Why Horror? A personal exploration.

As a lifelong horror fanatic, a question I ask myself all the time is, why horror? I don’t mean as a casual fan, I mean as a life long obsessive. I mainly watch horror when I go to the cinema. My home library is pretty much all horror fiction or non-fiction about the horror genre. I pointedly study horror cinema from every country I can find it. I watch horror films from the dawn of cinema to the most recent releases. I make top ten lists of my favorite authors and I am always on the hunt for what is next in the horror genre. Which is all just symptoms of an obsession, but goes a little way to explain, I have pretty much centered my life around this. I don’t mean in a nerdy fanish Star Trek way, but as I view the world through a lens informed by Kafka and Lovecraft and Ligotti and Cronenberg and Kiernan and Koja. My horror obsession does not need other fans to validate it, I have lived most of my life without knowing anyone really read Ligotti or watched Eraserhead. With the advent of social media, I have met a lot of like-minded people. But if social media went away tomorrow, I would still be the same horror obsessive I am today. When I view a great horror film or read a great horror short story, I feel like life is worth living, and everyday life becomes interesting for a brief time. Horror obsession is a very personal thing that is hard to talk about. How do you explain why you like horror and what it means to you personally? Well, I guess let’s have a go at it, shall we? First I shall talk of some of the pleasures I get out of horror, then I shall talk about the basic relationship I feel with the horror genre. And let me also say, this is a personal trip down my obsession with horror, you may have a different relationship or viewpoint, there is nothing more personal than one's obsessions after all. 

What draws me to horror? Well, I think it comes down to two things. The first is, society is full of lies. Mainstream cinema is trying to sell you a message. Religion is trying to sell you a message. Our educational system is trying to sell you a message. Work, marry, reproduce, die. Keep your head down and be obedient sheep. I honestly don’t understand what people get out of say, Marvel superhero films or say, the pride of working two jobs and having no time left, a life only consisting of sleep and brainless work as if that is a goal one would want to achieve. It all just seems so banal and brainless. Modern culture and its entertainments are just so… empty. As a kid growing up dirt poor with no kind of hope for the future, I felt that only the horror genre spoke to me in a real and honest way about how life was. Reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and it’s breakdown of how absolutely nightmarish work life and family life can be, really hit home to me in a way that popular culture could just never do. Watching Fulci’s The Gates of Hell, someone understood the vertigo and panic of existing, recreating the anxiety of life through over the top surreal and horrific shocking imagery and subject matter. Eraserhead showed me that someone understood the horror of the body and its functions and de Sade showed me the horror that underlies the desires of others and the absolute void of meaning surrounding us. Finding that others shared a similar experience as me, and can honestly explore it, is a huge reason why I love horror. 

The second is that the horror genre is one of the only places that is not ashamed to show beauty and pleasure in a way that showed no shame or fear. The longing for a way past the crushing banality of everyday life, the sadness of our attempts at love, the desire for perversion and damnation, of Kiernan’s fiction really spoke to me. The pleasurable poisonous mindfucks of Cronenberg’s films. The delicate creeping dread featured in the fiction of Aickman and Campbell. Ligotti’s bleak nightmare commentaries of existence. The inhuman desires and sensual otherness of the creature from Alien thrills us in ways that the typical Hollywood science fiction film can not even grasp. These landscapes of decay, of death, of nightmare, are in the best sense of the word, erotic. In horror, we can talk openly how lonely we are, how desperate we are for some kind of connection, how life is not at all what we were promised as kids. In the horror genre, there is an honesty about how horrible things are, but there is also room for an honest discussion about the pleasures of life, however dark and taboo some may find them. I find a kind of rapturous beauty in the horror genre. 

So now we arrive at the crux of the issue. What is the core pleasure of horror and why do we crave it? Is it some kind of awe as a lot of people claim? I have seen many, many statements of that kind, that the greatest horror achieves a sense of awe. The common notion of finding “awe” in horror is I feel misplaced. I think saying “awe” is a safe way of describing the pleasures of horror in a very dishonest way. As if the experience of say, a horror film, is the same experience as seeing the Grand Canyon. Is it not what you are looking for in horror, that feeling of supreme delirium and creeping dread, deeply desired, wanting to be consumed by it, something almost orgasmic in its effect? Is this a better way of describing what you seek from the horror genre? Or is it really...awe? Now let’s look at another common statement about why we like horror. Horror is a way to deal with our fears. Is horror really a way to deal with our fears? Seeing images of killing and death prepare you for the inevitable end? Wouldn’t a viewing of an autopsy video be more effective at confronting your fears then say, watching Argento’s Suspiria? After a close relative dies, do you seek comfort in a horror film? I don’t. Does a horror film make you feel better about plague? About war and death? Safely confronting fears is not at all what the horror genre is about. This is pretty close to the argument saying that horror is like a rollercoaster ride. You get your thrills in a safe manner and then go home.  I think this may be true for the more casual fans of horror, and certainly does come closer, but does not yet explain the obsession people have with horror. No, I don’t think we are quite there yet. Let’s examine it a little more closely. You sit and watch a horror film, waiting for it to hit those notes you keep coming back for, those moments of exquisite dread and delirium. The bleakness of the end of Night of the Living Dead. The mindblowing surrealism of Videodrome. You seek these moments of horror, over and over again. And after the film, you obsess over it. You read articles on it and discuss it with your friends. Or you quietly think of it, knowing your friends would never understand what you get out of them, what you get out of a viewing of Repulsion or Persona. You keep it inside, a burning obsession you can not share. Horror is the most obsessive of genres. In fact, I would say that the direct sibling to horror is not fantasy, is not scifi, but erotica. You can’t describe what you like, you just know it when you see it. When it hits all the right notes, for that moment, it's transcendental. Both horror and erotica are the most poetic forms of genre. Horror is a way of taking the rotting corpse, the vast dark of the night sky, the seething desires of all living things, and making poetry out of it. It takes what destroys us, and makes it beautiful. Horror at its heart is a form of willful masochism. What do I mean by this? Masochism is taking what ravages you and worshiping it. It takes what you find to be beautiful, and gives it a whip. Masochism deals only with the unreal, it has no desire for the actual. Ligotti has this wonderful quote from talking about Lovecraft's work: “ Lovecraft dreamed the great dream of supernatural literature - to convey with the greatest possible intensity a vision of the universe as a kind of enchanting nightmare.” This, right here I think sums everything up nicely. Horror is a vision of the universe as a nightmare. Nightmares are based in unreality. And they probe our deepest fears. But a bleakness and a horribleness are not enough. The nightmare must also be… enchanting. Seductive. Erotic. Horror is the art of enchanting nightmares. Of desired dooms. Horror is where the darkly unreal and the dreadfully erotic merge. And we obsess over horror like the good masochists we are. Always awaiting our next unreal doom with eager anticipation. Elsewhere I have named this an “Abysmal Masochism”. A masochism to the bleak nightmares of the abyss we call existence? Yes, I think that is what I get out of horror. 

Review: The Untamed.

In Amat Escalante’s erotic sci-fi horror film The Untamed, there are a couple scenes of the main characters looking off into the sky, with a look of wonder and longing on their face. But as this film eventually shows, human wonder and longing is no innocent thing. The beginning scenes of The Untamed show a slow-motion asteroid on its way from the mind breakingly far away and abysmal places of the dark Universe, on its way to fall onto an unsuspecting Earth. Then the film cuts to a young girl named Veronica being sexually ravaged by some strange tentacled.. thing. The main focus of the film centers on four people: Alejandra and Angel, a young married couple with kids, Alejandra’s cute and successful brother Fabian, and a young mysterious woman named Veronica. Alejandra is detached and distant from her husband and from her day to day life. Unknown to Alejandra, her seemingly homophobic husband Angel is having an affair with her brother Fabian. Alejandra has a well-regulated life, she works all day at a candy factory and takes care of her two children. And while her husband is out at night secretly fucking her brother, she sits at home with her own secret and perverse desires. And then out of the blue, like she senses a rift in Alejandra‘s and Angel’s relationship, Veronica slithers her way into all their lives, befriending first Fabian, and then Alejandra, eventually leading the both of them, one by one, to a strange cabin, into a dark room with a old dingy mattress laying on the dusty floor, where in the corner lurks this strange alien being, Veronica promises them that what they are about to meet is maybe the most beautiful thing on Earth, maybe even the Universe, something that will free them from their lives of entrapment and thwarted desires, she brings them to feel its alien caress.

All the characters in The Untamed walk around like if in a dream. They do everything normal responsible citizens do, except for Veronica, they take care of the kids, go to work, pay the rent. In most scenes, their faces read like a blank slate, maybe with a hint of exhaustion from work or a bit of repressed anger in their eyes when they stare off into the distance. They are somnambulists, just sleepwalking through their lives. But underneath, they want to break free. To escape the trap life has set for them. They dream and they desire. They are bored with life and want to find meaning in sex and perversion. They want to fuck. All the characters freely fuck throughout the whole film, with the exception of Alejandra, who is too busy with kids or work to do anything but lazily lay beneath her husband while he fucks her. But after Alejandra meets Veronica, that will all change. Veronica is a bit of a naive character. She is awkward in social situations. She just says what she feels and does not care what people think of her. She uses her youthful sexuality to make her way through life, to get what she wants. She is a bit adrift in the world, with no family, no job, and no partner. But she has found something that she feels she wants to belong to. She is addicted to the thing in the cabin. To the point that it may destroy her. The alien thing arrived on the asteroid seen at the beginning of the film and has been hidden away in a cabin by an old married couple, a retired scientist and his wife. They look after it and they bring it what it wants, they fulfill its strange desires. They introduced Veronica to the thing, and she found meaning through it. But it has started to become abusive to Veronica, apparently, the more you copulate with it, the more violent it becomes in its lovemaking, and she agrees with the married couple to find it new lovers. So she first brings Fabian, and after Fabian is destroyed by the creature, she brings it his sister Alejandra. 

The thing in the cabin is a strange mess of tentacled horror and alien anatomy, completely nonhuman and abjectly disturbing. Something about being in its presence, makes everything living, animals, people, want to fuck. It kind of centers them, allows their most hidden away selves to emerge. It fucks you and enters you, running its tentacles over all your bodies and your various holes, taking you over with its own desire, its all-encompassing penetration. From the hidden away cabin, the alien corrupts all the characters, and everything it comes into contact with, for good, or for ill. When they leave the cabin, the characters feel unfulfilled with their regular lives, their work lives, their family lives, after knowing such a rapture, all other pleasures in life are found to be lacking. Veronica tries, reluctantly, to get away from it before it destroys her, but Alejandra has found new meaning in life, committing herself fully to her alien lover.  For the first time in a long time, she is truly happy, no matter what the outcome may be. By the end of the film, you understand why the characters keep looking up to the sky in wonder. If this thing came from the stars is representative of what lurks out in the outer dark, does the entire Universe just seethe and roil with creatures fucking? Is that the secret purpose of life? To penetrate and be penetrated? 

In terms of where this film stands in modern horror cinema, it obviously is some distant cousin to Zulawski’s Possession. The Untamed is certainly a more subtle and quiet film whereas Possession is more loud and in your face. But The Untamed does have several moments of strange beauty and dream images. This is a coldly gorgeous film. It shares with Cronenberg’s film Crash a boldness in directly representing sex as plot. In showing humans to be sexual beings in a very taboo-shattering way. I think that The Untamed would make a great double bill with Glazer’s Under the Skin, both coldly poetic films that explore the alien and the feminine in sexual/gothic terms. Also, this film has some of the most startlingly unnerving dreamlike imagery since von Trier’s Antichrist. There are images that will stick with you for the rest of your life in this film. The Untamed continues the new wave of arthouse horror films that take inspiration from directors like Cronenberg and Tarkovsky. Modern horror cinema is releasing some of the best work the genre has seen since the 1970s, and I think The Untamed continues that trend, being one of the best films to have come out recently, being both challenging and provocative in an era of cookie-cutter megaplex blockbusters.  An under talked about, under viewed masterpiece. Highly recommended. 

Review: All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma.

I wish I had read this collection sooner. It came out in 2018 and has been on my to-read list for far too long. I finally took the plunge and let me tell you, Priya Sharma’s All the Fabulous Beasts is an absolute masterpiece of strange eroticism and dark fantasy. On the outskirts of horror, comes this book of gentle nightmares, of loving tortures, and of bone-deep longings. Beings lost in a world of disappointment, desperately seeking some kind of sense of self, a feeling of belonging, some kind of transcendence. The works in this collection are inspired by myth, fairy tale, and urban legend. Shapeshifers, bizarre combinations of human and animal, people with hidden identities, all roam these pages, but, they are no different than you or me. What defines who we are? Are other people not as strange to us as a mermaid or a snake woman would be? And when we look in the mirror, do we not see some unknown chimera staring back at us? These tales of fantasy are presented with a strict realism, an attention to the nuances of characterization, these are real living and breathing people, not one-dimensional fantasy tropes. The themes of transformation and rebirth run throughout her fiction here, but her stories are not the usual horror trappings about ordinary people suffering hideous transformations. Her stories are about beings trapped in lives they know they were never meant to have, and finally escaping their traps or at least longing to. Sometimes what traps us are things like family, love, or career. And sometimes we are trapped by what we thought we were, by what we were told we are. Yes, they may change in horrific ways, change into something alien to them and us, but at least it’s change, at least they are free to be who they really are. There is this recurring love of the outsider, and a fear of settling down, of compromising. These stories are hymns to loneliness, to secret desires, to those who chose to walk down the shadowy path far away from the sun. All written in this quietly poetic, understated yet powerful prose.

There is a lot of great work here. Some stories I would like to single out are:

The Crow Palace: A woman is forced to return to her old family home after her father's death, emotionally detached from years of being away and secretly haunted by deeply buried shame. She finds a landscape of skies filled with black crows and a shocking secret long hidden away. 

The Anatomist’s Mnemonic: A wonderfully many-layered exploration of fetishism and loneliness. It balances a tightrope between erotic thrills and a surgical coldness that only a master storyteller could accomplish. 

The Sunflower Seed Man: Maybe the most “horror” centered tale in the collection. It’s one of those stories where you are reading it, wondering if the author is really going to go there. And when she actually does go there, it’s just wonderfully macabre and amazing. 

A Son of the Sea: A tale of a man who feels this longing for something he can not define. A tale of loneliness and the mysterious depths of both the ocean and the human heart. And when he does what he has been seeking, it is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful and surreal endings in all of horror fiction. 

The Nature of Bees: A true chimera of a tale, where most would find horror in a strange tale about a woman, alone and longing for physical pleasures, and the strange cult-like group of beekeepers she encounters, here we find unbridled eroticism and an escape from social mores.

I could go on talking about all the stories I love in this, it is such a breathtakingly beautiful collection. It shares some of the quiet tenebrous subtlety of the films of Val Lewton. And those who love the work of Angela Carter and Caitlin Kiernan will love the heady mixing of eroticism, myth, and cynicism in her work. Through the use of fantasy and horror, Priya Sharma shows us we are all strange unique beasts, and all the more fabulous for it. Highly recommended! 

Review: In Fabric

Peter Strickland, director of Berberian Sound Studio, a meta-fictional romp about a sound designer working on an Italian horror film slowly going unhinged or is it the film that is going unhinged, and The Duke of Burgundy, a poetic study of masochism and power dynamics, is a director who exemplifies the notion of the director as artist, the auteur. His films are so deeply personal, so explicitly obsessive, they are at once almost completely unassessable and completely alluring in their fetishism and necessity. He clearly needs to create these films, and we are the better for them. He is one of the few modern masters of cinema, and his newest film, In Fabric, may just be his greatest creation yet.

One of the hardest things to do when you review a film is to attempt to pick apart the film, to understand it so you can explain it to the people reading the review. But, as a film lover, you don’t really want to know a film inside and out. You want to live inside it, to submit to its strange rhythms and textures. In Fabric is a film that almost defies one's ability to review. It is this phantasmic collage of different horror tropes, all perfectly assembled without the slightest stitchers seam to see how he put it together. 

Inside this strangely disorientating clothing store, sinister whisperings can be heard. A cabal of seemingly witchlike retail workers enchant customers into buying their wares. Their sales pitches are almost spell-like, absurd poems of sinister salespeak. This beautiful score, something that sounds like it came from the heyday of the European horror film, envelops everything in its sensual embrace. One of the customers, going out on a date with a man she met on a dating site, buys a dress, something to help her hopefully catch a new man. But, this is no ordinary dress. It is this creeping, dread-inducing thing, a haunted, or maybe cursed, thing that lurks, silently floating in the dark. Meanwhile, this strange clothing store, sends out these television commercials, maybe diabolic transmissions would be a better name, a cancerous technology, dangerous to view, infecting the late-night stations. 

In Fabric is this weird mix of the old school ghost story like The Innocents, shades of elegant Euro-horror films like Suspiria and Daughters of Darkness, the Cronenbergian techno-panic of Videodrome, a strong dose of the schizo drug-induced humor of Adult Swim programming, and the experiments in terror of the 90’s Japanese horror film like Ringu and Kairo. And it plays as this aggressively surrealist satire. Meant more to disturb than make light, but without losing sight of the humor of its disturbing subject matter. Like Eraserhead, you could watch it one day and laugh your ass off, then watch it again the next day in anxious silence. And somehow this all works, and it works perfectly. I was amazed at how this film is all of this and absolutely uniquely its own thing. It just may be the greatest horror film of the 2010s. Its only competition being Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution and Eggers’s The Witch.  I have the feeling that I will be watching this one over and over and over again, a contagious film fetish captured on celluloid.