“The great writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole. The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks in it, and still not fall in. It can no longer swallow us up. And we can get on with things.”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
My parents aren’t thrilled with my favorite genre.
My mother and father both come from largely secular childhoods, and it wasn’t until much later that they discovered religion together. They went all in, so to speak—it’s a famous and often repeated anecdote in our family’s oral tradition that my older brothers (or just one of them?) had to get rid of the Star Wars bed sheets that they were gifted. The way my brothers tell it, this stunted their childhood and radically altered the outcome of their lives.
I still remember standing in front of our childhood home during the summertime—back when I could sprint across our gravel driveway with bare feet—and selling our Dungeons & Dragons game at a garage sale for probably around $0.50. I have no idea where we would have even gotten it in the first place, because god knows we never played it. Another ill-advised gift, I’m sure. To me it was just a curiosity—an ark of unspeakably mysterious origins, which probably emitted a quiet, abyssal whisper if the room was quiet and you got close enough.
Later, I played a game on PC called Dungeon Keeper (loaned by a friend, no doubt) in which the player builds crypts and traps and dead-ends, before luring the valiant knight in only to be devoured or destroyed. My critical error was keeping the box of this game: on its cover was depicted a leering demon, and the tagline: “Evil is good.” Of course my parents eventually stumbled across the box, and needless to say that was the end of my knight-slaughtering days. That tagline was the most plainly stated perversion of everything my parents believed most deeply; I’m sure they agonized over how close I had come to eternal damnation, and wondered at how they had failed at parenthood so spectacularly.
One of my favorite traditions throughout my childhood and adolescence was going to Blockbuster on a Friday night. I loved the whole ritual of it. Walking through the aisles of the store was to me like time spent in a sanctum, or at least something close to it. Each video cover was a door to somewhere else, and I would stand in front of them the way people stand in front of fine art—with a gentle but insistent curiosity, a careful seeking of something true and exciting.
The horror titles in the store may have well been bound by heavy chain, protected by an armored guard with an itchy trigger finger. Their covers were either scandalously lurid, or obliquely terrifying in their bleak chiaroscuro. Considering them for movie night was of course not an option, but their unavailability instilled a latent intrigue that settled somewhere in the back of my mind for years, lurking quietly like the monster in the first act of a movie I had never seen.
Perhaps there are just two types of people in the world: the sheltered kid who discovers with innocent awe an entire world of ugly, beautiful dangers, and the worldly kid who knows nothing different, and gets to poke fun at their wholesome friend. You don’t have to guess which one I was. But I had a childhood friend named Jeremy who had two older brothers and a closet full of movies, many of them belonging to the vast and whispering Untouchable Collection.
Many of the movies I saw in the next year or two at Jeremy’s house shaped my young adulthood and the way that I saw and appreciated the world—Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Evil Dead, Snatch, Goldeneye, Army of Darkness, and many more which memory has let slip away. The guard with the itchy trigger finger had gone to lunch, and Jeremy’s parents left the key to the chains on the kitchen counter. I was hooked.
I do not mean to cast my parents as the bad guys. My childhood wasn’t any less rich because of a scarcity of R-rated movies. My parents taught me and my brothers the value of reading, of playing outside, of treating others with kindness and respect. They instilled a sense of appreciation and awe of the natural world. They taught us discipline and the true value of music. That time spent sitting at the piano—even when we didn’t want to—means that now we are fluent in one of the two major languages of the universe (I was decent at math but not adept). In any story about me, my parents are necessarily the heroes.
So why do I, well-adjusted and privileged as I am, hungrily consume the darkest types of stories I can find? Why do I push through haunted houses adorned with a shit-eating grin, or find a slow, unthinking smile spread across my face when the plane hits a patch of turbulence?
It would all make a lot more sense if my childhood was fraught with hardship and abuse, or if I suffered some singular trauma that formed the trunk on which all my branches grew. But besides the unavoidable afflictions of life, this was not the case. The closest I can come to this is a genetic predisposition to melancholy and depression. As my dad puts it, only partly in jest, “Russians aren’t happy unless they’re sad.”
But I don’t think you need to be sad or angry to seek out horror (to perhaps even need horror). And that might be the point of what I’m saying—an attraction to darkness isn’t necessarily a flaw or a failing. It might just be the healthiest option.
When I attempted to answer this question (“Why do people love horror?”) in a years-ago blog post, I pointed to the physiological phenomena of fear reaction. The dilated pupils, the accelerated heart rate, the flushed skin—essentially, the “roller-coaster effect.” We do it for the thrill, for the adrenaline. But that was myopic, because I was observing a side effect and mistaking it for the whole thing. I saw a branch and called it the tree.
In Jennifer Kent’s 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook, a woman named Amelia (Essie Davis) is in labor with her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), when her husband dies in a car crash on the way to the hospital. Several years later they are haunted by a character from a macabre children’s book—the ghastly Mister Babadook appears to Samuel first, before eventually possessing Amelia and bringing her to the brink of murdering her own son. This doesn’t happen, but they also never succeed in destroying the Babadook—there is no religious exorcism, or stake through the heart, or ritual by fire. Instead, they let him have a corner of the basement, and feed him earthworms twice a day.
On paper (and indeed on the first viewing) this resolution came across to me as a bit anticlimactic. But it is clearly metaphorical, and there is a certain wisdom to the way it all shook out: how do you kill a symbol? How do you destroy grief?
I watched a movie recently called Starfish, about a young woman named Aubrey (Virginia Gardner) whose best friend dies quite suddenly. After the funeral she breaks into her late friend’s apartment and nestles in there, in a state of quiet shock. She softly and deliberately goes through her friend’s things, makes tea, and wraps herself in a blanket that probably still smells of the departed. The places we live become portraits of us, and she is in no hurry to walk away from her friend’s intimate mosaic. Death turns homes into museums.
Aubrey wakes up after falling asleep there to a world falling apart—cars are abandoned with no sign of owners, smoke rises from nearby buildings, and when she goes outside to explore Aubrey is confronted by unspeakable monsters. In a hallucinatory progression, she starts to find clues from her friend that piece together a collection of cassette tapes that promise to “save the world.”
More than a conventional horror or thiller, Starfish finds some traction as a dreamlike meditation on death and ego, even breaking the fourth wall in a way that suggests (not inaccurately, I would say) that deep trauma can sometimes shatter or at least crack our psyche or sense of reality. The movie as a whole is beautiful but flawed—it is at times self-consciously abstruse and maybe just a bit jejune, but I found that its emotional color palette and mortal preoccupations fit into a larger genre pattern.
The reason that I’m talking about it in the first place is because of that pattern, and because it dug up that question which lingers constantly in the basement of my mind: why do we do this? Why have I made the consumption of horror one of the integral parts of my time and energy? Why do people make horror, in any of its various forms? How can I explain to my family that I’m not a deeply cracked loner on a one-way track to some cabin in the woods, or worse, an infernal afterlife of my own making?
Starfish, despite the machinations of its middle act, is not really about solving the mystery of its world-saving mixtapes or the ongoing apocalypse, and its conclusion does very little to answer any of the questions a logical audience might ask. It struck me that the answers did not matter—even more than that, there were no answers in the first place. Was the apocalypse even real? Or was it all an internal reaction to an unspeakably tragic event?
How do we explain the sudden and seemingly random death of a friend or a loved one? What remedy or formula can we engineer to cure or circumvent sadness or trauma?
It occurred to me, more clearly than before, that horror is not about that burst of adrenaline we get from a good scare. And it’s not even just about primal fear, that powerful evolutionary emotion that kept (some) of our primordial ancestors alive when they had to venture into the darkness to hunt and kill the food that would keep us alive for a few more days.
Surely, this is at least part of it: fear, although uncomfortable, is not a “bad” emotion, and it wouldn’t be wise to eradicate it even if we could. It serves a vital function to our survival, and it is very essentially part of our DNA. Without fear, we would have been an extraordinary but short-lived phenomenon—an intelligent and fearless ape that couldn’t wait to launch itself into the jaws of doom (and as I read that line back I realize it might still be an apt description of our most probable timeline).
William Friedkin called horror a “safe darkness” for us to connect with our primordial selves in a way that doesn’t end in dismemberment or death. Fear can also be a glue, a common ground for an increasingly isolated society. John Carpenter said: “Everybody in the world is afraid. We’re all afraid of the same things together. It binds us as people.” We are coded to respond to horror and fear, and in a world lacking saber-toothed tigers or quick sand, many of us create our own villains. We share them with each other, and we gather in dark rooms to marvel at their malignance. Sometimes we involuntarily clutch the arm next to ours, and suddenly we feel less alone.
But it’s not just that. Of course fear is an integral part of horror, but the more I examine the genre the more I am struck by even larger emotional themes. More than anything, I would say that horror movies are about grief and damage, and the secondary emotions that surround those things like Pilot fish to a shark.
Think about some of your favorite horror films (or some that you know): what stories are being told, and what are the characters dealing with? Strip away the blood and guts, and ask yourself what are the individuals going through? Most of the time it is tragedy. Illness. Alienation. The death or separation of a loved one. Henry Zebrowski has said that horror is just drama with higher stakes, and I think about that often.
This genre doesn’t work because of jump scares, special effects or frightening makeup, as important as those things are. When it works it does so because it tells deeply human stories that are steeped in the most intense emotional realms we can inhabit. Powerful grief can indeed feel like the ending of your world. Deep sadness can smother like a leaden blanket. And inside true love lives a fear almost as strong as the love itself: fear of rejection, fear of death, fear of the end of love.
Horror, we find repeatedly, is about processing the hardest feelings we know, about whether or not we can (or want to) confront the devils that inhabit our toothsome world. Horror that shows us the monster too soon, too directly, or at all often fails, not just because the most intense fear lies in the just-out-of-sight, but because we see the monster and feel disappointed, because no amount of teeth or claws can match the heft of the emotional world that we inhabit. Nothing can be scarier than losing a good friend, or a lover, a child or parent.
That is the unending struggle that horror concerns itself with: how to deal, simply, with the impossibility of existence, how to face and befriend death, how to find love in a scary world. What do we do when the unthinkable happens? Horror is filled with people figuring out the answer to that question, and sometimes the cure is just in the asking—healing, perhaps, lies in seeking it, because the alternative to that is surrender. It is a numbness that knows neither fear nor love. Apathy is a world without stories.
We don’t make and watch horror movies because we are hopelessly broken or because we’re deranged, irredeemable deviants (you did a good job, mom and dad). And we don’t even seek it for the adrenaline of fear, although that’s part of it. We do it because we seek redemption, and precisely because we believe it can still be found. We do it because we crave love and connection in a world that can hand those things out sparingly. By knowing the shape and size of the things we fear, we learn their limits. By taking a flashlight to the shadows encroaching in our rooms and hallways, we can know where the darkness stops and where we begin.
Horror is not a monolith: you will find streaks of cynicism and despair, because like all art, it mirrors the maker. Many people have found the world to be mean and unforgiving, and this will reflect in their stories. But even these people still choose to tell the story, and that in itself is an act of resistance. Even a bleak story told sincerely is purgative. When it tells the truth, horror is a hopeful genre.