The Great One In His Unknown Realm

When I was  just a little kid, I was scared of a lot of things—wasps, Vigo the Carpathian, team sports, peer pressure, aliens, Aliens, witches, faulty parking brakes, the future, getting kidnapped—but nothing scared me more than Hell. That’s why I loved the omnipotent God that watched over my every move. The faceless deity I learned about in school and at Sunday mass could see what I did, hear what I said and know what I thought. He was always right above me ready to hear any little prayer I might offer up and make sure I didn't end up in a pit of fire when I died as long as I followed the rules.

Now, when I say I loved God, I really mean I depended on his good favor. I didn't know what love was when I was  a child, I just understood reward, punishment and fear, all of which were amplified by an abundance of natural empathy. God was like the boss of all parents and teachers, the rule maker for the rule makers.  To the tiny red haired Catholic with asthma on the Mary Phelan Catholic Elementary School playground, every authority figure was an officer in God’s moral defense force, higher up on the ladder to my supreme being's favor and ready to report me for bad deeds.

God's moral defense force doesn't fuck around.

Sitting in a red plastic chair across from one of the priests I was made to confess my sins to during the school-wide sacrament of Reconciliation. The event would take place every few months. We would be called to the gymnasium over the school PA system, walk through the halls alone, and sit in a line on a bench watching the kids who came before us quietly talk to God’s executive marketing team. When it came my turn to talk, quietly watched by my peers who waited their turn on the benches, the offenses against my parents and teachers held a heavier weight in my mouth as I apologized to a stranger. Angry thoughts, yelling, swearing—sometimes I would make up ethical crimes just to cover my bases. It would be better to do penance for a made up F-word than go to Hell. (I now realize that this line of thinking was paradoxical, as lying to a priest must surely negate any good will garnered by praying away false sins).

I think it’s common for people who grew up in the Catholic school system to have a much more vivid vision of Hell than they do of Heaven. Heaven is a vague fantasy, with clouds, a gate, angels, all your dead relatives that weren’t Nazis and 24 hour church service. There is wiggle room when you imagine the Holy Kingdom, and so you can imagine it to be a personal paradise. It’s a powerful absence. I remember once hearing my younger brother tell our mom that he couldn't wait to die so he could go to heaven to see our grandparents and play video games.

Hell, on the other hand, is a detailed place of eternal thirst, fire and torture. Even the funny depictions of the media paint the Devil’s domain as horrific. There’s a Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons in which Homer is made to spend a day in Hell, and the jokes in that span of a single minute of television haunted my dreams until I was 13. At one point, Homer is bound to an apparatus that force-feeds him literally all of the donuts in the world. The punchline is that he actually succeeds happily, confounding the demon assigned to delivering his ironic punishment. The humor was lost on me though. All I could think was being filled beyond the capacity of my everlasting soul, never against worthy of forgiveness if I died between one swear word and the next scheduled school gymnasium confession.

I eventually learned to love eating too many donuts, just to be safe.

I didn’t die, though. I survived long enough to reject the church that threatened my soul for silly things like coveting goats and eventually came to embrace the void that will one day devour us all. Now, on the other side of fearing God’s retribution and the well defined Hell that he wielded with such menace, I realize that the vagueness of Heaven and it's King is WAY SCARIER.

It’s a very simple intellectual bridge to cross, and once you do it all sort of clicks together into a trans-dimensional, many-tentacled portrait of cosmic terror. We know that all human fears lead back to the unknown, and when comparing the good and the bad endings of a Christian life it turns out one is extremely well known. One has different strata and a well censused demographic; it has entire epic poems describing it and incredibly detailed paintings. The other is bright, but you left your eyes on Earth, locked behind a gate beyond which no one has returned to tell the tale; it is Heaven and it is as unhuman as a life without sin.

Choosing Horror Over Nothing

The supernatural staples of the horror genre are paradoxical. Monsters and ghosts and cosmic tentacled trans-dimensional abominations, while used to great effect in drawing fear from an audience, also affirm a comforting human desire for a reasonable narrative. Yes, the unhuman elements of a scary novel or film do emerge from an initial revelation that we, as a species, were wrong about the world, but by the end of the journey we are often left with some kind of explanation. Horror fiction produces in its audience a paradigm shift in terms of reality, but through its reliance on conventional storytelling structures, inevitably affirms that we were always right about one thing: everything happens for a reason.

There are exceptions to this for sure. The labyrinth in Mark Z. Danielewski's beautifully haunting House of Leaves is probably the best example I’ve encountered, incomprehensible by nature and never explained through any device. But the shifting nightmare halls of the house on Ash Tree Lane remain haunting because the book defies narrative expectation: neither the characters in the novel nor the real life readers are given even a hint as to what has caused the tear in reality. Danielewski’s house is the void given only the barest of forms—what Darkness Mystics refer to as the Godhead—the only aspect of the truly unhuman we can comprehend.

This is as close to an answer you get when it comes to House of Leaves

More often, horror leaves us with enough of an explanation to build a mythology that allows us to retroactively justify the terrible journey we’ve previously experienced. This convention of explanation defangs horror. When I read Stephen King, for instance or when I watch a Japanese horror film, the best parts are in the middle. The ghosts, the massive invisible domes, the deathly visions, the spooky children—when presented as truly alien, are thrilling and truly scary. But when we see that it was just aliens, or are given obscure rules to follow that will lift a Japanese video tape curse, we might not feel safe, but at least we benefit from an emboldened sense of importance. The conventional horror ending is one that says, “We exist and we can understand!”

Reality, however, is actually the stuff of middle acts. We don’t know what will happen, or why, because life doesn’t follow a narrative structure. Rather, we impose coherence on the events that we experience, and we build our lives into stories. The symbols of supernatural horror and mythology, therefore, offer us a convenient plaster with which to cover the unexplainable cracks in our autobiographies. We can use the language of the genre to give reason to the unreasonable.

On Monday, a horror legend died. Shigeru Mizuki, creator of Ge Ge No Kitaro and master yōkai (supernatural monsters and spirits) historian, passed away at the age of 93. It is a miracle that he lived so long. Having served in the Japanese army during World War II and lived through his country’s worst poverty, Mizuki came face to face with death multiple times. He battled malaria, he lost his arm, he was shot at and hunted, and ate food contaminated with traces of human feces. Most unbelievably, though, he dodged the deadly scythe of random chance.

In his historical memoir, Showa, Mizuki depicts an encounter that brought him incredibly close to the most senseless of all deaths. While in Papua New Guinea, alone in the pitch dark of night, the young soldier encountered an invisible wall that he could feel with his hands. It compelled him to stop and he slept the night, only to awake next to a cliff’s edge. Mizuki credits the spectral wall, a yōkai called Nurikabe, for his survival.

“If the Nurikabe hadn’t been there,” he writes, “I would have run straight off into the darkness and died.”

Surrounded by the deaths of millions of other soldiers his age, Mizuki turned to a horror mythology to make sense of his brush with random death. Using the language of ghosts, he cuts off the the possibility of a nonsensical demise, allowing himself and his readers to explain away the pure chaos of Mizuki’s cliffside encounter.

It’s an example of horror lore being employed to usurp the real, incomprehensible reality of the border between life and death. Any one of us can die at any moment, but we like to think that if we do, it will be for some sort of reason, or fit into a larger narrative in our life. We want our stories to end with a complete thought. Those hopes are not often satisfied, but narratives are imposed by survivors, and sense is made out of the senseless. The truth is: death is as chaotic as the fragile life that came before it. To comprehend that frailty and the lack of reason behind our inevitable demises is the stuff of the void, and the supernatural symbols of horror are the gatekeepers who guard us from that madness.

Modern Unknowns Part II: The Dark Web

There was a critical point in the mass adoption of the Internet where computers became less scary. It used to be that the general public ignorance surrounding Information Technology allowed for writers and creators of entertainment media to fill in the gaps with magic, but now that we are firmly in the age of Internet 2.0—with our Google and smartphones and personal websites—it is only with a great deal of irony that a TV show or film can get away with the haunted computer or ghost hacker scenario. What was once a cultural blind spot has become familiar, and the Internet just isn’t mysterious anymore.

This is problem for horror. Instead of a dark place of ignorance, the Internet has become a tool that we carry around in our pockets. It has become a trope of the genre, in fact, to disconnect protagonists so that the mystery of whatever encounters they have remains such, at least in places of paranormal activity. Storytellers need to artificially create shadowy corners for our nightmares to breed. Or, at least they did until we got the second Internet.

That's right: there is another Internet; a darker Internet; an Internet that has once again sparked the imaginations of horror practitioners. The Deep Web or Dark Web, depending on your taste in nomenclature (I prefer the latter), is a part of the information superhighway that you can’t find on maps. In order to access it you need to use a special software, called Tor, because the websites aren’t indexed by your average browser. While not evil in and of itself, promising the utmost privacy and anonymity to users, its reputation is one of a place for hackers and hitmen, drug trades and human trafficking, BitCoin and even the rumoured live snuff film. Instead of .com domains, places on the Dark Web use the suffix .onion. Chances are, you (like me) only know a little bit about it.

The Dark Web is rich and full of mystery, which is why the best modern horror is using it to deepen contemporary stories. The two best examples of this new trend in terror are Marisha Pessl's haunting 2013 novel Night Film, and the delightfully spooky Tanis podcast from Pacific Northwest Stories. Both of these media take the form of investigation horror, and each leans heavily on the occult nature of the Dark Web.

In Night Film, investigative journalist Scott McGrath embarks on a twisted journey to expose a legendary horror director named Stanislas Cordova. A famous recluse, Cordova has been linked to a number of deaths, including that of his own daughter, and McGrath sets out to find the mysterious auteur and expose him for reasons linked to revenge (Cordova ruined McGrath’s marriage and career when Scott last attempted to expose him).

Pessl’s great accomplishment with Night Film is her ability to build a massive amount of tension and fear without evoking the paranormal. Instead, she uses the occult to build a world that is alien yet familiar to the reader. Secret societies and underground film screenings make you question the world around McGrath in his search for Cordova, but nothing quite does this like how the author handles the Internet.

When McGrath takes his search to the Dark Web, the book switches to black pages. Reading them—presented as screen caps of hidden web pages that Scott visits—therefore has a weird physical sensation. With all of her real world action printed black on white, Pessl manages to make the Dark Web seem shadowy simply by virtue of framing it as shadow-like. The pages are literally dark, and that makes them feel hidden, as if they are in fact underneath the rest of the novel’s text.

Tanis uses the Dark Web in a similar fashion. One of the characters on the Lovecraftian radio show is a hacker who goes by the handle Meerkatnip, sometimes abbreviated to M.K. She serves a special role in the podcast’s narrative: she has the ability to navigate and understand the Dark Web, where a lot of the key information on the ancient and mysterious Tanis can be uncovered.

Just like Night Film, Tanis uses the Dark Web as a place filled with powerful occulted information, but rather than illustrating that by oppressing the audience through the application of darkness, the podcast shows that the horror-net is special through Meerkatnip. M.K. is a modern day dark sorceress. She is capable of IT miracles, especially when compared to the show’s other characters, and she is hyper-aware of certain types of creepypasta-ish spooky Internet lore. The connection is clear: by associating the most enlightened and useful character in a horror story to the dark web, an author implies that the places you can find on via Tor contain arcane knowledge.

Time may inevitably shed the light of common knowledge onto the Deep Dark Web, taking away its mysteries and therefore its power to birth fear. Already you can find news reporting online about Dark Web fueled misdeeds and, in a way, every horror story that uses a Tor browser as a spellbook depletes our collective reserve of ignorance on the topic. One day, everything we don't know now will be overused, cliche and familiar to the point of comfort. But for now the Dark Web is a blessing because popular ignorance  is a border, beyond which there are monsters.

Modern Unknowns Part I: The Man With The Bag

In the information age there aren’t a whole lot of blind spots, and thanks to that, a great number of fears have been dispelled. A combination of education and skepticism is a perfect remedy to the kind of terror to which we, as humans, are apt to attribute supernatural qualities. Now that we all have the internet in our pockets, connected to high quality video and sound recorders, we can share the spooky shit that happens to us with the digital world (about one third of the global population). Sadly, for those of us who wish the planet was a little more magical, this proliferation of high tech info-connectivity has killed a lot of the haunted house vibes that used to be so abundant on this ghostless space rock.

Last week’s alleged UFO sighting in California is a perfect example of this idea in action. Residents of the American West Coast collectively saw an unknown, brightly lit object in the night sky. Immediately everyone lost their minds and declared it a UFO—which, though technically accurate, has become shorthand for alien spaceship. Just as quickly, thanks to the modern miracle of the Internet, the US military copped to the disturbance declaring is a sea to air missile test conducted by a submarine, confirming the dreadful reality onlookers were trying to escape: even if we aren’t alone in the universe, we don’t seem to have any company here.

The same thing has happened with ghosts and cryptids. We have an immense resource of scientific data and expertise right at our fingertips, only too ready to dash our horrific fantasies, leaving us with cold hard explanations and a sickening suspicion that nothing is truly special. Yet, for all of our digital knowledge and community, there still do seem to be blind spots on our map, and like all human borders, these blank spaces are ready for us to stamp them with the label “Here be monsters.”

Yesterday I encountered a man on the subway. He was the perfect embodiment of a modern unknown, a monster who had ventured onto my map from beyond the edge. Walking from one end of the train to the other where I was standing, he made popping noises with his mouth while pantomiming a gun with his fingers and pretending to blow his own brains out, spattering passengers with hypothetical grey matter and blood. His eyes smiled as he did this, and his other hand, hanging from a slack left arm, clutched a heavy looking but small black garbage bag.

The bag smelled terrible and, as the man stood across from me committing a million smiling suicides, I was consumed with the mystery of what could possibly be in that horrific black sack. There is no way of knowing what the man was carrying, as there are countless items - both named and unnamed - that have repugnant aromas. Yet my brain wanted so dearly to know the specifics. The obvious answer was feces, but what if it was a dead animal, or a dismembered foot still gloved in a sweaty gym sock? Maybe it was week old calamari or a pile of slimy nightmares. Maybe it was a portal to Hell.

Or maybe it was a completed version of Silent Hills.

The man himself was as unknown as his bag, as paradoxically repellant and intriguing as his strange accessory. The words he spoke to other passengers were English, but they made no contextual sense. I got the impression that nothing I could say to the man, or that he could tell me, would be any more enlightening of the contents of his skull, or his infernal satchel, than a Google search for “subway suicide street performer + mystery sack” would. He was the void incarnate, joyfully telling everyone entranced by the scent of his bag, though the universal language of physical improv performance, that killing yourself is an option.

Now, I’m sure that an expert in mental illness would be better equipped to diagnose what was going on in this paragon of the void’s brain. When this thought entered my mind, as he popped his invisible gun, I felt the usual pang of guilt. If not scared, I was at least apprehensive of the man who was clearly unwell. I had allowed my personal unknowns seed within me a type of prejudice against a less privileged human. It’s ugly, but it’s honest.

That guilt, I think, is the key to modern ideas of the fearful unknown. Horror is a visceral experience of encountering the borders where our proverbial monsters live. As we become super connected through technology, these drawn limits are disappearing on an interpersonal level, but internally they are still there. Ignorance is an unknown, and it can exist on a one-to-one scale. I can take a train in a world I know and be confronted with the limits of my comprehension, even if they are wholly my own.

Why not every day, are you so afraid, what will people say?

Another Halloween has come and gone. I always get depressed on the first of November because, as you can probably guess, Halloween is my favorite holiday.

It’s not like I wait until October 31 to celebrate. I start decorating and listening to my Halloween playlist the first week of October. I often start planning my costume months in advance and I’ve been making my own costumes for well over a decade now. From my posts on this site, it’s obvious that I consume horror media on a near-daily basis. So why is it so important to me to celebrate this one day out of the whole year?

As much as I am OK with being considered a weirdo by some folks for being such a Halloween and horror junkie, it still feels immensely satisfying when so many other people are into the same things I am into, even if it’s only for part of the year. (And as someone who tends to choose esoteric or obscure costumes, all the positive attention I got this year for dressing as Papa Emeritus III from Ghost was even more immensely satisfying. That time that I dressed as Adam Ant and people asked if I was Prince? Not so much.)

Recently, I came across some social media commentary from people who didn’t understand why anyone would enjoy watching a horror movie. Different strokes and all that; besides, it’s certainly not the first time I’ve seen that sentiment expressed. I also came across a social media discussion, however, that was all about how seeing adults dressed up in Halloween costumes was disturbing or even scary.

This is utterly alien to me. Maybe it’s because I grew up in New Orleans and Mardi Gras is such a huge part of the culture there, maybe it’s because I took dance for ten years and costumes were an integral part of those performances, maybe it’s that I’m an exhibitionist at heart.

Now that so-called geek culture has become such a part of the mainstream, the cosplay community has been thrust into the world spotlight. Cosplayers, in some ways, get the side eye more than horror fanatics because they don’t even need the excuse of a holiday to get dressed up. Their lives are organized around which cons they’re going to attend and what costumes they are going to make and wear at these cons.

It makes me wish that Halloween cosplaying was a thing, although for a lot of people, it kind of is. When you attend any horror-related events like film screenings or conventions, you’ll notice that there are a lot of people wearing horror movie T-shirts. If you can make a valid case that cosplayers are just transforming themselves – via costumes - into characters that they feel represent their personalities, can’t we also argue that horror fans are doing the same thing, via Frankenstein tattoos and black clothing? Perhaps it’s not exhibitionism; perhaps it’s just letting the outside match the inside. (There’s a Morrissey quote in there somewhere…) 

I feel the fear all year long, but that feeling is heightened at Halloween. On top of that, dressing up as someone or something else is empowering and exciting. I love that there is a day dedicated solely to both of these things. That’s why Halloween will always be my favorite holiday.