the well& the web: on st(horr)orytelling

My first and most enduring horror obsession was Sadako, though my introduction to her—an afternoon rerun of Verbinski’s remake—came at a time when I was as far removed from chain-mail fare horror as I’d ever be. 

The tech anxiety that partly birthed her wouldn’t resonate until I was a late teen. Then, holed up in my room, torrenting Nakata’s Ringu on a virus-riddled laptop, Sadako’s curse seemed not only possible, but close; as if by mere proximity I could be subsumed. 

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to Verbinski, to an afternoon before creepypastas and forum threads. I’m twelve or thirteen, swaddled in a blanket on the living room couch. All the blinds are turned down, and the only light is the glow emanating from the television screen.

The first time I saw Sadako, I didn't know about the urban legend boom Japan underwent in the ‘90s or viral emails. I didn’t know about anonymous internet posts or how rapidly uploaded videos, doctored or otherwise, could spread. I didn’t think about how, at the meeting place of the internet and terror, a strange new landscape had been formed. I only thought about how she moved, how her pain snowballed into rage, and—most of all—about seven days.

I grew up in a yawning place with hilly pastures for goats and cows, miles of soybeans, creek beds full of snakes. It was quiet, fragrant, and rural; it was also superstitious, the kind of place where there was always something to do. 

People mounted hex signs on their barns, hung glass in trees to catch spirits, and were careful to leave a house through the same door they entered. They tossed salt, believed that fortunes could be told through bibliomancy, that some families had the power to talk the fire out of burn wounds.

My introduction to all of this was my mawmaw Nancy. Over mugs of milk splashed with coffee—none of this nonsense about too young to drink it—she told me tales of ghosts, demons, and what happens when you play with ouija boards; of angels, past lives, and reincarnation; of folk magic, though I can’t recall her ever calling it that.

From her, I learned to believe in what was felt more often than seen, and that the occasional glimpses we get of the strange have something to teach. It was a memory of one of these lessons that Sadako triggered. Seven days…what was about seven days?

Oh, that’s right. Argiope aurantia.

Spiders: another thing my childhood home had in spades—longlegs, recluses, black widows, wolf, garden, and a dozen other varieties. Some more dangerous than others, and adults had something to say about most, but nothing quite like Argiope aurantia.

A rather common black and yellow arachnid, it can be found in gardens or somewhere else equally unassuming. They’re orb-weavers, architects of elaborately detailed, circular webs, which they tear down and rebuild frequently. Though their bright colors and size raise a quick alarm, they’re a generally docile breed that camp in out-of-the-way places. If provoked, however, like most spiders, they bite.

By some accounts, they do much worse.

They have a handful of common names, but the two I most often heard had to do with the zig-zag patterns found in their webs. Some called them ‘zipper spiders’, for the pattern’s broken ladder shape. Others, like mawmaw, called them ‘writing spiders’.

I want to tell you a story. One afternoon when I was seven or eight, I was sitting at the table in mawmaw’s kitchen. I spent most of my time with her there. It was the heart of her trailer, where we bonded while the living room TV played softly beneath everything.

That day, Montel Williams was droning on mostly unnoticed. My cup of sweet tea, weighed down by lemon chunks, was condensating. My tomato sandwich was sliced diagonally, leaking mayo spotted with pepper. 

I hadn’t touched it yet. I was staring out the window.

I had to turn in my chair to do this. My usual spot put my back to it. I don’t remember now what I actually turned to see. There was a slouching old house beyond a line of pines, its granite walls crumbling and roof caved in from neglect. It was haunted, and I liked to look at it. Maybe that was it.

What I ended up transfixed with was an enormous spider with yellow dots and lines on its body and legs. It’d woven a web in the shade, safe from the heat and threat of rain. I shuddered. I didn’t like spiders. Mawmaw noticed.

She told me it was a writing spider, and that I shouldn’t even look at it. It was bad luck. They were dangerous, but not like brown recluses. Their bites didn’t cause necrosis. It was what they did if you disrespected them that was the trouble. 

If you tried to kill one or somehow damaged its web, the spider would take offense. After escaping, it’d spin some extra silk and write your name in the center of its new web. Not long after, usually within a week, you’d be dead.

She didn’t explain the mechanics, and I didn’t think to ask how the spider learned your name in the first place; or, once it did, how your death came about, if it was a curse or if the spider told it to the Angel of Death.

But the mechanics didn’t matter. The story did its trick. I looked away from the spider and back to my lunch. I didn’t turn around again that afternoon, and it took hours to shake the feeling of its glassy eyes watching me.

My paperback copy of Suzuki’s Ring is full of margin notes mostly relating to the mechanics of Sadako’s curse. By the end, how she created it, why, and how to escape are clear. In this way, she’s nothing like a writing spider.

But she’s not entirely herself either. Like every character, Sadako was shaped by what came before—one of the innumerable creations that exist in what J.R.R. Tolkien, another of my obsessions, called The Cauldron of Story. 

In the back of all our minds, swaddled in collective imagination, is a vat of soup keeping warm on a fire. In it is every archetype, concept, theme, and plot twist that makes a story worth telling. When it’s time to craft a new one, storytellers dip their ladles in and see what comes out with the broth.

Sadako’s character is part of a smaller, more concentrated soup cradled in a pock in the ancient bell of this pot. She, along with the writing spider, is a gelatinous spoonful of revenge, a spirit to whom suffering lends an unnatural bent.

Stories of such spirits, or more broadly, of action and consequence, are among the first and most powerful ones we learn. How we treat others affects them, and in turn, affects us. It has power, for better or for worse, so we must be careful.

A beautiful but strange and quiet girl, born of a mother with psychic abilities, Sadako grew up to be a powerful psychic herself. But unlike her mother, who could only read thoughts and imprint onto film, she could impress on living media, make soundbytes and films.

Set apart by her gifts, and, as she matured, her body—Sadako being intersex is a theme to dissect another time—she was often alone. Her life was a hopscotch from one lonely place to another, at the end of which lays a sad story. A doctor working in the tuberculosis ward where her father was being cared for became obsessed with Sadako over the course of her visits; and, on what would prove to her last, raped and strangled her, dropping her into a well and covering it when he was done.

You know this well, don’t you? It’s the birthplace of Sadako’s curse; like its mother, a choice plucking from the Cauldron of Story. An echo of Okiku and all her versions, historical and modern, a predecessor of abstractions such like Bartholomew from Fracassi’s Boys in the Valley, a bone we’ve been greedily sucking the marrow from for centuries; yet at the same time, a fresh shake of seasoning, a little something new.

The curse’s initial capture is reminiscent of guerilla broadcasts forced through public frequencies, a once not-common occurrence. Mixed with anger, regret, and lost hopes, her dying stream of consciousness overrode a VHS recording and from there went quite literally viral. 

A supernatural marriage of Sadako’s psychic abilities and smallpox, with which she was infected during her assault, this single transmission was the genesis of every subsequent case. You know this too, don’t you? The only way to save yourself is to duplicate and spread.

In the 1990s, when Ring debuted, this kind of transmission carried several layers of meaning. The book’s early focus on disease shows that a full decade had done little to ease people’s anxieties surrounding the AIDs crisis; but the fear of physical illness isn’t all Sadako invokes. When the book was released, ‘virality’ was beginning to be associated with personal tech. The average household was learning that machines, like their own bodies, could become infected.

It’s something we’re keenly aware of now—pop ups, spam mail, dodgy links, and bot messages on social media are so prolific they’ve become mundane, but at the time in which Suzuki was penning the first installment of the Ring trilogy, this was relatively uncharted territory. The concept was fresh, insidious, and lended a certain human slant to new technology. That inanimate objects could become ill, or act as vectors for illness, opened a new door on the landscape of horror.

But while these devices are new, relatively speaking, our anxiety surrounding them isn’t. As a species, we’ve been suffering from a low-grade fear of our creations since the advent of electricity. The quicker our advancements outpace themselves, the closer the virtual comes to reality, the more we worry: could this really, I mean really, affect us?

Ask Shelley, Orwell, or Huxley; ask the people who suffered psychotic breaks after purchasing home televisions in the 1950s; ask those debating the ethics of AI, computer generated art, and simulated reality today. Technology always seems to be toeing the edges of our comfort and sanity.

Sadako’s curse, with all its parallels to tech-jacking and virality, is, on one level, an answer to the question at the heart of every techno-fear: what if an advancement, made with the best intentions, was put to sinister ends? What if it became the vessel for something evil instead?

But of course, Sadako is more than that answer. In the same way a ghost can be a victim and villain, and a character is at once what it is and the shadow of what was, she has another, softer face.

In the first way I experienced her, Sadako is a storyteller. The survival of her curse hinges on sharing. Without something new to graft onto, it’s toothless. Without an audience, she’s just a dead girl in a well.
This, I think, is what mawmaw said without saying across hundreds of afternoons while I played with her jewelry, creating a vision of a world in which dropped pebbles never stopped rippling. A world that keeps scores, and yes: settles them.

Stories like hers, and so many others passed down through the decades, have the power to do more than entertain. The most potent ones make us toss in our sleep and think twice about what we might just do, even if we’re alone. Even if we’re sure we’d get away with it.

They’re gifts handed down from some place far behind us, from people we’ll never meet with names we don’t know, who probably lived ordinary lives but created something special: our species’ greatest vehicle for memory.

That’s what stories are; and hauntings, chain-letters, and videos; forum posts you’ve read a dozen times, their names and locations swappable, and yet you keep seeking them out, because the tingle they send up your spine is indescribable.

Horror, more specifically, is an enshrinement of our most painful memories, a way of righting old wrongs, addressing fear, and giving suffering meaning. Through it, the dead and their grief become a burden to be borne communally.

We dream about them, make movies, paint and draw them, craft stories. We aren’t just afraid, we’re moved, because like all forms of memory, horror is an expression of something fundamentally loving—a desire to heal and soothe, in spite of our own anxieties.

We look with determination into the face of what’s deemed monstrous, and though we flinch, refuse to turn away. We look at it through our fingers if we have to, because we want to see, even, and sometimes especially, when we’re afraid.

My little writing spider, Sadako, and every other wronged thing nestled and simmering deep in The Cauldron of Story, are embodiments of a particular set of needs: to love what was denied love; to purify and take its pain away; to show it understanding, and by service of our memory, put it to sleep.

These stories, at once incredibly old and new, reach out to us through the veil of time. They filter through the pages of a book, a loved one’s mouth, or a bright blue screen, their subjects demanding: share my story, learn from it, or be swallowed. 

And what do we do? We tell a friend and feel a bit better.