Spooky Islands…
Posted July 11th, 2010 by Murray By Moonlight
Filed under: Murray by Moonlight, Things That Go Bump
Tags: scary, spooky
I’ve just finished watching the rather spooky movie, Shutter Island, an atmospheric thriller set on a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Aside from making me very thankful that I have never had to spend a night on an island like Shutter Island, the movie got me thinking about why islands feature heavily in scary stories.
What is it about islands that makes scaring the pants off people such an easy task?
Far away from anywhere familiar…
To begin with, scary stories are usually about isolation.
This isolation isn’t always necessarily physical – at times it can be emotional or psychological – but in most scary stories the main characters are cut off from the ‘normal’ world in some way.
Perhaps they work late at night in a spooky building when everyone else has gone home; or perhaps they took a wrong turn down a country road and they are now far away from anywhere familiar. Regardless of exactly how the story delivers the characters into the scary situation, one of the basic rules of many scary stories is that the characters must be cut off from the world they understand.
Islands, then, are a perfect setting for a sense of isolation. What could be more isolated than being physically broken off from the ‘normal’ world by savage and dangerous seas? Being stuck on an island means that any real escape is much more difficult, if not entirely impossible – and so the characters must make a stand against the menace that is threatening them.
The only rule is that there are no rules…
Another common element of scary stories is that the ‘rules’ are changed. The characters can’t expect to be able to solve problems in simple, ‘normal’ ways. They must cope – or, in stories where characters are killed one-by-one, fail to cope – with the fact that they can’t rely on familiar mechanisms to save them.
In scary stories set on an island, it’s very easy to change the rules. All you really need is a very bad storm, and suddenly an isolated setting is entirely cut off from the outside world.
When the bad storm hits the island, the phone lines are down, the seas are too dangerous to navigate, the power generators have been destroyed, help can’t reach you for hours or perhaps even days. You are stuck on the island and there is simply no hope of rescue.
The rules of the ‘normal’ world no longer apply, and you must now fight for your very survival [1].
Like the back of his murderous hand…
And a final element that makes scary stories set on islands even scarier is the fact that the bad guy often knows the island much better than the main characters.
Because an island represents a limited landscape, the bad guy can move from place to place with relative ease. He knows exactly what to do to eliminate any remaining remote chance of escape or rescue [2]. He knows when to attack, and where to hide when the tables are turned. He can fade like a ghost into the forest, and he can make his way into locked rooms through secret tunnels and passages that everyone else has forgotten about.
For most of the story he is seemingly invincible, and the island almost seems to conspire with him to eliminate the characters, one-by-one.
Back on dry land…
For all that islands often represent a menacing locality in books, television series and movies, the comforting reality is that very few psychos have gone about murdering entire island communities during very bad storms.
In fact, after trolling for a couple of hours through newspaper databases, I haven’t been able to find a single reference to a situation that seems anything like the standard ‘remote island, bad storm, psycho gets stabby with everyone,’ plot.
When you think about it, that’s probably a good thing, because something like that would be hell on tourism.
That isn’t to say that there have never been any disquieting mysteries relating to islands. If you’d like to explore the topic further, you might like to read about the entire colony that vanished from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, somewhere between 1587 and 1590, or perhaps about the mystery of what, exactly, is buried on Oak Island, Nova Scotia.
Do you have a favourite scary book, movie or television show set on a remote island? Tell us about it in the comments below!
Footnotes:
| 1. | In fact, the plot device of ‘the very bad storm is on its way’ is so common in scary stories that if I lived on an island, I think I’d be pushing my boat into the water and heading for the mainland on any days when it was even just slightly cloudy… |
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| 2. | The two-way radio is destroyed, the boats in the harbour are sunk, the lighthouse has been disabled. |
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July 11th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
I thought I’d mention in passing that one of my favourite “spooky island” books is Bad Men, by John Connolly.
Very much not for the faint of heart, but a very good read (as are his other “Charlie Parker” books) if you like suspense mixed with mystery mixed with the supernatural.
Murray By Moonlight