Screen to Scream: The Lighthouse and Punishment by Hope

The ocean. It covers two/thirds of the planet, yet humanity still fears it. Sure, we swim in it, float boats on top of it, and we even go underneath it for long periods of time, thanks to the wonders of engineering. But the ocean is still frightening. Within its depths, there is no air for us to breathe, the pressure can crush you like an empty beer can, and there are many monsters with teeth, tentacle, and stinger that could easily kill you. In Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Hooper weren’t just afraid of the shark but of the water that was Jaws’s turf. So in a nutshell, the sea can be terrifying and a great setting for horror. Two examples of this are the Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse and Erik Hofstatter’s bizarre tale Punishment by Hope.

The plot of The Lighthouse is pretty easy to explain: In the 1890’s two men (played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe)  try to maintain their sanity while working at a lighthouse on a remote New England island. They spectacularly fail to hold onto sanity. But there’s also a lot going on within the movie itself that goes beyond both men doing their best impression of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. Viewers are given an intimate view of the two men gradually getting on each other’s nerves until those taut nerves snap. Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake is a stern taskmaster, constantly giving Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow a variety of taxing chores while banning him from the lighthouse’s light. Ephraim Winslow, a less-than-model employee, begins to see strange things from sea monsters to mermaids to the man who had his old job. This eventually leads to a violent confrontation between the two men and their mutual ruin. Rife with symbolism and playing on many established myths and tropes, from the siren leading seafaring men to their deaths to the story of Prometheus, The Lighthouse is a hallucinogenic journey down the dark and briney rabbit hole, a mythic tragedy underscoring the dangers of tempting fate, the sea, or whatever lives at the top of the lighthouse.

While The Lighthouse is grounded in the reality of the sea around New England in the 1890’s, Hofstatter’s Punishment by Hope takes place on the sea in an entirely different plane of existence. Nim spends his time longing for a mysterious woman who constantly refuses his advances. No matter how many times he swims to her, no matter what kinds of burdens he carries for her, she rejects him despite her becoming the center of his universe. If Hofstatter’s story plays on the siren myth, it flips the script by having the object of desire actively reject that role. What is assured is the sense of overwhelming tragedy that gradually pulls Nim into a deal that might be called a Faustian deal if it were on dry land, but may make readers, perhaps unfairly, think of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid (not so much the Disney version). To reveal too much about the story takes away from its power, but it also might not even be the point. Hofstatter excels not in creating a tight narrative but in creating a surreal fever dream that reads like epic poetry, carrying readers along on waves of gorgeous metaphors to this tale’s conclusion. Like The Lighthouse and Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods, Punishment by Hope is less like reading a story and more like drowning in the imagery of a painting that draws the eye and sucks you in. Both film and book are works of art where viewers and readers can get lost in the various swirls of black, white, blue, and red that are both artists’ individual palettes.