror movie as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), a film I saw in theaters and remember liking for the reasons that anybody actually can like a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
The film takes itself more seriously than it should, and besides, Lincoln is barely in the Hoosier state for most of the action. Doesn’t Indiana deserve better than that?
The Old
Indiana has the Netflix series Stranger Things, the demonic thriller We Summon the Darkness (2019), and of course the brutal gorefest Parks and Recreation.
But for me, the quintessential Hoosier Gothic style comes from Eerie, Indiana (which is on Tubi!), a short-lived TV show whose 19 episodes aired between 1991 and 1993, many of which were directed by none other than Joe Dante.
The show follows a monster-of-the-week format in the fictional small town of Eerie. Alongside Goosebumps and later The X-Files and Twin Peaks, the show is part of a golden era of ‘90s high strangeness and is probably the reason I got into horror in the first place.
The show’s actual eeriness, or uncanniness, is one of the most important elements in Gothic literature. Christine Berthin describes the uncanny as “the place where hard edges no longer exist,” where the repressed returns but unrecognizably. It is the “shadow that haunts the fantastic text” (87).
The adventures in Eerie, Indiana are fantastic, but deal in the mundane: A mother keeps her children young by storing them in Tupperware, for instance, or an ATM gains sentience and distributes money out of pity. This is a really compelling use of the uncanny because it throws into question what we take for granted, in this case the suburban niceties of the Midwest.
The Ancient
Many shadows haunt Indiana. Here is one.
When Abraham was nine, his mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln passed away of an ailment common to Indiana then, known as “milk sickness.”
The fatal illness had no known origin at the time. Decades of scientific research later, the culprit is an ecological horror story. An herb commonly known as white snakeroot, common to the Ohio River Valley, contains toxins that can pass from a cow to its milk to its milk’s consumer.
The Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in southern Indiana dedicates a room to Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The memorial is beautiful and haunting; the forests around it are lush this time of year. Uncannily, there are numerous white snakeroot plants along the park’s trails. No vampires, no monsters, just the ambient threat of nature that we have managed to keep at bay by regulating our food system.
Elsewhere and Meanwhile
Find my book: Frightful Harvest: Food, Agriculture, and Landscape in Folk Horror Films from McFarland Books.
Find my writing at my website and at Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States
Cited
Berthin, Christine. Gothic Hauntings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.