Hidden Pictures

Hidden Pictures pays homage to familiar horror tropes but finds new ways to explore and expand them. In the case of Hidden Pictures, one of the most classic tropes of all is at the heart of the story: the sensitive child who may or may not be in contact with the spirit world.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959, is a central example of this trope. Much of Stephen King’s work is—by his own words—indebted to Jackson. Books like It and The Shining make the fact that children can see through the veil of the supernatural in ways that adults cannot their major sources of tension and conflict. William Peter Blatty’s novel (and film) The Exorcist caused horror and controversy in audiences of the time precisely because of the child’s proximity to the supernatural. M. Night Shyamalan reinvigorated this formula with The Sixth Sense, in which the main character—a young boy—sees dead people, even though no one else around him can.

The idea of a child being in touch with mystical realms can be traced back to changelings in folklore. Changelings occur in many different cultures’ myths, most famously in Scandinavian and Irish countries. Without more scientific means to discern natural phenomena, unexplainable happenings were often blamed on faeries, trolls, or other invisible and magical folk whom humans couldn’t see. These folk usually lived in the woods and were known to steal human children and replace them with one of their own, who inevitably failed to live up to the parents’ expectations for the child. Children with illnesses, disabilities, or other traits the parents found undesirable were often accused of being changelings. These “changelings” were frequently abused, cast out, or abandoned by their families in the hopes of the return of their “original child.” The idea of the changeling throughout the horror genre plays on parents’ fears that with their greater curiosity and promise, children are at greater risk of loss to dark and corrupting forces. In Hidden Pictures, this trope is turned on its head, as it’s a corporeal anti-mother (Caroline) who steals Margit’s child.

Another familiar trope the author employs in Hidden Pictures is the framing of Caroline and Ted Maxwell as skeptics. Stories including elements that strain belief—or that threaten to take prestige or money away from a character—frequently include a skeptical character to serve as a foil to the believers and serve to placate the reader’s sense of disbelief. On The X-Files, Agent Scully’s job was to serve as a stalwart skeptic to Mulder’s immediate acceptance of nearly all inexplainable phenomena and urban legends. In books and films like The Exorcist, even the ranking theological leaders initially scoff at the idea that a legitimate possession might deserve their attention. The purpose of the skeptic character is to add tension to the narrative and make the reader question whether there might be a rational explanation for the events of the novel. The skeptic also serves as a foil to the protagonist and is a vehicle to drive the protagonist further into the supernatural.

Rekulak plays with the skeptic trope in that Ted and Caroline are not skeptics. They know that Margit is haunting them, and they know that they murdered her. Yet they must profess an aggressive, scornful skepticism of anything outside of the hard sciences because they still don’t want the spiritual realm to be real, despite everything they’ve seen. They are naïve enough to think that the ghost will torment Mallory instead of them simply because they place her in Margit’s presence. The Maxwells go to exhausting—and futile—lengths to escape their just rewards, and Rekulak uses their plight in Hidden Pictures to create a story that will feel both fresh and familiar to fans of horror.