The Horla

In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper-class, unmarried, bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish. This anguish occurs for four days after he sees a "superb three-mast" Brazilian ship and impulsively waves to it, unconsciously inviting the supernatural being aboard the boat to haunt his home. All around him, he senses the presence of a being that he later calls the "Horla". The torment that the Horla causes is first manifested physically: The narrator complains that he suffers from "an atrocious fever", and that he has trouble sleeping. He wakes up from nightmares with the chilling feeling that someone is watching him and "kneeling on [his] chest". Throughout the short story, the main character's sanity, or rather, his feelings of alienation, are put into question as the Horla progressively dominates his thoughts. Initially, the narrator himself questions his sanity, exclaiming "Am I going mad?" after having found his glass of water empty, despite not having drunk from it. He later decides that he is not, in fact, going mad, since he is fully "conscious" of his "state" and that he could indeed "analyze it with the most complete lucidity." The presence of the Horla becomes more and more intolerable to the protagonist, as it is "watching ... looking at ... [and] dominating" him. After reading about a large number of Brazilians who fled their homes, bemoaning the fact that "they are pursued, possessed, governed like human cattle by ... a species of vampire, which feeds on their life while they are asleep ... [and] drinks water", the narrator soon realizes the Horla was aboard the Brazilian three-mast boat that he had previously greeted. He feels so "lost" and "possessed" to the point that he is ready to kill the Horla. The narrator traps the Horla in a room and sets fire to the house, but forgets his servants, who perish in the fire. In the last lines of the story, faced with the persistence of the Horla's presence, he concludes suicide to be his only liberation. ==Background==

While the canonical version of the text is the 1887 novella, two earlier versions of the text demonstrate Maupassant's development of the central premise. ''Lettre d'un fou, translated into English as "Letter of a Madman", was published in the 17th February 1885 edition of Gil Blas'', under the pseudonym 'Maufrigneuse'. In the short story, the narrator writes a letter to a doctor describing his disillusionment with the world and his newfound ability to perceive a parallel invisible world. A later version of the text, also entitled Le Horla, was published in the 26 October 1886 edition of the newspaper Gil Blas. This version also sees the narrator impart his account to a group of doctors; this psychiatric context was dismissed from the final version of the text, which is written in the form of a journal. In the story, the narrator begins to see a figure who appears only when he is alone, and is only referred to as "He" or "Him". This figure inspires such terror in the protagonist that he is forced into marriage in order to resist being alone. These themes of alienation and a fear of solitude reoccur in "The Horla". It is likely that Maupassant was inspired by his own interest in hypnosis and psychiatry in writing the short story, having frequently attended the lectures of noted neurologist Dr Jean-Martin Charcot. ==Major themes==

The Horla's magnetic influence over the main character puts him in the same literary context as the double or doppelgänger, a field which had previously been explored in Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (1814), Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson" (1839), and Theophile Gautier's Avatar (1856). However, while in the traditional literary form of the double the perceived threat is a physical one capable of autonomy, in "The Horla" the titular creature is instead elusive and invisible, acting as a manifestation of the main character's solitude and anxiety. The Horla is characterised not as a physical being but as a "double-delusion", a means by which the narrator externalises his own depression into the physical world. It is no coincidence that he comes to the realisation that in order to destroy the Horla, he must destroy himself. ==Legacy==

Literature Reinterpretations of Maupassant's short story occur throughout horror fiction. In the short story "The Theater Upstairs" (1936) by Manly Wade Wellman, the plot revolves around characters watching a film adaptation of "The Horla". "The Horla" is the inspiration for Robert Sheckley's short story "The New Horla" (2000) in his collection Uncanny Tales. The American horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft is said to have been inspired by the story, with his 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu" having been particularly influenced by it. Horlas are mentioned or featured in several stories from the Tales of the Shadowmen series, including one story where a Horla menaces occult detective Thomas Carnacki. Kingsley Amis's first novel Lucky Jim (1954, chapter 6) describes Jim Dixon, a guest lecturer at a university, waking in a guestroom owned by the senior colleague whose good will he is depending on to continue in his job the next academic year, discovering he has fallen asleep drunk, and burned holes through blankets and sheets and on a bedside table. "Had he done this all to himself? Or had a wayfarer, a burglar, camped out in his room? Or was he the victim of some Horla fond of tobacco?" The Bartimaeus Sequence (2003–2010) features as powerful spirits, who appear as shadowy apparitions that cause madness in humans similar to the titular Horla of the short story. Film and television • The first cinematic adaptation was Zlatcha Notch (1914), translated as "The Terrible Night", by Russian film director Yevgeni Bauer. • The movie Diary of a Madman (1963) is loosely based on "The Horla". • Tim Lucas has argued that "The Horla" is also an influence on Mario Bava's story "Telephone", featured in his film Black Sabbath (1963). • Jean-Daniel Pollet directed a film adaptation called Le Horla in 1966. • The Star Trek episode "Wolf in the Fold" (1967), scripted by Robert Bloch, features an evil, primordial psychic entity that contains echoes of the Horla. • Le Horla, a 2023 television film directed by Marion Desseigne-Ravel and starring Bastien Bouillon in the primary role, first broadcast on Arte on 2 June 2023. Freely inspired by Maupassant's story, the film is transposed to the modern day. Radio Maupassant's short story has had a number of different radio adaptations: • "The Horla" was adapted for the syndicated radio program The Weird Circle in the 1940s. This has been considered one of Lorre's most powerful radio performances; in the end of the broadcast, Lorre breaks the boundaries of the narrative by stating the fact that the "real" Peter Lorre is still being menaced by the Horla while broadcasting on the radio. • The Hall of Fantasy radio show aired an episode on September 5, 1952, called "The Shadow People", which makes reference to the Horla. Music • "The Horla" is the title of a song from the British heavy metal band Angel Witch, appearing on their 2012 album As Above, So Below. • The concept album ''D'Après Le Horla De Maupassant'' by Canadian progressive rock band The Box is based on "The Horla". • The third track of French hip-hop artist Nekfeu's debut album, Feu, is entitled "Le Horla". Comics The story was adapted into the comic book Le Horla written by and illustrated by Éric Puech. It was first published in 2012 but quickly withdrawn due to a conflict between the publisher and distributor. It was republished in 2022. ==References==