Small town, big secrets, generational trauma, sins of the fathers: Field of Frights has all the right ingredients for a horror novel. Christina Hagmann’s novel explores themes like grief, friendship, and the connection between siblings and reads like an ode to slasher movies, a tip of the hat to movies that shaped palates in the horror genre. Indeed, the author is a horror fanatic, and so it comes as no surprise that she picks Wisconsin as the setting in which the story takes place: It is a state rich in folklore, myths, and legends, which the book goes on to exploit.
It is 1973 and Maggie Peterson is at a dwindling Halloween Festival near Archer’s Field with a boy named Evan Dawson. Evan has recently moved to Wisconsin and quickly warmed up to Maggie. He persuades her to go into Archer’s Field so they can be alone under the stars. Maggie is only out this late because her parents are enjoying an adult party, and she is hesitant, recalling what she thinks is an old wives’ tale about “the Harvested Man,” who kills anyone who dares step into his field—especially teenagers on All Hallows’ Eve. Evan, though, takes it as a story meant to keep them from having fun and convinces her to come with him. He grabs a blanket and whiskey, and they enter the field. They find a nice cozy spot, share a kiss—and hear a strange sound. Evan brushes it off, but a creature emerges from the maze in front of them. They make a run for the parking lot but are stopped by some kind of invisible barrier. Evan decides to sacrifice himself and the next morning Maggie is found near the barrier with no trace of Evan.
In the present day, Alex Morgan is grieving the absence of her brother, Marcus. It’s been three months since his disappearance. The police and townsfolk alike believe he is dead, but Alex strongly feels he’s still alive. She blames herself for not driving him home on the night he disappeared, opting to go for a celebratory shake with her soccer teammates instead. She finds herself back at school not by her will but by the school’s mandate—and on her first day back she has to contend with learning her friends Liv and Danny, to whom she hasn’t spoken since her brother’s demise, have got together. (She feels betrayed, in truth: She and Danny were almost a thing before all this happened and she shut everyone out.) To make matters worse, she starts finding letters in her locker and at home stating that she will find her brother in Archer’s Field on the night of the harvest festival.
Field of Frights pays mindful homage to movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Friday the 13th (1980), and Halloween (1978), not only in explicit mention but through the tropes, themes, and characterisation it employs, and often in more ways than one. We see this most clearly in the character of Ethan, the young film fanatic who moves to Field Park with a mission: to investigate and document the existence of “the Harvested Man.” Very well versed in Field Park’s history with the paranormal, he even writes an article about the place before moving to Wisconsin. It’s Ethan who connects Marcus’s disappearance to Archer’s Field and acts as a catalyst in speeding up the reconciliation of Alex’s friend group: He convinces Sarah to throw a party near Archer’s Field on the night of the harvest festival.
Just as Ethan enters this story as a young filmmaker inspired by reading pieces about the place he comes to save, Wes Craven’s inspiration for the film A Nightmare on Elm Street was several newspaper articles:
It was a series of articles in the LA Times, three small articles about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and who had died in the middle of nightmares—and the paper never correlated them, never said, “Hey, we’ve had another story like this.”
In Field of Frights, too, Ethan wonders why the town has never made the connection between the various disappearances. Creatively, Hagmann also has her story include the disappearances of migrant workers who work for the Foster family during the festival.
Ethan is not the only horror nerd in the novel. Another from Alex’s friend group, Ben, comes complete with a pair of glasses and an interest in math and gadgets. But Ethan’s obsession with myths, legends, and the paranormal earns him the title of “The Mad Scientist,” and he proves quite methodical in how he inserts himself in the friends’ lives, inspiring the fifth friend, Sarah, to plan a party near Archer’s Field. It is his own little “experiment.” The “madness” part, meanwhile, comes out most clearly in Archer’s Field, when the gang is literally faced with danger—and he still presses on in wanting to document the Harvested Man, getting his evidence on camera despite the tension. Of course, it is this kind of enthusiasm that blinds him and eventually gets him killed whilst conducting his little experiment.
In Alex Morgan we see another trope, that of the final girl. From the start, we can see that she is set to survive it all—but not, it transpires, without earning it. Before she was even trapped in Archer’s Field, she was already trapped in the field of grief into which she had also pulled her friends. She shuns her friends in a bid to punish herself for her brother’s disappearance—but indirectly punishes her friends, and her parents, whom she also pushes away.
In Sarah’s character, meanwhile, we see the scream queen, taking perhaps special inspiration from the movie franchise Scream (1996-). Sarah exhibits damsel in distress traits synonymous with scream queens—and the memorable screams, too. Piercing and realistic, they convey terror as a hallmark of the role. Sarah showcases this at the Festival, when she enters a haunted house attraction with Alex and Liv. Though she knows it’s not real, her screams are evidently realistic: “Sarah let out a blood-curdling scream that made Alex want to press her hands over her ears.”
Hagmann brings her monster to life, too, by shopping for characteristics in classic teen horror movies, incorporating them diligently into a story all its own. the Harvested Man has blades for fingers, which he uses to cut open his victims; Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street also has blades for fingers, which he uses for stabbing, cutting, and ripping open his victims. the Harvested Man takes his height trait from Jason of Friday the 13th: The latter is 6’5”, the former 7’. He takes his fashion sense from Michael Myers in Halloween, wearing a simple, monochrome suit, soiled and in tatters. He wears two masks—both Jason’s burlap sack and the leather face of Texas Chainsaw, moving between them to torment, manipulate, and deceive his victims.
But the masks also bring out the novel’s particular themes. The burlap sack represents the unknown, shown when one of the friends asks the monster to remove it and they see nothing beneath it but void and darkness. Likewise, when the Harvested Man wears the faces of his victims he shows us the true villains of the piece: When Sarah’s brother, Mikey, asks the monster to remove his sack so he can see his true face, the Harvested Man responds by gouging out his eyes and putting them in the mask’s two holes.
Also like Freddy, the Harvested Man’s beef is with teenagers, because their organs are fresh and “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” (The adults he kills for sport.) Sarah and Mikey, we learn, are the children of Maggie Peterson, now Margaret Foster, and is her spitting image. The darkness of the maze symbolises how in the dark she is about her mother’s past and present, but it is also where hidden secrets come out in the open. For example, Maggie often forbids her daughter from going near Archer’s Field, but she does not find out why until the night of the festival. Maggie never reveals her past to her daughter; but her daughter comes face-to-face with it in the field. Similarly, of course, in A Nightmare on Elm Street Marge only eventually discloses to Nancy that Freddy Krueger was a child murderer who was burned alive by the victims’ parents as vigilante justice.
In Field of Frights, the Harvested Man, too, was a victim of vigilante justice, at the hands of the residents of Field Park. Born Elias Whitmore, he was a doctor who harvested body parts from dying or dead patients to study further; the residents, in their misunderstanding, dismembered him alive and threw his remains in Archer’s Field. He has haunted it ever since. The “sins of the father” theme is highlighted when Sarah herself comes face-to-face with “the Harvested Man,” just as her mother before her. Though Sarah survives this ordeal, unlike Alex she holds no final girl qualities: Like the Harvested Man, parts of her are left in the field, figuratively and literally. Indeed, Sarah ultimately loses her mother and brother, even her voice. Once a bubbly person, the only things with which she leaves the maze are trauma, grief, and a tarnished family name.
The maze thus becomes a place where the past and the present collide. We come to see just how much Maggie’s son, too, was carrying on his shoulders: The future heir of the family empire, he must keep his mother’s secrets, and not just about her past encounter at Archer’s Field. He goes on to kidnap Marcus in an effort to cover up the fact that they were kidnapping migrant workers who worked for them, feeding them to the Harvested Man.
Though Maggie tries to put the past behind her, she only succeeds in passing it all on—not only her looks but generational trauma. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy realizes that Krueger is fueled by his victims’ fear; she calmly turns her back on him, and Krueger evaporates. In Field of Frights, too, we find out that the Harvested Man not only harvests body parts but emotions: He uses Alex’s grief to pull her and her friends into the field, manipulating Maggie’s son to leave letters about Marcus in her room and locker at school. Had Alex controlled her emotions like Marge, the Harvested Man would have disappeared for her, as for many he is just a myth; yet in this novel, if Alex didn’t let herself feel her emotions, she would have ended up like Maggie—who, by bottling it up, only led to tragedy. And would have still lost her brother. The novel seems to highlight how important it is for us to feel every emotion, yet not let the negative ones fester so much that they feed upon every facet of our lives, growing and giving birth to monstrosities. The secrets and trauma that Maggie passed on to her son gave birth to what later became of her son: a kidnapper, a human trafficker, a monster.
Likewise, in the maze Liv acts as a mirror for Alex. Killed by the Harvested Man and reanimated to help turn the friends on each other, she highlights Alex’s flaws: Because of her grief, Alex does not fully know how much she damages her friendships. Liv highlights how unfair of Alex it was to shun them all—and to get mad when Liv found refuge in Danny’s arms:
“I’m talking about how you destroyed our friendship the moment something bad happened to you,” Liv spat, and all that calm composure was gone, replaced by bitter rage.
“You just had to exist and everyone fell over themselves to make sure precious Alex got what she wanted. Even when what you wanted was—’’
“The kind who takes and takes and never gives back. The kind who expects the world to revolve around her problems, always so needy, so desperate for everyone’s attention and sympathy.”
the Harvested Man clearly harvests the worst emotions Liv had within her. Yet Hagmann also uses the maze as a place for contemplation and reflection for Alex (who again shows a bit of self-centeredness when she keeps casting herself as the victim instead of Marcus). Liv says what needs to be said, and so causes the death and rebirth of Alex in the maze—she moves from an ego-centric and selfish person to a more considerate one.
Field of Frights, then, isn’t just another horror story. It speaks deeply to the field of hurts we have inside us, the unresolved traumas that linger and control us. Unaddressed, they become a barrier preventing us from moving forward in life. These barriers force us to face the monsters within us, kill them, and be victorious, but that can only be done if we know what they are. the Harvested Man borrows organs, body parts, and faces; but he most enjoys the psychological torture of his victims, as when Sarah runs to him thinking it’s her mother. (Of course, he takes this capacity for similarity from Scream’s Ghostface, who uses a voice modulator to instill fear.) He represents unresolved generational trauma—decades of multiple horror stories, like the movies this novel draws on for its layers—that was never healed and calls us to do shadow work, so we do not become hurt people that hurt other people. But Marge, Mikey, and Liv, though dead, manage in the end to defeat him because they came to know what he really was: “Nothing but a parasite that’s fed too long on this place.”