"She would wake. And she would walk . . . As if woken from a nightmare, she would walk back to her home, feeling each time that it was a dream . . . How many nights, how many walks? She could no longer count . . . She would sleep, and as happens when one dreams, she would forget. And having forgotten, she would wake. She would walk . . . She would sleep, forget, and forget, and forget."
--Narrator, The Haunting of Bly Manor
Cheap jolts scarcely begin to approach the potential depth of the horror genre when it comes to exploring the existential impact that fear and other experiences can have on the human soul. Even if contemporary cinema and television do not fully mine the depths the genre offers as consistently as they could, the obvious exception does surface from time to time. The Haunting of Bly Manor is one such exception. The recently released season of Netflix's anthology series specifically highlights the terror that forgetfulness can bring, erasing the sense of self and fulfillment until only a hollow shell of a person remains. Both the reason behind the haunting and other parts of the story--ones that have little to do with the haunting itself--embrace this theme rather than subtly, vaguely hint at it.
There are multiple ways in which The Haunting of Bly Manor accomplishes this, one of which involves a character who later speaks at length on the struggles of caring for a parent with dementia as he waits for her to die. The consuming forgetfulness displayed by his mother prompts him to assess the very certainty of keeping one's current knowledge and personality for an entire lifetime (yes, he mistakenly refers to dementia as eroding a person's consciousness away instead of eroding memories within their consciousness, but otherwise the scene was quite philosophically valid). While his emotional memories of his mother's decline push him to insist that the past and the future cannot be relied on, revelations about the manor's past directly tie the past to the present.
In the penultimate episode, one of the most existentially charged explanations of a fictional haunting one might ever come across occupies almost all of the screen time. The narrator describes how Viola Bly, the "Lady of the Lake" at the titular Bly Manor, descended from a fiery woman to a spirit devoid of its memories. Viola once owned the manor, but a lasting sickness and eventual murder at the hands of a resident led to her soul becoming trapped in a "gravity well" of her own making. As more people died on the property, her spiritual gravity well contained their own souls on the premises--and then she and the others began to psychologically waste away, losing the recollection of their motives and hopes.
Viola exemplifies just how aimless and empty conscious existence would be without the memory that binds recalled experiences, and thus perceptions of one's own mind across multiple moments, together. To lose one's collective memory is to lose all awareness of self beyond whatever limited, immediate perceptions one has. One's grasp of reason and self would be so vastly diminished that it could never progress beyond the most minimal kind of awareness. The "Lady of the Lake" walks the estate without any evident trace of her former self breaking through. Her very face fades away in a visible indication that her conscious perceptions hold none of their former intentions.
The intellect is the most foundational part of any consciousness, as the lack of the faculty that grasps logic leaves a being without the ability to understand even the self-evident, immediate logical axioms that govern all things. After this, the most foundational part of consciousness is memory, a feature of consciousness so integral to many aspects of epistemology and everyday life alike that only experiences in the present moment could be understood without it. There could be no stable motivations or deeper reflection on one's own experiences without memory to hold one's focus from one moment to another.
People can realize this without ever watching a work of entertainment that intentionally calls attention to the nature of memory in forming and preserving personal identity. It still helps to have something like The Haunting of Bly Manor available to those who might not gravitate towards existential contemplation on their own, as it has both mainstream and philosophical appeal. The capacity of horror to cast light on issues of existentialism and personhood that many viewers might otherwise remain ignorant of for a lifetime is of no small thematic and cinematic importance. There was always more to the genre than hollow scares and invariable conceptual repetition, and both The Haunting of Bly Manor and its predecessor season serve as recent examples of how personal and existential horror can be.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/02/memory-defines-self_4.html
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