Shadow Benders
On using horror for good
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In the film Doctor Sleep, based on Stephen King’s novel by the same name and the sequel to The Shining, we follow Danny Torrance as he contends with his past at the haunted Overlook Hotel.
The ghosts that stalked the Overlook and drove his father to alcohol-fueled homicide keep following him, specifically the decomposing old bathtub lady who seduced his father and menaced Danny. The ghosts of his traumatic past are haunting him long after the trauma is done.
Early in the film, the spirit of his old mentor Dick Holloran appears to him and gives him a weapon against the ghosts.
“World’s a hungry place,” Holloran tells the little boy, “and the darkest things are the hungriest, and they eat what shines, swarm it like mosquitoes or leeches, can’t do nothing about that. What you can do is turn what they come for against them.”
Holloran tells Danny that there is a method to combat the Dark Things and gives him a gift.
“My Grandfather,” Holloran says, “he was a mean son of a bitch. Dark inside, same type of dark as your dad. Beat me senseless, and my grandma too, and when he died, I danced. But he kept on coming back, standing in my room, suit all gray and stinkin’ from whatever mold was growing on him in that box.
“So, Grandma, she taught me a trick. Gave me a present.”
Holloran unveils a small wooden box and hands it to Danny.
“I want you to know this box inside and out. Don’t just look at it, touch it. Stick your nose inside and see if there’s a smell.”
“Why?” Danny asks.
“Because you’re gonna build one just like it in your mind – one even more special. So next time that bitch comes around again, you’ll be ready.”
Stephen King, in his genius, is simultaneously describing the human condition of being haunted by our pasts and giving us a tool to combat it.
I won’t give spoilers for the rest of the story, except to say that Danny’s box becomes a sort of superpower. His ghosts haven’t gone away; they are contained. Finally contained, he has agency over them.
What I am calling Dark, or Shadow, or Ghosts, are the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Sometimes, these stories are well and truly Trauma with a capital T: an unusual and life-threatening situation that the brain struggles to consolidate. Far more often, though, The Dark is a self-destructive story rooted in our pasts that has metastasized across our minds.
Every single one of us has ghosts. Each of us has suffered in some tangible, brutal way. If you haven’t yet, you will. Someone close to you has died. You have witnessed or experienced violence, neglect, and evil, or you have endured horrific mental suffering. Perhaps you have been the villain: you have done the neglecting, the abusing, the betraying, and you now carry the weight of that moral injury. To be human is to be haunted.
Mental suffering is often a malady of attention and a loss of agency over how we direct it. The ghosts from our pasts appear in our doorways at three AM and impose themselves on us. We no longer have control over our minds; the ghosts are in control. As Dick Holloran said, the darkest things are the hungriest, and they feed on us.
The Dark will not go away. How, then, do we practice agency over it? How do we direct our attention towards or away from it as we will and, like Danny Torrence, use the dark for good?
We become Shadow Benders.
“Shadow bending” is a nod to the popular anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which characters control certain elements, hence “water bending” and “air bending.” We can do something similar with our own Shadows.
As my friend and mentor Gareth Higgins - The Porch once told me, “Let your horror become part of your hero.”
