Boo Love

Most horror lovers seem normal. I don’t understand them, but respect them—they know their stuff: if someone’s into horror, they’re into horror. I admit I’ve always been curious, and have dabbled on the fringes: I’ve read Frankenstein, Dracula, all of Lovecraft, and Stephen King novels. And, I enjoy zombies and vampires in movies. And I grew up on Godzilla movies, though back then we called them monster movies. Which I think counts as horror. These are the important questions as I delved into the recent collection of essays called—and answering the statement—Why I Love Horror, edited by Becky Siegel Spratford.

Because I’m only horror-adjacent, I’m not familiar with most of the writers Siegel Spratford has collected here. They’re all highly-published and enjoying the recent “boom” in horror. They all praise the horror fan community. Still, though I think Why I Love Horror is an interesting read, I wish the writers would’ve gone into what horror is. What is it about horror that makes one a fan?

The weakest reason, given by more than a few, is that life is horror—that reading or viewing horror prepares one for the horrors of real life. This doesn’t feel right—the preparing part: I fully accept that life has its horror moments—no monsters needed, since we have monsters among us. Even, as recent news is revealing, governing us. As Gabino Iglesias writes in his essay, “Horror Is Life: A Blood-Soaked Love Letter:

Horror is in your veins, riding in the memories your DNA carries from a time when we sat around the fire and made up stories about the hungry eyes that looked at us from the edge of darkness. Those eyes are still out there, and we are still telling stories about them because telling stories is how we understand the world... I love horror because it is a perfect mirror we can hold up to society. It is a tool we can use to criticize, to educate, to suggest solutions.

He gives no examples, but I think what he means is, for example, the zombies in Dawn of the Dead—either George Romero’s 1978 original or Zack Snyder’s 2004 re-make—attack and trap humans in a mall, which somehow becomes a comment on zombie-like consumer culture. Though I’m not sure there’s a solution, other than to kill all consumers. Likewise, zombies in the movie 28 Days Later represent diseases like AIDS, while 28 Weeks Later had the Green Zone in zombie-infested London, just like the Green Zone in Bagdad after the U.S. invasion. But again, solutions? To kill people with AIDS? To kill Iraqis? This is why I’m hesitant about horror: that the only “solution” is violence.

Other arguments in the book at least give a role model on how to act against real-life horror: To fight back, even if you’re not going to win. Stephen Graham Jones touches on this in the best essay of the collection, “Why Horror.”

I don’t write horror for the darkness. I write it for the good moments—for the heart, for the hope, for the chance of winning, no matter how distant and unlikely, no matter the cost. But you can’t have those good moments without a long, torturous grind through the badness... I’d rather see a single small daisy out in a bleak, frozen landscape when a whole field of wildflowers thriving. To me, that one daisy, it’s a fighter... it’s had to struggle so hard to be where it is... give me that one brave flower out there that doesn’t even know how to bow its head, that doesn’t know what surrender is. Even if it doesn’t make it through the winter, it tried... that’s what horror’s about: the trying, the fighting, the hope.

Sounds great, but this is again about violence, as an only solution, and supposes that the monster, the Other, isn’t worth knowing, though there are books and movies mentioned in the collection that remind us that some Others are misunderstood and worth knowing. Godzilla for one, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the “monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

If you’re horror-curious, I recommend Stephen Graham Jones’ book My Heart is a Chainsaw, a “meta” horror novel that explains horror novels and movies. He has a sense of humor, with a Native-American influence, like Sherman Alexie meets Stephen King. Jones also raises one point that I worry about in horror. I’ll preface it with another personal experience: Early on, in my teens, after reading King’s Salem’s Lot, I delved a little further, into a short story collection by British horror writer Clive Barker, The Books of Blood (I think there was only one volume at that point. There are now three, so this is Volume 1.) And, it was disturbing. I still remember, decades later, some of the images, like from the story “The Midnight Meat Train” where the guy gets his tongue cut out and forced into a cult. Not a happy ending. That was it for me and horror!

This is how Jones thinks about moments like that:

Ask yourself why you avoid this or that. I’m saying, I think it’s because we all know that art not only can change you, but it’s supposed to. Horror’s art. You experience it and you come out the other side a different person. However, with some of this transgressive stuff you’re letting in, there’s no guarantee you’re coming out a better person, is there? This story element, that imagery, it might open a door inside you that you didn’t even know you were keeping shut. And that’s truly scary... that danger, it makes horror fun, doesn’t it?

Does it? This doesn’t seem good. I think reading Clive Barker made me a worse person. Or at least gave me some anxiety. But Jones continues:

It can be a dangerous game, yes—not all the safety bars come down on this particular ride. But we all line up for it again and again.

The “we” in this case being horror fans. Me? I’m out. But I want to know—I think he’s serious here: horror can change you for the worse. He’s the only writer in the collection to claim this, and the only writer who’s honest and trying for some depth. I want him to go deeper: saying that horror could change you for the worse, and then saying that that’s the fun part about it—there’s something more going on there.

Speaking of disturbing, one aspect of horror which doesn’t get addressed in Why I Love Horror is the sub-genre—I think just in film—of slasher movies, à la Halloween, Saw, or I Know What You Did Last Summer. This is the mostly what the “Boom” in horror movies in theaters seems to be about, and where the term “Final Girl” comes from, since it’s a basic plot device to have that one teenage girl survive and take out the killer in the end. I think Stephen Graham Jones watches these, though I only know that after reading My Heart is a Chainsaw, not from his essay here. Nor do any of these writers mention them. Horror is mostly all monsters. But what’s going on with these slasher movies? What are they so popular with teens? And are those teens the same who’d read any of the horror writers in Why I Love Horror? I feel like they aren’t, but I can’t prove it.

Gabriel Iglesias also mentions—again with no examples—horror as “a space to process trauma.” But with the slasher stuff, or the really fucked-up Clive Barker-type stories, I think horror gives more trauma than it allows us to process. Stephen Graham Jones thinks we need that trauma:

That spike of terror, of certainty, that reminder that we’re not the apex anything, it’s what keeps us human. If we ever forget the chicken nuggets we most definitely are... then we’re not quite human... Horror can instill our chicken-nugget nature back into us so that we’re watching the sky again, so that we’re listening  with all we have around the next corner. Because you never know, do you? Why horror? Because it keeps us never knowing, it keeps us uncertain, it keeps us nervous.

Where I agree with him and Gabriel Iglesias is when, for example, Iglesias proposes that “telling stories is how we understand the world.” I just don’t know if telling horror stories is how I understand it. Or not all of it.