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Ever since I was a kid, I loved horror. I came up on watching horror themed sitcom reruns and classic monster films late at night on broadcast tv before then watching a lot of horror films on VHS that my older siblings rented at the local corner shop owned by a man who had no concerns about the rating system or what age people should be to rent R or unrated films.
I have a terrible memory, to be honest, which is pretty related to having total aphantasia, which simply is the name for the fact that I can’t form any images in my mind. Horror films, notably, make up the majority of memories for me, though, whether from my childhood or adulthood. You may be sitting there thinking, “ah, the fear is what she must remember” but, in fact, I don’t feel any fear from horror films at all. Scary scenes don’t replay or traumatize me since a lack of visualizing also means that I am not haunted by memories of fear, thoughts of monsters, or projecting what may be lurking around a corner. Nothing goes bump in the night for me. Nothing has ever hid under my bed waiting to grab my ankles, unless it is my cat.
For my memories of horror, then, what I remember in my body is physically where I was and how I was watching when something pleased or amused me. I remember laying on the couch and pretending to sleep while watching The Exorcist reflected in the large mirror behind the couch. I remember singing “one, two, Freddy’s coming for you” while taking a bath in my nana’s upstairs bathroom; I remember deciding to never marry after being disgusted at the deep betrayals by cinema’s worst partners in Rosemary’s Baby and The Sentinel (seriously, these two men planted the seeds for my lifelong anger at the patriarchy even when I didn’t know the word for it), I remember being obsessed with how funny Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was in the movie theater in high school or cracking up with my siblings at “death by shish-ka-bob” in Happy Birthday to Me or while singing the Silver Shamrock song from Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. I shake my head at the visit I got from the concerned pilot on a plane while watching Society (note: do not watch Society on a plane) or when I screamed in surprise on a train car at an unexpected loud noise in Drag Me To Hell. I also remember the deep guilt that I felt as a young teen watching and enjoying I Spit on Your Grave, an experience and shame so acute that in many ways it determined my journey toward film theory, masculinity, feminism, genre, politics, and cult as a way to understand why I found pleasure in not only “bad” objects but objects that many found repulsive and irredeemable.
Having so few memories, I find it really striking that the majority of things that I do remember are all related to—or filtered through—horror. Even more specific is the way that these moments also align to full-body memory of where I was, what I was doing, how I was feeling, why I was sulking or laughing. Thinking about these connections for this short essay has helped to click into place the key connection between physicality, affect, and the intellect that I have been arguing for over twenty years in my academic thought/writing/teaching. In particular, my constant chorus of how the lack of fearful looking relates to the importance of “attractions” and intellectualism is rooted in my subjective experience of horror in childhood and beyond.
The lack of fearful looking and, indeed, the embrace of the monster is often key for the works that speak to me and that I find politically significant. While all media is political, horror wears this on its sleeve much more prominently exactly because it can depart from realism and the real. Nobody needs to offer achievable solutions to problems in the way that realist dramas expect institutionally. Basically, in most other genres, we may see one bad actor, one bad billionaire, one bad corporation, and the film invests in removing and punishing them in a way that reaffirms our belief that the system itself is healthy and resilient. We are rarely invited to rethink capitalism or the desirability of the nuclear family structure. Fear is such a tool of the status quo, often being used to target, Other, and demonize minoritized identities as a threat that harms and contaminates. The conservative impulse of fear—or, rather, how fear is weaponized—is why common-sense approaches to horror often assume that all horror is misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, and racist. Yet, when the departures from realism are so great and/or the characters are stripped of provoking fear and disgust in others, we can then see the failures of the society as it exists.
Of course, none of this is groundbreaking in terms of horror theory, but it lays the foundations for then moving to also connect that affect and intellectualism are not opposed. This essential step of integrating affect and intellect counters the idea that spectacle is a tool of distraction and manipulation of the masses. For horror, spectacle is most obviously in images that primarily offer pleasure to the eye like the big set pieces of Final Destination, the baroque murders in Argento, the camera that pulls back to a bird’s eye view for a murder in Devil’s Rejects. For me, these moments work more like Geoff King’s contemplative spectacle from Spectacular Narratives. In the spectacular violence of horror films, there is usually no character watching in these scenes, yet the audience is invited to enjoy the elaborate design, the innovation, and the sheer audaciousness or whimsy of the violence and killing. Like King’s work with blockbusters and science fiction, these moments are not “unthinking” for the spectator but rather asking the audience to pause to actually look and admire the technical prowess, the practical effects, the beauty of design and editing. It is not truly an immersive moment, but rather a way to engage with the film as constructed beyond narrative purposes. For me, horror is a great example of this type of contemplative spectacle exactly because often the narrative is not the main focus of horror!
A second level of intellectualism and interaction can trigger, too, when there is someone looking, like the “woman who married the Travelling man” in Company of Wolves. Her repeated reverse shots of tenderness, curiosity, and compassion as she watches her first husband shift so painfully into a werewolf refuses to allow fear and rejection to dominate our spectatorial position. Through her, we accept. Later in the film, the scorned, pregnant Celtic witch turns her angry gaze to a mirror and exacts revenge on the abusive Big House inhabitants. Her spectatorship is not passive. She turns looking into a powerful action, applying quite literally James Joyce’s lines about “the cracked lookingglass of the servant” of Stephen Hero into a way of exposing and overturning the power structure.
Indeed, rather than serving as a tool of oppression and power, horror can shift the way that we see the world and make us realize the integration of the mind and body, of feelings and intellect. We know that the facade of normality is often covering the festering of a society. Horror, for me and my love of it, breaks free from an investment in narrative and having an answer and a solution. I never remember plots of so many of these films, yet individual moments break free and move me emotionally and intellectually. This movement beyond narrative and into just acknowledging and manifesting feelings of anger and sadness is why I return to horror over and over again, especially now in moments where so many people feel helpless, abused, attacked, and powerless. Horror captures that wide variety of emotions, especially as we slide across multiple points of view in the film.
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