First published in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a postpartum woman whose husband, a physician, prescribes a rest cure for her so-called “nervous depression,” confining her to a nursery. The narrator’s increasing fixation on the room’s titular wallpaper reflects her descent into psychosis, culminating in her belief that a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper—and, ultimately, that she herself is that woman. 

What if the short story were told from the man’s point of view? Obsession—the micro-budget horror film that has quickly become one of the year’s biggest box-office successes—feels, in some ways, like an answer to that question. 

Directed by Curry Barker, Obsession follows Bear (played by Michael Johnston), who acquires a supernatural toy that grants his wish for his co-worker and childhood friend, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), to love him more than anyone else in the world. Nikki’s mind and body are thereby effectively hijacked, echoing the woman’s loss of agency in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Unlike Gilman’s short story, however, Obsession places us in the perspective of the controlling figure, forcing us to confront not only the horror of victimization but that of possessive desire itself. 

Bear is initially presented sympathetically: as a lonely, shy, awkward music store employee with an unrequited crush. We might relate to his desperation for connection; after all, he seems as gentle as, well, a teddy bear. While bears are also predators, the character does not see himself as a villain—and because we spend time inside his mindset, neither do we. Even as Nikki begins to behave erratically, we believe that Bear deserves a chance at romance and that he can control the situation. More troubling, we believe that he can control Nikki. 

Unlike “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which we inhabit the woman’s mental breakdown, Obsession mostly foregrounds Bear’s fear and guilt, obscuring Nikki’s pain and suffering—at first. Hoping to alter his wish, he calls the toy’s customer support line and hears Nikki screaming in agony on the other end. He returns home to find her frozen in place, covered in excrement and vomit; later, she mutilates her own face with a broken bottle. Eventually, while she sleeps, the voice of her former self briefly resurfaces and begs him to kill her. But Bear refuses, asking, “What’s so bad about being with me?” His desire to be loved has become inseparable from his willingness to erase Nikki’s freedom. (Her surname, “Freeman,” feels heavy-handed.) The realization that we have centered Bear’s distress over the damage he has inflicted is powerfully uncomfortable.  

Gilman’s short story concludes with the protagonist rubbing against the wallpaper and declaring, “I’ve got out at last… in spite of you,” causing her husband to faint as she continues circling the room, liberated through madness. By the end of Obsession, Bear is similarly inert, but Nikki is lucid and seemingly still trapped—that is, left to grapple with the carnage unleashed by the obsessive version of herself that Bear created. 

Medicine is no longer the locus of patriarchal control it was when Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but it still carries traces of gendered authority. Barker’s Obsession critiques the insidious logic of modern “nice guy” entitlement; believing he deserves Nikki’s love, Bear prescribes not a rest cure but a “love cure” that reveals how ordinary longing and self-pity can become coercive.  

By aligning our sympathies with the perpetrator before exposing the full cost of his desire, the film tests our complicity and highlights the peril of love that demands possession. 

Web image from Capstone Pictures.

Shortly before the outbreak of The Great War, a young engineering student arrives at a tuberculosis sanitorium high in the mountains of Central Europe. Over the course of his visit there he will share many meals (and drinks) with some of the other patients, a group which will include among others a Catholic conservative and a liberal humanist; there will be long, leisurely after-dinner discussions of varied philosophical topics; temperature charts will be compared; and he will become intrigued by a mysterious woman who is also a patient.  

And no, this is not The Magic Mountain. 

The Empusium is the latest novel from the Nobel- and International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. The author subtitles her book “A Health Resort Horror Story,” which is exactly what it is. But it is a horror story which the author has cleverly folded into not just the setting of Thomas Mann’s novel, but the setting and certain elements of the plotline, all of them slightly altered, but recognizable. In fact, recognizing them is part of the fun of this well-plotted, rather Gothic tale. 

As the novel opens Mieczysław Wojnich, a young Pole from Łwów, has arrived at the tuberculosis sanitorium at Gӧbersdorf, in Lower Silesia (currently Poland, formerly Prussia), to be treated for his illness. There is no room at the main building, so he is assigned a room at Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he meets his fellow (male) patients, who come from various Central European cities and differing viewpoints, but who seem to agree on one thing: the general inferiority of women. Philosophical discussions, which often take place over or after leisurely meals and the consumption of a magic mushroom-laced liqueur called Schwӓrmerei, range widely over several topics (war, language, the nature of reality) but most of the time are intensely misogynistic—what is the purpose of women? Do women have smaller brains than men? Do women’s bodies belong to the State? Have any great discoveries ever been made by women? Should women even be educated at all? (Tokarczuk helpfully includes an appendix to the novel in which she notes that all of the quotes of her characters on this subject are paraphrased from quotes by well-known prominent authors of the past, from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats)  

Things at the sanitorium go badly from the beginning of Wojnich’s stay. He stumbles upon the dead body of a woman laid out on a table, who turns out to be the wife of the guesthouse proprietor, and his companions tell him surreptitiously that she may have been murdered. He hears noises—voices—coming from empty rooms, and cries in the night from outside the guesthouse. An art student who is terminally ill confides that “people die here,” and not just from tuberculosis; every November, apparently, a young man disappears in the surrounding woods, only to have his body turn up ripped to pieces. And what exactly is going on with those woodsmen in the forest, anyway? 

The Empusium works on many levels. It is an homage to The Magic Mountain, but it is definitely not a retelling of The Magic Mountain. The allusions to Mann’s novel are multiple: the pre-World War I setting at a sanitorium in both novels; the fact that both Mieczysław Wojnich and Hans Castorp are engineering students; the philosophies of Settembrini and Naphtha in the Mountain, analogous to the conservative and humanist positions taken in The Empusium; the close childhood relationship between Castorp and Pribislav Hippe (Mountain) and Wojnich and Anatoly (Empusium), in each case bonding over a pencil. And as in The Magic Mountain, there is a narrator who occasionally breaks the fourth wall; verb tenses in The Empusium shift repeatedly from third-person singular past tense to first-person plural present. These are not subtle, nor are they intended to be.  

Allusions aside, The Empusium is its own story, and a totally different narrative. It is a horror story, a revenge story, a wryly feminist tale of the supernatural set in a place hopefully of healing but also of chronic illness and the ever-present specter of death. Tokarczuk builds suspense slowly, bit by bit, with increasing tension. Almost from the beginning there is the undeniable sensation that something is very wrong at Gӧbersdorf, although it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is. Wojnich often has the feeling that he is being watched. The story line draws from a tradition of folk horror, and specifically from the notion that bad things can happen to “city people” when they are out in the country, among the “old ways.”  

The Empusium is also more than just a horror story, and an important aspect relates to the misogynistic attitudes mentioned earlier. Tokarczuk takes a position on the nature of male-female relations (perhaps the use of a sanitorium as the setting is meant to suggest that misogyny is an illness infecting educated society). In this book “civilization” seems to be identified with maleness, and maleness is located in the sanitorium and the guesthouse, a controlled environment with its dining rooms and drawing rooms and intellectual conversation—and in the medical world, since this is a facility for medical treatment— and it is here that women are demeaned. The forest, on the other hand, is the home of the Tuntschi, female figures created by laborers out of sticks and moss and other forest detritus. It is a place both beautiful and enchanting—and dangerous. Men venture into the (female) forest, and the forest—in the form of the Schwӓrmerei, which Wojnich describes as redolent of mushrooms, moss, and earth—is brought into the guesthouse; boundaries are porous. Male and female, the guesthouse and the forest each have their secrets…and Wojnich is the last to know. But Wojnich has a secret of his own.   

And the title? A word created by the author. Empusa, in Greek mythology, was a shape-shifting female spirit who seduced young men, drank their blood, then devoured them.  

The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk 
Riverhead/Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 
302 pp. 

Web photo by Marek Piwnicki