Let’s hide behind the chainsaws!
October is my favorite month: the air is crisper, the leaves are changing, and there’s so many scary movies to watch! I try to see one every day, and in the age of what many like to call “elevated horror,” there is honestly too much to choose from. See my watch list below!
But why do some of gravitate to horror? What is the history of the genre and what are its tropes that draw readers and viewers in time and time again? Many scholars have argued that horror fiction is a relatively modern genre, stipulating it emerges in the eighteenth century and is tied to Enlightenment thinking. So, as the West is celebrating its triumph over reason and order, narratives are also emerging that counterpose this command. The English gothic novel is a likely starting point for modern horror; perhaps the first case being Horace Walpole’s 1765 The Castle of Otranto. Of course, there are distinct variations of horror which can be distinguished according to the effect they have on the audience such as a mystery, suspense, or terror. In this way, horror is difficult to define because its recurring tropes are aspects that can also be found in other genres.
The Gothic tradition bloomed into the genre that contemporary readers call horror fiction in the nineteenth century, and ushered a period that lasted into the 1920s with ghost stories by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ambrose Bierce, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as classic horror novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stroker, and HG Wells’s cosmic horrors, who is usually associated with science fiction, but also produced a lot of horror and ghost stories. Of course, we cannot forget about Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, which centralizes a supra-human monster and the fantastic results of trespassing clear-cut boundaries, and which has also been called the first science-fiction novel. As literary and queer studies scholar Jack Halberstam has shown, the Gothic produces a “vertiginous excess of meaning” in the text, and as critic Andrew McCann argues, the Gothic reveals the “‘repressed’ of colonization: collective guilt, the memory of violence and dispossession, and the struggle for mastery in which the insecurity of the settler-colony is revealed.” This “locus of horror” is significant if we consider the ways race, ethnicity, nationhood intersect with the tropes of genre.
The abundance of periodicals at the turn of the century also led to the boom in horror fiction, and publications like Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, founded in the 1920s and 1930s, gave horror a more visible outlet. Thinkers like Noël Carroll argue that the 1970s sees another resurgence in horror and a boom in public interest and consumption in the genre with films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Jaws, Aliens, and Carrie. These and others led audiences not only to more underground and now-classics like Night of the Living Dead but also to horror literature. Let’s not forget that it’s rumored that Cuban Canadian George Romero got inspiration for the zombie film during a visit to Cuba! Certainly, texts like Richard Matheson’s I am Legend (1954) and Robert Bloch’s Psycho (which was later adapted by Hitchcock into the film by the same name) are forerunners and influences on the genre as well. Finally, bringing us into the twenty-first century are writers like Stephen King and Anne Rice, who have attracted incredibly large audiences to the horror genre with books like Misery, The Shining, The Outsider, Interview with the Vampire, and The Vampire Lestat.
We can see in our contemporary moment how horror has transitioned from a pulp, “low brow,” plot driven genre to one that is considered elevated and artistic; one that is deemed worthy of study. My goal here isn’t to legitimize horror or its study, which has in fact defined its place in the broader field of cultural production as illegitimate—shocking, sensational, an “immoral” form that seems to take pleasure from the fact that people find it disturbing. The “bad boy” of cultural production, if you will. But it is also true that the horror genre has also conquered the contemporary literary and popular market. From Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddie Kruger to Hannibal Lecter and Pennywise the Clown, the monstrous figures of horror stories terrify but also titillate us.
What are the characteristics that make up horror? What is it in horror that produces pleasure? And what are the uses of horror in scholarship and in the classroom? For this, let’s wander through the eerie hallways of horror’s tropes. Ultimately, I hope that we can see how horror offers an important aperture for examining the contemporary. Scholars like Greg Littmann argue that there are three standards for horror: 1) a constant potential for death, 2) detailed description of the threats characters face, and 3) the use of realist settings. Others like Noël Carroll, distinguish between what he calls “natural horror” and “art-horror”—that which happens in the world and that which happens in a text. Generally, horror creates feelings of fear, dread, anxiety, or discomfort that leads the reader to question the safety of specific spaces. I would go so far as to say that it feels at times like the text itself is betraying you. Lauren Berlant’s definition of genre is helpful here for thinking about how genre is established through “the confirmation one receives by repeating the dynamics of an affective scene.” Of course, something does not have to feel good, be good, for it to be pleasurable. Why are shows like Law and Order: SVU so successful to warrant 24+ seasons? Why does a show about serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer earn Netflix its largest streaming audience to date? Why do we keep returning to horror characters like Michael Myers again and again and again—a new iteration of the film franchise just came out this month. We should turn away from these types of stories, yet we’re enthralled.
Critic Philip Brophy says of horror, that “the pleasure of the text is, in fact, getting the shit scared out of you—and loving it, in an exchange mediated by adrenaline.” But in Philosophy of Horror, Carroll asks, for example: “how can anyone be frightened by what they know does not exist, and why would anyone ever be interested in horror, since being horrified is so unpleasant?” For my own research and teaching, I show how Latinx literature reframes these questions, challenging the boundaries between natural horror and art-horror, asking instead, who can afford to distinguish between these two. In fact, some Latinx literature—which I read through the tropes of horror—shows how histories of colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, dictatorship, exile and diaspora, among others (all which structure latinidad) are horrific and necessitate the tropes of the genre to understand them.
The paradox of horror is what makes it so fascinating: the capacity to disgust and fascinate also reveals larger concerns in the contemporary moment that particular forms of horror emerge. In her analysis of the role of gender in horror films, Carol Clover—who coined the idea of the “final girl” so popular in horror analysis—argues that what makes the genre so powerful is “its engagement with repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict of those feelings.” Robin Wood reiterates this point, showing how it is at once the personal dreams of the creators of the horror—the writers and filmmakers—and the collective imaginaries of the audience; a “fusion made possible by the shared structure of a common ideology.” Horror, I would add takes on many forms of cultural production with political inclinations and real socio-cultural effects that provide ways of defining, for example, what is good and evil, what is monstrous, “normal” or otherworldly. Some, like myself, would argue that the socio-political needs the rhetorics of horror to not only describe it but is also intrinsic to its construction as the socio-political.
In my classes, like “Monsters, Haunting, and the Nation,” students survey a variety of monstrous bodies, postapocalyptic landscapes, and dystopian fantasies, while considering questions such as: What is a monster? What is “Latinx”? How does the unique experience of Latinx people in the “New World” haunt conceptions of nation, citizenship, “illegality,” and personhood? Why do Latinx authors and filmmakers turn to horror to depict the Latinx experience? When I teach this class, I usually start by reading Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Here, Cohen illustrates how monsters are a reflection of the culture and contemporary zeitgeist in which they emerge. The monster is therefore not just what it is but also what it signifies. Take Godzilla, for example: it is more than a reptilian monster that terrorizes Tokyo, but also a reflection of the Japanese post-nuclear experience and fear of physical transformation because of nuclear fallout. Because the monster reflects a specific set of fears, ideologies, or desires of a particular time, the monster is also, according to Cohen, elusive and shifty. The monster is always a reflection of its time. Vampires, for example, are not static beings, but project different anxieties around things like sexuality, immigration, and Jewish populations. Most importantly for me, monsters resist any easy categorization, challenging us to stretch and rethink our rigid understanding of categories. The monster demands for us to questions the labels and frames we use to make sense of the world. But the monster is also an excuse. Because of its ability to surpass boundaries, it also manifests transgressions in cultural, racial, political, and sexual categories and, therefore, makes it easy to label something a monster in order to exclude them. Think about the labeling of Native Americans as savages or women who owned property or were unmarried as “witches. All these elements make the monster an amazing border patrol: it is a warning against exploration and transgression. The monster as Cohen says, “polices the borders of the possible,” preventing intellectual, geographic, and sexual mobility; and is created as a bogeyman to prevent change. For example, the slasher movies of the 1980s usually have teenagers off into the woods to have sex and the films’ monsters like Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers are always telling viewers about the dangers of premarital sex. Yet, most deliciously, the monster is a gateway drug, an escapist fantasy. The monster is a form of repulsion and desire that enacts cultural catharsis: it is a safe way to release some of our pent-up feelings without rocking the boat in any serious way. We go to the theater, we read horror to release our energies vicariously. Halloween is coming up, what are you going to dress up as?
Anticipated and recommended horror 2023:
Talk to Me (2022): When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and unleashes terrifying supernatural forces.
Hatching (Pahanhautoja) (2022): In the fantastical Finnish horror fairytale, a young girl hatches a murderous bird monster out of an egg she secretly nests in her bed. But that’s not the scary part! Her perfectionist mommy-blogger mother strikes the truest terror in the film. Like many great monster movies, “Hatching” uses its creature as a metaphor for repressed emotion, and the one at the center of this film is one of the most uniquely grotesque creations seen on screen in a long time.
Only the Animals (2021): A woman disappears in a remote region of France, leaving not only a mystery in her wake but also a lot of messy complications in her wake that connect the lives of three strangers.
Deliver Us (2023): When Yulia, a nun living in a remote convent, claims immaculate conception, the Vatican sends a team of priests to investigate. Concerns grow about an ancient prophecy that a woman will give birth to twin boys: one the Messiah, the other the Antichrist. Yulia becomes convinced that she’s been chosen by God, but following the birth of the twins the worlds around her begins to devolve into chaos. Torn between her motherly love and the fate to save the world, Yulia is faced with the ultimate battle between good and evil.
Fall of the House of Usher (2023): In this reimagination of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, two ruthless siblings build a family dynasty that begins to crumble when their heirs mysteriously die, one by one. This limited series is written and directed by Mike Flanagan who recently released other spooky miniseries such as The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Cobweb (2023): Eight-year-old Peter is plagued by a mysterious tapping coming from inside his bedroom wall, which his parents insist is all in his imagination. As his fear intensifies, Peter starts to believe that his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Anthony Starr) could be hiding something terrible—a dangerous secret that makes him question their trust: what could be more frightening than that?
Totally Killer (2023): Starring Kiernan Shipka, this genre mashup looks back to the 80s that follows Jamie (Shipka) after her mother’s friends are murdered by the Sweet 16 Killer on Halloween. Jamie travels back in time to 1987, where she pairs up with her mother to stop the young would-be-killer and return to her timeline before she is trapped in the past forever.
Birth/Rebirth (2023): In this psychological horror, a single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead. Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and follows the morgue technician as she harvests biological material from pregnant women in order to keep the child alive.
In Fabric (2023): From acclaimed horror director Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy and Berberian Sound Studio) comes a nightmarish film, at turns frightening, seductive, and darkly humorous. Channeling voyeuristic fantasies of high fashion and bloodshed. A lonely woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), recently separated from her husband, visits a bewitching London department store in search of a dress that will transform her life. She’s fitted with a perfectly flattering, artery-red gown—which, in time, will come to unleash a malevolent curse and unstoppable evil, threatening everyone who comes into its path.
The Feast (2021): In this Welsh horror, an affluent family gathers at their lavish home in the mountains for a dinner party, hosting a local businessman and neighboring farmer to broker a business deal to mine the surrounding countryside. When a mysterious young woman arrives to be the family’s waitress for the evening, they find their beliefs and values challenged, as her quiet yet disturbing presence begins to unravel their lives – slowly, deliberately, and with the most terrifying of consequences.
El Conde (2023): Chilean director, Pablo Larraín, brings us a black-and-white horror spoof with one ferocious gag: the former dictator Augusto Pinochet soars into the night on a quest for human blood. Military cape flapping about his thighs, Pinochet flies with his back as straight as an early Superman serial — a tip-off that Larraín (“Jackie,” “Spencer”) needs the audience to play along with his cheeky reimagining of the despot as a 250-year-old vampire.
Satanic Hispanics (2023): Five Latinx filmmakers get gory, and goofy, in a new horror movie anthology. When police raid a house in El Paso, they find it full of dead Latinxs, and only one survivor. He’s known as The Traveler, and when they take him to the station for questioning, he tells them those lands are full of magic and talks about the horrors he’s encountered in his long time on this earth, about portals to other worlds, mythical creatures, demons and the undead. Stories about Latin American legends.
The Conference (2023): A team-building conference for municipal employees turns into a nightmare when accusations of corruption begin to circulate and plague the work environment. At the same time, a mysterious figure begins murdering the participants.