The Lighthouse — A Haunting Gaze Into Prometheus’s Fire

★★★★★

O what Protean forms swim up from men’s minds, and melt in hot Promethean plunder, scorching eyes, with divine shames and horror… And casting them down to Davy Jones. The others, still blind, yet in it see all the divine graces and to Fiddler’s Green sent, where no man is suffered to want or toil, but is… Ancient… Mutable and unchanging as the she who girdles ‘round the globe.”

Amongst the iconography of fiction, few symbols are as enduring as the lighthouse. Long before Robert Eggers turned one into the setting for psychological horror, lighthouses had already become a familiar fixture of literature, painting, and cinema, standing at the edge of civilization where guidance and danger exist side by side. Like the haunted castle, the lonely road, or the abandoned basement, the lighthouse carries with it a language audiences instinctively understand. It is a place of isolation, mystery, obsession, and the unknown. It is little wonder that BioShock Infinite would later echo the sentiment. “There’s always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city.” The image has become so deeply embedded in storytelling that it transcends any single work. Eggers understands this tradition, and rather than simply using the lighthouse as a backdrop, he builds an entire psychological nightmare around the ideas it has…