Horror in Horrific Times

There are ants in my veins and my stomach is made of glass. When I stop to think about what’s going on in the world now, with the spread of a deadly contagion and the mandatory loneliness we must embrace for years to resist it, my bones start to warp out of shape, trying to pierce my organs and offer them up to the crows. And then there’s the violence. Last week a domestic abuser went on shooting rampage in my province, killing at least 22 people. The news of it stuck me on meat hooks and I’m still squirming.

The world is a nightmare, and my body craves obliteration as a break from the pain. The boulder I’m pushing is so heavy, I want to lie down and let it roll back over me, smushing away my sense of collateral trauma and its weird body sensations. But instead, I’m diving further into horror—and it’s working.

For many, I imagine horror culture might be the last thing they’d turn to in such wearisome times. It’s certainly not an intuitive choice when the world seems to be plagiarizing the first act of Stephen King’s The Stand. Horror doesn’t offer the escapism of fantasy and sci-fi, or the comparatively calm affect of conventional realist media. Horror instead asks us to empathize with someone else in a torturous situation, and to find meaning in their suffering. Through empathy and passion, horror opens a window to a better bad place, where terrible feelings and senseless tragedies have a meaning and a value. Horror’s gift is being able to roam those abominable frontiers safely, then come back to our own unspeakable crisis and better understand why our agony doesn’t have to be in vain. 

The worse the fictional pain, the better the relief. The family annihilations in Ari Aster’s Hereditary or Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, the gruesome body horror of Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Sardines”, the absurd guilty punishment of Kojima and del Toro’s P.T. or the sheer brutality of Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room—these artworks inspire the same sensations we feel in life right now, but in a safe environment where we can examine them and their relationship to our poor fictional surrogates on the page or screen. We can isolate our spasming fear and relax it. It’s physiotherapy for the parts of us we can only identify through metaphor and hyperbole.

Horror has always been an exploration of the shadowy parts of life, the abyssal trenches, and starless midnights of the soul. That’s why some people avoid the genre, experiencing it only through the gaps between their fingers as they cover their eyes. Unpleasant feelings are an acquired taste, but the world has become unpleasant, and we can’t hide under a blanket until the scary part is over. Instead, we have an opportunity learn about our new dark lives, and the emotions that come with them. In doing so we can find meaning, walking a bit more confidently now that the lights are out and monsters are real.