Black mold is spreading through contemporary popular culture: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011), Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015), Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017), Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the 3rd Floor (2019), the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story), and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020).
Spreading black mold, and death, in The Haunting of Hill House‘s “red room”
In most of these narratives, black mold seems to represent death: black mold sprouts up in the places characters have died or have been killed. Black mold doesn’t only signal individual death, however; it can also tell stories about species death, about the end of the human race. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent surge in stories about black mold is no doubt driven in part by contemporary anxieties about the fate of humans in a changing climate: black mold spreads where and when humans are not. Black mold flourishes in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.”[i]
