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So I recently watched Tarkovsky's Stalker, an eminently wanky, pretentious arthouse film I was fully expecting not to like. The plot is simple - three characters (the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor) conduct a pilgrimage through a wasteland called the Zone, supposedly filled with traps, to reach a room at the centre that's said to grant people their greatest desire.
I am the furthest thing from a cinephile you can imagine (I truly hate most of what New Hollywood put out, for example, and that's way less wanky than Tarkovsky), but I ended up watching the full thing and being thoroughly transfixed the whole way, and I can't really even explain why. The pacing is slothlike and tends to linger on specific moments, with an average shot length of over a minute and a total runtime of almost three hours, and not very much happens throughout the film - but there's such a dreamlike and liminal quality to the filmmaking that it doesn't really matter. The film fosters a trance-like rhythm that lulls you into a reverie and gradually accustoms you to its slow pace.
The Zone portrayed in the movie feels downright haunted, in spite of little that's overtly supernatural in it; the site is overrun with overgrown tanks from previous aborted military expeditions into the area, and abandoned industrial structures that were built on the site before it became anomalous. All the characters, particularly the Stalker, treat the area with a certain reverence, and you're constantly waiting for the Zone to react to the presence of the main characters. The film is perhaps the only one I've seen which perfectly captures the feeling of being in an empty church or temple, perhaps with all the candles somehow still lit or incense still burning, and being overcome with that ineffable sense of hallowedness which religious spaces inherently evoke. The kind of reverie which makes you feel as if you shouldn't speak loudly, because it somehow feels like doing so would be to defile the very space in which you're standing. I think the lack of any clear and explicitly spelled-out threat only intensifies that feeling, it almost creates a sense of pareidolia where you're assigning supernatural explanations onto events in the film, and given that Tarkovsky was a committed Orthodox Christian who infused the film with a lot of religious imagery, I find it hard to believe that this was not intentional.
Apparently Tarkovsky was incredibly fastidious about every shot in the movie, at one point asking that all the dandelions be picked out of a field before shooting. As such the filming process was arduous, with at least one reshoot required due to improper development of the film. An aspect of this that makes Stalker even more surreal to watch is that the production possibly killed much of the crew - all the shots in the Zone were filmed around a small river nearby a half-working hydroelectric station which was actually contaminated by a chemical plant upstream. Tarkovsky, his wife, and the actor that played the Writer all died from lung cancer after the filming of the movie.
I could analyse the movie to death (to be honest I didn't find the main thrust that difficult to glean), but it's a movie you feel in your gut more than pick apart, and as the director himself said:
Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.
In line with his filmmaking philosophy, it's a movie that's probably not going to click with everyone, and I don't think there's a coherent argument that could be made for why someone should like it. It's just a vibe.
Watching the video, he's talking about a completely different thing - he's addressing the recent sensationalised claims of megastructures under the pyramid of Giza using SAR, where skepticism is absolutely warranted. There are many reasons to doubt that their methodology could detect anything that deep - nevertheless, everyone has publicised these claims in spite of their questionable nature and a lack of historical documentation attesting to any of these structures.
OTOH the proposed location of the labyrinth is nowhere near Giza, it was a much older find, and is completely unrelated to this controversy.
The Labyrinth at Hawara
In Egypt, there is an enigmatic labyrinth, greater and more lavish than even the pyramids, attested to by ancient classical sources which has attained almost legendary status in the Western world ever since Herodotus described it in his Histories:
"[T]hey caused to be made a labyrinth, situated a little above the lake of Moiris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles. This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth, though it is true that both the temple at Ephesos and that at Samos are works worthy of note. The pyramids also were greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred. The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, going through them, and we tell of them having looked upon them with our own eyes; but the chambers under ground we heard about only; for the Egyptians who had charge of them were not willing on any account to show them, saying that here were the sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. Accordingly we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts. Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of forty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground."
Herodotus describes it as a multi-tiered structure nearby a lake named "Moiris", with one set of chambers above the ground, and yet another set of chambers beneath it which outsiders were forbidden from entering due to housing the sepulchres of its kings. Just the surface level of this labyrinthine mortuary temple seems to have floored him to the extent he declared it superior to the pyramids, and superior to anything built by the Greeks. This labyrinth would also be described by the Greek geographer Strabo in his book Geographica 17, writing that at Lake Moeris there was a Labyrinth "comparable to the pyramids, and, near it, the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth."
Despite likely never seeing this labyrinth himself, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus would go on to assert that the labyrinth was constructed by a native king named Mendes, who "did not accomplish anything at all, but he did build himself a tomb known as the Labyrinth,48 which was not so remarkable for its size as it was impossible to imitate in respect to its ingenious design; for a man who enters it cannot easily find his way out, unless he gets a guide who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure. 3 And some say that Daedalus, visiting Egypt and admiring the skill shown in the building, also constructed for Minos, the king of Crete, a labyrinth like the one in Egypt, in which was kept, as the myth relates, the beast called Minotaur. 4 However, the labyrinth in Crete has entirely disappeared, whether it be that some ruler razed it to the ground or that time effaced the work, but the one in Egypt has stood intact in its entire structure down to our lifetime." So he even goes as far as to claim that Knossos was inspired by the Egyptian labyrinth.
It seems that the structure has degraded significantly from the time of Diodorus to now, because this mighty labyrinth appears to have been long stripped from the Earth, and barely anything remains. The Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard identified current-day Hawara as the likely location of the labyrinth, drawing extensively from ancient descriptions of the location. There is a lake at that location, albeit shrunken from the original size of Lake Moeris, and sure enough, there is also a pyramid there - the pyramid of Amenemhat III, which is likely the tomb which Strabo recounts in his description of the location. When archaeologists investigated the location, things seemed to match up satisfactorily - except for the labyrinth itself. There was almost no trace of it, and few archeological remains could be found near the site. Flinders Petrie, upon visiting the site in 1889, found an enormous 300m x 244m artificial stone plateau - apparently the foundation of the labyrinth - and suggested the original labyrinth had been quarried for stone. This was the archaeological consensus up until relatively recently.
The Mataha Expedition, a geophysical study conducted by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, was carried out in March of 2008. It was done with the permission of Zahi Hawass, president of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and carried out with the support of Ghent University. They used ground-penetrating radar to examine the site at Hawara, and their research "confirms the presence of archaeological features at the labyrinth area south of the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhet III. These features covering an underground area of several hectares, have the prominent signature of vertical walls on the geophysical results. The vertical walls with an average thickness of several meters, are connected to shape nearly closed rooms, which are interpreted to be huge in number." This nexus of rooms and walls that they interpret as a labyrinth is completely submerged below the water table at this point, and above it there is a much more haphazard set of observations which appear to be decayed mudbrick features - likely the remains of a Roman settlement. In between the two layers of this underground structure there is the large stone slab identified by Petrie, and the authors posit that this was not the foundation of the structure, but its roof instead. Upon presentation of the scan results at the Ghent University public lecture, Hawass requested that the team stop communicating their results, "intimidating the Mataha Expedition team members with Egyptian National Security sanctions."
In other words, the Labyrinth of Hawara may have been quietly rediscovered over 17 years ago, and this find seems to have been buried in a way where it has gotten almost no mainstream attention. As far as I can tell the original study that located the labyrinth released to nothing but deafening silence, with only a small handful of obscure tabloids covering it. The most mainstream it's ever been was when Joe Rogan hosted a content creator in his podcast who brought attention to the possible discovery, and that's pretty much the most high-profile coverage it's ever gotten. No proper front-page coverage in mainstream media outlets. Nothing that would bring it to the attention of your average Joe on the street.
Meanwhile, the results of the Mataha Expedition have been independently reconfirmed multiple times now. In 2010, the authors of a study named "VLF-EM study for archaeological investigation of the labyrinth mortuary temple complex at Hawara area, Egypt" applied VLF-EM (very low frequency electromagnetic method) techniques to the site at Hawara, and found subsurface features consistent with descriptions by Herodotus. "[S]omewhat elongated and square filtered in-phase VLF-EM anomalies can be observed. They are approximately oriented in the SE-NW and NE-SW directions. These anomalies are produced from alternative positive (good conductors) and negative (bad conductors) peaks. These linear features may be interpreted as the remains of the labyrinth, which was described by Herodotus (II, 148–9): the visitor was guided from courtyards into rooms into galleries into more rooms and from there into more courtyards. Strabo (ca. 64 BC–19 AD) also described the labyrinth as hidden chambers, which are long and large in number and have paths running through one another that twist and turn." The location map they provide confirms this to be the very same structure the Mataha expedition analysed.
In 2023, yet another paper was written about it summarising the results of both the Mataha expedition and the VLF-EM studies, and supplementing that with further evidence. According to this author, there was even a 3d reconstruction of the subsurface features at some point, revealing at least two levels to the structure, but no accompanying scientific paper detailing their methodology was ever published, making it difficult to substantiate or check their findings. The author presents results from his studies of the site with Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar, where he finds the following: "Below the pyramid in what is believed to be a mortuary complex are at least three returns that are rectangular in shape. One of the delineated regions (B) is about 275,000 sq. feet – almost the estimated size as the rectangular area excavated by Petrie. Another region (C) may be the continuation of the above structure. A second rectangular area (D) west of the Abdul Wahbi canal is also evident in the SAR image. The lack of visible structures in Google Earth imagery over these areas suggests the possibility that these returns could be subsurface features." Note though that this specific study is using SAR, which is cost-effective but has extremely low subsurface penetration and is far from the best tool to detect extensive underground structures, so this must be taken alongside all the other evidence and not in isolation.
A more thorough study with a better setup for the task was conducted in 2024 using electrical resistivity tomography, which is a non-invasive geophysical technique that creates images of the subsurface using the spatial distribution of electrical resistivity within the ground. They found that "Based on the resultant ERT profiles conducted at the area and its surroundings and the extracted resistivity values across different profiles, it has been realized that the ERT profiles that cross the labyrinth area south of the pyramid show areas of very high resistivity values that appear in purple color and high resistivity values that appear in orange and yellow colors. These values could indicate an empty volume (Open cavity, Shafts, Halls, Rooms,…etc) that may reflect the presence of possible subsurface archaeological remains, as pointed by arrows in Figs (4 to 7)."
It really strikes me just how possibly staggering these findings are, yet they're completely unknown by your average member of the public - at least one that isn't highly interested in archaeology or Egyptology. If it's actually the site attested to by the ancient Greeks, this might well be one of the most interesting unexcavated sites from antiquity I've seen (second only to Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum), and hopefully more work will be done to preserve and investigate it in the future. And hopefully it gets opened to the public within my lifetime. I for one would like to be able to follow in the footsteps of Herodotus and see the remains of this massive mortuary temple with my own eyes.
EDIT: added more studies, clarified certain methodological points
Pretty much all of the most stirring and wondrous fiction I have read is inextricably tangled up with existential horror. Oddly enough, I think this feeling is most straightforwardly illustrated in a 1908 children's book, The Wind in the Willows - it's all based on bedtime stories the author told his son, and in line with this the vast majority of the book consists of extremely comfortable and idyllic stories of life in the English countryside. But there's one chapter that's completely distinct from the rest, named The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in which the Mole and the Rat venture into the woods to look for a lost baby otter, and start being lured into the wilderness by a pagan god:
Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees— crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.
'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror— indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy— but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'
'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'
It is only a side story unconnected to the main narrative thread - this brief delve into the cosmic is completely out of place and comes out of nowhere, and plays no part in the story going forward - but it's by far the most memorable chapter in the collection. It was removed from many versions of the book because it was deemed too strange or too creepy for its target audience. Now, this chapter certainly has a lot more of a positive and uplifiting tone than much horror, Pan here is depicted as a benign presence, but it does carry with it a haunting supernatural vibe that's merely incidental and necessary for such an encounter.
I feel as if a lot of the best horror fiction gives me a more extreme version of that same feeling - it isn't gratuitous; it's just an intrinsic part of confronting something (an entity or a concept) that by nature inherently threatens your sense of security and place in the world. It's the deep-seated, queasy emptiness and awe you get when you first realise on a gut level just how truly vast and gaping the distances between planets are even in our own stellar neighbourhood; it's the kind of memetic virus that has you staring absent-mindedly into your morning coffee once it crops up in your train of thought. Shock (the thing a lot of bad horror films optimise for) is one thing. Horror is another. Done right, it's deeply affecting in a way I barely find in any other fiction.
I don't think the chemical plant was disused, rather it was emitting waste into the water and it's not implausible that it emitted fumes as well. Apparently the crew were getting allergic reactions on their faces as well during production.
Admittedly this is based on a statement by the sound designer Vladimir Sharun, and it's not quite clear how supported his claim is. But it's a thing that's been weaved into the mythology of the movie.
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