Horror, Community, and the Window of Empathy

“Why do you like this?” Emma practically screamed at me from her side of the couch. We were watching Hereditary. A child was just decapitated, and her mother Annie found the headless body in the back seat of her car, left there in shock by her son Peter. Curled up on the floor, Annie wailed in agony. My enjoyment must have seemed ghoulish, and the fact that I’d seen the film before recommending it to her and our friend Séamus (who was also there, agape in horror) didn’t exactly help my public perception. Hereditary is gruesome, and I saw her point. After all, horror is a window of empathy, and there’s nothing to see through this one but anguish.

But the fact is: I did like it. I loved it. Later that year, when Aster’s sophomore feature Midsommar showed me a family murder-suicide, an exposed leg bone from a botched cliff-dive, and the still breathing remains of a tourist turned into a floral chicken coop, I loved that too.

I could go on and on about why I love Aster’s films – about their beautiful symmetry and their sinister use of real cult rituals (particularly in Hereditary), the way they go all-in on their premises instead of copping-out with a trite “it was all mental illness” twist – but the core of my fandom is this: Aster takes classic subgenres that have been thoroughly explored and injects them with unflinching depictions of trauma. His films are perfect little puzzle boxes of pain, which is a human emotion and sensory experience normally reserved for places a lot less safe than my living room couch. Invoking pain early in his films, the established horror tropes of his Rosemary’s Baby and Wicker Man tributes take on a new role. Instead of reflexively commenting on their filmic lineage, Hereditary and Midsommar safely guide us through the sensations we normally are not permitted to explore.

Longtime readers of this blog will know about my history with PTSD rooted in gun violence. I never stop writing about it, and that is at least partially because I feel alone, and I know others must feel that way too. Violence is stylized and defanged in our popular culture to the point that horrific actions, like shooting human beings with guns, become almost quotidian. No consequences, no sleepless nights, no pain, agony, and desperate self-harm, just quips and tired thrills. The pervasiveness of false and fun depictions of violence is alienating for a person like me, creating an unspoken social pressure to forget the feelings and emotions of my own trauma. Violence must be fun, says the unspoken rule, or else you’re broken.

As perfectly articulated in a recent Irish Times feature by Brian J Showers (building on an observation by editor Douglas E Winter), “horror is an emotion, and so the success or failure of horror literature is predicated on eliciting an emotional sensation in the reader.” That emotional nature is why horror so perfectly pairs with all other genres. Sci-fi horror, dark-fantasy, prestige drama horror, horror comedy, splatterpunk, children’s horror, eco-gothic, vampire romance – it’s not about the specific mechanics, it’s about the affect. Wherever human stories take place, horror can start to bleed through the walls and rise from the ground. Like crossing your eyes at the corner of a room and finding a portal to Hell.

In order to find connection with other media aliens, I write about mental illness through the lens of horror. The genre’s affective nature allows me to engage with media in a meaningful way, providing a forbidden language for despair. The path to community is simple: the greater the degree of horror, the more extreme the fictional pain, the more honest it feels, the more nuanced my conversations can be, the less alone I feel.

#HorrorCommunity

Community is the point here. The post-traumatic reading isn’t the only way to access horror. For many it has religious significance, a space for stories of spiritual liberation. For others it’s just a fun adrenaline rush. You’d be hard pressed to find a genre with more inventive practical effects, and the indie sensibilities brought to it by a mainstream aversion to pain and suffering make it feel accessible to young creatives. The horrific landscape is a wide open plain – moonlit, haunted, and bulging with corpses. Horror is everywhere and horror is for everyone. I will say it again, horror is a window to empathy, and on the other side you’ll find understanding.

Emma, Séamus and I made it through that screening. Together as viewers, we crawled out of the abyssal emotional pit dug by the act one decapitation. Now, Emma often cites Hereditary as the film that made other horror accessible to her (great news for me, her horror writer partner), and I think of that movie night wherever the three of us reunite for a night of terror. We know we’re safe together, no matter what we see, because we have each other.