The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books Horror Studies) 1793643393, 9781793643391

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The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century

LEXINGTON BOOKS HORROR STUDIES

Series Editors: Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary monographs or edited volumes that expand our understanding of horror as an important cultural phenomenon. We are particularly interested in critical approaches to horror that explore why horror is such a common part of culture, why it resonates with audiences so much, and what its popularity reveals about human cultures generally. To that end, the series will cover a wide range of periods, movements, and cultures that are pertinent to horror studies. We will gladly consider work on individual key figures (e.g. directors, authors, show runners, etc.), but the larger aim is to publish work that engages with the place of horror within cultures. Given this broad scope, we are interested in work that addresses a wide range of media, including film, literature, television, comics, pulp magazines, video games, or music. We are also interested in work that engages with the history of horror, including the history of horror-related scholarship. Titles in the Series The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Simon Bacon Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss, edited by Erica Joan Dymond Supranational Horrors: Italian and Spanish Horror Cinema since 1968, by Rui Oliveira The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination, edited by Simon Bacon Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, edited by Natalie Neill Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives, and Aesthetics, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Subashish Bhattacharjee, and Ananya Saha Violence in the Films of Stephen King, edited by Michael J. Blouin and Tony Magistrale

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Simon Bacon

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bacon, Simon, 1965- editor. Title: The evolution of horror in the twenty-first century / edited by Simon Bacon. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Lexington Books horror studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022054416 (print) | LCCN 2022054417 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793643391 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793643407 (epub) | ISBN 9781793643414 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Horror in mass media—History—21st century. | Horror films—History and criticism. | Horror television programs—History and criticism. | Horror tales— History and criticism. Classification: LCC P96.H65 E96 2023  (print) | LCC P96.H65  (ebook) | DDC 700/.41640905—dc23/eng/20230213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054416 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054417 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Simon Bacon PART I: FRAMEWORKS AND CLASSICS OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HORROR

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Chapter One: Horror Theory Now: Thinking about Horror Kevin Corstorphine‌‌‌ Chapter Two: Decadent Feasts: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock





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Chapter Three: From One Extreme to Another: Horror Cinema and Censorship in the Twenty-First Century Neil Jackson

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Chapter Four: The Recurrence and Evolution of Universal’s Classic Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror M. Keith Booker

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Chapter Five: The Remixing (and Ransacking) of Hill House: Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley Jackson in Contemporary Gothic Fiction Joan Passey

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Contents

PART II: MEDIA AND CONSUMPTION



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Chapter Six: Further Notes Toward a Monster Pedagogy John Edgar Browning



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Chapter Seven: Sounding Horror: Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the Power of Music in Black Horror Erik Steinskog Chapter Eight: The Evolution of Horror on Stage Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

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Chapter Nine: Hauntify the World: New Directions in Video Game Horror 129 Gwyneth Peaty Chapter Ten: The Evolution of Horror and New Media Carlos Littles



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PART III: RECOGNITION AND EVOLUTION



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Chapter Eleven: The Future of Horror: Evolution or Revolution? Carina Bissett Chapter Twelve: Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror Maisha Wester



Chapter Thirteen: Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century Jacob Floyd Chapter Fourteen: “Stepping out of the Closet”: The Evolution of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century Horror TV Natasha C. Marchini



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Chapter Fifteen: Involution, Adaptation, Mutation: Horror’s Disability Dynamics Angela Marie Smith‌‌‌

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Chapter Sixteen: Sympathy for the Candyman: The Politics of the Past in Supernatural Horror Brandon R. Grafius

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PART IV: EVOLVING THEMES

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Chapter Seventeen: The Futures for Folk Horror Mikel J. Koven



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Contents

Chapter Eighteen: The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism Teresa Fitzpatrick

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Chapter Nineteen: Undying Earth: Extinction Romances in the Age of Anthropocene Ian Fetters

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Chapter Twenty: Fear of Infection: Negotiating between Community and Isolation in Gothic Contagion Narratives Laura R. Kremmel

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Chapter Twenty-One: The Metal and the Flesh: Techno-liminalities, Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced Super-Body as a Horror Space 303 Lorna Piatti-Farnell Index

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About the Editor and Contributors



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List of Figures

Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror

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Figure 2.1. Josh Hartnett as Ethan Chandler and Eva Green as Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful

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Figure 2.2. Tom Hardy as James Keziah Delaney in Taboo



Figure 2.3. A murder victim transformed into a ghoulish work of art in Hannibal

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Figure 0.2. Visual Intervention II: Mother



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Figure 0.3. Visual Intervention III: Sinew



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Acknowledgments

First of all, I’d like to thank all the authors who have been involved in this book at whatever stage for helping to make it happen—without you all, we never would have made it from idea, to proposal, to final manuscript. A special thanks to all those that made it to the final volume as the “new normals” we have been constantly experiencing over the past few years have made sustained focusing on anything other than coping an amazing feat in itself: well done and thank you to all of you. I would like to thank Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Carl Sederholm for wanting the book for their terrific series at Lexington and Judith Lakamper for her help and patience in getting the book from manuscript to finished thing. A big thank-you to Gemma Files who is not only an amazing horror writer but a terrific artist as well and who kindly let me use one of her drawings for the cover of the book (someone needs to approach her about publishing a book of her drawings). As always, the biggest thankyou to my wife, Kasia, my always and forever, without whom none of this would ever get done or be worth doing. Also, to our own two little “horrors,” Seba and Maja, who always help to keep things in perspective no matter how stressful things get. And last, but not least, Mam i Tata Bronk for their constant support and never-ending supplies of sernik Magdi.

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Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror. Source: Drawing by Gemma Files. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Introduction Simon Bacon

The beginning of the twenty-first century feels like a special moment in the evolution of the horror genre, in part due to the intersection of many areas of global and cultural anxiety over a world that humanity no longer has any control over, but also in the convergence of a growing importance given to minority directors, new emerging genre themes, production methods, and means of distribution. As many commentators have noted, horror is at is most important and it’s most valuable at times of extreme emotional and psychological excess, as a way to externalize what we, as a cultural and as individuals, are feeling and also visualize ways beyond it. While this can be seen to be a rather Freudian observation on cultural production, recent studies have claimed that horror does indeed prepare us to cope better with horrific and anxiety-producing situations (see Johnson 2020, Clasen 2017)—even if it might also mean we will leave more lights on at night and not investigate strange noises outside the house. However, it does reinforce, and build upon, the more established observation that each generation creates its own monsters (Cohen 1996, Auerbach 1997) which would strongly suggest that the same is true of horror—we need only think of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster to see how a particular cultural moment produces not only a unique monster but the nature of the horror it produces or partakes in, is equally individual (even if the cultural and individual anxieties at play can seem to be similar across time). The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century then begins the important work of conceptualizing exactly what that means and how the interplay of evolving means of creation, production, and audience consumption and participation affects what we consider to be horror in the 2020s. More so, through speculating how the evolution of the genre might develop in the future, it also suggests ways in which we might not only cope with a world during a pandemic, populist politics, #MeToo, BLM, and constantly

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changing versions of the “new normal,” but preparing us for how we might conceive of what follows. The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century then sees the horror genre as intimately connected to our experience of being in the world at a very particular historical and cultural moment. This implies a certain responsibility on the genre itself, and indeed those that write about it, to engage with that moment in ways that both help to understand it and to interrogate it, interrogation here being a frank questioning, a laying bare of what is ordinarily hidden, an inherent part of horror, so that we might be more able to recognize and evolve with it. In many respects, horror can be seen to perform a similar function to Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the unheimlich as a “dark double” to this world that allows us to investigate the nature of the world (Withy 2015). From this, it is equally important and timely to redress imbalances within the genre itself, especially in terms of gender and ethnicity, as seen in the necessary promotion of female, indigenous, LGBTQ+, and minority themes, directors, creators, and producers. There has been much talk around horror at the start of the twenty-first century as being smart, intelligent, or “elevated” as a defining characteristic. In part, this is a product of each age wanting to distinguish itself from what came before—a process that has increased ever more rapidly in an age of “Buzzfeed” headlines and online content creators vying for audience attention—though it is equally related to the increase of quality horror production and its increasing standing within the film industry, which remains highly influential within the discourse of entertainment media. Due to its inherently exploitational nature horror has always produced a lot of B-movie and low-budget content—not least as there has always been a significant-sized audience who appreciate such fare—particularly in the relation to gore, jump scares, and sex (predominantly scantily clad women). However, the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen horror and horror adjacent narratives becoming more mainstream with A-list directors, actors, studios, and budgets producing significant numbers of films and related content—oddly this has been assisted by the pandemic that saw a large boost in the demand for streaming and online services offering original films and series with several major players in this offering dedicated horror channels. Later in this collection Jeffrey A. Weinstock describes much of this new content as “prestige” horror in the sense that it has high-quality production values and has obviously had large amounts of money spent on it. Almost inevitably, this has seen a rise in more inventive and plot lead narratives which have subsequently labeled as “elevated.” It is worth noting that this can be a highly problematic category as many films categorized as such often still depend on well-worn horror tropes within their plots as much as slasher and gore lead horror can involve deeply intricate and “elevated” plot lines (see Wes Craven’s New Nightmare [1994]).

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Indeed, even the current studio obsession with sequels and remakes that the terminology was meant to react against, can equally be shown as much more knowing and inventive than such oppositional categorization would like to suggest. In contrast to this, then, the current volume would like to propose something else as a defining characteristic, not necessarily just for the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it is possibly one we need now more than earlier generations, and that is horror as a call to action. This call to action is part recognition of the horror portrayed on screen and part affective in that it compels a response, be it ontological and/ or physical—a change in how one views the world and/or how one acts within it. Consequently, it can almost be seen to be aspirational in that it calls for us to be better than we are now—more inclusive, more accepting of others though less accepting of the bad behavior of others. Aspirational would seem a contradictory word to use in relation to horror, unless one was encouraging a generation of serial killers, but here it is meant as narratives and/or “vehicles”—vehicle in the sense of all the other aspects of a horror property, such as production values, actor choices, minority representation, access and distribution, fan interaction, and so on—that express a desire for change. “Change” can be a difficult term to use here, though it relates back to Heidegger’s thoughts on the unheimlich, which for him was a means to investigate the ontological and what “normal” might be (Withy 2015, 3–4). Horror, then, if interpreted as a means to defamiliarize the world around us, by revealing the darkness and violence within it, becomes a way to look at and investigate what we think of as “normal”—normal often meaning a safe, unprejudiced, and equal world—and, by revealing it is anything but that, can force us to recognize and change that. Subsequently, fictional horror, in revealing the real horror of the world, allows us to “see” it and potentially redress the imbalances and prejudices underpinning it. Obviously, it’s worth citing some examples to see how this might work in practice. An obvious one would be a recent remake by Blum House, The Invisible Man (Whannell 2020), which more clearly than any of its predecessors, of which there have been a few (see Bacon 2020), explicitly relates the narrative to domestic abuse and gaslighting. The Invisible Man—from a story by H. G. Wells from 1897—as played by Claude Rains in 1933 is one of the Classic Universal monsters alongside Frankenstein’s Monster and Count Dracula. In the original film saw brilliant inventor Dr. Jack Griffin becoming unhinged as the effects of his invisibility potion start to take a toll on his sense of self. One of the victims of his increasingly erratic and often violent behavior is his fiancé, Flora (Gloria Stuart) who tries to help him. This aspect remains with the figure and becomes increasingly eroticized through later additions to the canon such as The Invisible Women (1940) and Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) reaching something of a climax in The Hollow Man

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(2000) where sexual violence becomes a key feature of the narrative. The majority of these earlier texts promote the titillating aspects of the narrative around male control over the female body, though often tries to mitigate this through blaming the invisibility potion itself as the real source of the scientist’s unhinged behavior. However, the Blumhouse film explicitly shows invisibility as a tool for the already possessive and violent inventor (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) to control and abuse his partner (Elizabeth Moss) even more. In contrast to its predecessors then, Whannell’s film cites the true source of horror in the film, the unseen monster in the room as it were, as violence against women and more so that inflicted by partners. The effects are shown as graphically real, not just on the victim but the world around them. By showing this behavior as monstrous, it equally identifies all those that inflict such violence, or help facilitate it, are also monstrous. This, the film is a call to both to stop such behavior and also for those that assist in its continue to be held accountable. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) can be seen to work in a similar way in citing cinematic precedents of Black slavery in the United States and the dangers of entering the symbolic White (plantation) House (Lauro 2018, 69–75) and how Black bodies are used to ensure the immortality of White power and privilege. Peele knowingly shows an image of traditional wealthy Whiteness, that presents as a “friend” to Black America, yet exploits and, literally, takes on its talents as their own, to prolong their own longevity and prowess—the kind of systemic oppression and exploitation shown in Get Out is shown to be of national scale in Us (2019). The monsters are many in Peele’s film, but potentially the most horrific one is the implication that Black identity is being replaced by the White world that seeks to “inhabit” and subjugate it—once out of the city the majority of Black bodies seen are actually inhabited by White minds. Get Out then more clearly delineates the horror of modernday America and its treatment of Black bodies and identity, becoming a call for change. It is no surprise maybe that these two examples can be connected to two social and political movements that came to prominence just before the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, and that’s #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Both are the result of years of discrimination, abuse, trauma, and unnecessary deaths, and both actually feature in individual essays within this collection. Given the worldwide support garnered for each of the movements, it is unsurprising that they might find form in popular culture and in films, novels, comics and games amongst others. In many respects then, they have become focal points for earlier works (texts, films, etc.) that had already begun the work of expressing the inherent horror that has always been present in racism, misogyny, sexual and physical abuse, and exploitation.

Introduction

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One can make similar and related cases for films that highlight the continuing plight and social vilification of immigrants, as seen in His House (2020), and No One Gets Out Alive (2021); the unseen pandemic of dementia and Alzheimer’s in old age, as shown in Relic (2020); and through to environmental concerns as highlighted in movies like In the Earth (2021), Gaia (2021) or even Endzeit (2018). In this sense, Aspirational Horror, or Call to Action Horror, becomes a way or reminding ourselves of how entangled we are in our environment and with each other and that we have a duty to recognize this and respond accordingly if we are ever to address the very real horrors of the world that we currently live in. As such, this idea informs much of what this collection is about, accepting the human, emotional, and political nature of horror, and not just as a genre to titillate but as one of worth, in the psychological, emotional “work” it facilitates in its audience/readers/players, and a facilitator of change. As suggested above, entanglement and relationships are of increasing importance with contemporary horror, not just within the various areas within the genre itself—funding, production, creation, and distribution—but in relation to its audience as well. While all genres have always been ultimately reliant on their respective audiences for their continued popularity and financial rewards—Dracula has remained part of the horror canon since its publication due to its mainstream popularity rather than critical plaudits—in the age of the internet and New Media, the relationship between content producers and their audience/consumers has altered dramatically. Many projects now rely on crowdsourcing for their funding, often giving their multitude of investors more input on the final product; promotional films, shorts, and even complete works are now released online via YouTube, subscription sites, or online streaming services; fanzines, slash fiction, tribute works, and all manner of fan art are released online, often garnering their own respective dedicated audience and occasionally launching mainstream careers; fan communities now “power” all manner of comic cons and events where content creators and producers can be met and engaged with, often broadening the scope and appeal of a particular narrative/franchise and its characters/actors—some content producers even introduce this into their content (see Camilla 2014– 2016). Taken together, in many areas of its creation and production, horror has become a far more collective endeavor allowing for greater engagement and influence over the finished material. In contrast, of course, the kinds of celebrated horror of the early 2000s, the elevated and prestige variety, are far more in the area of auteur- and studio-funded works. More importantly however, it does speak to the relationship between horrors creators and their audience and how the two are often the same thing. This further intimates why horror is becoming more diverse and also why it aspires to do even more.

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Consequently, The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century will not only speak to the changes wrought by technological development in creations, production, and distribution but also promote the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented positively in horror—women, LGBTQ, indigenous, and BAME communities—are being seen and finding space to speak. As such this is a hopeful collection, one that identifies how horror has, and is, evolving in the twenty-first century and the kinds of positive futures it can allow us, as a shared humanity and part of a larger ecosystem, to have. As such it claims that horror is not just about identifying the cultural anxieties of today but about revealing and recognizing the ways that we might ourselves, evolve into the future. THE SHAPE OF THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE The collection will then be divided in to four sections that focus on different areas of the horror genre. Beginning with what might be termed theories, or frameworks through which aspects of horror can be viewed. Consequently, the first section, “Part I: Frameworks of Horror” will largely concentrate on where we are now, covering some of the groundwork for what will follow. The first essay, “Horror Theory Now: Thinking about Horror,” by Kevin Corstorphine then looks at a more purely theoretical approaches considering recent classifications of horror with canonical approaches such as Freud, Kristeva, and affect theory, while stressing the importance of evolving and inclusive theory. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in “Decadent Feasts: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television,” continues the theoretical turn with an affective twist, contemplating the aesthetics of gore and violence in recent narratives and the beguiling nature of certain recent horror narratives. This is followed by “Horror Cinema and Censorship in the Twenty-First Century,” by Neil Jackson who discusses the changes in cinema censorship for recent horror where old prejudices still persist even though new means of distribution and consumption increasingly take new material beyond the reach of such official bodies. Next is “The Recurrence and Evolution of Universal’s Classic Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror,” by M. Keith Booker who considers how the classic Universal monster such as Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man have continued to fascinate and engage horror audiences up until the present day, and indeed into the future. The first part ends with “The Remixing (and Ransacking) of Hill House: Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley Jackson in Contemporary Gothic Fiction,” by Joan Passey which continues the wider recognition of one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century whose work is finally receiving the due it deserves. This essay

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also acts as a prequel of sorts to Carina Bissett’s article in part III which reiterates the importance of women writers to the ongoing evolution of the genre. “Part II: Media and Consumption” then considers the different media involved in the production of horror as well as the evolution of the ways in which it is received and consumed, many of which have been dramatically affected by world events in 2020. In his essay “Further Notes toward a Monster Pedagogy, John Edgar Browning begins the section with an unusual place for the dissenting of horror: the classroom. Here horror becomes a useful educational tool in the consideration of difference and otherness in light of evolving real-world events. Erik Steinskog in his essay “Sounding Horror: Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the Power of Music in Black Horror,” examines what constitutes Black music and how that relates to Black horror. Next, in “The Evolution of Horror on Stage,” Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. moves from aural to physical space and the evolution of theatrical horror into lived experiences. Challenging the barriers between real and fictional it provides a direct critique of the world beyond the narrative space. In “Hauntify the World: New Directions in Video Game Horror,” Gwyneth Peaty looks at gaming and the horror genre and how the uses of virtual spaces and development of multiple players online create increasingly realistic and “horror-full” places of interaction and experience. Carlos Littles, in “The Evolution of Horror and New Media,” considers how New Media effects horror and horror production, and in particular how, through the online democratization of creation, production, funding, and distribution, the lines between the authors and audience of horror are becoming increasingly blurred. This is followed by “Part III: Recognition and Evolution” which looks more at groups that have more traditionally been excluded from the production of horror as creators, actors, directors, producers and also from positive identification or leading roles within horror narratives. The first essay here is by Carina Bissett who, in “The Future of Horror: Evolution or Revolution?,” considers the ongoing struggles of women writers in the horror genre and how it has taken decades for them to be valued as much as their male counterparts. Maisha Wester in “Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror,” argues for the recognition of a new subgenre of horror, Black Lives Matter Horror, that groups films and texts together that specifically deal with Black experience in contemporary America. In “Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century,” Jacob Floyd considers First Nation indigenous horror in both its complexity and its gradual increase and acceptance by wider audiences. This is followed by Natasha C. Marchini, whose essay, “‘Stepping out of the Closet: The Evolution of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century Horror TV,” will then look at how concepts of the queer run deep in the heart of the horror genre and never more so than in recent films and series. Next is “Involution, Adaptation, Mutation: Horror’s Disability Dynamics,” by Angela

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M. Smith who describes the how many horror films try for greater inclusion and sensitivity with their respective narratives yet often slip into old, disenfranchising modes of thought in regard to mental and physical disability. On a positive note, though she does suggest that some recent narratives envision disablement as a site for radical human transformation. The last essay in this part is “for the Candyman: The Politics of the Past in Supernatural Horror.” Brandon Grafius uses the figure of the traumatized and traumatizing ghost to cut through the complications and false equivalences that often arise in the horror genre. The collection closes with “Part IV: Evolving Themes” which brings to the fore themes that have particular relevance to the 2020s and, indeed, either as concerns for many recent horror narratives or as real-world anxieties over just what our future might be. Mikel J. Koven begins this section with “The Future Promise for Folk Horror,” that looks at the increasingly popular subgenre of Folk Horror, though not as one where the past inevitably consumes the future but for its ability to provide a voice for marginalized groups. This is followed by “The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism,” by Teresa Fitzpatrick, which lays out the main areas of what we think of as Ecohorror, giving special attention to those which begin to describe the subgenre as evolutionary rather than avenging. Next Ian Fetters in “Undying Earth: Extinction Romances in the Age of Anthropocene,” examines the rise in apocalyptic or “extinction” narratives in science fiction and how the “horror” within them might not describe “the end” but a reckoning with what’s to come. In “Fear of Infection: Negotiating between Community and Isolation in Gothic Contagion Narratives,” Laura R. Kremmel continues the idea of extinction through the lens of contagion and our experiences of the recent pandemic. Here, the future is one that cannot take firm through isolation, a point picked up in the final essay in the collection “The Metal and the Flesh: Techno-liminalities, Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced Super-Body as a Horror Space,” by Lorna Piatti-Farnell. The “horror” of the future here is in “super bodies” that deny human isolation in favor of a collective, though one not of human sociability, but by combining the human and the nonhuman: horror then becomes the inability to accept the inevitability of a future that makes us unheimlich in relation to our present selves. As noted above, horror is a way for us to investigate the “horrific” nature of the anthropocentric world we have created around us. The intersection of the genre with science fiction and environmental studies reveal more clearly how horror can describe a world that is more than we can ever understand. And yet, horror is also hopeful, and as such is the only chance we have to make sense of where we are and where we might be going.

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WORKS CITED Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bacon, Simon. “Domestic Abuse: The Invisible Man (Whannell, 2020)—Domestic Monsters.” In Monsters: A Companion, edited by Simon Bacon, 23–30. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020. Carmilla. Created by Jordan Hall, Steph Ouacknine, and Jay Bennett. Toronto: Smokebomb Entertainment, 2014–2016. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clasen, Mathias. 2017. “Lessons from a Terrified Horror Researcher.” TEDxAarhus, November 28. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=6St5R2bYMOY. Accessed 21 August 2022. Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions, 2017. Johnson, Nicole. 2020. “How Horror Movies Can Help People Overcome Real-World Trauma.” National Geographic, October 30. https:​//​www​.nationalgeographic​.com​ /science​/article​/how​-horror​-movies​-can​-help​-overcome​-trauma​-and​-relieve​-stress. Accessed August 21, 2022. Lauro, Sarah Juliet. 2018. “Ron Honthaner’s The House on Skull Mountain (1974)— Zombie Gothic.” In The Gothic: A Reader, edited by Simon Bacon, 69–75. Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd. The Invisible Man. Directed by Leigh Whannell. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 2020. Us. Directed by Jordan Peele. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 2019. Withy, Katherine. 2015. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

PART I

Frameworks and Classics of Twenty-First-Century Horror

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Chapter One

Horror Theory Now Thinking about Horror Kevin Corstorphine‌‌‌

THEORY Horror’s capacity to delve intimately into the human psyche at the same time as reflecting the preoccupations of society more widely makes it a mode that is particularly open to theoretical approaches. It is also a topic, whether in fiction, film, or other media, that attracts a great deal of concern over its potentially negative effects. At the same time, enthusiasts extol its virtues in terms of allowing a safe exploration of fear, fostering communities of like-minded individuals, and even being fun. Indeed, horror has been playful since its earliest inceptions, and continues to be so in the twenty-first century, especially after its close entanglement with postmodernism at the turn of the millennium. In film, genre theory, aesthetic approaches, and psychoanalysis have loomed large, and in literary studies the conversation has been hugely affected by the dominant idea of the “Gothic,” stemming from the influential wave of sensational novels that appeared in the late eighteenth century and in their Victorian evolutions came to influence the later media of film and television. This chapter will chart the trajectory of horror studies in the twenty-first century and aim to point to the areas likely to prove most fruitful in the future. Horror has a tendency to be cyclical, and so many of the age-old debates continue, even as new and challenging expressions of horror appear and, in their turn, inspire fresh critical perspectives.

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HORROR THEORY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY The start of the twenty-first century was a particularly interesting moment for horror theory. A century prior, the late Victorian fin-de-siècle had thrown up some of the most enduring horror texts to this day, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In parallel, the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries were proving capable of interpreting these strange tales but at the same time writing Gothic narratives of their own. In Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919), as Nicholas Royle points out, “Freud is storytelling in ways that make his essay irreducibly literary, touched and energized by the fictional” (Royle 2003, 3). This intertwining of Gothic text and criticism explains why Freud has remained prominent in horror theory, long after having fallen out of fashion in the field of psychology itself. Horror is a genre that is especially capable of absorbing its own criticism and reusing it as a template. Twentieth-century horror had been characterized by this inescapable loop in which the mind itself functioned as a kind of haunted house and the distinction between the symbolic and physical nature of the demons scarcely seemed to matter as psychoanalytic theory flowed back into the work of horror authors and filmmakers. On one level this moved toward making some forms of horror theory redundant or at least tautological. Ken Gelder’s brief but significant sketch of the “field of horror” in the introduction to The Horror Reader (2000) perfectly encapsulates this situation. After conducting a prescient survey of forward-looking postcolonial and queer readings, he notes the limitations of horror studies as things stood then: The approaches here remain semiotic: almost no ethnographic work of any consequence on actual horror audiences has been done, although the occasional pious reminder that horror audiences are as “diverse” as the field of horror itself may be of as little help to analysis as the weary dismissal of horror as a genre that performs the same task over and over again. (Gelder 2000, 6)

Gelder here recognizes the limits of interpretation within a framework that is so wrapped in self-referentiality, and his criticism has been justified by an expansion in the twenty-first century not just of perspectives, but approaches to horror, many of which will be explored here, such as ecocriticism, critical race theory, and reception studies. Nonetheless, what Gelder refers to here as a semiotic approach remains broadly common even within these expanded approaches. The question of what is represented or, to use popular current terminology, “coded” into horror, remains relevant, especially where it come to monstrosity and what is actually portrayed as horrific.

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The position of horror theory in the 1980s and 1990s paralleled wider developments in literary and film criticism. Theory, specifically postmodernism, threw the doors open to the academic study of what has consistently been thought of as a “low” cultural form, from Gothic novels to horror cinema. As Myra Mendible writes in 1999, “As theorists of popular culture, we shamelessly cast our gaze on cultural productions that once were ‘beneath us,’ recognizing pornography, working-class literature, B-movies, pulp fiction, and soap operas as relevant objects of scrutiny” (Mendible 1999, 71). Horror was very much part of this and, importantly, horror productions themselves were regarded as becoming “smart,” or at least indulging in the kind of intellectual self-referentiality characteristic of postmodernism. In film, the Scream franchise (1996–present) exemplifies this trend. Scream relies on audience expectations of established slasher movie tropes at the same time as recycling them for a new audience. Director Wes Craven’s earlier New Nightmare (1994) arguably took this further, by having the director himself, and the key actors from his Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (1984–present), menaced by the monstrous Freddy Krueger, who has escaped from his fictional universe. This metafictional approach would be echoed in fiction such as Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005), where the author is troubled by the rumored presence of his own serial killer creation Patrick Bateman in the neighborhood, having seemingly left the pages of his novel American Psycho (1991). Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) takes the postmodern turn in horror to its logical conclusions by containing a deeply layered narrative framework, copious footnotes that spill across multiple pages, and fictional interviews with everyone from horror authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice to literary critic and custodian of the cultural canon, Harold Bloom. Danielewski’s text serves to anticipate and even forestall the act of literary criticism. As Bill Clough points out, “the novel functions as a parody of the traditional scholarly edition of a text”’(Clough 2019, 294). In the light of developments in the early twenty-first century this phase of horror seems somewhat indulgent, even smug, but served to complicate a previously complacent critical relationship to the text. It is difficult, for example, to imagine now a successful reading of a horror text that simply falls back on the claims of psychoanalysis. If horror in the 1990s had hit a peak of postmodernity in a creative sense, then critical theory and the expansion of the canon opened up new possibilities for approaching the text. The emergence of Gothic Studies as a discipline is intertwined with these developments. Gothic Studies grew out of a number of critical forerunners, but coalesced in the work of a group of academics including David Punter, Glennis Byron, and Fred Botting, who used the springboard of the Gothic novel as a way of expanding the scope of the Gothic and its interpretive possibilities.1 As Catherine Spooner points, out, one of the key elements of this was “to loosen Gothic from the straitjacketing

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notion of genre [. . .] reconfiguring Gothic as a mode” (Spooner 2021, 7–8). This opening up of the Gothic led to a proliferation of new perspectives that is crucial to horror theory today. Spooner acknowledge the possibilities and limitations of this approach: The advantage and the problem with the shifting critical understanding of Gothic as a mode, discursive site or aesthetic is that it meant that almost anything could be defined as Gothic [. . .]. At best, this produced exciting new combinations of Gothic and theory—Queer Gothic, Ecogothic—but this could also dwindle into the endless taxonomisation of subgenres and, at worst, deliver an ever-multiplying and thus, ever-vanishing critical object. (Spooner 2021, 8)

Gothic Studies takes in everything including but not limited to literature, film, television, videogames, art, fashion, music, and tourism, and is not even limited to horror. Spooner’s own Post-Millennial Gothic (2017) focuses on the rise of “happy Gothic,” uncoupled from both the association of Gothic with horror, but also the “anxiety” model of reading Gothic texts (the crucial importance of which will be returned to in this chapter). Spooner contends that “Gothic” takes on new meanings in the early years of the twenty-first century, moving from something ardently associated with subculture to something approximating a mainstream presence. Accordingly, there is a need to stop thinking about Gothic as something solely at the margins, merely indicative of things that are pushed out of mainstream culture. Spooner notes that, “nuances are often overlooked to feed a popular conflation of Gothic/horror and social anxiety” (Spooner 2017, 14). In this model, horror fiction and film exist primarily as an expression of the repressed: appropriately, the Freudian psychoanalytic model refuses to lay down and die. The interdisciplinary approach of Gothic Studies is inclusive of many different forms of media but emerges from literature departments and remains anchored in this history. In an essay alluded to by Spooner, Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall attack the “anxiety” model of Gothic theory by critiquing its supposed claims to radical transformation. Rather than revealing much about the subtext of such narratives, they claim, Gothic criticism tends to pat itself on the back by pointing out the foibles of, for example, the repressed Victorians: a move that reinforces the spurious notion that we (specifically academics in the humanities) are progressive and liberated. They claim that “it stands as a central, if more colourfully flagrant, instance of the mainstream modernist, postmodernist, and left-formalist campaign against nineteenth-century literary realism and its alleged ideological backwardness” (Baldick and Mighall 2000, 210). Baldick and Mighall’s criticism here is loaded with specific references to a certain tendency in literary studies and specifically the self-congratulatory nature of postmodern critique. Like

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Gelder’s piece earlier, this essay emerges in 2000, and further signals a turn in Gothic and horror criticism away from complacency and toward a wider world. As they do well to point out, though, Gothic studies does not occur in a vacuum, and follows the same trends seen in literary criticism more widely. It is instructive, too, to look outside this specific field and to examine the convergent evolution of film studies in particular. Film studies has long considered the Gothic to be primarily an aesthetic mode, and instead has focused on the term “horror” as a marker of genre. Nonetheless, the concerns of horror film scholars align closely with the Gothic studies approaches outlined here. As Xavier Aldana Reyes points out, “the once-neglected history of Horror has, in the twenty-first century, been consistently explored and recast” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 3). Like the Gothic, the vaguely disreputable nature of horror film has affected how it is viewed through an academic lens. Rather than starting from a neutral position, horror is almost always approached in terms of its social function and a certain amount of restating its importance is generally necessary. Bryan Turnock, for example, in Studying Horror Cinema (2019), borrows from the now-established field of Gothic criticism to associate the themes and narratives of horror cinema with “early-to-mid eighteenth-century Britain and the works of the so-called ‘graveyard poets’” (Turnock 2019, 10) and the associated Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century. The motifs of death, ghosts, and ruins, established in the Gothic, are later joined by a focus on psychology, particularly as seen in American authors like Edgar Allan Poe, and all feed into a genre that would come to be fully established in film toward the middle of the twentieth century. Like the Gothic, horror film has very much been interpreted as indicative of social mores at the time of each individual production. As Turnock notes, the dominant approach to studying horror “illuminates broader social, political and cultural histories” (Turnock 2019, 13). This is all well and good, but when horror is viewed, as it often has been, as subcultural, then the reading is skewed by other factors. As Baldick and Mighall point out, “since Gothic horror fiction has a generic obligation to evoke or produce fear, it is in principle the least reliable index of supposedly ‘widespread’ anxieties” (Baldick and Mighall 2000, 222). This critique has not necessarily changed the way that horror criticism operates: the loose framework of the “anxiety” model is still commonplace well into the twentyfirst century. Where there is hope of progress in this regard is probably in an increased attention to the specifics of history and the operations of power. The increasing diversity of horror authors and creators has also helped to avoid the kind of critical complacency that Baldick and Mighall warn of.

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HORROR THEORY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Although horror film maintains the “generic obligation” of causing fear pointed out here, it is worth noting the shift in position of horror in the twenty-first century. As Turnock points out, horror has become increasingly mainstream. This has been demonstrated by the huge box-office success of films like It (2017): a big-budget adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel that Turnock uses as a case study. Although the apparent crossing-over of horror into the mainstream inspired a slew of newspaper headlines, Turnock argues that “in reality the genre’s popularity had been growing steadily for a decade or more, fuelled by commercial and technological changes across the entire industry” (2019, 266). Larger changes that affect the consumption of horror include online distribution and unexpected sources such as social media: Turnock points to the case of the 2014 film The Babadook when postrelease, “the title character became the subject of an Internet meme that bizarrely elevated it to the status of gay icon” (2019, 290). Turnock sees this as symptomatic of wider forces, demonstrating, “the genre’s ability to cross cultural boundaries and capture the imagination of non-traditional audiences, while at the same time delivering a well-made scary movie” (2019, 291). Audience is crucial here, and the ways that horror is received and transformed through this actively engaged relationship with the genre necessarily changes the way we should examine it. This has much in common with Spooner’s observations on the Gothic, which also demonstrate that academic study itself has moved the Gothic toward something approaching respectability, as can be seen by the popularity of Gothic studies in English literature departments. Spooner documents the tensions between a rebellious subculture and the establishment, questioning “what happens when Goth images or aesthetics enter the mainstream or are appropriated by cultural producers and audiences who are not current participants in the subculture” (Spooner 2017, 21). Spooner answers this question by claiming that “just because something, an image, is appropriated by what, for want of a better term, I shall call the mainstream does not mean that it stops signifying” (2017, 21). If anything, in the twenty-first century, the signifying potential of Gothic and horror has increased exponentially. In addition to the collapse of the high/low cultural binary characteristic of postmodernism, there has been an additional collapse of a firm distinction between the subcultural and mainstream.2 At this point it is important to distinguish between Gothic and horror in the scope of this discussion. The entangled history of the two modes mean that Gothic criticism is useful in approaching horror. Clearly, though, Gothic aesthetics, mood, and narrative templates are not necessary to horror as such, particularly when thinking outside of the literary. Spooner’s arguments make

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clear the possibility of such as separation with the rise of “happy Gothic.” It is more difficult to imagine such a thing as happy horror, with the aforementioned need to create fear being a generic prerequisite. Accordingly, horror theory has moved to an increased consideration of how audiences actually consume horror, and to the mental and biological effect of horror itself. As Aldana Reyes pointedly claims, “horror films do things3 to viewers and their bodies” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 5). This experience is desirable and even pleasurable for viewers: a seemingly obvious point that has been hugely overlooked by critics. Aldana Reyes notes that “while socio-political readings of Horror are necessary, they hardly even cover the experiential side of Horror” (2016, 134). This aspect, for many viewers, “may be more consciously present in the decision of watching a film in the first place” (Ibid.). Horror, for Aldana Reyes, is “underlined by the emotional state of being under threat at a fictional remove” (2016, 100). This is crucial and goes some way to explaining the appeal of horror, even while it exists alongside a reluctance. Mathias Clasen’s work on the biological and evolutionary components of horror has seen the establishment of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark, in 2020, and the publication of wide-reaching research that bridges the academic and general readership.4 The importance of such work is that it takes assumptions and truisms such as the idea that horror fans are thrill seekers in general and conducts empirical research to establish firm findings. This movement away from purely “theoretical and interpretative work” (Clasen 2021, x) toward a quantitative and also socially engaged method, is one major thread of the evolution of horror research in recent years, and a response to the challenge posed by Gelder in 2000. The claims put forward by Clasen echo the work on affect highlighted by Aldana Reyes. An understanding of evolved human nature, of our physical identity as “an anxious hairless ape” (Clasen 2021, ix), provide insight into the functions and even tropes of horror. For example, claims that “many horror monsters are exaggerations of ancestral predators” (Clasen 2018, 358) or that they exhibit antisocial behaviors that have consistently been proscribed in human societies (359), really do provide insight into how horror interacts with what Clasen calls our “evolved cognitive tendencies” (Ibid). Importantly, this work emerges from a perspective beginning with passionate engagement and a real appreciation for horror, avoiding reductive or dismissive readings. A wider, and partly internet-driven, expansion of fandom and interactions between fans (including researchers) has meant that a consideration of who is actually watching, reading, or playing horror is not easily dismissed by academics. As Aldana Reyes claims of his “affective-corporeal approach” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 133), this allows an expansion, rather than a contraction: away from “an excessive focus on representation” (2016, 132) and toward “a more intuitive way of finding value in Horror that proposing

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apposite readings about its transgressive qualities that, at times, depend on points of reference viewers might not share” (2016, 133–34). What brings these approaches together is an acknowledgment of the futility of producing a single, totalizing reading. Instead, multiple interpretive possibilities come together under the aegis of highly specific case studies. Linnie Blake, using the lens of trauma, gives an example of how this might work. In a nod to classic horror theory such as Julia Kristeva’s interpretation of psychoanalysis, Blake argues that “the narrative of the decomposing corpse as object of erotic attachment can be seen to take on a particular significance once located within the broader context of a wounded post-war Germany [. . .] fulfilling a specific socio-cultural function” (Blake 2008, 188). Such approaches allow for an integration of the New Historicist impulse to deny eternal, fixed meanings in favor of the specific, but also to integrate post-Freudian ideas such as trauma theory. Trauma, at both a personal and collective level, has emerged as a trope that captures the mood of the early twenty-first century and lends itself overtly to reading the themes of horror. In the wake of the 2020 global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic this shows few signs of changing. As discussed earlier, Freudian psychoanalytic ideas became so entangled with horror and the Gothic in the twentieth century that it was impossible to separate the text itself from its interpretative meanings. Roger Luckhurst points to something of a crisis in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s over the legacy of Freud, when a kind of collective hysteria deriving from Recovered Memory Therapy saw accusations of ritual Satanic child murder on a mass scale in the United States. A sober reflection on what actually happened suggests, as Luckhurst notes, that, “traumatic memory might be iatrogenic, the product of the very therapy used to treat it” (Luckhurst 2013, 12). Luckhurst’s work does not seek to diminish the very real experiences of those suffering from responses to trauma, but to argue that “it is valuable to be made aware that psychiatric discourse assumes a plurality of possible responses to traumatic impacts” (2013, 211). An example he uses is that of the July 7 bombings in London in 2005, where “thousands of people on the tube system that day met the criteria of experiencing an extreme stressor event, yet diagnoses of PTSD fell vastly below usual statistical extrapolations” (Ibid). This observable plurality of responses is in contrast to claims made in the humanities, particularly literary and film studies as discussed here, that often assume a set response to trauma, itself a Gothic narrative of haunting more than a claim to truth. If such a plurality is possible, then how can we read a text from another culture with any certainty of accurate interpretation? A possible answer is through the highly specific attention to historical, social, and political detail proposed by Blake, and one that is also charted empirically by Clasen’s work on audiences. Clasen points out that “horror movies are always enmeshed in, and a product of, the cultural

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context” (Clasen 2021, 130). While this does mean that they “are good at mirroring widespread anxieties and concerns” (Ibid.), they are also bound up in other factors such as technological changes and business models of distributors, all of which are not extraneous to how we can and should interpret an individual horror text. Clasen uses the word “enmeshed”: a term that will is also relevant in ecological readings, as discussed later, but this concept is also related to the work of Bruno Latour, whose ideas will also be discussed in more detail later. Luckhurst invokes Latour’s ideas by contending that “rival theories proliferate around the notion of trauma because it is one of these ‘tangled objects’ whose enigmatic causation and strange effects that bridge the mental and the physical, the individual and collective, and use in many diverse disciplinary languages consequently provoke perplexed, contentious debate” (2013, 15). All this means that the position of horror theory in the early twenty-first century is one where a much wider nexus of connected ideas is acknowledged in all of their contradictions and paradoxes. An area of urgent critical concern, and certainly horror, is the question of the environment. This is also an area where theory has “proliferated” in an attempt to grapple with a very real problem that is simultaneously immediate and on a scale that is difficult for our minds to grasp. Human evolution has simply not prepared us to tackle global warming, the extinction of species, and our part in this at the level of humanity taken as a whole. Ecological theorist Timothy Morton sums up a certain critical reticence by pointing out that, “thinking outside the Neolithic box would involve seeing and talking at a magnitude we humans find embarrassing or ridiculous or politically suspect” (Morton 2016, 27). Morton calls problems at this magnitude “hyperobjects” because although things like global warming exist, they are the result of large-scale interactions between billions of human beings and their activities, and feel instinctually removed from our individual actions and desires. Nonetheless, in what many such thinkers call the Anthropocene, an era defined by human impact on the planet, we are the monster of the story. A novel like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and its film adaptation (2009), portrays future environmental collapse by zooming in on a father and son’s experience of such a world, and borrowing heavily from the lexicon of horror. A television show such as The Walking Dead (2010–2022), ostensibly a zombie horror narrative, emphasizes attempts to rebuild human social structures with a heavy focus on agriculture. The “walkers” of the show and the cause of their resurrection might be said to be a hyperobject in Morton’s terms, and through this, it becomes clear why critics like Morton (who began his research career writing on Romantic ecologies) have turned to horror, and particularly the Weird, to illustrate their points and to show what horror texts themselves are capable of illuminating about the human condition. The horrific sublimity of beings such as H. P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of deities

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like Cthulhu equate to Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. Beyond even this, with specific reference to climate change and species extinction, is the realization that we are part of this monstrosity even if we experience our individual lives on a different scale. Weird fiction can function as a means by which this disjunction is revealed. As Morton writes, “even when I am fully aware of what I am doing, myself as a member of the human species is doing something I am not intending at all and couldn’t accomplish solo even if I wished it” (2016, 20). This sense of the larger scale, wrapped up in narratives of forbidden knowledge and magical realms beyond, for example in Lovecraft or in the world of The Evil Dead (1982–present), reflects back on the human subject. In the connected field of Object-Orientated Ontology (OOO), a theorist like Graham Harman sees horror fiction, again focusing on the Weird, as a crucial intervention in philosophy. He writes of Lovecraft that “no other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess” (Harman 2011, 3). This “philosophical turn” in horror theory, as we might characterize it, serves to refocus horror criticism away from tired psychoanalytic models as well as the excesses of postmodernism. Using Paul Tremblay’s novel, A Head Full of Ghosts (2015), as an example, Lyle Enright points to the future of “horror after theory,” claiming that in the novel, “the power of the unknown regains its ability to frighten from a space outside explanation or symbolism” (Enright 2018, 507). It is through an appeal to thinkers slightly tangential to horror criticism like Harman, Morton, and others such as Latour, that horror theory is finding an escape from the haunted house of psychoanalysis and the self-referential loop of postmodernism. Latour’s writing, and the wider concept of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in particular, have become useful in horror criticism to explore and articulate the enmeshed nature of humans and non-human actors. ANT, as Jonathan Murdoch writes, “stresses how social and natural entities come into being as a result of the complex relations (or networks) that link them together” (Murdoch 2001, 114). What these ideas do in practical terms is to allow a re-examination of the ways in which what we call “nature” has been depicted in horror fiction. Clasen’s earlier point about how evolutionary factors have shaped what we fear can also be applied to the natural world, which has appeared as a force of horror in the form of terrifying animals, natural disasters, and even killer vegetation. This demonizing of the natural world, what Simon C. Estok terms “ecophobia,” in The Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018), is not solely responsible for environmental destruction, but can be seen as part of a wider network of connections through the work of the theorists discussed here. Horror criticism then comes to the fore as part of a network of resistance and takes on new practical significance. As editors Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland write in the first issue of Gothic

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Nature, “nature in the Gothic is so effectively uncanny because it is known and unknown all at once—strangely made visible in these stories in a way that often challenges our foolish sense of human self-enclosure” (Parker and Poland 2019, 12). The rise of ecogothic criticism has huge implications for the focus of horror theory and what is actually does. Like ecocriticism more widely, it allows for an engaged and practical purpose, exposing instances of ecophobia but pointing to the possibilities of a more enmeshed and connected view of humans and the nonhuman. Donna Haraway has proposed the need for a “Cthuluscene” (Haraway 2016, 101) in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Here, we would embrace what has previously been approached, at times, with horror: our interconnected “tentacular” relations with the natural world. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, in their landmark collection on the ecogothic, claims that, “the Gothic seems to be the form which is well placed to capture these anxieties [climate change and environmental damage] and provides a culturally significant point of contact between literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process” (Smith and Hughes 2013, 5). An examination of what is “natural” is an inherent quality in horror’s depiction of monstrosity, and as Smith and Hughes note, this, “representation of ‘Evil’ can be used for radical or reactionary ends” (2013, 2). This question of representation comes to the fore in early-twenty-first-century horror criticism when thinking also about the representation of race and of LGBTQ+ identities, where nonwhite, gay, and trans characters have often been sidelined or coded as the monsters. This is partly a consequence, too, of the historic lack of creative diversity in horror. In her work on African American representation in horror, Robin R. Means Coleman notes “how the genre ‘speaks’ difference. That is, marking Black people and culture as Other— apart from dominant (White) populations and cultures in the US” (Coleman 2011, 2). Similarly, Tabish Khair sees this as a global process, claiming that, “the Other—Gothic, gendered, imperial, colonial or racial—remains a key concern of not only Gothic fiction but also postcolonialism” (Khair 2009, 10.). A renowned critical focus on race and representation has been spurred on by movement such as Black Lives Matter and an impetus to decolonize the academy, but also specifically in horror by a wave of nonwhite creators using horror in new and provocative ways. Sherie-Marie Harrison identifies a “new black gothic” (Harrison 2018) in the work of filmmakers like Jordan Peele, whose film Get Out (2017) both works within and subverts American horror film tropes. Horror and Gothic frameworks have allowed Remi Weekes to examine the experience of asylum seekers in the UK in His House (2020), Ahmed Saadawi to explore the legacy of the invasion of Iraq in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014), and Steven Graham Jones to center previously Othered

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Native American characters in The Only Good Indians (2020). This all feeds back into horror criticism, which is increasingly questioning its own assumptions. Indeed, a special edition of Gothic Studies in autumn 2022 is dedicated to “decolonising the Gothic.” As with ecocriticism, this is very much overdue. In a broad sense, horror theory is moving in line with other forms of critique in the humanities in expanding the range of perspectives and possible avenues of exploration in approaching a text. This involves both an awareness of wider factors such as audience reception and the material conditions of the production of the text, which might involve things such as race, gender, and sexual orientation of the creator. If Barthes signaled the death of the author in 1967, then they have now, appropriately, risen from the grave. Technology and the increasing ability of horror fans to communicate and form networks has meant that fandom is now a crucial part of the text itself. Horror, like other genres, now responds to and preempts fan expectations on a scale far beyond previous generations. The 1980s and 1990s idea of queering the text, as in exploring the gay subtext of a novel like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is somewhat old hat compared to the layers of meaning surrounding The Babadook, mentioned earlier. Such readings can take into account fandom, social media studies, and meme culture alongside queer theory and textual analysis. Postmodernism has evolved into something taken for granted, as seen in the proliferation of mashups and intertextual references that characterize many horror texts.5 Horror theory at the cutting edge is fully embracing the critique of power structures inherent to social justice movements, while steering a path away from the binary political readings of the past. Affect theory, cognitivist and evolutionary approaches, and an awareness of the enmeshed, or networked, nature of the text in terms of society and the environment are currently driving horror theory forward. All of this is taking place in the context of the neoliberal devaluation of the humanities that horror theory critiques but is also, by necessity, finding ways to appease by bringing out the practical benefits of understanding what scares us and why. NOTES 1. For a full account of this history, see Spooner, 2021. 2. We might look to the massive success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in particular the multi-billion-dollar monetization of what might have recently been seen as marginal “geek culture,” including the pushing of previously obscure characters into the mainstream. 3. My emphasis. 4. See Clasen, 2021. 5. See Bruin-Molé, 2019.

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WORKS CITED Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership. New York: Routledge. Baldick, Chris, and Mighall, Robert. 2000. “Gothic Criticism.” A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 209–28. Oxford, Blackwell. Blake, Linnie. 2008. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bruin-Molé, Megan. 2019. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Clasen, Mathias. 2018. “Evolutionary Study of Horror Literature.” The Palgrave Companion to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel, 355–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2021. A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clough, Bill. 2019. “Scholarly Parody: Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” MPCA/ACA 7, no. 2 (2019): 294–306. Coleman, Robin R. Means. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge. Enright, Lyle. 2018. “Horror ‘After Theory.’” The Palgrave Companion to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel, 499–510. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Gelder, Ken (ed). 2000. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Harman, Graham. 2011. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. London: Zero Books. Harrison, Sherie-Marie. 2018. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books. https:​//​lareviewofbooks​.org​/article​/new​-black​-gothic​/. Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Luckhurst, Roger. 2013. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. Mendible, Myra. 1999. “High Theory/Low Culture: Postmodernism and the Politics of Carnival.” American Culture 22, no. 2 (Summer): 71–76. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Murdoch, Jonathan. 2001. “Ecologising Sociology: Actor-Network Theory, Co-construction and the Problem of Human Exemptionalism.” Sociology 35, no. 1 (February 2001): 111–33. Parker, Elizabeth, and Poland, Michelle. 2019. “Gothic Nature: An Introduction.” Gothic Nature, no. 1 (2019), 1–20. Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Smith, Andrew, and Hughes, William. 2013. Ecogothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spooner, Catherine. 2017. Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2021. “Introduction: A History of Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume III: Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Catherine Spooner and Dale Townshend, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turnock, Bryan. 2019. Studying Horror Cinema. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Chapter Two

Decadent Feasts Aesthetics, Ethics, and Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

AESTHETICS “Why are you watching this?” This question has been on my mind ever since a discussion with my wife some seven years ago about the horror/thriller/ police procedural-cum-cooking show Hannibal. I had been binging the series and it had impressed me deeply with its aesthetics, its writing, its character development, and its sheer audacity.1 In response to my amazed recapitulation of some of the more ghoulish moments of the series—such as a character forced to consume a gourmet preparation of his own amputated leg and another who slices off pieces of his face and eats his own nose—my wife caught me off-guard with her blunt question: “Why are you watching this?” I responded, no doubt a bit defensively, in ways that are certainly true: That as someone who researches, writes about, and teaches horror and the Gothic, the show is firmly in my wheelhouse and is something with which I need to be conversant; that the series, like horror in general, offers us insight into contemporary sociopolitical concerns, anxieties, and desires; that the show does fascinating things with familiar characters and is extremely interesting from a transmedia adaptation studies perspective; that it has a fascinating narrative arc, that the performances are nuanced, that it is gorgeous to look at, that the writing is excellent, and that the crimes committed and the gustatory proclivities of the primary antagonist are incredibly audacious—especially given that the program was created for network television; and so on. All of this is 100 27

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percent true, and yet I still managed to dodge the real questions at the heart of the question—not just why are you watching this, but do you actually like this? Is this OK? Should anyone like this? Because of the note of dismay lurking in my partner’s voice, I stopped short of saying that I was watching the show—and, by extension, much of the horror media that constitutes my primary media diet—because I enjoy it.2 It needs to be acknowledged at the outset that few things are calculated to irritate horror fans more readily than the suggestion that there may be something wrong with or immoral about horror and its consumption because it implies that one’s tastes are depraved and that, as a consequence, one is morally flawed. It’s a bit like a vegan asking a carnivore how they can possibly stomach eating meat—it ends up feeling like a personal attack that can elicit a knee-jerk defensive response. Of course, “acafans” of horror like myself have developed excellent strategies not only to deflect the question but even to turn it back on those who raise it. We may freely acknowledge, for example, that many works of horror may be in “bad taste,” but then cleverly foreground (by way of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) the classist connotations of taste and the standard bearers of conservative culture who police it; we may highlight the very conventional moral framework at play in most works of horror in which the antagonists are punished for moral transgressions and the rule of law re-established and reaffirmed at the end; we may, as I suggest above, point out the many ways that horror narratives give us insight into our culture and ourselves; and so on. And these things are entirely and indisputably true: The idea of “good taste” has indeed always been the privileged faculty of those with access to wealth and power; many horror narratives in the end are in fact extremely conservative reaffirmations of the status quo and its system of values; and to varying extents, horror narratives can certainly offer insight into what we dread and secretly desire. We may even scoff at those who question the morality of horror as close-minded puritanical teetotalers who lack the sophistication or stomach to appreciate the value and virtues of horror.3 And yet these responses don’t tell the whole story because they mostly side-step the question of enjoyment. One doesn’t have to enjoy horror to watch or study it, of course; one can acknowledge it as a pervasive form of contemporary entertainment and explore its forms, themes, and messages in a neutral, dispassionate way. One can watch a horror movie just to see what all the fuss is about or study horror to see what it has to say about race, gender, class, and other issues without either embracing or rejecting the genre as a whole. Lacking an affective investment in the genre, such individuals also would have little reason to be irritated by having their motives for watching questioned. Such individuals, however, I suspect are likely in the minority. Viewers typically choose to watch horror because they want to watch horror—that is, they derive some enjoyment or satisfaction from the viewing.

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And those who study horror often focus on the genre either because it is something they already enjoy or, less commonly I think, because they have a bone to pick with it. To have a frank and honest discussion about horror in the twenty-first century, therefore, we have to raise the issue of enjoyment, which then becomes central to any discussion of the even more vexed issue of the ethics of horror. What does it mean to enjoy films that include scenes of violence, abuse, murder, cannibalism, and so on? Is there something immoral in taking pleasure in scenes of other people being harmed? Just to ask these question can make someone seem puritanical or provincial; nevertheless, especially given not only the cultural prominence of horror as a genre, but the twenty-first-century development of what I will refer to below as “prestige horror” that aestheticizes violence in ravishing ways, it seems a question at least worth asking, even if it “gets under the skin” of horror fans and scholars and even if there are no easy answers. Addressing enjoyment in relation to media in general, it should be pointed out, is a vexed endeavor because the reasons we enjoy or do not enjoy a particular narrative can be multiple, overlapping, and even in conflict. We may enjoy a clever plot construction that defies our expectations or keeps us on the edge of our seats, and we may enjoy a satisfying conclusion that provides the closure we desire and answers questions raised by the narrative in convincing or surprising ways; we may enjoy a narrative that we perceive as a timely meditation on contemporary issues and/or one that reflects and reaffirms our positions and opinions; we may enjoy a television episode or film because of its lyrical writing, complex character development, compelling acting, dazzling effects, and any number of other technical aspects. Crucially, we often enjoy narratives because of how they make us feel: pleased, aroused, amused, exhilarated, and even ways that would seem contrary to enjoyment, such as sad, angry, disgusted, anxious, and scared. The question of enjoyment is one that has been particularly important to considerations of horror because of the apparent logical conundrum of the genre: Since we usually seek to avoid being afraid or disgusted, and these are presumably the emotional responses horror seeks to provoke, how then can we explain the appeal of horror? Put simply, why would anyone intentionally seek to experience painful or unpleasant emotions? Quite a few different theories have been proposed to explain this seeming paradox, and I will offer a quick survey of the existing theories of horror below. I will then propose that these theories need to be updated to accommodate the prestige horror of television’s twenty-first-century golden age. With Hannibal in mind in particular, but also series such as Dexter, Penny Dreadful, Kingdom, Taboo, American Horror Story, True Blood, Hemlock Grove, and so on, I will propose that enjoyment of horror today is at least in part scopophilic, a pleasure

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we derive from seeing TV programs that are essentially cinematic in quality and that seduce viewers with a gorgeous aesthetic that transforms violence and death into art. This then prompts a consideration of an issue neglected by most theoreticians of horror: ethics. Theories of horror have attempted to explain why people enjoy it; most, however, have shied away from asking the question of whether or not we should enjoy it. For my purposes here, I’m particularly interested in the implications of the aestheticization of violence and gore in twenty-first-century prestige horror television. What happens when extreme violence is turned into a thing of beauty? What are the ethical implications of dining with Hannibal? A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THEORIES OF HORROR ENJOYMENT Theories of why people enjoy horror can be grouped into three broad categories: denial theories, conversion theories, and competition theories. Denial theorists reject the idea that horror actually evokes painful emotions. To a certain extent, this could be referred to as “schadenfreude theory.” That we may experience pleasure or joy from witnessing the trouble or humiliation of others seems undeniable, although in the case of horror narrative, this would seem to apply more immediately to characters coded as negative or evil: We can delight, for example—and with little or no guilt—in seeing the faces drain away from the Nazis at the end of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark (a useful example from a film that wouldn’t necessarily be considered a horror film). It is generally considered OK to take pleasure in the punishment, comeuppance, or even death of monstrous or morally compromised characters in fiction, film, and television (especially if they are Nazis). It seems to me to be far less acceptable to celebrate or derive pleasure from harm done to “innocent” or “good” characters. This suggests a kind of underlying sadistic impulse that can find expression in either acceptable or more questionable ways—we, therefore, can derive pleasure from seeing representations of people being hurt, punished, or killed, although this is only “sanctioned” if they are “bad” people. Included under this denial of pain rubric are the related propositions from philosophers Alex Neill and Kendall Walton who both argue that our emotional responses to horror are not inherently unpleasant. Neill draws an interesting distinction between situations and elements present in horror that may be evaluated as painful or unpleasant, and our emotional response to them, which may in fact be pleasurable (Neill 1992, 62–63). Berys Gaut offers a similar approach in proposing that we can in fact enjoy fear and disgust, which reflect our evaluations of objects and situations (see Gaut 1993). From

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this perspective, there is nothing paradoxical in taking pleasure in the disgustingness of gruesome cinematic effects, such as Regan (Linda Blair) vomiting in The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973) or Pam (Terri McMinn) hung on a hook in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Walton, for his part, argues that it makes very little sense to say that we are afraid when watching or reading horror because we know we’re safe. Our emotional arousal is real, but it is what Walton refers to as a “quasi-emotion” elicited through a form of make-believe. When we consume horror, we are thus playing an enjoyable kind of game in which we pretend to be afraid (see Walton 1978). For denial of pain theorists, there is no paradox associated with horror enjoyment because we aren’t really ever truly scared or grossed out. As opposed to denial theories of horror enjoyment that reject the proposition that we are ever actually scared or truly disgusted, conversion theorists propose that unpleasant or painful emotions can certainly be elicited by art but that they are then transformed into something more pleasurable; discomfort is the price paid, so to speak, for enjoyment or relief that comes afterward. This idea goes all the way back to Aristotle and his theory of tragedy—tragedy, he proposes, generates negative emotions that then result in a pleasurable purgation of excess pity and fear: catharsis (see Aristotle 1997). Applied to horror, this might suggest that we really do feel fear and disgust but emerge from the experience feeling good. Conversion is also the basis of philosopher David Hume’s approach in “Of Tragedy” in which he proposes that the eloquence of expression in tragedy transforms what in real life would be painful into pleasure (see Smuts 2007, 64)—although in Hume’s case, artistry converts what would otherwise be painful into something enjoyable (so a case can be made here for grouping Hume under the denial of pain category; see Hume 1907). Rather than one emotion being converted into another, competition theories of horror enjoyment propose that more than one emotion is aroused by horror, but that enjoyment prevails. This is the basis of one of the better-known theories of horror consumption: Noël Carroll’s proposition that the negative emotions evoked by what he calls “art-horror” are offset by the enjoyments of narrative and the interest elicited by categorically impure monsters. According to Carroll, while we really do experience fear and disgust when watching horror, we are also fascinated by the monsters and get wrapped up in the plot and want to see how things turn out. If our curiosity prevails, we keep reading or watching. If our disgust or fear wins the competition, we stop (see Carroll 1990). Carroll’s approach can and should I think be expanded to include aspects of narrative other than plot and its eliciting of curiosity or suspense. Viewer engagement with or appreciation of any other element of a horror narrative may reasonably be considered to compete with negative affect: We may, for example, be disgusted or disturbed by a film, but appreciate on an intellectual level its theme or subtext or that it functions as an allegory, and

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therefore keep watching for that reason. The main idea is that two (or more) different responses are simultaneously elicited by horror literature or media, and they fight it out to determine whether one keeps watching or reading, or calls it quits. Carroll’s approach does, however, leave an important question unanswered: If narrative by its nature creates curiosity and a desire to see how things turn out, all things being equal, why wouldn’t we just choose stories that don’t evoke fear or disgust? An answer to this question is provided by John Morreall, whose “control theory” proposes that we can enjoy even unpleasant things as long as we know we can “start, stop, and direct the experience” (Morreall 1985, 97). This explains, for example, why roller coasters are appealing—they may be frightening, but we can also experience pleasure because we assume we are safe. The same goes for television or film: We can always turn off the TV or leave the theater. Morreall’s theory is similar to Aaron Smuts’s “Rich Experience Theory.” According to Smuts, “painful art” lets us “have experiences on the cheap” (Smuts 2007, 74). That is, “Art safely provides us the opportunity to have rich emotional experiences that are either impossible or far too risky to have in our daily lives. We can feel fear without risking our lives, pity without seeing our loved ones suffer, thrills without risking going to jail,” and so on (Smuts 2007, 74). Mathias Clasen takes Smuts’s Rich Experience Theory the next step by arguing from a biocultural perspective that human beings are in some ways evolutionarily conditioned to “find pleasure in make-believe that allows them to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context” (Clasen 2017, 4). Horror fictions, which, according to Clasen, toss a “live wire into ancient structures in the audience’s central nervous system” (Clasen 2017, 29), thus actually serving some important functions. Among other things, horror, according to Clasen, helps us learn to manage negative emotions, acquire coping skills, and thus learn to negotiate real-world dangers (Clasen 2017, 59–60). A variant on competition theory is what Smuts refers to as “power theories” (see Smuts 2007, 69–70) in which individuals seek out “painful art” to test their capacity for endurance. Extended to horror, this might explain why some fans seek out extremely violent or gory horror films—to show they have the intestinal fortitude to consume extreme representations; extreme horror fans thus enjoy being the kind of people who can sit through extreme horror. Susan Feagin offers an interesting slant on the question with a focus on tragedy, proposing that we take pleasure in being the kinds of people moved by sad things. That is, there is a form of satisfaction derived from being the sort of person able to feel sympathy for others (see Feagin 1983). Finally, a somewhat different form of competition theory is repression theory. Derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, repression theory, especially

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as developed by Robin Wood, proposes that, like dreams, horror films express tabooed desire in disguised forms. From this perspective, which is, to be fair, difficult to prove or disprove, fear or disgust is the price the viewer pays to be able to secretly enjoy the lifting of repression, which is pleasurable (see Wood 2020). Before going further, I think it is important to point out that many of these theories seem to suffer from a “one-size fits all” approach. They often fail to acknowledge the diversity that exists within the horror genre, making claims about horror in general on the basis of a limited number of cherry-picked examples (more often than not, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), assuming that all consumers of horror respond in similar ways, and discounting competing theories of horror enjoyment when the reality is likely far more complicated. Different horror narratives will, of course, evoke different responses from various consumers, and there is no reason that these proposed theories of horror enjoyment are necessarily mutually exclusive. Conversion and competition theories could, for example, be simultaneously true as a horror fan is both grossed out and amused by the same vivid effect, pleased by their discomfort, and thrilled on an unconscious level by the staging of some repressed desire. That said, I personally think that the physiological component to consuming horror narrative is a significant element of its appeal that deserves more attention. While I agree with Walton that consumers of horror aren’t concerned with their personal safety when they read or watch horror, horror is nevertheless an affect-generating machine that can certainly create suspense, surprise, shock, disgust, sadness, satisfaction, amusement, elation, and so on—and these affective responses can combine and blend in hard-to-describe ways that, importantly, are experienced in pleasurable ways both psychologically and physically. Horror is far from unique in this respect, but the intensity of the responses it evokes may be greater in some ways than that of other genres. The feelings generated by horror may also to varying extents be an acquired taste; that is, one learns over time how to enjoy the affective responses evoked by horror literature and media. As with other forms of thrill seeking, this would explain why enthusiasts seek out more extreme versions. LOOKING AT PRESTIGE HORROR As we move toward a consideration of what I’m calling prestige horror television, it is important to note that the affective response generated by visual horror narrative has always been connected to seeing. One important polarity that has conventionally distinguished not just individual horror films from one another but horror subgenres from one another is the distinction between

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showing and obscuring. In some films and television shows, graphic violence and gore is central; in others, it is mostly or even entirely implied or takes place off-camera. The distinction I am making here is between something like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) or Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), in which violence done to the body is graphically displayed, and works such as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) or Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) in which violence and the supernatural are implied but never shown directly. However, regardless of whether we are considering the visual excesses of torture porn or body horror, the subtle implications of psychological horror or visually indistinct found footage, or something in between, suspense in horror is still generated over the question of what will or will not be shown. At the heart of the horror genre writ large I propose is the simultaneous dread and desire related to the prospect of seeing the horrible thing. Will the killer be reflected in the mirror when the bathroom cabinet is closed? Will the trapped victim sever their own limb to escape? Will the monster suddenly emerge from the darkness to attack? Horror in this way is about the staging of anticipation. Indeed, the true milieu of the horror film has traditionally been the extended suspenseful moments between the intimation of a threat or disaster and its revelation, which may come as a jump scare or simply the pulling back of the veil. The tension of such moments as the audience waits to see what will happen can be unbearable; its resolution then comes as a relief, even though the tension is often broken by something awful: the revelation of the monster, the attack of the villain, the witnessing of the disaster. My proposal here is that the viewer’s psychological and affective investment in horror has a lot to do with the question of seeing: Will the horrible thing be shown or not—and, if so, will it be as horrible as we have been led to believe? But what if the dreaded revelation is made beautiful? What if horror is presented as art? The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been characterized by many critics as a “golden age of television” (see, for example, Suskind [2017]). Such critics typically have in mind TV dramas, sometimes referred to as “prestige TV” or “prestige dramas,” including The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Downton Abbey, Fargo, Game of Thrones, and so on, marked by big budgets, complex plots, sophisticated story arcs, eloquent writing, convincing acting, and cinematic production values.4 It seems to me, however, particularly notable that the contemporary golden age of television has extended to horror—a television genre historically ghettoized as low culture and often marked by low budgets with corresponding production values. To the list of twenty-first-century golden age dramas mentioned above, one can add quite a few horror series including Hannibal, together with Dexter, Penny Dreadful, Kingdom, Taboo, American Horror Story, True Blood, Hemlock Grove, True Detective, The Frankenstein Chronicles, and Mike

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Flanagan’s series for Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. These series and others like them are what I am calling “prestige horror television”; like prestige dramas, they are essentially cinematic in quality with big budgets, complex characters and story arcs, compelling writing and performances, seductive soundtracks, and so on—and, crucially, they are beautiful to look at. The significance of the development of prestige horror for understandings of the horror genre in the twenty-first century is hard to overestimate. There have, of course, been horror films and television shows that have been not just popular but also critical successes to varying degrees, but until recently, these have been the exception rather than the rule. Across the twentieth century, critics tended to dismiss the quality of horror films, which, to be fair, were often low-budget formulaic affairs. Horror television, for its part, was hampered by various forms of censorship and the policing of content on public airwaves that virtually ensured any attempt to match intensity of cinematic horror would fall short (perhaps with the exception of David Lynch’s uneven Twin Peaks). Prestige television horror therefore had to wait until the proliferation of cable networks in the United States starting in the 1990s and then really blossomed in the twenty-first century. In short, what we are witnessing in the first three decades of the twenty-first century is the transformation of horror television, as well as attitudes regarding it. Horror has been “elevated,” and while there may be some residual resistance on the part of critics, if not viewers, to considering horror as a “legitimate” genre of interest to general viewers, programs such as Hannibal, Dexter, and True Detective in particular have done much to erode that bias. In this sense, prestige horror television is different from prestige dramas, which never had to overcome a bias or stigma against them. Prestige horror is remaking horror, while prestige drama reinforces its centrality to televisual entertainment. A key component of prestige horror’s remaking of television horror is its often-ravishing aesthetic. Rather than a degraded aesthetic, prestige horror is gorgeous to look at. Part of the appeal of prestige horror, I wish to argue, is scopophilic, a love or enjoyment of looking. Here, I mean the term scopophilia in a broader sense that in feminist film theory where it typically applies to the male gaze and its objectification of female bodies. Prestige horror television is often marked by beautiful bodies, yes—as often today male ones as female—but, importantly, they are presented as parts of meticulously staged mise-en-scènes. Individual shots are artful and color palettes are carefully managed. The refined cinematography of prestige horror television transforms the experience of consuming horror by altering the way we look at it. Rather than peeking through our fingers as we await the possible revelation

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of the horrible thing, the sumptuousness of prestige horror television is part of its seduction as we luxuriate in pools of beauty. In shows such as South Korea’s Kingdom, the UK’s Taboo (see figure 2.1), the Sky/Showtime series Penny Dreadful (see figure 2.2) and, above all others, Hannibal, the look is a hook as aesthetics act as part of the allure—and this is where aesthetics meets ethics as horror is presented as art. ETHICS BECOME AESTHETIC: THE ART OF MODERN HORROR In an insightful piece from 2003, Steven Jay Schneider observes the trend in horror films of depicting murderers as artists and murder as an artistic performance. With attention to a number of twentieth-century films, including Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Schneider argues that what marks the modern horror film is “a shift in the genre’s dominant aesthetic metaphor: what used to be the monster as corrupt or degraded work of art has become . . . the monster as corrupt or degraded artist” (Schneider 2003, 177, emphasis in original). In his attention to these films, Schneider notes how murder is staged as a kind of performance art in which “dead bodies are carefully positioned and manipulated, often symbolically arranged, so as to make more or less comprehensible ‘statements’” (Schneider 2003, 180), which Schneider later refers to as “gruesome tableau[s]” (Schneider 2003, 185). Schneider does not explore the reasons for this transformation in any depth, merely noting that across the twentieth century, avant-garde artistic practices transformed understandings of art: “‘art’ itself has become more (and more) open to and associated with notions of ‘shock,’ transgression, and offensiveness, with the violation of standing cultural and conceptual categories . . . and with incongruity . . . rather than with traditional notions of aesthetic technique, form, and beauty” (Schneider 2003, 191). Interestingly, in the course of his discussion of the transformation of the murderer into an artist and the murder into art, Schneider quotes W. H. Auden, who wrote in 1948 that murder is the means by which “the aesthetic and ethical are put in opposition” (qtd. in Schneider 2003, 190). Schneider’s analysis of late twentieth-century horror films shows how that opposition is being called into question, as murder is coded as art “intended to elicit a complex and at least partially aesthetic response from viewers” (Schneider 2003, 187). Twenty-first-century prestige horror television continues this development, pushing it perhaps as far as it can go. “You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. You have aesthetical ones,” comments Hannibal’s (Mads

Figure 2.1. Josh Hartnett as Ethan Chandler and Eva Green as Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful, created by John Logan (Showtime/Sky: 2014–2016). Penny Dreadful and Taboo (see below) are examples of prestige television horror defined by a carefully staged and very beautiful aesthetic.

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Figure 2.2. Tom Hardy as James Keziah Delaney in Taboo, created by Steven Knight and Chips Hardy (BBC: 2017–present).

Mikkelsen) psychotherapist/lover Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), to which he replies, “Ethics become aesthetics.” What matters most to Hannibal is both literally and ironically good taste; whether art, music, literature, fashion, furnishings, or meat (human or non-), the aesthetical is elevated as Hannibal’s guiding principle, his ethics, and, as Michael Fuchs has observed, Hannibal’s ethic becomes the operative principle of the series as a whole, one notable for its “finely-tuned aesthetic vision” (Fuchs 2021, 285) that remediates painting as it draws on “the traditions of the still life and the tableau vivant” (Fuchs 2021, 289). The murderer is no longer an alienated and degraded artist; the murderer is now the center of the represented world, a distillation of its values. The world of Hannibal echoes Hannibal’s vision of ethics become aesthetics and, as Fuchs observes, the art of Hannibal/Hannibal “becomes representative of televisual art in the early twenty-first century” (Fuchs 2021, 280). This then brings us at last to the question of ethics and enjoyment of prestige horror television in the twenty-first century. José Luis Bermúdez notes in relation to the art world that “[t]he idea that moral considerations might usefully be employed in criticism is one that finds few supporters today” (Bermúdez 2003, 111), and, indeed, while critics and viewers are certainly attentive to moral complexities of the visual appeal of, for example, Hannibal’s decadent feasts or the cheering on of Dexter, there seems to be little appetite for consideration of the ethics of horror consumption. “Don’t like horror? Then don’t watch it” seems the general attitude and, as I’ve noted

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above, far more attention has been paid to the question of why people enjoy horror than to the question of whether or not it is good for them to do so. Perhaps the most vigorous recent critique of horror is the argument mounted by philosopher Gianluca Di Muzio from 2006 in an article titled “The Immorality of Horror Films,” which is a kind of position paper intended to spark debate. Di Muzio’s argument is straight forward: It is morally wrong to enjoy representations of people suffering and being assaulted, wounded, tortured, and killed (Di Muzio 2006, 281). Di Muzio’s reasoning is that “A compassionate reaction to human suffering is at the basis of the most important moral attitudes” and “someone reacting to the suffering of others with indifference, or whose overtly compassionate behavior is just a mask for Schadenfreude, strikes us as morally incomplete, if not downright repulsive” (Di Muzio 2006, 284). The assumption here is then that consuming horror makes us less compassionate. Di Muzio’s position has found little support as defenders of horror have been quick to point out that there is no real evidence that consumption of horror makes viewers less compassionate or more prone to violence (see Clasen 2021, 71), that viewers of horror can distinguish between fiction and reality, that enjoyment of horror does not mean endorsement, that viewers

Figure 2.3. A murder victim transformed into a ghoulish work of art in Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller (AXN Original Productions: 2013–2015).

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are typically positioned to sympathize with victims, to recoil at the violence to which they are subject, and to reject the predations of the villain (see Pascale 2019, 148). Clasen, in his A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror quotes Stephen King on this point: “The horror story, beneath its fangs and fright-wig,” argues King, “is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece pin-striped suit . . . its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile” (King, qtd in Clausen 2021, 84). But to what extent do these pronouncements still hold true where twentyfirst-century prestige horror is concerned within which violence is transformed into art that is very much a part of an overarching gorgeous aesthetic? In a very strongly worded piece, cultural critic Henry A. Giroux has excoriated what he characterizes as the contemporary American “aesthetics of depravity” defined as “an aesthetics that traffics in images of human suffering that are subordinated to the formal properties of beauty, design and taste” (Giroux 2012, 261). Giroux notes that such images become visually alluring as they are “increasingly abstracted from social and political contexts and the conditions that make such suffering possible” (Giroux 2012, 262), and connects them to what he refers to as the “culture of cruelty.” “Spectacles of violence,” argues Giroux, “provide an important element in shaping a market-driven culture of cruelty that gives new meaning to the merging of an economy of pleasure with images of violence, mutilation and human suffering” (Giroux 2012, 266). In the end, asserts Giroux, “spectacular representations of cruelty disrupt and block our ability to respond politically and ethically to the violence as it is actually happening” (Giroux 2012, 267)—and then, addressing disturbing 2011 photos of US soldiers happily posing with murdered Afghan citizens, Giroux quotes a response from scholar David L. Clark who writes, “This isn’t Hannibal Lecter, after all, but GI Joe” (Clark qtd. in Giroux 2012, 271). What we know from Hannibal is that it could never be Hannibal Lecter in the picture because that would be in bad taste. Hannibal takes no trophies, leaves no evidence, and lets nothing go to waste. Hannibal nevertheless is in the picture, as his maxim—which is the series’s maxim—that aesthetics becomes ethics is exactly what Giroux characterizes as the aesthetics of depravity: images of cruelty presented as art. For Giroux, the aesthetics of depravity “serves in the production of a collective subject through an economy of affect that traps people in their own narcissistic desires by aestheticizing violence and concealing a hidden order of politics that harbours a deep disdain for social responsibility and democracy” (Giroux 2012, 268–69). To what extent prestige horror television traffics in the aesthetics of depravity

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and promotes a culture of cruelty is a question that seems to me at least worth asking, even if scrutinizing our own enjoyment is uncomfortable. NOTES 1. For the uninitiated, Hannibal, as will be addressed more fully below, is a series developed by showrunner Bryan Fuller for NBC based on Thomas Harris’s novels, Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006) and concerns the relationship between FBI investigator Will (Hugh Dancy) and cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). It ran for three seasons from 2013–2015 and certainly belongs at or near the top of the list of television’s best horror serials. 2. Here I feel compelled to add that my wife is not a prude where horror media is concerned. Like me, she grew up on a diet of 1980s and 1990s pop culture horror films and novels and used to share my enthusiasm for them; her tastes began to shift after the birth of our first child. I, too, I must confess, have more trouble these days than I once did with narratives involving harm to a child. 3. Not the response I would recommend to one’s life partner. 4. You know you are watching a prestige TV show, writes Kathryn VanArendonk in a satiric article, when, among other things, instead of episodes there are “chapters,” the first season is the “pilot,” the color palette is browns and grays, the cast features A-list Hollywood stars, and “literally nothing is funny.” I would add that you know you are watching prestige horror when something falls to the ground in slow motion during the opening credits—a teacup, blood, and so on (See VanArendonk 2017).

WORKS CITED Aristotle. 1997. Poetics [c. 335 BC]. Translated by Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books. Bermúdez, José Luis. 2003. “The Concept of Decadence.” In Art and Morality, edited by José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner, 111–30. London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Clasen, Mathias. 2017. Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror. New York: Oxford University Press. Di Muzio, Gianluca. 2006. “The Immorality of Horror Films.” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 20, no. 2: 277–94. Feagin, Susan. 1983. “The Pleasures of Tragedy.” American Philosophical Quarterly 20, no. 1: 95–104. Fuchs, Michael. 2021. “An Art Form That Honors Aesthetic and Taste: The Art of Murder and the Art of Television in Hannibal.” In Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on

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America’s Favorite Cannibal on Television, edited by Kyle A. Moody and Nicholas A. Yanes, 278–98. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Gaut, Berys. 1993. “The Paradox of Horror.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 33, no. 4: 333–45. Giroux, Henry A. 2012. “Disturbing Pleasures: Murderous Images and the Aesthetics of Depravity.” Third Text 26, no. 3 (May): 259–73. Hume, David. 1907. “Of Tragedy.” In Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 258–65. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Morreall, John. 1985. “Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fictions.” Philosophy and Literature 9, no. 1: 95–102. Neill, Alex. 1992. “On a Paradox of the Heart.” Philosophical Studies 65, no. 1/2: 53–65. Pascale, Marius A. 2019. “Art Horror, Reactive Attitudes, and Compassionate Slashers: A Response to Di Muzio’s ‘The Immorality of Horror Film.’” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 33, no. 1: 141–59. Schneider, Steven Jay. 2003. “Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticizing Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror.” In Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 174–97. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Smuts, Aaron. 2007. “The Paradox of Painful Art.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 41, no. 3 (Fall): 59–76. Suskind, Alex. 2017. “It’s the Golden Age of TV. And Writers Are Reaping the Rewards and Paying the Toll.” The New York Times, Aug. 18, 2017. https:​//​www​ .nytimes​.com​/2017​/08​/18​/arts​/television​/its​-the​-golden​-age​-of​-tv​-and​-writers​-are​ -paying​-the​-toll​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. VanArendonk, Kathryn. 2017. “13 Signs You’re Watching a ‘Prestige’ TV Show.” Vulture, March 28, 2017. https:​//​www​.vulture​.com​/2017​/03​/prestige​-tv​-signs​ -youre​-watching​.html​#​_ga​=2​.10389685​.1026175576​.1652100839–1870202003​ .1652100838. Accessed August 21, 2022. Walton, Kendall. 1978. “Fearing Fictions.” The Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 1: 5–27. Wood, Robin. 2020. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 108–35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter Three

From One Extreme to Another Horror Cinema and Censorship in the Twenty-First Century Neil Jackson

CENSORSHIP No history of cinematic censorship has ever been a mere matter of the disapproval of that cultural phenomenon commonly referred to as “the horror film.” However, this critically maligned, but most durably popular of generic forms has always had to account for censorship, and while the ensuing account is unavoidably narrow in its global scope, a comparative overview of some recent trans-Atlantic priorities can be instructive and illuminating all the same. Whether it has been through the often maddeningly contradictory decision making of the British Board of Film Censors/Classification (BBFC), the puritanical strictures of the early sound-era Hollywood Production Code, or the subsequent maneuvers of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), numerous titles now enshrined in the horror canon have achieved their status via a damaging process determined to restrict or dilute their affective charge. While Frankenstein (1931), Freaks (1932), The Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and Dracula (1958) may now be the stuff of loving curatorial care and preservation, they have not always survived the journey unscathed. In many other cases, indifference to or neglect for the shavings of the cutting room floor has meant that the original and integral visions of many key titles have probably been lost forever. Julian Petley has suggested “there can be little doubt that, after pornography, [horror] has been cinema’s most censored genre” (Petley 2017, 130). However, while regulators may have once bristled at horror’s providence in 43

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the fantastique (encompassing anything from mythology to folklore, religion, surrealism, and the gothic novel), they must now evaluate the less fanciful developments of the genre. These have encompassed the social immediacies of rape, serial murder, and various other interpersonal atrocities borne of sexual dysfunction or aberration, an evolution of form and content that has tested many a censor’s tolerance levels. David Cooke, a former director of the BBFC, has noted that concern over many historically contentious horror titles “centred on the idea that it is particularly harmful to make sexual violence erotic” (Cooke 2012, 175), a characteristic that is by no means exclusive to the genre, but through which it has often manifested in an alternately baroque or base expression. Of course, the levels at which this potent mix have been explicitly portrayed increased exponentially as various censorship barriers fell away over the decades. Hence, there has been an insistent and ongoing mistrust of horror as either an entertainment form or an artistic pursuit, assuming malformed audience tastes that have barely developed beyond enthusiasm for the lurid exhibits of a carnival freak show. Cooke therefore sees the more recent push into the outer extremes simply as part of a rather disreputable “tradition of excess and ghoulishness, attempting to gross out the audience and challenge it to see how much it can take” (Cooke 2012, 177). Despite this, and like many that occupied his position before him, Cooke is fully cognizant of the pull between liberty and restraint in the assessment and classification of horror, and how this can seriously problematize a film censor’s obligation in some cases to uphold the letter of the law. THE HORRORS OF CENSORSHIP The privilege of hindsight often reveals the bans and excisions of our ancestors as bafflingly odd or misguided, throwing the slicker and considerably more sophisticated corporate machinations of the modern film censor into sharp relief. Horror enthusiasts of any era have been unforgiving in casting the censor as authoritarian villain, whose seemingly heedless decision-making and ruthlessly swingering curtailments have denied countless outré pleasures to several generations of by no means unprurient spectators. The presumptuous and often ruinous impositions, excisions, and refusals of those charged with the task of officially sanctioned regulation continue to inform the genre’s distribution and reception. This has often been illustrated by censors still determined to detect textual “meaning” as the barest of ideological justifications for their decision-making, a tacit refusal that the genre might be allowed to function purely on the level of emotional or corporeal

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intensity. Historically, this has not appealed to censors keen to encourage a textual clarity that explicitly rejects, contains, or destroys any manifestation of monstrous desire or behavior. Subversion of such an attitude at both the conceptual and experiential level has frequently been embedded deeply in the horror film’s intent and purpose, its transgressive tendencies compounded by an effort to stimulate the body and senses rather than the intellect. And while the genre’s supposedly dubious appeal has in the past occasionally inspired spirited public debate and scandal, this was stoked by what now seem like the petty, creatively stifling mores that censorship organizations persistently nurtured as a matter of unshifting policy. Regardless of any historical lessons that have been learned, horror cinema has retained its status as an ever-recalcitrant bête noire, its regulatory control still founded in—but not necessarily restricted to—the ever unsteady virtues of religious dogma, social propriety, moral fortitude, legal obligation, and cultural decorum. Accordingly, the genre’s tendency to stir moral and ethical outrage has remained steadfast and durable. Just as horror itself has inspired diverse and often contradictory responses, the censorship decisions made in its name are frequently greeted with both enthusiastic approval and vehement opposition, inspiring heated debate and controversy among ideologically opposed sections of both the public and the news media. As generic boundaries, spectator tolerances, and consumer demands have become ever more complex though, today’s censors are as likely to use their classificatory systems to accommodate horror’s access to an expansive mainstream audience as they are to prohibit any audiovisual transgressions deemed liable to inflict social or psychological harm. In this context, the censor’s role on both sides of the Atlantic has also become as much a matter of determining suitability for the youth audience as an attempt to gauge the social consequences of oppositional adult taste. Caught in an ongoing pull between permissiveness and severity, censors must now consider horror as anything from the teen-oriented Twilight series to yet another Texas Chainsaw reboot. The genre’s appeal across generational lines is plainly apparent, and never has its policing seemed like such a thankless and possibly even futile endeavor. As a result, filmmakers in different realms of production and distribution have sought to both meekly satisfy and stubbornly defy official censorship requirements. Some, more mindful of the corporate dictates and market requirements of their paymasters, have tailored their work according to the official classificatory systems which partly mold their target demographics. Others have operated in marginal, independent spaces where the demands of the censor never figure in their creative process at all. It might seem a bewilderingly inclusive genre church that manages to find space somewhere on the spectrum for both Paranorman (2012) and underground faux snuff excess of the August Underground trilogy (2001–2007). Both offer a

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specifically tailored experience, and both in very different ways give film censors (whether officially sanctioned or self-appointed) something to think about. The former offers a benchmark concerning the adaptation of horror imagery for a family audience mindset, an accessible entry point for youngsters discovering the genre’s myriad affective pleasures courtesy of a major Hollywood distributor. The latter has its roots firmly in the genre’s less salubrious and resolutely independent corners, deliberately targeting a niche market seeking the outer limits of horror as a fictional construct. Achieving a degree of dedicated fan recognition without ever standing before a regulatory body, these underground productions minimize any kind of narrative hook and trade in sounds and images that would befuddle any official organization tasked with approving them for public consumption. Perhaps ironically then, some of the more willfully confrontational of recent horror films have met with no censorial opposition at all, circulating in spaces far removed from the commercial constraints of the Hollywood studios determined to yield significant returns on their multi-million-dollar investments. This has given rise to a constant sense of tension between “mild” and “extreme” polarities of the horror film, and censors have become ever more active in defining the characteristics of each category. Concern over the affective, emotional, psychological, and even criminal impact incurred by horror’s audiovisual strategies continues to inform the censor’s engagement. While the genre flows ever more freely through the mainstream, it also continues to serve as a vessel for challenging, troubling, and potentially radical ideas in other spaces besides, even as the most elaborately bizarre or gruesome spectacles play themselves out onscreen. Therefore, any overview of horror’s modern relationship with the organizations tasked with checking its perceived excesses must consider not only moral debates as old as the cinema itself, but also fresh arguments which go beyond traditional notions of horror as a “cinematic” experience. The virtually unmanageable flow of digital information in the internet age has meant that age-old methods of image control and administration have become effectively nullified, the demands of the censor in any one territory easily sidestepped by one push of a download button in another. In this context, home-made, real death video compilations masquerading under titles such as Fetus Munchers and Snuff R73 are seen by relatively few, but they raise new questions (and perhaps renewed justification) for a moving image censor. They call into question the definitional boundaries of horror itself, and their presence in the murkier shadows of the internet has generated a renewed urban mythology of criminal perversity that has historically attached itself to such material. Utilizing an assortment of actual tortures, executions, homicides, and grisly accidents, such footage nevertheless maintains certain iconographic links to the genre’s fictional realm. The sights and sounds of anything from mass global conflict

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to individual homicidal rampage are now the regular stuff of private, instant online consumption, functioning beyond the reach of any film censor’s remit or jurisdiction. This has stretched the envelope to a point where censors are powerless to intervene, exposing further the gulf that exist between officially sanctioned power and those niche audience groupings determined to defy it. HANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN The contrasting attitudes of the BBFC and the MPAA to horror’s commercial appeal lays bare each organization’s place amid both the economic demands of the industry and the lay of the sociocultural landscape. As far as theatrical exhibition is concerned, neither has their role written into the laws of the land. Instead, their work is founded upon an interest to protect the industry they serve, with various differences regarding their underlying philosophies, methodologies, and statutory heft. While both consider specific age ranges as part of their decision-making process, there are some important distinctions in terms of who is eventually permitted through the cinema doors once classification has been granted. Among the MPAA’s current G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 categories, only the last serves as a wholly prohibitive gesture, and the option to deny theatrical access to those viewers below the age of eighteen is rarely taken up by major distributors keen on reaching as expansive an audience as possible. The MPAA’s faith in the sanctity of parental discretion has therefore meant that either adult accompaniment or simple juvenile guile still allows many younger people to regularly consume some of the horror mainstream’s more gruesome (or otherwise) confections in a movie theater. On the other hand, the BBFC’s U, PG, 12/12A, 15, 18, and R18 range has ensured that horror films only very occasionally slip into release below the 15 level. The age-restrictive nature of the 12, 15, and 18 certificates ensures at least a modicum of control in a public exhibition environment (the R18 is reserved for pornographic “sex works” [as the BBFC euphemistically dubs them], and stipulates that both sale or exhibition of such material can occur only on specially licensed premises). Effectively, this has resulted in curious trans-Atlantic contrasts regarding the audience makeup of theatrically released horror films, a situation significantly influenced by the ratings and certificates that have come to partly define any film’s commercial and even creative identity.

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DOING THINGS THE BRITISH WAY Still in its ascendant pomp by the end of the 1920s, the BBFC was innocent of the imminent onslaught of sound-era supernatural terrors soon to be exported across the Atlantic. However, it was abundantly clear that the burgeoning regulator detected something foul and horrible in the air and that the stench seemed to be blowing in from both an east and westerly direction. Discussing possible approval of Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (1928), but utterly perplexed by its surreal narrative opacity, the BBFC justified its 1929 rejection by concluding infamously that it “was so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable” (McKibbin 1998, 425). Much as things might seem to have changed since this judgment, they have developed a curious habit of remaining just the same. As it entered the twenty-first century, the BBFC—having amended its moniker somewhat disingenuously in 1984 to the British Board of Film Classification—was very mindful of two recently extended bouts of hand wringing over horror as an entertainment form, particularly in its home video incarnation. Mindful of what Andrew Britton called “the salacious charisma of the video nasty” (Britton 2009, 110), the 1984 Video Recordings Act created a separate (and legally embedded) role for the BBFC in terms of its home video classification system. The act had for several years effectively outlawed legal home video versions of genre landmarks such as The Last House on the Left (1972), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), their recent prosecution as obscene articles rendering them highly unlikely for any kind of BBFC-approved classification. Other titles embroiled in the “nasties” furor which did gradually re-emerge over the next decade, such as Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980), The Driller Killer (1979), The Evil Dead (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981) circulated in versions significantly shorn of some of their more contentious material. Later, in the wake of the 1993 conviction of the youths responsible for the murder of Liverpool toddler, James Bulger, several news outlets seized upon the trial judge’s speculative comments on screen violence to launch a further onslaught against the genre. Seizing bizarrely upon Child’s Play 3 (1991) as its primary target, this time the “video nasty” designation was adapted by the tabloid mindset to condemn anything from Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Natural Born Killers (1994), whose home media releases were all delayed due to the utterly unfounded reportage on links between the Bulger murder and the screen antics of the demonic Chucky doll. Therefore, since that period, the modern relationship between the UK censor and the horror film has been a steady process of reconciliation, revisionism,

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and rethinking over the pragmatic considerations of the genre’s social impact. Following the 1999 departure of its idiosyncratic and long-standing director, James Ferman, the BBFC adopted a relatively liberal stance regarding horror’s contemporary developments. Gradually authorizing home video certificates (often without cuts) to many of those “nasty” titles previously deemed unsuitable for the domestic sphere, the BBFC also relented on titles such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), both of which Ferman had treated with especially delicate caution. Neither of these films had been previously identified as “nasties,” but they suffered as collateral damage in the wake of his hypersensitivity toward horror in the home. By 1999, following an extended home video distribution hiatus stretching across two separate decades, the BBFC found itself in the slightly ludicrous position of finally being seen to approve these two key examples of the genre, a modest harbinger of the new age of relative liberalism to come. Yet, in a space of little more than a decade after his departure, the genre has tested Ferman’s successors in ways which perhaps even he hadn’t anticipated. By 2010, they were confronted with moments from A Serbian Film (2010) in which (amongst other things) an anonymous thug rapes an infant child pulled fresh from the womb, a woman is raped and decapitated at the point of the assailant’s orgasm, and an eyeball socket is pierced by a monstrously engorged penis. The film established itself as one of the most troublesome titles of recent times for censors around the world, suffering extensive cuts for its UK release, as well as outright bans in regions such as Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Spain. While eventually passed at the 18 category, the forty-nine separate cuts (approximating approximately four minutes of screen time) demanded by the BBFC chiefly reflected a view that its integral form “tended to eroticise or endorse sexual violence” (Bailey 2010) and ensured noninfringement of both the Obscene Publications Act and the Protection of Children Act. Such an intervention, if anything, demonstrated that while willful confrontation of any censorship organization’s tolerance levels may still generate a significant level of scandalous hype, this is not always necessarily conducive to either its completeness or even its legality in territories resistant to certain extreme strains of the horror genre. The year 2011 saw the same organization grappling with the legislative implications of passing Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011) on the still-flourishing DVD home video format. This time, the BBFC would have to determine how a bad taste, jet-black meta-comedy, infused with patently absurd but relentlessly graphic monochrome images of sado-erotica, human degradation, mutilation, and murder had potentially transgressed the dictates of the British statute books. Initially rejecting the film outright (thus restricting its commercial potential in a key market), the BBFC relented under appeal to over two and a half minutes of cuts, contesting that its unexpurgated

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form would have “involve[d] risk of harm within the terms of the Video Recordings Act, would be inconsistent with BBFC guidelines and broad public opinion, and may even be considered obscene within the terms of the Obscene Publications Act” (BBFC undated). The language may have shifted from the moralistic and vaguely theological posturing of the 1929 condemnation of La coquille et le clergyman into a precise articulation of legal responsibility, but the stern condemnation of an undesirable object and its potential for socially and psychologically harmful effects remained firmly embedded. Some may postulate that the respective, but generationally remote, visions of La coquille et le clergyman, A Serbian Film, and Human Centipede 2 are indicative of both historical degeneration and cultural downturn, whereby a willfully political assault upon the oppressive strictures of the Catholic Church has been supplanted by crass wallows in abject, degrading spectacles of flesh, blood, semen, and feces. Either way, these contrasting yet oddly convergent cases provide not only a useful chronological framework for almost a century’s worth of censorial intervention, but also a means by which to measure a cinematic tradition that has persistently reveled in and suffered for its shock-inducing sins. They also reflect a history of societal fears, developing from rapt concerns over the gleeful expression of sacrilege to the belief that obscene articles serve as potentially causal elements in psychological harm, criminal behavior, and social breakdown. To this day, the bold fact remains that several horror films freely available in other democratic territories are looked upon as potentially criminal objects by the UK’s film and home video regulator. Horror continues to offer test cases in which moving image culture intersects with points of legal contention, and just a cursory glance at some other horror or horror-adjacent titles that the BBFC has recently rejected completely for classification in the UK becomes instructive in terms of re-emphasizing ongoing areas of concern. Murder Set Pieces (2005), The Texas Vibrator Massacre (2008), Grotesque (2009), NF713 (2009), The Bunny Game (2010), and Hate Crime (2013) all presented extended bouts of torture, sexual violence, and human degradation which went beyond the board’s tolerance levels, particularly in terms of their risk of legal challenge if certified and made available to the public. In the case of The Texas Vibrator Massacre, those stated concerns were compounded by its status as a hardcore pornographic “sex work” and in no way mitigated by either restriction to licensed premises or its foundation as a cheap, shot-on-video parody. Oddly enough, despite the contemporary nature of the problems posed by these titles, a more recent pair of cases demonstrate that the troublesome aura of the original video nasty era still lingers, and that the current fears of the censor are still founded further back in both the American and European exploitation cinema practices of a prior epoch. Both Love Camp 7 (1969) and The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) fell victim

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to the video nasty purge of the 1980s, and when they were rejected for classification by the BBFC in and 2020 and 2021, respectively, it was decreed that both the conceptual and narrative concentration upon sexual depravity and coercion was so pervasive as to render both films beyond the pale. This sustained notoriety of films founded upon the kinky potential of Nazi themes and imagery demonstrates again that, as a generic categorization, horror need never necessarily be restricted to a rigid set of identificatory rules and that the passage of time is not always conducive to a blunting of a transgressive edge. So, while it has striven to liberalize and become more open in terms of its political processes, it is very clear where the chief concerns of today’s BBFC lay in terms of the horror film’s potentially deleterious impact. General assumptions persist that images of sexual aberrance, pain, mutilation, psychological disturbance, physical grotesquery, and violent death are symptoms of creative degeneracy. Yet, censors today are just as likely to be confronted by troublesome films designed for elitist art house consumption as those which blatantly target the basest viewer demands. Indeed, in matters of horror film imagery, the “art film” designation has become an unspoken bargaining chip with the UK censor whether or not they would care to admit it. Several titles illustrate how those seemingly clear lines of demarcation drawn for titles from the more obviously “exploitation”-tinged end of the horror market become increasingly blurred when they are navigated by “higher” cultural sensibilities. Censors have by no means granted full and unrestricted license, but an overt, but crafty fusion of art cinema inflections with extended bouts of graphic violence have influenced the assumptions about who, exactly, is consuming this material and how much of it should be allowed to pass unscathed. In turn, this has allowed the likes of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) and The House That Jack Built (2018), as well as Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002) to receive full, uncut approval at the 18 certificate level. All of these films draw blatantly and explicitly upon a litany of cinematic devices derived from both horror and violent pornography. Consumed and appreciated simultaneously as auteur, arthouse, and “extreme” cinematic objects, this has encouraged critical as well as censorial discourses around the aesthetic, authorial, and philosophical dimensions of their onscreen horrors, managing to offend bourgeois liberal and conservative taste formations alike in the process. Noe’s film even prompted extensive discussions between consultant psychologists and the BBFC, ensuring that its unusually protracted sequences of skull-smashing and anal rape satisfied all legal requirements in spite of their verisimilitude, detail, and duration.

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LAND OF THE FREE In the United States, the MPAA’s approach has become especially notable in light of horror’s ongoing appeal to adolescent and even preadolescent viewers. This has allowed for a renegotiation of the assumptions regarding the genre’s suitability for juvenile or perhaps even collective family viewership, the potential economic margins enhanced by direct appeal to those less enraptured by the genre’s more gruesome or unpalatable attractions. However, this might also tend to corroborate the long-held feeling that horror is something consumed and celebrated primarily by an immature mindset, an attitude forged in the wake of baby boomer “monster kids” sitting in thrall to television horror hosts and their quasi-comedic introductions to the sights and sounds of the genre’s “golden age.” Some studios have willingly tailored films specifically to that market through attainment of a PG-13 rating, a category introduced in 1984 as a tool of studio appeasement, and a halfway house bridging the then expansive gulf between PG and R-rated levels of content. This was partially designed as a guarantee that family audiences (and particularly those children present) would no longer engage with large-scale blockbuster entertainments such as Poltergeist (1982), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Gremlins (1984), wholly oblivious to their grisly litany of peeling skulls, rotting flesh, and manual heart removal. As Filipa Antunes argues, “the existence of the PG-13 has exposed children to some adult content that was previously controlled, thus challenging the purpose of the R-rating and opening the door to concerns over child protection” (Antunes 2017). In the past, this occasionally resulted in some remarkable anomalies in the BBFC and MPAA’s respective judgments on horror films. This was most glaringly evident when Poltergeist (1982) somehow managed to convince the former to impose a restrictive “X” certificate (prohibiting those under 18 years of age) in measured response to the family friendly PG-rating doled out by the latter. The growth of the PG-13 market has seen some Hollywood studios, ever keen to establish horror franchise properties with a broad appeal, benefit substantially from a happy compliance with the regulator’s requirements. This ensured that the likes of The Ring (2002), Cloverfield (2008), Insidious (2010), and A Quiet Place (2018) repositioned the genre firmly in the mainstream of popular taste while still pushing the rating to its absolute limits. However, this lead provided by Hollywood has not always proven consistent in terms of anticipating the responses of censorship organizations in other territories. In the UK, all these films were released with the age-restrictive “15” certificate, thus reducing the potential audience that the MPAA’s process allows for in the American theatrical environment. A notable and ironic

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exception to this occurred with the release of The Woman in Black (2011). Rated PG-13 in the United States, the BBFC worked in conjunction with the film’s distributor to tailor its content to a “12A,” resulting in the removal of six seconds of footage as well as the visual muting and amendment of sound effects in other moments of the film. Regardless of this seemingly conscientious level of due care and attention, the BBFC received a reported 134 letters of complaint regarding the leniency of its decision. Expanding the potential audience, it seems, does not always necessarily lead to a contented consumer base when it comes to matters of censorship, even when dealing with an established and seemingly respectable property. All of this has been offset by a curiously parallel impulse: to push beyond the representational parameters of the R-rating even further into the realms of the “extreme” horror experience, moving as far from the safe ground of the PG-13 as it is possible to stray. Unlike the BBFC, the MPAA is not required to issue ratings for home video releases. While it is still far from the case that “anything goes,” the MPAA has made many decisions in full knowledge that major distributors will subsequently issue alternative versions in a home video market beyond its regulatory purview. While studios still baulk at the prospect of either NC-17 or unrated theatrical release, MPAA mandated cuts for either PG-13 or R-rated theatrical release have been easily and happily restored for many releases on DVD or Blu-ray, their packaging boldly and defiantly pronouncing their uncut status. As a primary marketing hook to lure both the dedicated fan and the casual observer, the undesirability of restricted theatrical outreach was thus transformed into a useful tool for expanding a property’s commercial potential in a separate market. This has ensured that theatrically released titles such as the Hostel series, the Saw series, and Texas Chainsaw: The Beginning all circulated in versions which rendered the initial demands of the MPAA effectively redundant. This smacks of pure cynicism on the part of distributors, keen to appease the MPAA in the limited theatrical window, but ready to capitalize upon horror’s grand guignol tradition through the reinstatement of multiple shots and frames, the notion of the “extreme” itself becoming one more generic marketing hook. It would therefore be extremely naïve to assume that a good portion of the emergent fanbases for Saw and Hostel, or, for that matter, hits such as Paranormal Activity and The Conjuring did not consist partly of a significant demographic yielded from the very sector that the ratings system was designed to protect in the first place. In this age of the wide dissemination of “unrated” horror content, as well as the access afforded by both legal and illegal online options, one can only wonder further how effective a system of official classification actually is. Indeed, the latter may simply prove to be a vast digital magnification of just how ineffective it has always been, with those deemed most vulnerable or

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susceptible to the audiovisual lexicon of horror still finding simple and ever more expansive ways in which to access it. CONCLUSION It is clear then that despite the radical transformations undertaken in the second century of the cinema’s creative, technological, and commercial development, film censors remain a durable and stubborn presence. Having developed a series of pragmatic and not always illiberal mechanisms for dealing with the horror film’s increasingly eclectic range, the cumulative historical antipathy of both the BBFC and the MPAA has mutated into a pragmatic acceptance of its seemingly unshakeable appeal. This has forced the BBFC in particular to exhibit a much greater level of both public engagement and self-awareness, its website now littered with detailed case studies of horror films (and many others besides) which have inspired both public debate and internal soul searching throughout its history. Notably, the UK censor now finds itself in a position whereby its decisions have become the very stuff of horror cinema itself. Harking back to the historical aftermath of the aforementioned “video nasties” controversy, Censor (2021) goes so far as to link the personal trauma of its protagonist with the bureaucratic and practical processes of the job itself. If anything, the film suggests that the historical intersections of horror and censorship are now so deeply ingrained as to have become a legitimate site of thematic exploration within a fresh genre space. As the varied global calamities of the twenty-first century continue to inform the genre’s predominant shape and direction, Censor seems to suggest that the genre’s true power still resides not only in the pull between the impulse to conceal and control it, but also the revelations it begets regarding the motivational, unconscious desires and fears of those yielding that power. As the limits to where filmmakers are prepared to go extend ever further outwards, it seems that the very experience of being a censor may well be the most frightful prospect of all. WORKS CITED Antunes, Filipa. 2017. “Re-Thinking PG-13: Ratings and the Boundaries of Childhood and Horror.” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 1: 27–43 Bailey, Fiona. 2010. “A Serbian Film Is ‘Most Cut’ Film in 16 Years.” BBC, November 26. www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/entertainment​-arts​-11846906. Accessed August 2, 2022. BBFC. Undated. “The Human Centipede Series.” BBFC. www​.bbfc​.co​.uk​/education​/ case​-studies​/the​-human​-centipede​-series. Accessed August 16, 2022.

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Britton, Andrew. 2009. Britton on Film: the Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press Cooke, David. 2012. “The Director’s Commentary.” In Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, edited by Edward Lamberti, 162–80. London: Palgrave/BFI. McKibbin, Ross. 1998. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petley, Julian. 2017. “Horror and the Censors.” In A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, 130–47. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Chapter Four

The Recurrence and Evolution of Universal’s Classic Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror M. Keith Booker

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS The twenty-first century has seen a remarkable outburst of creativity and originality in the production of horror films. At the same time, the recombinatory logic of Hollywood has shifted into overdrive in the new century’s horror film industry, with a flood of sequels to earlier horror films, remakes of a number of classic horror films, and reboots of all the most important slasher franchises of the 1980s. Some of these reworkings of earlier horror films have been rather unfortunate, but many have shown their own kind of creativity and originality, breaking some genuinely new ground with old material. Legendary Films’ MonsterVerse films, for example, have created a new shared universe built on resurrected versions of King Kong and Godzilla, revamped with the latest in digital special effects and updated political visions. Universal Studio’s Dark Universe shared universe project, on the other hand, failed to get off the ground, but one of the most important sources of horror film ideas in the twenty-first century has nevertheless been the classic Universal horror franchises of the 1930s. Indeed, films drawing upon some of horror film’s oldest ideas have produced some of the freshest visions in horror film of the twenty-first century. The original monsters of Universal’s Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, and Mummy films have themselves continued to make appearances in horror films of the twentieth century; they have also continued to exercise an important influence on their respective subgenres, even if the original monsters are not featured. 57

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This kind of renewal of the classic Universal monsters, of course, has a strong precedent in horror films produced by Britain’s Hammer Films, especially the numerous Frankenstein and Dracula films released from 1958 to 1974, though their 1959 reboot of The Mummy was also highly successful, triggering three sequels of its own. With that precedent and with a hegemonic postmodern culture that thrives in general on techniques of pastiche construction from bits and pieces of previous cultural works, it was almost inevitable that iconic figures such as the Universal monsters would be resurrected in various forms by the American Culture Industry of the twenty-first century. What was perhaps not inevitable was that many of these resurrections have been so effective, though it is certainly the case that some of them have been much more effective than others. THE MUMMY The Mummy, from the first film starring Boris Karloff as the resurrected ancient Egyptian high priest Imhotep in 1932, has been somewhat a marginal member of the Universal monsters, and this original film had no direct sequels. The concept was then rebooted with The Mummy’s Hand in 1940, with a different central character and a different actor (the rather obscure George Zucco) playing that character. The three sequels to that film then starred Lon Chaney, Jr., as still another mummy (Kharis), and it seems likely that one reason for the marginality of this monster figure is that he had so many different identities in his original incarnations. The Hammer Films Mummy sequence rebooted the Mummy’s Hand sequence, starring Christopher Lee as Kharis in The Mummy (1959), but each of their subsequent films featured a different central Mummy and different actor playing that character, continuing the vague definition of this monster. Given this dispersed identity, it is possibly no surprise that subsequent Mummy films have been related to the Universal original primarily in a generic sense, rather than in the sense of bringing back a specific central monster. From this point of view, it is perhaps not surprising that one successful reincarnation of this motif occurred in a series of adventure films that had virtually nothing to do with the original horror films, despite the fact that the reanimated mummy in Universal’s own The Mummy (1999) was again named Imhotep. The emphasis here, though, is not on the mummy but on swashbuckling Indiana Jones wannabe Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser), who battles against the mummy. Fraser would star as O’Connell in two sequels, eventually leading to a spin-off film series starring Dwayne Johnson in the title role of The Scorpion King (2002), though Johnson would be replaced in the role by a series of different actors in subsequent direct-to-video sequels.



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Interestingly, the planned Universal Dark Universe series of films was initiated in 2017 by another action-adventure version of The Mummy, now with A-list star Tom Cruise in the role of the lead mummy-fighter, but this film was such a colossal misfire that the entire series of films was put on hold, Universal’s strategy shifted to reboots that do not share a universe. THE WOLF MAN The Mummy was clearly the least important of the Big Four Universal Monsters, both in the original run of the Universal monster films and in the twenty-first century, but the Wolf Man was also less important than Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster in both time periods. Again, this is partly because the Wolf Man did not have a clearly established and distinctive identity from the very beginning. When most horror fans think of Universal’s Wolf Man, they think of Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot in the 1941 film of that title, but The Wolf Man was actually not Universal’s first werewolf film. That honor goes to Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935), in which botanist Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) gets bitten by a werewolf in Tibet while in search of a rare flowering plant. Upon his return, he himself becomes a dangerous werewolf at each subsequent full moon, making this a sort of Jekyll and Hyde story. Werewolf of London did not really strike a chord with American audiences, leaving it for Chaney’s version of the Wolf Man (turned into a werewolf by a gypsy curse issued by a character played by none other than Bela Lugosi) to become the protype for future cinematic werewolves. Chaney himself returned as Talbot/The Wolf Man in four subsequent Universal films, though all of these were mashups rather than direct sequels to The Wolf Man. In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1942), Chaney’s character at least shared top billing with a more famous monster, but in House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) he was relegated to the status of a supporting character to his more famous cousins. It probably comes as no surprise, then, that, despite Chaney’s emotionally powerful performance in The Wolf Man, the werewolf genre has largely evolved apart from his influence, with films as different as An American Werewolf in London (1981), Canada’s Ginger Snaps (2000), Britain’s Dog Soldiers (2002), and Brazil’s Good Manners [As Boas Maneiras] (2017), demonstrating the versatility and promise of the werewolf genre. One twenty-first-century werewolf film, Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman (2010) is ostensibly a remake of the 1941 classic, again featuring Larry Talbot, scion of an aristocratic British family, who gets bitten by a werewolf and then becomes one. That’s about where the similarities end, though. Set

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in Victorian England, this film employs lavish period details, state-of-the-art digital effects, and A-list actors to produce a big-budget Hollywood action film. Unfortunately, it lacks the heart of the original and goes more for spectacle instead. Benicio Del Toro now plays Larry Talbot; he actually looks a bit like Lon Chaney, Jr., and has some of that same soulful vulnerability. Del Toro is no doubt a much better actor than Chaney, but he’s not nearly as good as Chaney in this particular role. Similarly, Anthony Hopkins, who plays Talbot’s father (who now turns out to be a werewolf as well), is a better actor than Claude Rains, who was featured in the original, but his role is a bit ridiculous here, clearly punched up to try to give Hopkins more to do. There’s major talent behind the camera as well. Director Johnston is a special-effects whiz best known for directing Captain America: The First Avenger, for example, and it even has music by Danny Elfman. It also introduces a new character, Inspector Francis Aberline, who comes to investigate the werewolf activity and is apparently meant to evoke Frederick Abberline, a real historical figure involved in the Jack the Ripper case, though one who is probably best known to contemporary audiences as the protagonist of the 1999 graphic novel and 2001 film From Hell. His inclusion here seems a bit gratuitous, meant perhaps to hook this film into a contemporary craze for Victorian revivals of various kinds. With a production budget of $150 million, The Wolfman was a critical and commercial failure, which might be one reason why a planned sequel ultimately morphed into an unrelated werewolf movie, Werewolf: The Beast Among Us (2012). That one was also a failure, but Universal apparently still has faith in this intellectual property. As of this writing, still another reboot of the Wolf Man series (starring Ryan Goslin and co-produced by Universal and Blumhouse) is reportedly in development. DRACULA Unlike Imhotep and Larry Talbot in their genres, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, from the original 1931 film, has continued to exert a strong influence on the entire vampire genre. A lighter version of Dracula was even featured in the 1987 comedy The Monster Squad and in the animated family comedy Hotel Transylvania (2013), which was not really a surprise, given that the character had already moved into similar territory in pop culture as the inspiration for the puppet Count von Count, who taught numbers to kids in Sesame Street beginning in 1972, and for Count Chocula, a loveable mascot used to market a children’s sugary cereal since 1971. The bloodthirsty count has not, however, always been so benevolent. Starting with Count Orlok of F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (the name was changed in



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Murnau’s film for copyright reasons) has often been one of the darkest and most menacing figures in all of horror film. Lugosi’s definitive version was a far cry from Count Chocula, for example, and Dracula remained a dark figure in Universal’s series of sequels in the 1930s. Dracula was also effectively menacing in Christopher Lee’s Hammer version, while Orlok’s original creepiness was well-nigh restored in what is essentially a direct sound film remake of Nosferatu by Werner Herzog, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), a highly respected vampire film. Among other things, it is notable for being made in both English and German versions, with names from the original novel (including that of Dracula) restored (though with some modifications), due to the fact that the book was by then out of copyright. The 1931 Dracula was virtually remade in John Badham’s Dracula (1979), with Frank Langella in the title role. Dracula has also been an important direct influence on films as varied as the Blaxploitation film Blacula (1972) and the comic-book action film Blade: Trinity: The Curse of Dracula (2004).1 Even films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s much-hyped, big-budget Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), remained very much in orbit of Tod Browning’s original, despite supposedly drawing directly from Stoker’s original novel. Dracula has even acquired a sort of celebrity status that has allowed him to make guest appearances in a number of vampire narratives, as when he was featured in the premiere episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (initially broadcast September 26, 2000), where he even manages to take a bite of Buffy herself, though she ultimately bests him. In the twenty-first century, Dracula has continued to hover over an explosion in the production in vampire films, even as those films have sometimes attempted to move away from the Gothic origins of the genre and into textures that were more grittily realist or more dreamily romantic. Dracula has been a particularly prominent presence in the plethora of productions that have attempted to meet the increasing needs of the twenty-first century cable and streaming programming machine, including such entries as the Showtime mashup Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), which features numerous characters from nineteenth-century British culture, with characters from Dracula and Frankenstein playing particularly important roles (though Dracula himself doesn’t actually appear on screen until season 3). The best vampire films of the twenty-first century—such as Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009), Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)—have generally not dealt directly with Dracula, preferring instead to explore new territory. It is clear, though, that the vampire genre could not have developed into such an important form of horror without the important influence of the Dracula figure. There are, of course, many cases where Dracula himself a prominent figure is, though not the dominant one, as in the streaming series from Amazon Prime

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Video, Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017). Here, two vampire clans (one descended from Dracula himself) battle for world domination, in a series that tries just a bit too hard to be both as cool and as bloody as possible. Still, films and series specifically about Dracula have continued to appear in the new century, beginning with Dracula 2000 (2000), which is set in present-day New Orleans during Mardi Gras, while Universal’s own Van Helsing (2004) converts the Dracula story into a big-budget action film with A-list stars (e.g., Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale). It also features state-of-the-art CGI and a nod back to Universal’s mashups of the 1940s by including Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man (and manages to incorporate Mr. Hyde) as guest stars. The Monster even switches teams and gives an assist to Van Helsing and the good guys. Perhaps the most notable recent effort to resurrect the Dracula narrative in film came in 2014 with the release of Universal’s Dracula Untold. Dracula Untold uses state-of-the-art digital imagery to make Dracula into an action hero (actually, a superhero). This film, however, is much darker than Van Helsing, both visually and thematically. Here, rather than serving in his original role as a sinister figure who threatens to bring the darkness of the East into the civilized milieu of the West, Dracula is a self-sacrificing champion of Western values who serves as a bulwark against violent intrusions from the East (specifically from the Ottoman Empire). Willing to do anything to protect his Transylvanian homeland from conquest by the evil Turks, Dracula essentially sells his soul to the devil, agreeing to become a vampire so that he can gain the superpowers needed to defeat the invaders. It’s a refreshing take on the Dracula story—though it might have been even more refreshing if the film had challenged the fundamental Orientalist premise that evil comes from the East and must be resisted by heroic, virtuous Westerners. Dracula has joined the contemporary streaming world with the Netflix animated series Castelevania (2017–2021), as well Dracula (2020), produced by BBC One and subsequently released on Netflix, with Danish actor Claes Bang in the title role. Consisting of three feature-length episodes, this series nominally looks back to the original novel but sometimes seems to be channeling the Hammer Dracula films, with an added touch of twenty-first century humor and romance. Each of the three episodes is devoted to one well-known segment of the Dracula story: the encounter between Dracula and Jonathan Harker in the former’s castle in Transylvania, the trip from Transylvania to England on a sailing ship, and Dracula’s invasion of England. Much of the action is quite familiar, and dialogue is sometimes lifted directly from the 1931 Dracula as a sort of fan service. (We are reminded several times that Dracula never drinks . . . wine, for example.) However, there are some clever twists in the storytelling that add a bit of spice. The first two episodes



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introduce a new character, the spunky and not-so-religious nun, Sister Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells), who crosses swords from Dracula in an effort to save the world. Her efforts are not entirely successful, but they do lead him to be trapped in a coffin at the bottom of the sea for 123 years—so that he can emerge in the third episode in the England of 2020. The last episode cleverly transplants much of the material from the original novel and film into a modern-day context, though this segment, in particular, seems a bit undercooked. In any case, it ends as Sister Agatha’s great-grand-niece Dr. Zoe Van Helsing (also Wells) finally manages to kill Dracula, but there is just enough ambiguity in the ending to leave open the possibility of a direct sequel. FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER Like Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster has become a loveable iconic figure in some versions of American popular culture—through such manifestations as television’s Herman Munster in The Munsters (1964–1966) or the marketing mascot for Franken Berry cereal. In addition, Frankenstein’s monster has also become enough of a celebrity that versions of him appearing as “guest” monsters in various venues can be easily identified even by casual fans. Thus, it is obvious that the central monster of the 1997 X-Files episode “The Post-Modern Prometheus” is clearly based on the Frankenstein monster, even without the signal of the title or even without realizing that the black-and-white cinematography of the episode mimics the look of Whale’s original Frankenstein films. Similarly, “Adam,” the “biomechanical demonoid” who appears in season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1999–2000) is an obvious Frankenstein monster, even without such signals.2 Moreover, the Frankenstein narrative has anchored an extensive family of films, including both direct sequels to James Whale’s 1931 original and a panoply of diverse re-imaginings that have nevertheless maintained a clear connection to the original. In fact, the Frankenstein franchise dominates the genre of artificial-human horror even more than Dracula dominates the vampire genre. It is, for example, quite possible to watch many vampire films without thinking of Dracula at all, but any film about a mad scientist creating an artificial human is pretty much going to register automatically as a Frankenstein film. And there have been plenty of those over the years, with the original Universal and Hammer sequences supplemented by such varied entries as Frankenstein 1970 (1958), in which Karloff finally gets to play the scientist instead of the monster and Mel Brooks’s hilarious Young Frankenstein (1974), one of the greatest horror comedies of all time. The Frankenstein story has also inspired a number of over-the-top variants, such as the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), in which Tim

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Curry, as the mad scientist Frank-N-Furter, delivers one of the most spectacularly campy performances of all time, at the same time emphasizing the gay subtext of Whale’s films. Other outrageous films with strong resonances of the Frankenstein include such examples as Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (1990), while Tim Burton has directed two more whimsical versions in the postmodern fantasy Edward Scissorhands (1990) and the animated children’s film Frankenweenie (2012). Finally, one particularly notable attempt at a straightforward version of the Frankenstein story can be found in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), a relatively big-budget film that strives (as the title suggests) to return to the original novel rather than simply building on Whale’s films. Branagh’s visually sumptuous film has some impressive moments as well, especially in Robert De Niro’s compelling performance as the Monster (now called the “Creature”), though many critics felt that it did not really succeed as a horror film. In the twenty-first century, Frankenstein’s monster has thus far received the least attention from Universal itself in terms of potential reboots of their original monster franchises, yet the new century has been a particularly rich and creative period for Frankenstein narratives in general. Like Dracula, Frankenstein and his monster are prominent presences in Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), for example, while the ITV/Netflix series The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–2017) injects some new period energies into the original narrative, using Shelley’s novel as a backdrop for what is essentially an 1820s–1830s police procedural, mixing in liberal portions of historical and literary material from roughly that period. The new century has also been particularly rich in the production of films built upon the Frankenstein story. Paul McGuigan’s Victor Frankenstein (2015), for example, gives the story a new twist with a unique emphasis on Victor’s assistant Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), who now turns out to be a brilliant surgeon, rescued from the circus and “cured” of his hunchback by Frankenstein. Unfortunately, the monster created by Victor and Igor (here named Prometheus) turns out to be rather uninteresting and only spends a few moments alive before being killed. This film moves the story forward in time to the late Victorian era and adds peripatetic postmodern editing but doesn’t quite come together. A number of films have updated the setting to the present day and/or moved the emphasis away from Gothicism toward science fiction or away from camp and toward gritty realism. Damian Leone’s Frankenstein vs. The Mummy (2015), set in present-day America, adds a dose of science fiction and even replicates the Universal mashup strategy of the 1940s. Other films that have moved in a science fictional direction (while dropping the direct Frankenstein connection) include the genetic engineering dramas Splice (2009) and Little Joe (2019), as well as Alex Garland’s remarkable artificial



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intelligence drama Ex Machina (2014).3 Of these, Ex Machina is particularly successful. As Guy Lodge puts it in a review, Garland’s film might be described as “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein redreamed as a 21st-century battle of the sexes” (Lodge 2015).4 One of the best modern re-imaginings of the Frankenstein story is Lucky McKee’s May (2002), which has become something of a cult classic. This film’s protagonist, May Canady (Angela Bettis), is a lonely young woman who was bullied in childhood because of her lazy eye and who remains something of an outcast in adulthood. Ultimately, her inability to connect with others drives her to commit a series of murders and then use her skills (she works as a technician at a vets surgery and sews for a hobby) to reassemble the bodies into a hybrid whole using her favorite parts from each body. She hopes, thereby, finally to have a friend, thus placing her in somewhat a hybrid position herself, sharing characteristics of both Frankenstein and the Monster. Perhaps the most direct attempt to retell the Frankenstein narrative in a realistic modern setting is Bernard Rose’s Frankenstein (2015). Here, Danny Huston and Carrie-Ann Moss play Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein, a husband-and-wife research team who create, via the wonders of modern science, an artificial man (played by Xavier Samuel). This time the monster is good-looking, though he initially has the mind of an infant, given that he was just created. Then, due to errors in cell replication, the man (whom they name “Adam”) begins to deteriorate, and the Frankensteins eventually decide to put him down, even though Adam has developed a bond with Elizabeth, whom he calls “Mom.” Adam proves to be surprisingly resilient, though, springing back to life after his attempted killing and escaping into the outside world, where he suffers a number of abuses so horrific that they border on torture porn—as when he is brutally beaten and killed by a sadistic cop (only to again spring back to life). Given such scenes, it is no surprise that this film completely drops the humorous aspects of Whale’s films. It does, however, replicate (or perhaps even exceed) Whale’s creation of sentiment for the Monster, whose heart-wrenching experiences include cleverly modernized re-imaginings of many key scenes in both of Whale’s Frankenstein films; the blind hermit in Bride of Frankenstein is here replaced by a blind, homeless bluesman, played by Tony Todd, who became a legend in the horror film world for his title role in Rose’s Candyman (1992). There’s also a clever recreation of the scene with little Maria. This time the girl survives, but Adam’s beloved pet dog is brutally killed by the police in the same sequence. In the course of the film, meanwhile, Adam becomes quite articulate, and even serves as the narrator for much of the action, though he never quite overcomes his childlike innocence, despite all that happens to him, leading to a tragic and fiery conclusion.

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Paul Mitchell suggests that Rose’s Frankenstein, along with a 2007 British television film of the same title, offers “a provocative depiction of hybridized/synthetic identities that situate the creature’s aberrant body in relation to the exploitative biomedical practices of modern capitalist society” (Mitchel 2021, 4). Contemporary sociopolitical commentary is similarly crucial to Larry Fessenden’s Depraved (2017), which also serves as a particularly clever illustration of the uses of the legacy of the Frankenstein story in contemporary film. For example, the film overtly calls attention to the fact that its chief mad scientist is named “Henry” (David Call), as in Whale’s films (rather than Victor, as in the novel), providing one of many clues that Fessenden draws more directly from Whale’s films than from Shelley’s novel, though the novel remains important as well. The action is placed in contemporary New York, with the important wrinkle that Fessenden has chosen to tell his modern-day Frankenstein story through the optic of the war on terror. In particular, Henry first began to develop both his technique for resurrecting the dead and his motivation for doing so while working as a field medic in “the Middle East.”5 Later, working in a Brooklyn loft, he finally creates a living specimen that he dubs “Adam” (Alex Breaux), constructed from bits and pieces of corpses. The naïve and misunderstood Adam gets out of control and escapes at the end of the film, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Crucial to the narrative is the fact that Henry is still suffering from the trauma of his experiences in the Middle East, where many soldiers died while in his care. As Henry’s girlfriend Liz (Ana Kayne), a counsellor who works with traumatized veterans for a living, warns him (after meeting Adam), “Henry, you brought the war home with you.” The satirical implications of the film are broadened, meanwhile, by the fact that Henry is encouraged and assisted by the film’s most despicable character, one John Polidori (Joshua Leonard).6 Polidori is an ambitious employee of a large pharmaceutical company (SynTech), which of course serves as a marker of the evils of American capitalism. Polidori has developed a drug called “rapamycin,” or “Rap X,” which helps Adam to stay alive and which Polidori hopes will eventually have significant commercial potential, boosting his standing with the company. Thus, Polidori has supplied Henry not only with pharmaceuticals and other supplies for his research, but with bodies and body parts—early in the film he murders a young man named Alex (Owen Campbell) so that his brain can be extracted for use as Adam’s brain. Meanwhile, not only is SynTech more concerned with its profits than with actually helping its customers, but it is also perfectly happy to damage the health of its customers by selling them drugs they don’t really need, thus contributing to Americans’ excessive reliance on drugs in order to further its aims. As Henry tells Adam when he explains to him that he is going to need to take a number of drugs (including Rap X) in order to survive, “Don’t worry.



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Most of America is on drugs. Uh, uppers, downers, painkillers, mood enhancers, blood pressure, diabetes, opioids, and meth.” In what is perhaps the crucial “message” scene in Depraved, Polidori takes Adam to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to teach him more about human history and culture, which he summarizes as “Since the beginning, it’s been wars and warring, with factions of artists trying to find beauty and meaning, capture the agony and the ecstasy. This museum, it’s a mausoleum to the aspirations of man.” In the museum, they view a variety of paintings and displays, several of which seem to strike a particular chord with Adam. For example, he identifies with the dead and broken body of Christ that he sees in the Pietà by seventeenth-century Spanish painter Juan de Valdés Leal, clearly pointing back to the links between the monster and Christ implanted in The Bride of Frankenstein. At one point, Polidori takes Adam to the 1913 painting Ariadne, by the Greco-Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, a classic expression of modernist alienation. Polidori explains the painting with what can be taken as a central statement of his own philosophy of life: Modernity encroaches. Twentieth-century angst. God is dead and we are left alone with our technology and our nightmares. It is the beginning of the end. A culture of narcissism and self-indulgence born out of the comforts of modern life. All that’s left to do is enjoy the ride.

Later, Polidori takes Adam to a display of weaponry, which he characterizes as a monument to humanity’s fundamental inclination toward violence and destruction. He sees this display as a fundamental statement about the human race (though it also might be taken as a description of Polidori himself): “Depraved. That’s what we are, Adam. Utterly depraved.” The plot takes a dark turn when, perhaps stirred by the visit to the strip club, Adam tells Henry that “I want a girl like you have a girl,” again taking the film into the realm of The Bride of Frankenstein. Upset after having just learned new details about his origins, Adam goes to a bar, where he meets a young woman named (what else?) Shelley (Addison Timlin). Meanwhile, Shelley’s clothing is decorated with daisies, which identifies her with the girl Maria from the 1931 film and suggests that she might be in big trouble. Indeed, Adam does accidentally kill Shelley soon afterward, eventually begging Henry, hours later, to resurrect her so that she can be like him. Shelley does double duty as an adapted version of both the girl Maria and the Bride, and her principal function seems to be to provide additional links to the original Whale films. Meanwhile, the naming of Adam in this film calls attention to the fact that the Bride motif in Frankenstein stories had always echoed the Biblical story of the creation of Eve, a story that problematically identifies women as secondary to men and as created for their benefit. In

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this case, Shelley also calls further attention to the film’s engagement with capitalism. Though she seems like a free spirit in the bar at night, she admits to him that she has to get up early the next morning to go to work, because, by day, she is an ordinary corporate employee, “just a cog in the wheel.” Her gestures toward rebellion (she has numerous tattoos, is a fan of Iggy Pop, and is willing to befriend an outsider like Adam) suggest her desire to break free of the soul-crushing routinization of daily life under late capitalism, while the feebleness of her rebellion makes clear just how unlikely such individual rebellions are to produce significant results. From this point, pretty much everything unravels. Henry tries to kill Adam, but Adam proves remarkably hard to kill; he revives to murder Liz before Henry’s eyes, having possibly raped her as well. He then stalks Henry with a Karloff-like gate as lightning flashes in the background, providing the film’s most Gothic visual and the one that recalls the Whale films most directly. Adam ends the film on the run from police, who initially fail to catch him even after tracking him with police dogs that inevitably recall the racist legacy of using such dogs against African Americans in the South and making Adam into a sort of stand-in for all those who have been Othered by mainstream American society. If one sees Shelley’s original Frankenstein as a commentary on the dehumanizing potential of the Enlightenment reliance on reason and the emergent Industrial Revolution, the rather vague critique of capitalism embedded within Depraved would seem to serve as a bookend that comments on the ultimate impact of a now-complete capitalist modernization. In this sense, Fessenden’s film can be taken as a verification that Shelley’s original fears were well founded. Meanwhile, to the extent that one sees the war on terror as central to the message of Depraved, the film suggests that a particularly violent form of American capitalism perhaps goes into even more vicious territory than Shelley might have imagined. It is also worth noting that Fessenden’s use of the war on terror provides an interesting link to another recent version of the Frankenstein story, Ahmed Saadawi’s award-winning 2014 Arabic-language Iraqi novel Frankenstein in Baghdad. This novel features a being, the “Whatsitsname,” that is constructed of bits and pieces of individuals killed by car bombs in US-occupied Iraq during 2005. The Whatsitsname is then animated and begins to shamble about, with dire results, as any good Frankenstein monster must do. In this case, though, Saadawi’s novel specifically identifies the source of its Frankenstein imagery as the film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), rather than Shelley’s novel, so that Frankenstein in Baghdad ultimately illustrates the international reach of Frankenstein films.7 With the rich production of Frankenstein films in recent years leading the way, the original Universal monsters continue to provide a rich source of



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material for contemporary horror films and streaming series. And this material has been used in some very creative ways, such as updating the original settings to the present day (and often to America) or using advances in digital effects technology (and changing ideas about the acceptability of certain kinds of images to add action or visceral impact. Many recent works have also used the Universal monsters to produce cogent social and political commentary on contemporary issues. Moreover, the production of works based on the original Universal monsters seems to be accelerating,8 so that the future promises to give us many more films and series based on these monsters. NOTES 1. The subtitle is not often used. 2. On the use of the Frankenstein story in Buffy, see Anita Rose (2002). 3. There are, of course, earlier examples as well. Friedman and Kavey (2016) also list the important science fiction films Blade Runner (1982) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) among recent science fictional adaptations of the Frankenstein story. 4. See also Beal (2018) and Hammond (2018) for discussions of Ex Machina as a Frankenstein narrative. 5. Internal visual clues in some flashback battleground scenes (as well as Fessenden’s comments in interviews) suggest that the setting is actually Afghanistan. It may be, though, that the film fails to be specific about this location in order to make its commentary applicable to the entire war on terror, which includes the invasion and occupation of Iraq. 6. Polidori’s name, of course, is derived from the original Dr. John Polidori, who served as Lord Byron’s personal physician and was present at the gathering in Switzerland where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein famously originated. 7. For a more extensive discussion of Frankenstein in Baghdad, see Booker and Daraiseh (2022). 8. Indeed Universal Studios, after accepting the failure of their own attempts to launch a Dark Universe of their classic monsters have begun working with Blumhouse to produce a series on one-off films, the first of which was The Invisible Man (2020).

WORKS CITED Beal, Eleanor. 2018. “Frankensteinian Gods, Fembots, and the New Technological Frontier in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. In Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives, edited by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 69–84. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. 2022. “Frankenstein in Baghdad, or the Postmodern Prometheus.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 32, no. 3: 388–403.

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Friedman, Lester D., and Allison B. Kavey. 2016. In Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hammond, Emma. 2018. “Alex Garland’s Ex Machina or the Modern Epimetheus.” In Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction, edited by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers, 190–205. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Lodge, Guy. 2015. “Film Review: Ex Machina.” Variety, January 16. https:​ //​variety​.com​/2015​/film​/global​/film​-review​-ex​-machina​-1201405717​/. Accessed November 22, 2021. Mitchell, Paul. 2021. “Frankenstein’s Creature on Film in the Twenty-First Century: Posthuman Monster, Saviour, and Victim Narratives.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 23, no. 1: 1–23. Rose, Anita. 2002. “Of Creatures and Creators: Buffy Does Frankenstein.” In Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, 133–42. Lansdale, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Chapter Five

The Remixing (and Ransacking) of Hill House Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley Jackson in Contemporary Gothic Fiction Joan Passey

SHIRLEY JACKSON In the bonus episode of the on-screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman released in 2022, Arthur Darvill, playing Richard Madoc, enslaves Calliope, one of the Muses of Ancient Greece, to inspire him, and begins an acclaimed career as an author of weird fiction. All the while he holds this woman hostage, he claims to be a liberal, a social justice warrior, a champion of equality. During an interview, when asked for his main literary influences, he cites three women—Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, and Shirley Jackson. This scene has Neil Gaiman’s tongue set firmly in Neil Gaiman’s cheek. References to Jackson often include some mention of her being “your favourite horror author’s favourite horror author,” and Neil Gaiman’s name crops up as frequently as Stephen King’s in lists of Shirley Jackson’s superfans (Temple 2019). In the context of this episode, however—when a male author feeds, thanklessly, on the gifts of an entrapped woman—the throwaway reference takes on the teeth of scathing criticism for those “in the know.” Jackson, so frequently, is reduced to or remembered solely as “muse.” Madoc name-checks women to enhance his progressive credentials—he reads women!—but we know this respect for women is hollow. Gaiman makes the conscious choice to embroil Jackson, specifically, 71

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in a narrative of influence, legacy, and erasure, in a blistering investigation of the gendered dynamics of acts of creation and inspiration. Calliope is not just the muse of myth and legend, but a stand-in for all the invisible women behind great male authors—whether the women who run the home, or type up the notes, or who forged traditions that go on to inspire generations while fading into obscurity themselves. Gaiman, as a long-time reader of Jackson, cannot be oblivious to the way Jackson made a habit of illuminating the invisible women at the heart of literary output, and the horror implicit in acts of obfuscation and erasure. Gaiman provided the blurb for Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of Jackson, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, stating that it is “[n]ot just a terrific biography, but a remarkable act of reclamation: if there was ever a great writer of the twentieth century who fell victim to ‘How to Dismiss Women’s Fiction,’ it was Shirley Jackson” (Gaiman quoted by Franklin 2016). Carmen Maria Machado notes that Gaiman’s blurb is a covert reference to Joanna Russ’s 1983 book-length essay “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” (Machado 2016). Machado reports discomfort at Gaiman’s failure to properly attribute the reference. Lee Mandelo, writing on Russ’s essay, states that: By using extensive citations of real women writers’ works, and real books devoted to women writer’s like Moers’ much-cited Literary Women, Russ is creating a concrete list of the past. Using the references she uses, documenting them so thoroughly, creates a history and a set of possibilities not written in sand; the knowledge that not only were there networks of talented women writing, we can prove it. It’s not new. It’s a history, and the presence of a real history is a boon to young critics and writers. It defeats the pollution of agency, it defeats the myth of the singular individual woman, it creates a sense of continuity and community. (Mandelo 2011)

Following on from this, Machado states that: But Russ is dead. Jackson is dead. And in the thoughtless, uncredited, mangled deployment of that phrase — even in praise — Gaiman broke the chain between the two of them; a prominent, living male artist inserted between Russ’ ideas and Jackson’s reality. (Machado 2016)

Gaiman, then, has unwittingly participated in the same culture of occlusion that makes the Richard Madoc joke work in the first place. It is these acts of remembering, of creating a history, that is the focus of this chapter. How is Jackson recalled in the twenty-first century, how can processes of recollection be processes of remaking, and what can this tell us about the future of horror and the Gothic? I will provide an overview documenting the ways in which Jackson is referenced—implicitly and explicitly—in a range of media

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sources, including television shows, films, and novels, to establish a model of inheritance that is explicitly Gothic. Further, I will use this to consider the ways in which Gothic and horror influences can provide a model for anticipating further evolutions. A feature for Penguin, the publisher to rerelease Jackson’s work across the 2010s, states that in the twenty-first century we are living in a moment possessing a specific “Shirley Jackson energy,” and that does seem to be evidenced by a resurgence of interest in Jackson (Penguin 2020). Mike Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation for Netflix of The Haunting of Hill House marks a significant moment in this seeming renaissance. This was followed by The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and filming wrapped in July 2022 on Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name from 1839. This cements Hill House among the pantheon of haunted houses in American Gothic literature. This has been further bolstered by a surge of texts drawing on Jackson explicitly and implicitly, including Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 roman à clef Shirley, a semi-fictional biography of Jackson told in the style of Jackson and adapted into a film of the same name by Josephine Decker in 2020. Both novel and film toy with Jackson as creator, centering on her writing of the novel Hangsaman (1951) and the pregnancy of a young woman who moves into her home. In the same year Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) was adapted into a film of the same name by Stacie Passon. Modern authors are constantly compared to Jackson in blurbs and reviews, reinforced by the significance of the Shirley Jackson Awards which have been recognizing excellence in genre fiction since 2007 at the Readercon convention (see Carina Bissett later in this collection). Paul Tremblay, writing a tribute to Jackson in 2012 for the Readercon souvenir program, states that: Having had the honor of spending the past five years working with the Shirley Jackson Awards, I’ve heard heartfelt and erudite speeches from Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, and Victor LaValle detailing Jackson’s legacy and enduring influence. I’ve listened to and read scores of acceptance speeches from award winners and nominees who expressed their deep and abiding love of Shirley Jackson’s work. (Tremblay 2012)

These authors have drawn from Jackson’s work, and many others—Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Joyce Carol Oates, and Catriona Ward among them—have been compared to Jackson across the twenty-first century and earlier. Tremblay states that there is something “ineffable” about her work, something that evades description, yet there is also a clear enough “Shirley Jackson energy” that Ellen Datlow was able to commission an

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anthology of stories tapping into this very particular vein of Gothic fiction, When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, in 2021. This collection includes takes by Hand, Machado, Oates, and Tremblay, alongside many others, such as Cassandra Khaw and Stephen Graham Jones. It reads like a who’s who of the most celebrated authors of Gothic and horror fiction of the 2020s. To understand the particular flavor of horror in the 2020s, and its future, we must, then, understand Shirley Jackson and her enduring influence. In The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix, one of the characters is named Shirley for Jackson, but Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is penned in-universe by Steve Crain. When Steve gives a reading from the novel, the words are familiar to us as verbatim from Jackson’s own pen. Jeanette A. Laredo has noted that this “male-centered adaptation of Hill House is a stark reversal of Shirley Jackson’s female Gothic novel” (2020, 63–73). This offers a parallel to Gaiman’s reference to Jackson in The Sandman. In The Sandman we have a man violating and exploiting a female muse while paying lip service to an emblematic female author. In Flanagan’s adaptation, Jackson is replaced entirely by the male author. Indeed, the Steve is criticised throughout the series for appropriating and distorting his family's trauma, as Crain becomes a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy for Jackson’s text. Steve Crain himself is named for Stephen King. These networks of borrowing and homage form a tangled web, raising questions about the gendered implications of ownership and inspiration. Critics have taken umbrage with the ways the series departs, significantly, from the novel. Netflix dubbed it a “reimagining” of the novel. Holly Green penned a review entitled “How Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House Betrays Shirley Jackson” describing it less as adaption and more of a “ransacking” (Green 2018). Interestingly, Wetmore notes how some horror writers love the way the show “remixed” the novel. “Remix” is a pertinent term for this chapter—Megen de Bruin-Molé, in Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture (2019), describes how the Gothic as a genre is sustained by these acts of reimagination, reworking, and adaption. At its core the Gothic is four centuries of literature bound together by a tapestry of references, a series of interlocked intertexts. How many times has Frankenstein been reimagined? To what extent is Frankenstein’s monster an apt metaphor for these acts of reanimation and transfiguration? The house at the center of The Haunting of Hill House is, too, an amalgam, a patchwork of inherited traumas. This is a productive framework for considering the ways in which contemporary horror texts engage with, borrow from, pay homage to, and, indeed, “ransack” Jackson’s oeuvre. Yet, contemporary horror texts have engaged with Jackson’s life, constructing Jackson as a character, as well as drawing from Jackson’s texts,

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though the two frequently become merged in disquieting ways. In Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), an adaptation of the stories of the teenage witch from the Archie comics, previously adapted into the series Sabrina the Teenage Witch from (1996–2003), Jackson’s influence is clear. The episode “Feast of Feasts” follows the mechanisms of Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (1948). Where “The Lottery” follows a close-knit group voting to stone one of their own to death in an act of collective, irrational catharsis, in The Chilling Adventures they vote to cannibalize one of their own, literalizing the consuming of another in the name of a perverse utilitarian greater good. The horror generated is a result of inverting the desire for unity and community. Sabrina is constantly looking to belong, being not quite part of the mortal realm and not wholly a part of the world of witches. This familiar, adolescent desire to find kin and community is displaced by the cannibalism at the heart of the “Feast of Feasts,” whereby being ingested literalizes the desire to become part of a community, as “The Lottery” unveils the dangers of being subsumed into an insular group. It is arguable that figures like Sabrina would not be possible without the template for the disturbed and disturbing magical teenage girl laid out by Jackson through Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House, among others. These young women bearing terrible power alongside terrible trauma led to the genesis of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), whether directly or indirectly, and lay the foundations for a tradition of horrifying teenage girls or young women in the horror canon. In this light, I do not believe it is a coincidence that the teenager voted to be consumed is called Prudence, later revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of Father Blackwood, and thus Prudence Blackwood, mirror to Constance Blackwood from Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Indeed, Father Blackwood’s subdued, subjugated wife, who dies in childbirth, is called Lady Constance Blackwood, perhaps a “what if” play on what would have happened if Constance had been wed to the devilish cousin Charles. In The Chilling Adventures Prudence Blackwood is enemy turned friend, replicating the moral ambiguity of Jackson’s own Constance, who we are led to assume is a murderer, but is later revealed to be protecting her murderous younger sister. Crucially, Prudence Blackwood is one of the “weird sisters,” dedicated to her two adopted siblings. In case we as viewers were still oblivious to the explicit inheritance of Jackson’s oeuvre, in “Chapter Twelve: The Epiphany” we meet a witch called Shirley Jackson. This would no doubt have delighted Jackson, who (teasingly) referred to herself as a witch and was fascinated by witchcraft. “Shirley Jackson” is fed a cupcake by the most wholesome of Sabrina’s aunts, Aunt Hilda, a domestic goddess of frilly aprons and homely spells, which kills her dead. As the Blackwood family are poisoned by the sugar bowl, Shirley Jackson is killed by a frosted cupcake

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in a witch’s kitchen. Consuming, again, is rendered monstrous, witchcraft is drawn parallel to domestic activity, power is located in femininity and archetypal feminine activities, and danger is spied in relationships between women. On the whole the series wears its literary credentials with pride— Dorian Gray is a character in-universe, Sabrina’s cousin Ambrose is likely named for Gothic author Ambrose Bierce, Father Blackwood’s forename is Faustus, and the series finale is dominated by the emergence of Lovecraftian eldritch horrors. The Chilling Adventures revels in its intertexts, and specifically engages with tropes from Jackson’s oeuvre to unravel the horror of the relationship between domestic femininity and life in a fascistic, patriarchal society. Toward the end of season four the male-dominated Church of Night is replaced by the matriarchal coven, worshippers of Hecate, as We Have Always Lived in the Castle ultimately concludes with a return to a prelapsarian sapphic, feminist Eden—located specifically in the kitchen, and achieved through ritual. While adaptations and revisions of Jackson’s work have doubtless been primarily enchanted by The Haunting of Hill House and “The Lottery,” Castle has provided fertile soil for a number of reimaginings. Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) is a book for horror aficionados partially narrated by a horror aficionado, concerned with acts of storytelling, raising questions about why people love the horror they love. Like Jackson’s novel it centers on the complex, intimate relationship between two sisters and their strained relationship with their family. It is narrated by a Merry rather than a Merricat, and a terrible horror is falsely attributed to the elder sister, concealing the culpability of the younger. Curiously, its final act is a mirror to the act that takes place before the opening pages of Castle: a poisoning at the family dinner table. In Castle it is gradually revealed that Merricat poisoned the sugar bowl, killing members of her family, yet sparing her sister, Constance, who she knew did not take sugar with her berries. In Tremblay’s novel, where a vat of spaghetti is poisoned at the dinner table, another sister is saved because of her known aversion to certain foods. Both novels end in kitchens, the heart of the family home, surrounded by destruction. Both Merry and Merricat live in fantasy worlds, and at the center of those worlds are the elder sisters they revere. A Head Full of Ghosts takes the psychical investigators of The Haunting of Hill House and transforms them into a ghost hunting reality television series, à la Most Haunted, asking what would happen if Eleanor’s seeming possession was produced within an inch of its life into consumable entertainment, which is in itself a commentary on the strangeness of processes of production, digestion, and collaboration. This provides a new way of considering the genesis of horror: not as an act of raw creation inspired by the muses, or a remixing of earlier influences, but of locating the horror present in reality; of

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capturing and recording something terrible about the “real,” and thus dismantling the arbitrary boundary between the real and unreal. While Jackson lived and died a long time before Derek Acorah graced our screens, this locating of the terrible in the mundane is the crux of her fiction, and is of specific interest to Tremblay, who states that her appeal lies in the collision of “realism” with “ethereal atmosphere” (This Is Horror 2018). Like A Head Full of Ghosts, Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw (2021) has been continually compared to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (Crump 2021; Merritt 2021). In this novella a group of friends descend upon a Heian-era mansion in Japan to celebrate the wedding of two of their own. It quickly becomes apparent that the group have a tangled, complicated history, and that the protagonist has recently recovered from some sort of “episode.” The mansion is built upon the bones of a bride and the women sacrificed to keep her company, and the wedding party are comprised of the classic combination of believers and sceptics. The format is familiar, and the tweaks indicative of a turn in contemporaneous anxieties. The Haunting of Hill House forces us to ask whether the hauntings are real or manifestations of inherited trauma, and in Nothing but Blackened Teeth those traumas are simultaneously recent (the dynamics amongst the friends) and unspeakably ancient (the bride interred a thousand years earlier), with one sacrificed woman per year marking the passing of time. Women are sacrificed into the very makeup of the house, as Calliope is entrapped to enable the stories of men. Legends (and horror) are built upon (often unwilling) sacrifice and women’s work. The family trauma at the heart of The Haunting of Hill House—Eleanor’s mother, the Cranes—becomes found family trauma. While the Gothic and horror rest on the shoulders of heteronormative marriage plots, family feuds, and threats to patrilineal inheritance, perhaps contemporary horror narratives are moving more toward friendships and different sorts of nontraditional family structures outside of the nuclear family dynamic. This fits with a surge in queer horror fiction centred on found family dynamics, such as Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019), Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo (2021), and Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin (2022). With the rise in millennial loneliness, the simultaneous disconnect and saturation in connection provided by social media, the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which late-stage capitalism emphasizes individualism and prevents walkable communities, “found family” and friendships become the more pertinent foundation for exploring interpersonal dynamics in a horror setting (Howe 2019). Jackson’s unconventional family units lay the groundwork, in part, for these latter novels. Similarly, Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021) takes The Haunting of Hill House formula and adapts it for a twenty-first-century audience to explore the horror of transphobia and both the rise of and inheritance

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of far-right politics. It mobilizes the intertextual inheritance of literary influence as a means of exploring the inheritance of lingering political ideologies as embedded in and foundational to Western culture—specifically, white supremacist British imperialism. Three key hauntings occur in parallel: the haunted house, the memory of the novel The Haunting of Hill House, and a poster of a music idol-turned-extremist. These three images blur and enmesh, demonstrative of the ways in which insidious belief systems pervade the popular consciousness. The overriding idea seems to be the impossibility of the apolitical: media is always political, and our consumption and repurposing of it as means to processing our own experiences and biases is a fundamentally political act. Rumfitt describes the encounter of “the house” at the center of the haunting, as locus of shared trauma: Whoever owned it did not seem to care for it, so we, Ila, Hannah and I, decided we’d break in and spend a night there. Young people can be stupid. We wanted to make some political point of the whole thing, we disagreed that great old houses like this should be empty when there were homeless people on every street. We knew that the owner might send people to pull us out, but we wanted to prove something. We were young and idealistic. The House stood on the outskirts of a city, with a huge DANGER KEEP OUT sign across the rusted gates. The fence, however, had decayed, so we bypassed the gates and crossed the boundaries easily. Nobody was around.

Rumfitt is explicitly connoting the origins of the Gothic genre as one fundamentally entrenched in economic ideas of ancient castles and mansions imbued with inherited traumas. The castles of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe were used in the eighteenth century as a way of expressing anxieties surrounding revolutionary thought in the midst or wake of the French Revolution, where the riches of the castle and the recurrence of monstrous, murderous aristocrats speak to resistance against hegemonic power structures and feudal, patriarchal inheritance systems. The Gothic is resplendent with empty old houses “when there are homeless people on every street.” Criticism of the Gothic has pointed out its tendency to uphold conservative ideas about gender and nationhood, while critics of those critics have lauded its revolutionary capacity. In Rumfitt’s horrific mode the Gothic is both, as her characters are both revolutionaries and haunted by their own internalized misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Tell Me I’m Worthless is “haunted” by the question of what is “foundational”—to nation, to self, to literature. What makes up the bricks and mortar of identity? And to what extent are those foundations irrevocably corrupt, tainted, infused with prejudice? This passage of Rumfitt’s characters invading the house is immediately followed by an explicit reference to Jackson:

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I first read The Haunting of Hill House when I was sixteen, and I’ve never been able to think about hauntings since then in a way that didn’t align with that book’s idea of a fundamentally demented place onto which you latch. Our house, my house, her house, was not like Hill House, however much I structure my thoughts on it in the same way. Hill House was, I think, an apolitical animal. Our house was not. It had a system of beliefs. And those who walked there marched as one faceless mass.

Hill House as foundational to the protagonists, thinking is analogous to the ways in which the novel is foundational to our understanding of Gothic fiction since Jackson—and how Hill House itself speaks to a longer tradition of haunted house literature and the American Gothic. Alice is describing being haunted by her knowledge of Hill House as framework. The language choices here are deeply intentional. “Fundamentally” gestures towards fundamentalism of thought and the fundaments or makeup of genre and belief. To “latch” gestures to the idea of being fed, nourished, formed by ideologies (and literatures). Her thoughts are structured upon Hill House—Hill House is both mother and foundation. Crucially, Rumfitt does not state that “Hill House was an apolitical animal.” Instead, the “I think” disrupts the surety of the statement and reminds us of the subjectivity of reading and of reading political intention into a literary text. The politics—or apolitics—of Jackson have been the consistent subject of literary criticism. While Jackson deals overtly with gender and even sexuality, discussions of national identity and race in her fiction has been relatively scant, despite the obvious intersections between these aspects of identity. Rumfitt has clarified in subsequent tweets that she does not believe The Haunting of Hill House itself to be an apolitical novel, but it is crucial for the development of Tell Me I’m Worthless for Alice to believe that Hill House is an apolitical animal to set the House encountered in its own discrete category. The House they encounter is a fascist house, loaded with explicit hate and vitriol, while Hill House is a more amorphous, ambiguous creature, up for interpretation. Is Hill House haunted? Is Eleanor psychic? Mad? Possessed? These questions have dogged Hill House readings and criticism. Such space is not allowed in readings of Tell Me I’m Worthless— the house is explicitly, undoubtedly, fluorescently, and heinously fascistic, prejudiced, violent. Rumfitt uses the ambiguity of Jackson’s House to speak to a “post truth” age, a “false news” age, to illuminate the vivid lived realities of horror in contrast to Jackson’s appeal to a Radcliffean ambiguous terror. The trend seems to be that twenty-first-century authors take what is ambiguous about Jackson and bring it to the surface. The publisher’s blurb describes Mrs. March (2021) by Virginia Feito as “Shirley Jackson meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets My Sister the Serial Killer” and reviews abound with comparisons to Jackson. Even the 4th Estate cover lends itself to Jackson’s

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particular brand of uncanny domestic femininity—a woman poses, primly, in a 1950s-style dress, her eyes cropped out, while a cockroach skims its way up her thigh. We are led to believe that, as in Jackson’s world, there is a crusty underbelly to the outward sheen of melamine and Pyrex. Significantly, the novel opens with Mrs. March shopping in pursuit of her favorite olive bread, as so many of Jackson’s stories center on women exercising their purchasing power and consuming in the changing marketplace of the postwar economic boom. Mrs. March’s world of cocktail parties and appetizers is flung upside down when a throwaway comment suggests she is the inspiration for the protagonist of her husband’s new novel. While Mrs. March is the ideal of domestic propriety, the protagonist is a sex worker, beneath Mrs. March’s contempt. As with Shirley, Mrs. March seems to be a novel inspired by both Jackson’s work and life, raising questions about the slippages between the two. Mrs. March wrestles with the demands of enabling and celebrating her husband’s life and career at the detriment of her own, feelings articulated in Jackson’s own letters and the brittle hostesses of her fiction. To give one’s all to one’s writer husband seems to be stretched to its very limit once the self is consumed into the creative project. Mrs. March seems content to enable George’s writing, but to leak into his writing is a step too far, dismantling her reality and dissolving the illusions she has established to protect herself. The narrative of her life unravels as the mechanisms behind George’s narratives are unveiled. The “illusion” of writing—and the reality as its source—fragments, and the consequences are horrific. But whereas so many of Jackson’s stories end on ambiguity, or the subtle and infuriating maintenance of the status quo, or the protagonist’s dastardly end, Mrs. March ends on Mrs. March’s victory—and the revelation of her name. In this way Mrs. March seems to be drawing a line between Shirley Jackson and the “good for her” genre of horror that arguably would not have been possible without Shirley Jackson (Morrison 2022). Further, Mrs. March seems to occupy a specific space in horror history—horror centered on the “hostess with the moistest,” derived as much from Shirley Jackson as from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and Stepford Wives (1972), and even Sylvia Plath’s poetry and The Bell Jar (1963). These psychological thrillers locate horror in the mundanity and crushing expectations of women hosting, where the act of hosting is not merely cocktail olives and martini shakers but a wider metaphor for the giving up of the self in service to others. The hostess is reduced to entertainer, to glittery, sugared shell, to smiles and placation and the satisfaction and nurturing of others. It is an extension and conglomeration of the mother and wife—caregiver, cheerleader, performer, with no space for self-actualization. There is horror under the surface of this evacuation of self, and pleasure to

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be taken in inverting the candy-colored pastels of safe, secure domesticity. It is the same basic premise as the horror of the haunted house: finding the uncanny at the core of all that is meant to be safe, secure, and nurturing. The future of horror will see a resurgence in these monstrous housewives. Don’t Worry, Darling (dir. Olivia Wilde, 2022) is set to forge the way, focused on a young woman who moves with her husband to a utopian experimental community that seems to be hiding terrible secrets. Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy (2019–Present) has an archetypal 1950s housewife who turns out to be a robot who unwittingly brings about the end of the universe. Horror darling Christina Ricci is due to star in Monstrous (2022), a 1950s thriller about a woman in pastel cardigans forced to confront both the monster in her new house and the question of whether she needs to be medicated. These neo-monstrous housewives, seemingly fixed in the amber of midtwentieth-century Americana, are reborn amid declining birth rates, the overturning of Roe versus Wade and the popularization of bioessentialist views of sex and gender that serve to subjugate trans people and erode reproductive rights. With this has come a push for “traditional values,” centering on the place of women within the home. Jordan Peterson and other figures at the forefront of “incel” movements blame increasing gender equality for the ills of the world—men, and thus humanity at large, would be happier if women only knew their place. The normalization—nay, popularization—of transphobia has fixated on rigid ideals of femininity where deviation from those norms is met with violence. The gender binary and the ways in which that binary is located in imperialist, white supremacist, and capitalist hegemonies is being re-asserted in mainstream culture, with devastating consequences. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise. Women’s rights are being stripped. Archaic institutions—the British monarchy, for example—are being further enshrined by populism. The howl of the subjugated housewife made political center of a destabilized world is being heard yet again, and a flood of monstrous housewives will follow. These monstrous women are being made visible by processes of remixing and ransacking, drawing on midcentury images of idealized domestic femininity and Jackson as emblematic of the horror entrenched in those idealizations. The act of remixing then becomes an act of reclamation, weaving Gothic and horror intertexts to demonstrate both the pervasiveness of these subjugating ideas and the inevitability of their decay. Gothic and horror being explicitly self-referential is, of course, not a new invention. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) hinges on a pastiche of the Gothic, referencing “seven horrid novels.” Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) is a fictionalization of the lives of the Romantics, themselves originators of the Gothic. The writer-as-character is a recurrent trope in horror fiction—consider George Gissing and Karl Marx as

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characters in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), or Lord Byron in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). The Gothic, from its origins, is profoundly motivated by acts of genesis and destruction; of the strangeness from whence stories come, and of the distortion of reality into fantasy as well as the fantastical nature of reality. The transfiguration of the author-into-character-penned-by-another author is located within this concern with the uncanniness of acts of narrative creation, as Frankenstein has been read as Mary Shelley’s own anxiety about her own terrible creation of the novel itself. As the vampire narrative centers on death and reanimation, the dominance of the sire, the Gothic novel is haunted by the “creator”—whether God, father, mother, author, mad scientist, bloodsucking fiend. To state that acts of creation and genesis in Jackson’s work are but a facet of her monstrous engagement with motherhood is to do her work a disservice. Yes, motherhood is central to Jackson’s work, in its realities as well as its metaphorical capacities, but anxious creation is at the heart of Jackson’s participation in a Gothic canon and provides the groundwork (or permission) for recurrent reimagining and repurposing—remixing. Acts of making and influencing—changing the world around you—abound in different ways in Jackson’s oeuvre. Using We Have Always Lived in the Castle as an example, we see that all parties are drawn into compulsive acts of Gothic creation. Constance is constantly cooking, growing the archive of preserves and condiments in the Blackwood family basement. Merricat is denied access to the kitchen, and thus engages in ritual and witchcraft, magic words, and secret acts, as a way of controlling the narrative and writing the world around her. Uncle Julian is the most literal, forever trapped in writing his life story, in narrating the terrible event that came before the events of the narrative, a Casaubon figure, doomed to a constant state of creation in a project that can never be completed. Twenty-first-century horror takes these seeds from Jackson and reworks them. In an oversaturated technological age how do we make new? As history seems to repeat itself how to we depart from the status quo? Amidst environmental disaster and climate crisis how do we create amidst destruction? The 2020s seem to be conspicuously marked by a harking back to tradition and a revival of conservative, conformist, and puritanical ideas about bodies, sexuality, and behavior, indicated by the rise of right-wing political movements across the Western world, the normalization of neofascism, and a turn towards the “tradwife.” The Gothic—and Jackson—provide a means of exploring how we take from the past to make the future; how we remake, rewrite, reimagine. Jackson’s philosophy, and thus Jackson’s successors, accept haunting as existing at the heart of existence and ask not how we make peace with the skeletons in the closet and the ghosts in the attic, but how we use them to generate something new, and even liberatory.

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WORKS CITED 4th Estate. n.d. “Mrs March.” 4thestate.co.uk. www​.4thestate​.co​.uk​/book​/mrs​-march​ -9780008421717​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. de Bruin-Molé, Megen. 2019. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Crump, Jodie. 2021. “Review: Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw.” Grimdark Magazine, July 30. www​.grimdarkmagazine​.com​/review​-nothing​-but​ -blackened​-teeth​-by​-cassandra​-khaw. Accessed August 21,2022. Franklin, Ruth. 2016. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright. Green, Holly. 2018. “How Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House Betrays Shirley Jackson.” Paste Magazine, October 18. www​.pastemagazine​.com​/tv​/the​-haunting​ -of​-hill​-house​/how​-netflixs​-the​-haunting​-of​-hill​-house​-betrays​-sh. Accessed August 21, 2022. Howe, Neil. 2019. “Millennials and the Loneliness Epidemic.” Forbes, May 3. www​ .forbes​.com​/sites​/neilhowe​/2019​/05​/03​/millennials​-and​-the​-loneliness​-epidemic​/​ ?sh​=bd112407676a. Accessed August 21, 2022. Jackson, Shirley. 2009a. The Haunting of Hill House. London: Penguin. ———. 2009b. “The Lottery.” Dark Tales. London: Penguin. ———. 2009c. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. London: Penguin. Khaw, Cassandra. 2021. Nothing but Blackened Teeth. London: Titan Books. Laredo, Jeanette A. 2020. “Some Things Can’t Be Told: Gothic Trauma in The Haunting of Hill House.” In Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (ed.). The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, 63–73. New York: McFarland. Machado, Carmen Maria. 2016. “How to Suppress Women’s Criticism: On Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, and the Importance of Not Erasing Women’s Writing.” Electric Lit, October 14. electricliterature.com/how-to-suppress-womens-criticism. Accessed August 21, 2022. Mandelo, Lee. 2011. “Reading Joanna Russ: How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).” Tor.com, November 2. www​.tor​.com​/2011​/11​/02​/reading​-joanna​-russ​-how​ -to​-suppress​-womens​-writing​-1983. Accessed August 21, 2022. Merritt, Sheila M. 2021. “Nothing but Blackened Teeth (Book Reviews).” Diabolique Magazine, September 27. diaboliquemagazine.com/nothing-but-blackenedteeth-book-review. Accessed August 21,2022. Morrison, Kim. 2022. “Top 15 Good for Her Horror Movies.” Ghouls Magazine, March 26. www​.ghoulsmagazine​.com​/articles​/top​-15​-good​-for​-her​-horror​-movies. Accessed August 21, 2022. Penguin. 2020. “Eerie, Anxious, Foreboding: No Wonder We Can’t Get Enough of Shirley Jackson.” July 22. www​.penguin​.co​.uk​/articles​/2020​/07​/shirley​-jackson​ -anxious​-reading​-haunting​-hill​-house. Accessed August 21, 2022. Rumfitt, Alison. 2022. @hangsawoman, August 21. twitter.com/hangsawoman/ status/1561435348449853444. ———. 2021. Tell Me I’m Worthless. London: Cipher Press. Temple, Emily. 2019. “11 Famous Writers on the Genius and Influence of Shirley Jackson.” Lit Hub, August 9.

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lithub.com/11-famous-writers-on-the-genius-and-influence-of-shirley-jackson. Accessed August 21, 2022. Tremblay, Paul. 2016. A Head Full of Ghosts. New York: William Morrow & Company. ———. 2012. “Shirley Jackson, an Appreciation.” thelittlesleep.com, August 17. thelittlesleep.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/shirley-jackson-an-appreciation. Accessed August 21, 2022. Wilson, Michael David, Bob Pastorella, and Paul Tremblay. 2018. “TIH 214: Paul Tremblay on Shirley Jackson, Supernatural Turn-Offs, and Ambiguity in Horror Fiction.” This Is Horror, July 12. www​.thisishorror​.co​.uk​/tih​-214​-paul​-tremblay​-on​ -shirley​-jackson​-supernatural​-turn​-offs​-and​-ambiguity​-in​-horror​-fiction. Accessed August 21, 2022.

PART II

Media and Consumption

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Chapter Six

Further Notes Toward a Monster Pedagogy John Edgar Browning

EDUCATION The old adage that humans fear what they don’t understand seems innocuous enough, even practical in its contemporary uses, even, if only potentially, self-vindicating for the user. But as someone who occupies(d) more than one marginalized demographic, I’m inclined to see it differently, from the outside, as a kind of romanticized, even amnesic racism or bigotry. Rumblings during the Enlightenment about the so-called natural hierarchies of race—that is, the need by early scientists to biologically taxonomize “physical difference into relations of domination” in order “to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery” writes a New York Times opinion columnist for Slate as recently as 2018 (Bouie)—all but melded with the collective consciousness of Victorians then gained strength in the eras that followed. However, by 2009–2010, following the election of America’s first nonwhite president, many of us felt a shift in this collective consciousness, and so I began to acknowledge publicly the creative possibilities monsters offered that I had been experimenting with in the classroom since 2005. Unfortunately, their classroom practicality at that time lay only in their seemingly inherent ability to elicit in students both curiosity and stimulation, not in their actual critical application. The latter often proved inaccessible to students in general postsecondary education courses because they lacked the appropriate theoretical underpinning, just as the educators themselves did who wanted to teach monsters. It became apparent that more and more educators were finding themselves ill-equipped to appropriate monsters as teaching 87

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tools in the classroom because it remained an area in which pedagogical theory was severely lacking. Thus, out of an overwhelming need to equip both educators and students with more practical and culturally responsive tools for engaging in Monster Theory while improving its accessibility and applicability, I embarked on a study I would later publish in 2013 as “Towards a Monster Pedagogy: Reclaiming the Classroom for the Other” (Browning). In it, I developed “Monster Pedagogy,” a theoretical mode and inclusive teaching practice I coined that has now become the driving impetus behind new outside scholarship (see, for example, Golub and Hayton 2017), conference presentations, a TED Talk, masters and doctoral theses, and innovative classroom practices at universities in the United States and abroad, even making its way into Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (2017) recent “Monster Classroom (Seven Theses),” a derivative of his canonical essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” What follows is an extension of that work, building upon a further ten years of teaching experience in two additional R1 institutions and a liberal arts college. Moreover, whereas my previous experience with Monster Pedagogy was generally confined to first-year composition and sophomore-level survey literature classes, it has since grown to include film and media studies courses at the graduate and undergrade level, as well as a number of literature and humanities courses. Readers, then as now, may indeed question the applicability of Monster Pedagogy in classes outside of the academy, but I wish to re-emphasize its feasibility and implementation in any teaching situation or environment that warrants discussions of marginalized persons, hierarchical systems of normalcy, or tales told to frighten. The creative possibilities potentiated by Gothic and horror literature, film, and other media for use by educators in virtual and on-ground classrooms have grown tremendously with the onset of the “post-millennial gothic” (Nelson 2012), particularly now and since the Trump presidency, a socially tumultuous time during which this new gothic age has only further proliferated. By “post-millennial gothic” is meant narratives featuring monsters or other(ed) figures who performatively critique normalcy, monsters who make us doubt ourselves, who don’t (have to) die by the end of the story as typified in the more conservative endings and normative resolutions of narratives before September 11, 2001. Students today were born during the post-millennial gothic, and as the only world they’ve ever known, it offers educators unique opportunities to utilize our fanged and taloned friends on the other side of the mirror for some rewarding teaching experiences. In my 2013 study, I took as an organizing premise that monstrosity may easily function as a means of inquiry into the sociopolitics of any given culture, denoting what various societies fear to let into the interior of their social corpi or seek to expel from it. As noted by Judith Halberstam (2006),

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monsters share in a “Gothic economy” because of their mutual “ability to condense many monstrous traits into one body” (88). Iconic figures like Dracula serve, for Halberstam, as “technologies of monstrosity,” or programmable edifices in which outdated forms of otherness can be exchanged for new ones. Throughout my 2013 study, I tried to emphasize the centrality of this circulative function that permitted the monster’s body to transcend the superficial mechanisms and structural principia to which it refuses reduction. However, for my purposes, it also demonstrated that this adaptive, pliable quality revealed how monsters could be equally serviceable at making visible the larger social framework of dominative and “corrective” moral and behavioral imperatives through which different societies construct their respective versions of “normal.” Thus, these imperatives became crucial to the classroom project of presenting monstrosity as a strategic site, to borrow loosely from the work of Eve Sedgwick (2002), for not only confronting but challenging the ideological assumptions that are culturally and historically imbedded in hierarchal and classificatory systems. Monsters, then, make accessible the infinite potential for educators and students alike to expose, plot, trace, and, in the end, unfix the repressive/oppressive categories that precipitate marginalization. To that end, I asserted that monsters could provide educators with a critical tool with which to facilitate the reexamination of cultural and historical prejudices. In summary, the 2013 study proceeded in accord with three fundamental areas that provided the basis of my approach to “Monster Pedagogy”: theory, praxis, and conceptual tools for students. My discussion began by emphasizing the need for a sort of meta-politics when designing coursework around monstrosity, horror films, or Gothic literature. Additionally, I discussed the limitations inherent in both the classroom and the institution; the practical capacity for introspection and meta-political thinking outside the classroom; and, in realistic terms, the level of agency and efficacy that students entering the workforce could expect after graduating. My discussion then narrowed to consider an article by two female professors of color who discussed in it their experiences with mistreatment by their students. I followed their insightful discussion by offering possible suggestions for dissipating or disarming the prejudices and marginalization students impose on educators by introducing a theory of otherness to the students. Expanding this notion, I then elaborated upon other theoretical models and tools as well as their practical use in guiding students beyond student-teacher politics. Specifically, I described the use of a neutral, that is, unbiased, classificatory system, or vocabulary, that students can use to engage and organize the familiar monsters and threatening images they regularly encounter. Finally, I considered the particular gothicized terrains in which monsters appear, as well as the ways in which the positionality of given monsters is articulated in these terrains, a vantage

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that is visually useful to students in helping them to disassemble or “decode” the highly politicized rhetoric through which monsters and horror films are constructed. What follows in the present essay extends the above work through a series of brief notes and strategies informed by my classroom practices and experiences as well as those of others. TRIGGER WARNINGS In my 2013 study, I discussed effective ways in which educators can (1) use monsters as tools to empower students by raising their sociopolitical awareness, and (2) utilize a classroom praxis that fosters counter-hegemonic thinking while also emphasizing student-centered “safe space(s)”—be they through open class discussions, smaller group activities, or virtual forums— in which students feel more encouraged to voice their ideas or concerns about marginalized identities or “other” more sensitive, subtopical issues. Moreover, I examined fear responses common among students in these counterhegemonic learning environments, that is to say classrooms in which figuring prominently are conflicted representations of monstrosity (where “good” and “evil” blur ambiguously into one another), as opposed to the more “classic” models (where “good” and “evil” enjoy clearly demarcated boundaries). Building on these discussions, I would like here to encourage educators to utilize, or at least discuss among themselves the potential need for, “trigger warnings” (or “content warnings”) and their fundamental place in classrooms and syllabi. A trigger warning, according to the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTL) at the University of Waterloo, is a statement made prior to sharing potentially disturbing content. That content might include graphic references to topics such as sexual abuse, self-harm, violence, eating disorders, and so on, and can take the form of an image, video clip, audio clip, or piece of text. In an academic context, the instructor delivers these messages in order to allow students to prepare emotionally for the content or to decide to forgo interacting with the content. (n.d.)

In the proceeding years after my 2013 study, trigger warnings have become a popular topic among educators, and even more popular among their detractors in various popular media. Regrettably, my own use of trigger warnings before this period remained limited to relatively vague verbal cues during class before showing a movie or clip. This I did proceeding on the idea that if students were in my class, then, in essence, they already “knew what they were getting into.” However, it’s now evident that thinking in this way only

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served to mask a number of potential pitfalls, discount the individual experiences of the students, and delegitimize my own student-centered teaching philosophy. The proponents of trigger warnings, among whom I now include myself, convincingly argue that certain course content can impact the wellbeing and academic performance of students who have experienced corresponding traumas in their own lives. Such students might not yet be ready to confront a personal trauma in an academic context. They choose to avoid it now so that they can deal with it more effectively at a later date—perhaps after they have set up necessary resources, supports, or counselling. Other students might indeed be ready to confront a personal trauma in an academic context but will benefit from a forewarning of certain topics so that they can brace themselves prior to (for example) participating in a classroom discussion about it. Considered from this perspective, trigger warnings give students increased autonomy over their learning, and are an affirmation that the instructor cares about their wellbeing. (CTL, n.d.)

Trigger warnings, affirms the Centre for Teaching Excellence, aren’t merely an excuse for students to exempt themselves from finishing their classwork. In fact, “Ideally,” as I’ve experienced for myself over the last decade, “a student who is genuinely concerned about being re-traumatized by forthcoming course content would privately inform the instructor of this concern,” at which point the instructor can choose how to work with the student in an accommodating way that still meets the standards of the class (CTL, n.d.). In addition to providing trigger or content warnings in the syllabus, I also include a preliminary “content note” preceding the weekly schedule. Below I offer an example from a southern literature course I teach: Our classroom is here to provide an “open space for the critical and civil exchange of ideas. Some readings and other content in this course will include topics that some students may find offensive” and/or remind them of past traumas. I will endeavor to prepare or “forewarn students about potentially disturbing content,” and I ask all students “to help to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and sensitivity.” It is also worth pointing out that those of our class readings which belong to the “Southern Gothic” literary tradition were designed to arouse fear and horror in readers through supernatural events, disquieting landscapes and environments, and/or topics like death and murder. Thus, students should assume the presence of these themes when engaging in our classroom texts. (Quoted passages by CTL[n.d.]).

For further information on these and other practices related to potentially triggering content, I encourage faculty to utilize the resources the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTL) provides at their website or contact a center liaison or other staff member.

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PERFORMATIVE SILENCE According to Sayan Dey (2022), “any form of communication in an institutional classroom and beyond” does not allow for silence, for educators regard “the phenomenon of ‘silence’” as a form or mode, as it were, “of epistemological and ontological absence” (15). Dey continues, the act of remaining silent is usually equated with incapability and nothingness. The authenticity and relevance of building and sharing knowledge with one another are mostly judged on the basis of one’s capability to verbally express. But silence as a form of communication and knowledge dissemination has been an integral part of several native indigenous communities across the planet. It was with the emergence of European colonization, that such silent systems of knowledge production were disbanded as mysterious and invalid. The exercise of disbanding the phenomenon of silence continues to take place through the colonial/modern vocal-centric pedagogical practices in the contemporary era. (15)

Dey sets out in his work to “explore the possible ways through which silence, along with vocal pedagogical practices, can be performed in an intersectional manner as a habitual pedagogical practice in educational institutions today” (15). For Dey, communication in the classroom necessitates the performance of silence as a “de-hierarchical, non-linear, and undisciplined mode of communication and knowledge dissemination,” which is to say that “every form of knowledge cannot be conceived and shared through the construction of verbal narratives within the linear boxes of [different] . . . institution-based knowledge disciplines,” forcing us to recognize the alternativity of “complex, non-linear, contradictory, conflictual, uncategorized, and collaborative spaces of performative silence” (16). Dey’s project warrants discussion here because it extends beyond indigenous practices. Classes, lectures, and assignments that appropriate monstrous figures, traumatic stories, or any number subtopical issues relating to marginalization are replete with silent reactions from students. In years past, although I had sought to train myself to allow verbal answers and discussions to occur naturally and uncoerced, in some ways I failed to recognize more fully the potential for the practical uses of Dey’s conception of performative silence. In the past, to counter “silences” and encourage responses from students, I would turn a particular “shy” class or “shy” topic over to an online discussion forum where they could submit their responses textually, after which I would call upon volunteers to verbalize their responses. However, to help create a “safe[r] space” that recognizes—and legitimizes—silence as a form of productivity, I could alter my classroom practices on such days in a couple

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of small but important ways: (1) allow students to respond to the discussion forum not only textually but also visually if they prefer (i.e., show me your thoughts through images or clips you locate online), and (2) refrain from reading (or showing) responses from students who didn’t previously volunteer to do so themselves but instead encourage students to read the other responses on their own and respond themselves. As Dey stresses in his article, the “performance of silence as a pedagogical practice acknowledges the experiences of confusions, incompleteness, and inconclusiveness as usual experiences” (24 n24). Indeed, sometimes that’s exactly what certain topics and discussions call for on certain days, depending on the mood and personality of the classroom. Sometimes, it’s enough simply to recognize certain topics and issues for the class to consider, then move on. WHY CAN’T CHECKING YOUR PRIVILEGE BE PAINLESS? In my previous work on “monster pedagogy,” I considered the experiences of two female professors of color whose mistreatment by their students prompted me to offer possible suggestions for dissipating or disarming the prejudices and marginalization that students, whether incognizantly or not, impose upon educators through the introducing to them a theory of otherness. I then elaborated upon other theoretical models and tools whose practical use in guiding students beyond student-teacher politics went beyond the classroom. In the end, I attempted to demonstrate how educators can help to de-/re-socialize their students by making them more aware of how they intuit their experiences and “congeal,” that is, expose for themselves, the network of sociopolitical conditioning that has and continues to frame their daily lives. This journey, I stressed, must be personally and consciously enacted by the students themselves in order to legitimize their own “consciousness raising” and prevent scenarios like the faculty described in which students accused them of using oppressive language and attacking white men in particular (Johnson-Bailey and Lee 2005, 113). Below is my continuation of that work. I would like to start by providing the reading list I assign students (in the order given below) that’s aimed at helping them begin to help themselves through exposing and evaluating the ideologies that shape and control their individual lives; however, these readings proceed only after a short series of lectures, discussions, and activities around Louis Althusser’s conception of “Ideology,” “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs), and “Repressed State Apparatuses” (RSAs):

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1.  Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267–319. 2.  Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,” Peace and Freedom (July/August 1989), 31–36. 3.  Gina Crosley-Corcoran, “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person,” Huffington Post (May 8, 2014), www​.huffpost​.com​/entry​/ explaining​-white​-privilege​-to​-a​-broke​-white​-person​_b​_5269255. 4.  Joshua Rothman, “The Origins of ‘Privilege,’” The New Yorker (May 12, 2014), https:​//​www​.newyorker​.com​/books​/page​-turner​/the​-origins​ -of​-privilege. 5.  Tal Fortgang, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege,” Time (May 2, 2014), time.com/85933/ why-ill-never-apologize-for-my-white-male-privilege/. 6.  Daniel Gastfriend, “Reflections on Privilege: An Open Letter to Tal Fortgang,” Huffington Post (May 7, 2014), www​.huffingtonpost​.com​/ daniel​-gastfriend​/open​-letter​-tal​-fortgang​_b​_5281169​.html. 7.  Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture,” Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Gail Dines Jean Humez (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 5–17. Equipped with these new theoretical lenses about race, class, and sexuality, it then becomes important for students to start discovering their own agency by applying these lenses, like tools, first to the physical, visual, aural media around them, then afterward to themselves through “intersectionality,” as covered in number 3 above. To help facilitate the former, I have utilized, in groups of two, an activity similar to what Ashante the Artist demonstrates in their YouTube series “Intersectionality Chats” with guest Jackson Bird, wherein the two speakers go through a checklist together acknowledging their respective advantages and disadvantages in relation to class, sex, sexuality, gender, the body, and so on. My use of a similar classroom activity has varied in its success, largely depending on the personality of the class itself, the mood of the class that day, recent events in the news, and so forth, thus making it an invaluable, albeit inconsistent classroom tool. Moreover, it also became apparent over time that no small number of students were actually prepared for this or similar group participatory activities that involve public self-identification, because even with the help of their new critical lenses, they simply weren’t mentally ready to acknowledge to other students’ certain ones of their advantages and disadvantages; and, honestly, it’s clear to me now they shouldn’t be forced to. Therefore, I’ve moved the activity from a group assessment to an individual one, either online or on paper.

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A number of individualized self-assessments exist online for educators to utilize. The Illumination Project (IP), Portland Community College’s “innovative, nationally lauded student leadership and social justice theater program . . . designed to address issues of equity and inclusion and to foster a climate of belonging, compassion, and respect for all people in the PCC community,” offers a “Privilege Points Questionnaire” that’s especially handy in helping students raise their social consciousness. After administering this activity, only then do I ask if students want to volunteer some of their scores and what helped or inhibited them. Allowing students a space in which they feel comfortable publicly voicing some of their advantages and disadvantages is not only therapeutic and empowering for the students doing so, but it’s the same for the students standing by because it allows them to witness silently others’ truths, perhaps in turn helping them to witness and acknowledge some of their own. Finally, we, as faculty, should also strive to acknowledge to students our own privileges, as well as our own mistakes. I routinely acknowledge to students how my ethnicity, body, sex, sexuality, and gender, or at least how I present in these categories, grants me unearned authority in the classroom with certain topics over colleagues who teach the same topics but present outside of my categories. Acknowledging that to students, acknowledging mistakes we as faculty have made in the classroom when we didn’t recognize our own privileges, even acknowledging mistakes we made when we ourselves were students, is a way of publicly granting students permission to do the same. INDIGEN[IZING] MONSTROSITIES FOR “DRACULTY” Secondary and post-secondary factulry or “Draculty” (i.e., “Monster Pedagogues”) who regularly employ mainstream or ‘domestic’ monstertypes in order to help engage students and facilitate learning should note that Count Dracula speaks more languages than any other monster in the world, and frankly that’s because every continent outside of Antarctica has produced films and other media featuring the world’s most famous vampire (Browning and Picart 2011). Here I would like to extend the theoretical models and tools that I’ve proposed in previous studies that help guide students beyond student-teacher politics. Previously, I described the use of a neutral (i.e., “unbiased”) classificatory system or vocabulary students can implement when engaging in and organizing familiar monsters and threatening images. Additionally, I considered the recognizably gothicized terrains monsters tend to inhabit and how their teratological positionality within these terrains can often prove useful to students in guiding them through, and disassembling (or

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“decoding”) visually, the highly politicized rhetoric around which monsters and horror films are constructed. What follows is simply intended to show that culturally expanding that vocabulary or classification and extending geographically these haunted terrains would prove fruitful in promoting inclusivity in the classroom in a natural, accommodating way. Ken Derry (2018) in “Myth and Monstrosity: Teaching Indigenous Films” (2018) laments that  until recently [he] only ever showed one Indigenous film in [his] course [on religion and film at the University of Toronto Mississauga], and always in relation to an explicitly “Indigenous” topic. This approach is arguably problematic because, as Emma LaRocque (Nêhiyaw-Métis) has affirmed in relation to literature, the all-too-common tendency to relegate materials by Indigenous people only to the category of “Indigenous” is essentially a kind of “ghettoization.” (3)1

Derry now lists “a number of Indigenous movies on the syllabus and as options for essays, and in relation to a wider range of topics and theories— which is to say, topics that are not specifically ‘Indigenous,’” and afterward feedback from students, Derry happily reports, “has been entirely positive, in part because most of them have rarely encountered Indigenous cultural products of any kind, especially contemporary ones” (3). To offer as an example, when I teach a ten-week class on Adaptation Theory, my students spend two weeks studying theory, then they apply that theory over the remaining eight weeks to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its numerous retellings. Highlighting Derry’s approach above, I don’t organize my Dracula materials according to geography, culture, and language but instead genre or medium, from film and television to comic books, video games, and stage. And in each case, my lectures utilize, as evenly as possible, discussions and examples that underscore Count Dracula’s transnationality and heterogeneity. What’s more, my in-class activities, both group and individual, encourage students to look beyond domestic products and, if international, embrace their distinct cultural heritages if they so choose. For Derry, exposing students to Indigenous film, and more importantly, doing so in a way that doesn’t single out these narratives, “provides students with the critically important experience of seeing Indigenous stories and perspectives presented by Indigenous filmmakers” (3), a goal any “Draculty” interested in multicultural approaches to learning or diversifying their teaching materials should consider with great care.

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CONCLUSION Donaldo Macedo (2005 [1970]) writes in his introduction to his friend and mentor Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005) words that resonate with all fellow “Draculty” I think: “I found comfort in the immeasurable hope that Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less discriminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane,” comfort in “[our] profound commitment to fight social injustices in our struggle to recapture the loss of our dignity as human beings” (25). In Freire’s own words, Macedo continues: “I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century” (qtd. in Macedo 2005, 25). But in monsters, we “Draculty” have found, lies comfort, and in the nonhuman there is dignity. For “[d]ifference,” writes bell hooks (1994), must be recentered in the classroom, and through difference may students unlearn the need to hierarchize themselves in relation to others (36). In my own teaching, I’ve worked to balance teaching and research commitments by integrating into my courses my own scholarly interests in normativity, inclusion, and marginalization, particularly through interactive learner-centered or learner-directed activities and discussions. For indeed, central to “transformative pedagogy” (hooks 1994, 36) like Monster Pedagogy is a setting that fosters social awareness through active student-led learning, a process that helps students not only with the acquisition of socially engaged critical tools but guides their innovation in thinking about identity and difference. In my courses, I try to use both virtual and classroom-based instructional modalities that, together with a dialogical approach to group discussions, help work towards creating a learner-centered environment where students feel encouraged to voice their individual passions as personal tools in their studies. Such experiences have and continue to assist me in designing, and updating, coursework that encourages students to think and move beyond traditional approaches to learning. Thus, assigning “consciousness raising” texts by scholars like Douglas Kellner, Foucault, Althusser, bell hooks, Marx and Engels, Peggy McIntosh, and Gayle Rubin, expands the ways students think and write about power, privilege, and difference in normative culture. My work as a teacher-scholar continues to be concerned with trans- and interdisciplinary approaches to confronting, and challenging, the broader ideological relations between culture and alterity, and I’ve expanded, expanding my work in film, television, and multiculturalism over time to include such related areas as critical media literacy, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Together, my teaching and scholarly work, broadly

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conceived, include the history of identity in American cinema and culture, particularly within broader transnational contexts. More specifically, I investigate connections between power relations and social identities, centering on how popular visual portrayals of marginalized communities underscore issues of dis/empowerment. These and other similar commitments to student-led and learner-centered classrooms help to promote diversity, inclusivity, and rights advocacy. Showing students how to re/consider monstrous representations—some of which may hierarchically dictate “inferiorly”-sexed, -classed, -raced, or -sexualized positionalities as a means of legitimizing “superior” ones, while others may show the possibilities that difference offers—must be every Draculty member’s goal: that is the promise of monsters. NOTE 1. As Derry is apt to point out, LaRocque (1990) further states that “lumping of our writing under the category ‘Native’ means that our discussion of issues and ideas that are universally applicable may not reach the general public” (xviii).

WORKS CITED Ashante the Artist. 2019. “Privilege, Queer-ness, and Transition with Jackson Bird!” Intersectionality Chats. YouTube. February 28. Video, 11:45. www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=fh8tP​-7R5Ms​&t​=223s. Accessed August 21, 2022. Bouie, Jamelle. 2018. “The Enlightenment’s Dark Side: How the Enlightenment Created Modern Race Thinking, and Why We Should Confront It.” Slate, June 5. https:​//​slate​.com​/news​-and​-politics​/2018​/06​/taking​-the​-enlightenment​-seriously​ -requires​-talking​-about​-race​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. Browning, John Edgar. 2013. “Towards a Monster Pedagogy: Reclaiming the Classroom for the Other.” In Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror, edited by Aalya Ahmed and Sean Moreland, 40–55. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Browning, John Edgar, and Caroline Joan (“Kay”) Picart. 2011. Dracula in Visual Media: Film, Television, Comic Book and Electronic Game Appearances, 1921– 2010 Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2017. “Afterword: Monster Classroom (Seven Theses).” In Monsters in the Classroom Essays on Teaching What Scares Us, edited by Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton, 228–35. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Derry, Ken. 2018. “Myth and Monstrosity: Teaching Indigenous Films.” Journal of Religion & Film 22, no. 3: 3.

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Dey, Sayan. 2022. “Pedagogy of Performative Silence.” Philosophy and Global Affairs 2, no. 1: 15–40. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.5840​/pga202282926 Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. 1995. “A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race.” Harvard Educational Review 65, no. 3 (Fall): 379. Golub, Adam, and Heather Richardson Hayton. 2017. Introduction to Monsters in the Classroom Essays on Teaching What Scares Us, edited by Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton, 11–22. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Halberstam, Judith. 2006. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Johnson-Bailey, Juanita, and Ming-Yea Lee (2005). “Women of Color in the Academy: Where’s our Authority in the Classroom?” Feminist Teacher 15, no. 1: 111–22. LaRocque, Emma. 1990. “Preface, or Here Are Our Voices: Who Will Hear?” In Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, edited by Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Vance. Edmonton: NeWest. Macedo, Donaldo. 2005 [1970]. Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 11–27. New York: Continuum. Nelson, Victoria. 2012. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. “Privilege Points Questionnaire.” The Illumination Project (IP), Portland Community College. https:​//​www​.pcc​.edu​/illumination​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/54​/2018​/05​ /privilege​-questionnaire​-instituional​-privilege​-exercise​.pdf. Accessed August 21, 2022. Sedgwick, Eve. 2002. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. “Trigger Warnings.” Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo. https:​ //​uwaterloo​.ca​/centre​-for​-teaching​-excellence​/trigger. Accessed August 21, 2022.

Chapter Seven

Sounding Horror Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the Power of Music in Black Horror Erik Steinskog

MUSIC I remember opening Victor LaValle’s novel The Changeling (2017) when I bought it, only to be filled with joy by the epigraph, as the novel opens with a quote from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” a song from Wonder’s 1972 album Talking Book: “When you believe in things you don’t understand you suffer.” As a musicologist working with Black music, I could hear the song for my inner ear, and that even if one could argue that the epigraph only focuses upon the lyrics. I am sure I am not the only one, however, that also hears the song with its recognizable clavinet riff, in addition to remembering lyrics. And then, obviously, the lyrics—even when quoted before the novel begins, and thus in a sense “outside” of the novel—these lyrics still echoes while reading, opening up the question about the relation between the song and the novel. The song (lyrics) is not simply a paratext; it becomes a part of the interpretational frame, perhaps as a warning. A similar experience with music being almost outside of the narrative I experienced with the end credits of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), with Minnie Riperton singing “Les Fleur” from her 1970 album Come to My Garden. Riperton’s song has very little to do with doppelgängers, with subterranean existence, and other topics of Us, but as the literal end of the movie—not to say an afterthought, after the end—the presence of the song invites us to listen to it differently while also reflecting differently on the movie we have just watched. These two examples, then, at the same time frame and help me think about music in relation to horror or 101

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horror stories. Given music’s less concrete meaning, there seems to be fewer discussions of music related to speculative fiction, including horror, than other forms of art such as literature and film. Music seems not to be thought of as being related to fiction in a similar way, and there are good reasons for this. At the same time, and especially in film, music is often used to establish atmosphere, to mark history (also when used anachronistically), or to highlight emotional content. Sounds or music in the background can get us as film viewers to anticipate horrors or shocks in the narrative, we hear then before we see them, so to speak. References to pre-existing music is key to much film music, as a different strategy than having music composed for the particular film. Sometimes the pre-existing music is part of the action of the movie, diegetic, other times not so much, and there is even a third possibility where it is not clear whether the sounds are diegetic or non-diegetic. An example could be the end credits to Us (2019). Such uses of music can also, slightly differently, be found in literature, with the important difference, obviously, that music in literature more often than not is unheard, whereas in film it is heard. The “unheard” or described music can still be put to similar uses in literature to the ones found in film. Thus, listening to literature may bring about other dimensions of interpretation than seeing music (or sounds) as just one topic within the narrative. This is how I would read the epigraph to The Changeling. One could make an argument that it is primarily the title and the lyrics that are important here, and thus not “the music” in a narrower sense, but I do not think this is the case. Rather, I would argue that even as an epigraph, and thus almost “outside” of the text, this reference partakes in establishing both an atmosphere and a frame for interpretation of the novel. As readers, we hear the silent echo of Stevie Wonder’s song, as we turn the page to begin reading. And while Wonder’s song is a classic, it will also resound differently to different audiences, although the song will arguably be of significance to a Black readership, highlighting Black music. There is also, arguably, something happening in the use of history when using music. Wonder’s 1972 meets LaValle’s 2017, but then also the historical time of the novel, which may be more or less precise. The reference to Black readership is also meant to invoke the intimate relationship between music and lived experience in Black communities, as for example in the introduction to Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions,” where he writes: “Music has long been understood to be central to the lived experience of black people” (Nyong’o 2014, 173). In this chapter I will discuss Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) and P. Djèlí Clark’s novella Ring Shout (2020) with a focus upon music in the novellas. By this I mean both how music is a part of the respective stories, but also how music is part of the very meaning of the stories. Music, then, is more than simply a topic in the novellas. The Ballad of Black

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Tom takes place in Harlem in 1924, and tells the story of Tommy Tester, a hustler who sometimes is a street musician, and who in the beginning of the novella is taking a book to Ma Att. While in Queens he also meets the millionaire Robert Suydam, who wants him to play at a party. The novella is a retelling—I am tempted to call it a remix—of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Horror of Red Hook” (1925), and the first section is from the point of view of Tommy Tester, whereas the second section is Detective Malone’s perspective. The references to Lovecraft’s story is even more important given the discussions on Lovecraft’s racism, and how rereading Lovecraft from a Black perspective becomes crucial in The Ballad of Black Tom—just as in LaValle’s preface for the novella: “For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings” (cf. Hudson 2022). Ring Shout also takes place in the 1920s, more exactly 1922, in Macon, Georgia. The story follows Maryse Boudreaux who hunts “Ku Kluxes,” supernatural demons summoned by the Ku Klux Klan. An alternative history, filled with magic, thus also establishes a context for a reading of the racist past, including references to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation. In both novellas, music is central. Where we can, so to speak, hear the echo of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” when we are about to begin reading The Changeling, in The Ballad of Black Tom, music is “heard” and felt throughout. At the very beginning of the novella, as Charles Thomas Tester is leaving his apartment on West 144th Street, he hears his father, Otis, plucking a guitar and singing “John the Revelator” (LaValle 2016, 10), a traditional gospel blues call-and-response song, recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 20, 1930. While this date of recording may give some readers a slight problem, as the story of the novella takes place in 1924, I think the recording by Blind Willie Johnson should primarily be seen as recording an already existing traditional song. Thus, in this sense, the song signifies a cultural context where music is crucial. As a call-and-response song, it also signifies a community, and in the opening of the novella the relation between Charles and his father, Otis: “Who’s that writing?” his father sang, voice hoarse but the more lovely for it. “I said who’s that writing?” Before leaving, Charles sang back the last line of the chorus. “John the Revelator.” He was embarrassed by his voice, not tuneful at all, at least when compared with his dad’s. (LaValle 2016, 10)

The lyrics are relating to John of Patmos, as the author of the Book of Revelation, and thus also signals the end of time, and thus already at this humble opening of a man sitting in his bedroom singing gospel blues, as readers we learn about the possibility of an apocalyptic event. Thus, even more than Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” in The Changeling, signaling that the

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“writing is on the wall” and “the devil is on his way,” here, the narrative of the novella can be said to unfold from the call-and-response of the gospel blues. Thus, the music is not only setting the stage of 1924’s Harlem, although it does that as well. Rather, the music is a kind of prophecy of what is to come. At the same time there is an important dimension to how to read Charles in this opening scene. He is embarrassed by his voice, something that is peculiar given that he is, in a sense, a guitar player and musician. When he is about to leave the apartment, he takes his guitar case with him “to complete the look” (LaValle 2016, 10), but he leaves the guitar at home, the guitar case only containing a yellow book he is to deliver to Ma Att in Queens. But there is more than the empty guitar case to Charles life, as he later goes back to Queens to play on the streets to earn money. None of the other Harlem players would take a train out to Queens or rural Brooklyn for the chance of getting money from the famously thrifty immigrants homesteading in those parts. But a man like Tommy Tester—who only put on a show of making music—certainly might. Those outer-borough bohunks and Paddys probably didn’t know a damn thing about serious jazz, so Tommy’s knockoff version might still stand out.” (LaValle 2016, 18)

Here, then, a difference in audience—and thus in collective experiences— comes to the fore. Tommy Tester may not be a musician in Harlem, but he may pass for one in Queens. His music making will not stand out among “real” musicians but playing for a—we are meant to think—white audience, Tommy’s shortcomings may not even be noticed. Thus, the music here is not simply signifying Black culture and the Black public sphere; it also signals a belonging to the culture, and thus by implication also a belonging to the music. The music Tommy is playing is Black music, but the implication is that a white audience may not really understand. One could be tempted to refer to Henry Dumas’s story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (from 1966), where the music, or the particular sounds played, kills the white audience members in a jazz club.1 “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (published in Ark of Bones) is not only important for the reference to “free music,” as Amiri Baraka comments about the story in his “The Changing Same,” also from 1966 (cf. Jones 2010, 212). In that essay Baraka also underlines the call-and-response, claiming “The line we could trace, as musical ‘tradition,’ is what we as a people dig and pass on, as best we can. The call-and-response form of Africa (lead and chorus) has never left us, as a mode of (musical) expression” (Jones 2010, 206). An equally interesting dimension, with reference to sounds, is one of the instruments described in the story, an afro-horn that the main character, Probe, has

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gotten his hands on. This is a rare instrument, on many levels, and it has a long history, as it has ancient origins. There are only three afro-horns in the world. They were forged from a rare metal found only in Africa and South America. No-one knows who forged the horns, but the general opinion among musicologists is that it was the Egyptians. One European museum guards an afro-horn. The other is supposed to be somewhere on the West Coast of Mexico, among a tribe of Indians. Probe grew into his from a black peddler who claimed to have travelled a thousand miles just to give it to his son. From that day on, Probe’s sax handled like a child, a child waiting for itself to grow out of itself. (Dumas 2003, 109)

The power of Probe’s instrument is immense. And it turns out, at the end of the story, that it is deadly. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is also of interest as a way of describing not only sound in literature, but also a sound that must be imagined. It would be deadly, at least for quite a few of us as readers, if we actually got to hear this sound. Thus, the power of sound is invested in letters, that in many ways provoke the reader. This speaks to an interesting dimension of sound: literary sound. And I want to distinguish this from the literary voice, as there are similarities. Paying attention to these similarities could also help in discussing how the use of the trope of the literary voice may not be a metaphorical voice—as so often is the case—but in one way or another grounded in the material singing voice as much more than literary studies perhaps wants to acknowledge. Discussing sounds in literature, on the other hand, points to something different than this voice, and might also take us into a different territory. Remember as well that with the exception of phonographs and material scores, words are the most common way to convey sounds, even if, arguably, most people would be quick to contest that words cannot really do this. What is happening in Dumas’s story, however, is that literature conveys sounds that are not only unheard, but also inaudible, thus pointing to one place where literature has an advantage over phonographs, simply by being able to describe these sounds in one way or another, or, perhaps better, to describe their effects. The way Dumas describes the afro-horn is also of interest. There are some musicologists here claiming that the origin of the afro-horn is in Ancient Egypt, a reference also common within Afrofuturism or Black Speculative Fiction, and where Dumas’s friendship with Sun Ra is probably also important. But the afro-horn also echoes Salim Washington’s discussions of technology with reference to Henry Dumas and Samuel R. Delany. Washington discusses what he calls “the Afro-technological,” thus contributing to the importance of discussing whether there are “Black technologies” that both sound studies and technology studies have for the most part overlooked.

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He expands on the Afro-technological, calling it an impulse as well, and argues that it has been “manifested in music” by “the inventions of instruments themselves” (Washington 2008, 236). In addition to the instruments themselves, there are, he argues, also particular “black techniques applied to conventional European instruments” (Ibid.), and he focuses first on percussive elements, and second on extended vocal techniques. He also claims that “in part because of its West African aesthetic inheritance, African American music frequently makes use of sounds that are considered extramusical in the Western art music tradition” (2008, 242). And thus music, among other things, becomes “a technology for transporting minds, bodies, and souls—the very being of black folk—away from oppression and viciously circumscribed living conditions” (2008, 237) and thus “a vehicle for either personal or corporate transformation” (2008, 239). The Egyptian dimension of Dumas is not only found in the origin of the afro-horn, but also in the album he collaborated with Sun Ra on, The Ark and the Ankh also from 1966. It is also, however, possible to find an “Egyptian” dimension in The Ballad of Black Tom, with the already mentioned Ma Att. She is “linked to the otherworldly and poses a threat to Tommy,” but her name also echoes “Maat, the Egyptian goddess of justice” (Witzel 2018, 566). “It’s an Egyptian name, isn’t it?” (LaValle 2016, 86). This reference to ancient Egypt at the same time also puts “the Supreme Alphabet” of the story into a broader context often found within Afrofuturism, where ancient Egypt is crucial, while also giving LaValle the possibility of connecting the 1920s of Lovecraft with the Five-Percent Nation—the Nation of Gods and Earths— thus adding yet other layers to his remix of Black culture. The Supreme Alphabet is mentioned throughout the novel and is related to Ma Att and thus Ancient Egypt as well as magic. It could also be seen as a cue to interpretation, where hidden meanings are found in ordinary script. Another layer of hidden meaning, perhaps, is found in music, as well as in the historical references to musical meaning as “hidden” from (white) outsiders. While “John the Revelator” was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in 1930, the development of the story of The Ballad of Black Tom makes it even more likely that the reference is to Son House’s version from 1965. While this may be less important for the overall story, to me this possibility signals an ongoing relation to music, where new versions of the same songs are played or heard, a sign that music is a constant in the cultural fabric the novella takes place within. It is not unlikely that this also signals the importance of music within Black culture, and as such is more likely to be found in this remix of Lovecraft than in Lovecraft’s own writings (although see Machin 2012). Preparing for the party, Tommy is practicing a song taught him, and which Otis describes as “Conjure music” (LaValle 2016, 36). Having practiced it for three days, Tommy is getting closer to playing it well:

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“Conjure music, Otis called it. As he began, he felt his father and mother were closer to him, right there with him, as real as the chords on his guitar. For the first time in Tommy’s life, he didn’t play for the money, didn’t play so he could hustle. This was the first time in his life he ever played well.” (LaValle 2016, 70)

We get a bit of the lyrics, when Tommy is singing “Don’t you mind people grinning in your face” (LaValle 2016, 70), and at least for me this sounds an echo of Son House’s “Grinnin’ in Your Face” found on his album Father of Folk Blues (1965). Son House (1902–1988) also recorded “John the Revelator” (found on the same album), making him a likely soundtrack to the novella and the events of The Ballad of Black Tom. And “Don’t you mind people grinning in your face” is also what Black Tom (in the novella’s second part) sings to Malone when they are fighting, and Malone almost dies (LaValle 2016, 131f). Another but related use of music in speculative fiction is found in P. Djèlí Clark’s novel Ring Shout (2020). Here the title is in itself a reference to music, or more precisely to a ritualistic use of music and movement. But music is also an integrated part of the narrative. In his Slave Cultures: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, Sterling Stuckey argues that “the ring shout was the main context in which Africans recognized values common to them. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African provenance, they were fertile seed for the bloom of new forms” (Stuckey 2013, 15). And in his article “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry,” Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., following Stuckey, argues that “the shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged, and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual in which the slaves made music and derived their musical styles” (Floyd 1991, 266) and also claims that “Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and foundational to all subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in descriptions of the shout that, in the ring, musical practices from through-out black culture converged in the spiritual” (Floyd 1991, 267). And the ring shout is central in the story of the novel, as is music on several levels. The story opens with a Klan march on Fourth of July 1922, in Macon, Georgia. There are fireworks and, as the narrator, Maryse Boudreaux, tells us: “A brass band competing with the racket, though everybody down there I swear clapping on the one and the three” (Clark 2020, 11). This march, then, is clearly “white music,” and the whiteness is underlined with the clapping on the one and the three. This is in explicit contrast to the music heard in Frenchy’s Inn, where the main characters are together for drinks, dancing, and music:

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The music at Frenchy’s so loud I feel it on my insides. The piano man up out his seat, one leg hanging off the grainy wood and pounding the keys hard enough to break them. He sweating so I’m wondering how that shiny conk holding up. Whole while he wailing on about some big-boned woman he left in New Orleans, just about jumping out his maroon suit to croon, “And when she roll that jelly!” The crowd roars, men whooping and women fanning hands like to cool him off.” (Clark 2020, 55)

This difference between the march and the dancing, between white and Black, between the Klan and the Black community, is thus a difference music is used to describe. Related to the music in the bar, although at the same time with important differences, is the shout, presented when the main characters for the first time in the novella meet the Gullah people. There’s a Shout going on. In the center of the room, five men and women— their hair peppered with white—move in a backward circle to the floor. Them’s Shouters. Keeping time is the Stick Man, stooped and beating his cane on the floor. Behind him are three Basers—in overalls frayed by labor, and clapping hands just as worn. They cry out in answer to the Leader, a barren-chested man named Uncle Will in a straw hat, bellowing out for the world to hear. “Blow, Gabriel!” “At the Judgment.” “Blow that trumpet!” “At the Judgment bar.” “My God call you!” “At the Judgment.” “Angels shouting!” “At the Judgment bar.” (Clark 2020, 36)

The ritual follows the same pattern described by Stuckey and Floyd, and the description clearly demonstrates both the counterclockwise movement, the structure of call-and-response, as well as the spiritual as a foundational musical dimension. In his description of the ring shout, Floyd also notices that “the ring shout was a dance in which the sacred and the secular were conflated” (Floyd 1991, 268), which while not clearly illustrated in the above quote, rings through and contributes to see the similarities of the music in the ring shout and in Frenchy’s Inn. There is a continuity within the Black community’s relation to music, a continuity between what in other communities may be differentiated between the sacred and the secular. In this a key feature of the music comes to the fore, as a force of community building where both the sacred and the secular is at stake. It is also important for the story that the ring shout is old. “The Shout come from slavery times. Though hear Uncle Will

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tell it, maybe it older than that” (Clark 2020, 37). Thus, not only, perhaps, a feature of Black music in the United States, but of older origin, thus contributing, as Stuckey also says, to something “in which Africans recognized values common to them” (Stuckey 2013, 15). And while the lyrics are not identical, it is not difficult to hear the above quote as an echo of Reverend Gary Davis’s “Blow, Gabriel” from the 1956 album American Street Songs by Reverend Gary Davis and Pink Anderson, thus underlining the continuity both between sacred and secular, but also how the music is transported across time. The importance of the ring shout for the story is also underlined by the character Emma Krauss, presented as “the German widow,” who owns a store in the town. “But in Germany she trained to study music and can’t get enough of the Shout” (Clark 2020, 40). In many ways she functions as an ethnomusicologist in the story, and there are notations, almost like ethnographic field-notes, spread throughout the novel, “transliterated from the Gullah” (Clark 2020, 9, 53, 93, 121, 159). In these notes the “outsider’s” perspective on the ring shout comes to the fore, but not quite totally an outsider. Given the ethnographic dimension they function more like explanations coming from the practitioners themselves. The novella even begins with “Notation 15” before chapter one, and it is Uncle Will, “age 67,” who is referenced, that is to say the man we later learn is “the Leader” of the above-quoted ring shout. In the interview he tells about “a Shout we do ‘bout old pharaoh and Moses” and he compares the story from Exodus with “when Union soldiers come tell us ‘bout the Jubilee” (Clark 2020, 9). Thus, the pharaoh is compared with the Confederacy, in a clear illustration on how the spirituals—here it is tempting to quote “Go down, Moses”—are used to explain the lived experiences of the Black community. Emma Krauss also brings to mind Zora Neale Hurston and her fieldwork in Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in 1935 researching, among other things, Black music, song traditions, and relations to slave culture and African music. Hurston also wrote about the ring shout claiming that “There is little doubt that shouting is a survival of the African ‘possession’ by the gods. In Africa it is sacred to the priesthood or acolytes, in America it has become generalized” (Hurston 2022, 72). What is described in Clarke’s novella thus align perfectly with Hurston’s interpretation. Toward the end of the novel, the march of the Klan—probably clapping on the one and the three—and the song of Maryse, that is the music of white supremacy versus the music of the Black community, take part in a battle of metaphysical proportions. Butcher Clyde, the Klan leader, is on the one side, and Maryse on the other. Here is one of her descriptions: It’s like the night at the juke joint. A mashed-up chorus, with no real timing or rhythm. As if it was created to unmake music. Like before it threatens to take

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me off balance, and I stumble under it. But no! I have songs too! I listen to my sword, letting those chanting voices fill me up. For a moment it seems the two are battling: my songs and his uneven chorus. But it was never a real fight. What I have is beautiful music inspired by struggle and fierce love. What he got ain’t nothing but hateful noise. Not a hint of soul to it. Like unseasoned meat. My songs crash right through that nonsense, silencing it, just as my sword takes off his arm. He falls back and I dip low, slicing away everything under one knee. (Clark 2020, 163)

Maryse has songs of her own, and the voices she can hear are also the voices of the ancestors. The whole culture, and a long history, sounds in her mind, “beautiful music inspired by struggle and fierce love” (Ibid). This music is the opposite of the “hateful noise” of Butcher Clyde, which, as Maryse writes, is as if “it was created to unmake music.” This reference is to actual music, but music also functions like a metaphor, a way of describing a whole way of life, the lived experience of which the ring shout is a foundation. The full title of Clark’s novella is Ring Shout, or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times, and there is an apocalyptic dimension to the story, as there is to The Ballad of Black Tom. Both novellas take place in the 1920s, and both reference contemporary racist societies: The Ballad of Black Tom with the reference to Lovecraft and the references to the Klan as well as D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) in Ring Shout. In stark opposition to these racists dimensions is music, the ring shout, the music at Frenchy’s Inn, the gospel blues, the call-and-response. This music at the same time standing for the lived experiences of Black folks. This music is contrasted with “the hateful noise” of Butcher Clyde on the one hand, and with “a demented music, evil orchestration” in The Ballad of Black Tom on the other (LaValle 2016, 129), showing the power and force of music in opposition to the horrors of white supremacy. NOTE 1. I discuss Dumas’s story in Steinskog (2018), 62.

WORKS CITED Baraka, Amiri. 1988.“Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2: 164–6. Clark, P. Djèlí. 2020. Ring Shout. New York: tordotcom. Dumas, Henry. 2003. Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, edited by Eugene B. Redmond. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.

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Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1991. “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry.” Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2: 265–87. Hudson, Kathleen. 2022. “Racial (In)Visibility, Cosmic Indifference: Reimagining H. P. Lovecraft’s Legacy in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).” In Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, but Still Dreaming, edited by Antonio Alcala Gonzalez and Carl. H. Sederholm. New York: Routledge, 2022, 186–200. Hurston, Zora Neale. 2022. You Don’t Know Us Negroes And Other Essays. New York: HarperCollins. Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). 2010. Black Music [1967]. New York: Akashic Books. LaValle, Victor. 2016. The Ballad of Black Tom. New York: Tor. ———. 2017. The Changeling. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Machin, James. 2012. “Music against Horror: H. P. Lovecraft and Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” East-West Cultural Passage 1: 38–50. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2014. “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions: Black Sound Studies after the Millennium,” Small Axe 18, no. 2: 173–79. Steinskog, Erik. 2018. Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Stuckey, Sterling. 2013. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America [1987]. New York: Oxford University Press. Washington, Salim. 2008. “The Avenging Angel of Creating/Destruction: Black Music and the Afro-technological in the Science Fiction of Henry Dumas and Samuel R. Delany.” Journal of the Society of American Music 2, no. 2: 235–53. Witzel, Guy. 2018. “Abcanny Waters: Victor LaValle, John Langan, and the Weird Horror of Climate Change.” Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 3: 560–64.

Chapter Eight

The Evolution of Horror on Stage Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

THEATER Horror has always been a part of the theater, even before horror itself was a concept. However, we must be wary of transferring our own understandings of genre, genre terms, and their meanings onto cultures of the past. The ancient Athenians would not consider their tragedies “horror,” for example, and it would be a mistake for us to conflate Medea with The Woman in Black, though both are intended to cause fear, unease, and perhaps even disgust in their respective audiences. In The Poetics, the first and most significant critical work on theater in the west, Aristotle noted that the primary purpose of theater was to cause fear and pity in the audience. Greek tragedies contained ghosts, monsters, gory murders and vendettas, incest, rape, and violence performed by supernatural beings—see, for example, Aeschylus’ The Eumenides. Philosopher Eugene Thacker observes that Greek tragedy “evokes a world at once familiar and unfamiliar,” which is the very definition of Freud’s unheimlich/uncanny (2011, 3). So, while the concept of the genre of horror was not invented until the eighteenth century, with gothic theater, inspired by gothic literature, theater’s origins certainly indicate an affinity for the horrific. In this chapter we shall examine the evolution of horror theater in the twenty-first century in the (mostly anglophone) West. HORROR (?) IN THE THEATER Ghosts, monsters, murder, and the macabre continued in western theater through the early modern era. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, evincing ghosts (Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III, etc.), devils (Henry VI, Part 1), 113

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witches (Macbeth, The Tempest), and horrible murder, torture, and violence (Titus Andronicus and virtually every tragedy). Horror theater proper begins in 1797 with the premiere of Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre, which premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London and ran for a record forty-seven performances. For much of the nineteenth century, gothic dramas and melodramas were prevalent among the other theatrical offerings of the period. Adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein dominate the stage (see Forry 1990), as do adaptations of Polidori’s The Vampyre (see Stuart 1994). Gothic drama focused on unrepentant, truly wicked villains, helpless female heroines, and the material culture and setting of gothic literature: castles, abandoned monasteries, the homes of a decaying aristocracy (Anthony 2008, 5–7). It is also not until the nineteenth century that the word “horror” falls into common use to describe a genre. Thus, while the theater has been horrific and contained horror elements since its origins, “horror theater” as a genre does not emerge until this period. In the second half of the nineteenth century, led by individuals such as Émile Zola, Eugène Scribe, and André Antione as well as playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, naturalism began to flourish. The dictates of naturalism required everything on stage to be as it would be in life, meaning the supernatural vanished from the naturalistic stage. Conversely, a parallel movement of antinaturalist genres such as symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, Dadaism, futurism, and theatricalism sought to make the theater fantastic and as unreal as possible. The irony being that both naturalism and antinaturalism lend themselves to horror theater, with the symbolists, for example, holding on to supernatural elements (August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata [1907], for example, reads as naturalism but contains apparitions and reveals the horrors behind a bourgeoise façade in urban Sweden), and naturalism focusing on the horrors of everyday existence. Violence, loss of social status, the horrors of the poor were the subject and thematic matter for naturalistic playwrights. Both the naturalism and the antinaturalist theaters developed alongside melodrama, which also loved its monsters, human and supernatural. This period produces arguable the most famous ghost play from one of the most famous ghost stories: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Dickens read the story aloud, live in front of audiences quite often. In 1844, no less than eight stage versions were mounted in London simultaneously, only one of which was authorized. Marvin Carlson argues the modern stage ghost can trace its origins to stage versions of A Christmas Carol (2014, 27), which was easily the dominant ghost story of the twentieth-century stage. The theater of the twentieth century saw a home for horror in France at the Grand Guignol (1897–1962) in Paris. For its sixty-five years of existence, it served as the heart of a naturalistic theater movement dedicated to showing

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physical and psychological horror. No ghosts, monsters, or devils to be found on the stage of the Grand Guignol. Instead, madmen attacked their victims by cutting open their heads, popping out eyes, cutting skin off the back, and other horrors. A guillotined head is brought back to life in one play; sailors burn a prostitute to death for stealing a statue of the Virgin Mary in another. The small theater was dedicated to gore and psychosis as entertainment. Allegedly a doctor was on premises during performances as the number of patrons, both male and female, who fainted and needed medical attention due to the terrors on the stage were considerable (See Gordon 2016; Hand and Wilson 2002). It was a theater of special effects and over-the-top performances designed to be horrifying and entertaining. The atrocities of the Second World War, however, far outdid the Guignol in scope and it closed in 1962. The occasional horrific play could be found in the West, although horror was rarely taken seriously as a genre in the theater. Local theaters might present an evening of Poe adaptations. The early twentieth century had a vogue for faux-haunting plays in which a place was presented as haunted, but then over the course of the play the haunting was revealed to be a cover story to allow the villain to seek lost treasure, or buy the property cheap, for example, in the 1909 play The Ghost Breaker by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard (2010). The title itself is a play on the strike breakers, men paid to stop and beat striking workers. The eponymous character enters a haunted house and proves that it is not haunted. The play was made into a film in 1914, 1922, and finally in 1940, the last starring Bob Hope. As in cinema in the fifties and sixties, horror was also often considered a genre for children’s theater. Many adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, as well as tales of ghosts and witches, Poe adaptations (again), and parodies and pastiches of same were written and performed for schools, community groups and children’s theaters, yet another example of horror theater not being taken seriously as an adult genre. Indeed, theater often ceded horror to the cinema, which is ironic because in the first half of the twentieth century the theater influenced horror cinema. When Universal adapted Dracula and Frankenstein it was not the original novels which were adapted but the popular stage plays based on them. Florence Stoker had given Hamilton Deane permission to adapt Bram Stoker’s vampire novel for the stage. He reduced the scope of the epistolary novel down to a series of drawing room scenes, in keeping with the naturalism of the British theater at the time. John L. Balderston further adapted the text when it transferred from the United Kingdom to the United States, and it was the Deane/Balderston stage version that the universal film was based upon. Similarly, Hamilton Deane hired Peggy Webling to adapt Mary Shelley’s novel for the stage, with John L. Balderston further adapting the

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text for American audiences, and it was that text that was used for Universal’s Frankenstein. This pattern would continue in the second half of the twentieth century, in which the handful of horror plays that did receive production in New York or London would almost immediately be adapted for the screen. Fredrick Knott’s 1966 play Wait until Dark, concerning a blind New York housewife being terrorized by three criminals seeking the heroin inadvertently hidden in a doll they think she has, was made into a film the following year. John van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle (1950), typical of the period, is a light farce in which a witch in present-day New York falls in love with a man in her building, which witches are not supposed to do. Also made into a film in 1958, Bell, Book, and Candle uses the subject matter and tropes of horror, but in the service of a romantic comedy. The first major evolution of horror theater in the twenty-first century is a reversal (of sorts) of source material. If film sought source material from the stage in the twentieth century for Dracula, Frankenstein, Bell, Book, and Candle, Wait until Dark, and others, the theater began mining film for stage worthy material in the next century. For example, in 2012 the Geffen Playhouse produced John Pielmeier’s stage adaptation of The Exorcist, based as much upon the 1973 film as the novel. Previously, in 2008, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France commissioned composer Howard Shore and librettist David Henry Hwang to adapt David Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly into an opera. The piece was performed first in Paris and subsequently later in Los Angeles in 2008. As will be discussed below, cinema shaped and continues to shape twenty-first-century horror musicals. THE (R)EVOLUTION OF HORROR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The twenty-first century began with a radical increase in the amount of horror theater being produced. Partly this was because of the emergence of a generation of theater-makers (and, for that matter, audiences) interested in producing horror theater. An explosion of companies dedicated to producing horror theater and events centered on horror theater occurred in the late nineties through the present. For example, London Horror Festival, run by Theater of The Damned’s Stewart Pringle and Tom Richards, premiered in 2011 (Hand and Wilson 2022, 39). Companies in the UK, Europe, and the United States that focused almost entirely on producing horror theater developed homes and followings, including the Thrillpeddlers (San Francisco), Zombie Joe’s Underground (Los Angeles), Grand Guignolers (Los Angeles), Visceral Theater (Los Angeles), WildClaw (Chicago), Molotov Theater Company

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(Washington, DC), Vampire Cowboys (New York), RADIOTHEATER (New York), Theater of the Damned (London), Dreamcatcher Horror Theater (Devon), Tin Shed Theater Company (Newport, Wales), and Licensed to Thrill (Liverpool), among others. Other theaters, not entirely dedicated to horror began to add horror-themed plays to their seasons, frequently to be performed in October, as both that month and “the Halloween season” grew to be very lucrative periods for anyone offering horror content. In addition to the shaping influence of television and film on twenty-first-century horror theater, as noted above, three dominant trends demonstrate the evolution of horror theater over the past twenty years. The first is a shift in horror musicals, which in the twentieth century had been serious adaptations of literary works, and in the twenty-first are postmodern, self-aware adaptations of iconic horror films. The second is the development and growth of immersive theater, which forms a continuum from straightforward theater productions that are immersive to haunted attractions which now involve actors not just providing jump scares or chasing patrons with chainsaws but involve the enactment of a complete narrative. Lastly, the ghost story in drama form has radically evolved, in part in response to paranormal investigatory television and partly out of a desire to create an experience that simulates an actual haunting for the audience. THE EVOLUTION OF HORROR MUSICALS A handful of horror musicals emerged in the twentieth century, virtually all of which were adaptations of literary works and were presented as serious works. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler, dramatized a penny dreadful about a barber who slit customers’ throats and the baker who then put their flesh into meat pies sold to the public. The whole narrative was a tale of vengeance that descended into gore, cannibalism, and madness. Phantom of the Opera (1986), with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, and a libretto by Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe, was the first of the mega-musicals and based on the novel by Gaston Laroux. It ran in the West End and on Broadway for decades, most famous for its plunging chandelier. The Phantom was a hideously disfigured composer, out for revenge and to promote his protégé. Carrie (1988), with a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, lyrics by Dean Pitchford, and music by Michael Gore, was based on the Stephen King novel. So associated with failure and seen as the definition of a flop, it was used as the title example in Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, in which he described Carrie as an “instant legend” during previews because of how unbelievably bad it

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was (1991, 10). Lastly, Jekyll & Hyde (1990) with book by Leslie Bricusse, music by Frank Wildhorn, and lyrics by Frank Wildhorn, Leslie Bricusse, and Steve Cuden began as a concept album but after a few failed attempts finally became a Broadway hit, narrating the tale of Robert Louis Stevenson’s scientist turned sociopathic killer (see Larkin 1999 for the histories of these individual musicals). What all these musicals had in common is that despite their origins in horror literature, not one created a genuine sense of fear in the audience. Although spectacular, and entertaining, the form of the musical does not allow for sustained tension or dread. At least two musicals based on film, Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976) and Little Shop of Horrors (1982) with music by Alan Menken and lyrics and a book by Howard Ashman, also appeared during this period, but again the tropes and elements of horror were employed in the service of a musical, not actually meant to create fear or terror. In fairness, the twenty-first-century horror musical is also not actually meant to create terror. Instead, most tend to be postmodern, referential musicals based on or inspired by films. Evil Dead: The Musical premiered in Toronto in 2003 and subsequently has been performed all over the world. 2005 saw the creation of Silence! The Musical by Jon and Al Kaplan, a musical adaptation of the 1991 Academy Award–winning horror film The Silence of the Lambs. Premiering in New York, over the next decade Silence! The Musical was produced in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tampa, San Francisco, and Vancouver, in addition to several New York revivals. Toxic Avenger: The Musical (2008), based upon the Troma film of the same name, premiered in New York and has had major productions throughout North America. Ghost: The Musical, based on the 1990 film, premiered at the Manchester Opera House in 2011 before transferring to the West End and subsequently Broadway. In that same year Stuart Gordon adapted his own 1985 film into Reanimator: The Musical with music and lyrics by Mark Nutter for a premiere in Los Angeles, followed by runs in New York and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2012. The Texas Chainsaw Musical debuted in 2012, and at least three different versions of The Exorcist: The Musical have been mounted. American Psycho: The Musical premiered on the West End in 2013 and transferred to Broadway in 2016, with subsequent performances in Sydney, Australia, in 2019. With music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik and a book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the musical is an adaptation of the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis and the 2000 film based upon the novel. With the exception of Ghost: The Musical, all of these are over-the-top, camp musicals relying on ridiculous special effects, audience knowledge of the original, and copious amounts of bodily fluids replicated on stage. If

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twentieth-century horror musicals presented horrific subjects seriously with tragic results, twenty-first-century horror musicals reveled in postmodern ridiculousness. With song titles like “What the Fuck Was That?,” “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Kandarian Demons,” and “Do the Necronomicon,” it is obvious that Evil Dead is not meant to be taken seriously (Reinblatt 2007). But then again, neither was the film series upon which it is based. Twentieth-century horror musicals were aimed at the Broadway/ West End audiences. Postmodern musicals are aimed at the fans of the movies being adapted. Instead of high-minded literary adaptation, horror musicals have evolved along the Grand Guignol route, using stage blood and musical recreations of iconic moments from the films, much to the audience’s delight. Phantom of the Opera crashed a chandelier; Reanimator: The Musical had a decapitated body holding its own singing head. With the twenty-first-century horror musical, the audience is as like to laugh in recognition as to be grossed out by the content. I argue that the current generation of horror musicals is not only aimed at horror fans instead of musical fans (although certainly the latter can also appreciate them), these musicals are also rooted in the idea that it is difficult if not impossible to sustain tension, dread, and fear through song, so rather than attempt to create horrific moments the creators display a tendency towards camp, humor, and gross-out—a celebration of horror as fun rather than a weighty attempt to treat it seriously. IMMERSIVE HORROR Jennifer Oulette reports a substantial increase in the twenty-first century in “recreational fear”—events and media that mx of fear and enjoyment: horror movies, extreme haunts, escape rooms, and immersive performances (Ouellette 2022). In the theater this forms a continuum of performances running the gamut from straightforward theater productions that are immersive, such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an immersive adaptation of Macbeth, to haunted attractions that have plot, performers, and a full narrative arc, such as Delusion. These are but two of the many immersive horror performances to emerge in the twenty-first century. As its name suggests, immersive theater immerses the audience into the physical, narrative, and emotional worlds of the performance (Bisaha 2022: 229). Immersive theater tends to be site-specific and often not performed in a traditional theater space. Sleep No More, for example, is performed in New York City in a series of linked warehouses, designed to appear like an early twentieth-century hotel. Audience members are free to wander throughout the “hotel” to experience various events, see and speak with characters, and

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explore the material world of the production, as the space is filled with furniture, books, notes, letters, paintings, all of which the audience may interact with seeking clues to what the event is really about (Venning 2022). Unlike productions of Wait until Dark or A Christmas Carol, in which a mostly passive audience sits and watches the same production, immersive theater offers a different experience for each audience member depending on their individual choices as well. Sleep No More is regarded as one of the first fully immersive horror plays, first performed in London in 2003, New York in 2011, and Shanghai in 2016. Immersive experiences are designed to bring the audience into the narrative itself, making them a part of the horror. If the purpose of horror is to create fear in the audience, as Ouellette notes “it turns out that immersion is pretty key to generating fear” (Ouellette 2022). Partly this is because one is not passively experiencing a story but instead is in the actual environment, but also because of what Ouelette refers to “fear contagion”: “picking up on the behavioral signals from one’s friends amplifies one’s own fear response” (Ouellette 2022). Because theater is a live, collaborative art, requiring performers and audience to be present in the same physical space, it makes the horror experience all the more “real.” As Mathias Classen reminds us, “Haunted attractions are real in a way that horror videogames and VR simulations are not” simply because you and the monster/ghost/killer are in the same space (2017, 159). Theater companies have learned to use this fact to generate terrifying immersive plays. For example, Norfolk, Wales’s Tin Shed Theater Company’s productions of The Ritual (2013) and Leviticus: Evil Resides Within (2014) are fully immersive, site-specific performances that place the audience in the narrative. In The Ritual, performed around Halloween, audiences were told they would be taken by bus to the woods to see a ritual. Instead, on the way to the performance, they were kidnapped, taken to an urban warehouse where a very different ritual is enacted. An immersive performance ritual presented at a residential home in Newport, Wales, Leviticus: Evil Resides Within employed four performers, and only four audience members were allowed to participate at a time. Audiences would purchase a ticket giving them the address of the house and a time slot. At thirty-five minutes, the play could be performed several times an evening. The show goes beyond immersive into make the audience members witnesses to an exorcism. Upon arrival at the house, they are greeted by two priests and shown into the house. The history of the case is given, and the audience meets the father of the possessed girl before finally mounting the stairs and meeting the girl herself. While sitting downstairs with the priests, noises and strange sounds are heard upstairs. The overall effect of the show is to give the audience the experience that they are present at a real exorcism (Hand and Wilson 2022, 241). As with Sleep

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No More, the performance does not take place in a traditional theater, but an environment designed to enhance the experience and make it more active for the audience. One cannot become lost in the anonymity of the crowd—the characters introduce themselves at the beginning and use the audience member’s actual names. Secrets are revealed, nightmarish things happen during the exorcism, but again, not on stage, but rather in a real bedroom (see Hand and Wilson 2022 for the full script). In keeping with the mode of films influencing theater, Hand and Wilson note how much the film of The Exorcist (1973) shaped Leviticus (2022, 241). At the other end of the spectrum is Delusion. Unlike many “haunts” or “haunted attractions,” in which patrons walk through a maze or series of rooms in which jump scares are performed and disturbing tableau are offered, interactive haunts such as Los Angeles’s Delusion, begun in 2011 by creator Jon Carver, a Hollywood stuntman and a film and theater director, require audience members to be a part of the narrative (Rylah 2018). Individuals may be tasked with finding something for the characters, they may be pulled away by the cast into a different room, they may be told something individually that the rest of the group does not hear. Most years the haunt is in an actual house, although in 2018 they used a commercial space. Each year Delusion has a different narrative (they refer to them as “plays”). 2018’s The Blue Blade, for example, focused on fighting vampires, whereas 2022 presents the audience as cult deprogrammers who must walk through a mansion full of cult members (Delusion.com 2022). In her wonderful volume Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear, Margee Kerr (2017) reports of a Japanese immersive haunted attraction called Daiba Strange School in Tokyo (109). Individuals go through one at a time. The backstory is that a number of bad things had happened within the school, and so now it is “haunted by an evil and malicious ghost” (2017, 125). Individuals entering the haunt were given a paper charm with a prayer written on it. They were to find the room with a small fire going, say the prayer aloud, and burn the paper; this would banish the ghost. The only performer in the haunt was the yūrei, the ghost. This individual would stalk the audience through the house. Kerr reports: In all my years as a thrill seeker, I had never had a monster run straight at me in a haunted house. . . . The evil ghost stopped abruptly not two inches from my nose. She was a good seven or eight inches taller than I, and from behind her hair I heard her breathing in a low, growling manner. I was whimpering, truly terrified, and shaking. Then, just as quickly as she charged at me, she was gone, her white robes flowing behind her, dissolving back into the ghostly dark. The encounter couldn’t have lasted longer than twenty seconds, but it felt like forever. (2017, 127)

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Kerr goes on to describe the experience of walking through the school, finding the fire, throwing in the charm, all the while being stalked by the ghost. She states how effective the haunt was, not needing “two hundred actors all playing different monsters”: All it takes is one ghost, out to find you wherever you go. This tiny, five-minute haunt with only one actor made me scream and feel six years old again. I screamed more in that tiny haunt than I did walking through some of the top haunts in the United States with every high-priced animatronic and twenty-foot-tall monster available. (2017, 129)

As this quotation demonstrates, the experience was both immersive and personal—the idea that the ghost is tracking you specifically is what made the experience more real for Kerr. This reflects the experiences of audiences as The Ritual, Leviticus, and Delusion. Even during the COVID lockdown of 2021, the theater found ways to make horror immersive. Produced and presented over Zoom during COVID, the Geffen Theater’s Someone Else’s House, written and performed by Jared Mezzocchi in May of 2021, offered an interactive horror experience. For each performance, thirty-five or so people could attend. Ticket buyers were then sent a box in the mail and told not to open it until the performance. Attendees kept their computer cameras on, so everyone could see both the performer and each other. In the box were photographs, text cards, candles, and matches. Mezzocchi narrates the history of the house in Enfield, New Hampshire, in which his family lived before he was born. He relates the strange and unusual things which occurred in the allegedly haunted house. As he related the origins of the house and the family that built it, individual audience members would be called upon to read the cards from their boxes, thus the community collectively undertakes to tell the haunting tale. Mezzocchi then revealed he was living in an apartment within the same house, which had been subdivided a few years before. The audience is then given a tour (via the computer), seeing the rooms which were on the photos in the cards in the box. As with cinema, slowly elements of the background began to change, indicating an unseen presence. A camera turned to show a picture would reveal that a chair had moved when the camera returned to its normal position. Shadows moved and lights flicker in the background until the climax, in which Mezzocchi seemed to be driven from the apartment by violent spirits. As with Kerr’s experience in Japan, it was the immersive and personal nature of the experience that informed how effective it was. The audience all took part in relating elements of the story. Each audience member had a lit candle at one point for a blessing ritual to drive the spirits from the house that ultimately failed. This is not passive theater in which one sits and watches.

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Even on a computer within one’s own home, the audience (at this point already very used to participating in employment, education, and even life itself via online services such as Zoom) find themselves active participants in seeing a haunting unfolding in front of them. Indeed, may even be the cause for the increase in activity. Someone Else’s House was an online immersive performance. It was also, however, part of a larger history of twenty-first-century ghost plays that reshape how the ghost is presented in theater. NEO-GHOST DRAMA: THE THEATER IS HAUNTED “As a monster that appears in fiction and mythology,” notes Michael Chemers, “the ghost is common to all cultures” (2018, 121). And since both the ghost and theater/performance are common to all cultures, every culture has ghost plays, or at least narrative dramas that feature ghosts: Hamlet, Snow in Midsummer, The Ghost Story of Yotsuya on the Tokaido Highway, for example. The issue for us to consider is, how does the theater depict ghosts? How can one make a discarnate, incorporeal entity appear on stage. For much of theater history it has been an actor in costume and make up—a corporeal being playing a noncorporeal entity. In addition to the actor-dressed-as-a-ghost approach, special effects have also been used to create a phantom on stage, the best example being Pepper’s Ghost, named after English scientist John Henry Pepper, who demonstrated the effect in 1862. A pane of glass between the audience and the stage can make a brightly lit object off stage appear as a translucent, three-dimensional object or person on stage, allowing for a noncorporeal ghost to be seen on the stage. The effect was very popular in the nineteenth century, and vestiges of it remain in current practice (e.g., in Disney’s Haunted Mansion), but much of the twentieth century returned to the mode of actor-in-a-ghostly-costume to present disembodied presences. Twenty-first-century theater has shifted from that practice, even as it continues to embrace it in many ways. Starting in the late twentieth century with Stephen Mallatrat’s The Woman in Black, the long-running stage adaptation of the Susan Hill novel, and continuing to the present moment, ghost plays as often as not use the elements of theater to create a haunting, relying as much on effect, affect, atmosphere, and a sense of presence to establish a ghost effect. Actors’ bodies might still be employed, but in new and different ways than simply claiming, “this actor plays a ghost.” This transition still includes actor-as-ghost but has also been profoundly shaped by paranormal investigatory television and an aesthetic of the experience of the uncanny rather than simply viewing the ghost as another character. In the wake of such programs as Most Haunted, Ghost Hunters, and

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any of the over one hundred “reality television” ghost hunting programs that have proliferated in the twenty-first century, playwrights and directors have employed the tropes of such shows to create a live experience of a haunting in the theater that no longer merely relies on the actor’s body to visually represent a ghost but to instead create a phenomenological experience through the elements of production and the tropes of those shows to create an experiential haunting in the theater. Ghost hunting shows take “ordinary experts,” as Amy Lawrence calls them, everyday people who also investigate the paranormal and place them in an allegedly haunted location (2022). Ghosts are never fully seen or confirmed. Instead, whispers are heard, shadows shift, inanimate objects move, attempts to communicate are made, and the assertion that the paranormal has been encountered is confirmed. What makes the show effective is that it is presented as a documentary; the audience watches events unfold as they happen, and thus we are experiencing an unfiltered encounter with the paranormal. Contemporary theater artists take this mode and theatricalize it. Elements of the paranormal investigatory television program that begin to appear in ghost theater include the direct address of the audience, ambiguity and use of misdirection, a desire to create a genuinely uncanny atmosphere in the theater itself through darkness, ambiguous sounds and whispers coming from off stage or all parts of the theater, and inanimate objects moving on their own. Such shows call attention to the theater as a haunting and the metatheatrical nature of hauntings and seances. The difference in the twenty-first century is the association with paranormal television and the use of immersive theater techniques to put the audience in the paranormal environment itself. The first play to engage in this new type of presentation of ghosts was Stephen Mallatratt’s 1987 adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel The Woman in Black. The novel is a straightforward linear narrative, purporting to be the memoirs of Arthur Kipps, a lawyer who encountered the supernatural while settling a reclusive widow’s estate in a small town on the northeast coast of England. Upon seeing the eponymous “woman in black,” whose appearances precede the death of a child, a few years later back in London, Kipps watches his own wife and child die in an accident. The novel is thus written as a memoir many years later, retelling the events at Eel Marsh House and then the events of a few years later. Rather than a straightforward adaptation, Mallatrat presents an empty theater, leased by Kipps who has hired an actor to play himself while he plays all other roles in the story. Kipps recreates the events surround his time at Eel Marsh House when he began to see the Woman in Black and hear the noise of the accident that drove her to become a malevolent ghost. They re-enact the story from the novel. A few times during the performance, a “pale young lady . . . with a wasted face” appears to the actor playing Kipps, who at the

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end of the performance asks the real Kipps about what he assumes is the other performer Kipps hired (“She is remarkable. Where did you find her?”) (1989, 51, 50). The audience has seen a woman in black at various points during the performance. She was not listed in the program, nor does she take part in the curtain call. By breaking theater convention, Mallatratt’s version works to suggest an actual supernatural experience for the audience. Woman in Black set the stage for similar productions in the twenty-first century. Jeffrey Hatcher’s Turn of the Screw (2008), adapted for the Portland (ME) Stage Company in 1996, subsequently premiered in New York in 1999, followed the model of The Woman in Black, reducing a complex novel with several characters down to two performers in an empty theater recreating a haunting. “This decision to kill naturalism killed a lot of birds with one stone” (Hatcher 2008, 6). First it allowed for the tale to unfold quickly from a single point of view and second it preserved the haunting ambiguity of James’s novel. “Woman” plays the governess, “Man” plays all the other roles. The governess tells story directly to audience. Hatcher relates, “It seemed to us that if we cast flesh and blood actors to play Quint and Jessel—we were implying thar the ghosts were real and not products of the governess’s imagination. If the audience could see the ghosts, the ghosts existed” (2008, 6). Conversely, if the ghosts had no effect on the physical world at all, that would confirm they are not real. Hatcher allows the audience to experience the events as the governess did, with no external confirmation as to the reality of the events. This is remarkably similar to The Woman in Black. Plays such as Play Dead and The Basement Tapes similarly narrate the story directly to the audience who, as they watch the show also directly experience the haunting. Most recently, as of this writing, Danny Robins’ 2:22: A Ghost Story uses misdirection and subtlety to generate a sense for a contemporary audience that they experience an actual ghost event. Jenny, Sam, and baby Phoebe have moved into a new home that may be haunted. Every night at 2:22 Jenny hears footsteps on the baby monitor. The play begins with the audience observing this phenomenon, and then the rest of the performance consists of a dinner party with Lauren, an old friend of Sam’s, and her new boyfriend, Ben, who agree to remain in the house until 2:22. As the evening progresses, strange things happen that imply the house may indeed be haunted. In her review of the initial run for The Independent, Kate Wyver wrote, “In one of the most chilling scenes, absolutely nothing happens yet the grand old room is electric with fear of expectation” (2021). This puts this play, like the others discussed here, in a similar category to horror cinema that follows the less-is-more model. Such films as Paranormal Activity (2007) or The Conjuring (2013) often build dread in the audience by hinting that something might happen, but when it does it is often small and unexpected but resolves the dread with a jump scare. Like The Woman in Black but unlike The Turn of the Screw, 2:22

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blatantly implies that the audience most certainly has encountered a ghost and that ghosts are real. In his remarkable book The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson argues that every play could be called “Ghosts,” as the theater itself is a haunted place (2003, 3). Each play is a haunting— a re-enacting of some trauma in the same space every night. We perform plays like Hamlet, written over four hundred years ago, and that event in and of itself is the dead speaking to the living. The theater itself is a haunting. Phantom comes from the Greek word meaning to make the invisible visible, which, of course, is also what theater does. It is a site of horror. The theater began, as I noted above, in horror, fear, ghosts and monsters, and it continues so today, albeit in a much more sophisticated, self-aware, and immersive form than in times past. WORKS CITED Anthony, M. Susan. 2008. Gothic Plays and American Society, 1794–1830. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Bisaha, David. 2022. “The Dark Ride Immersive and the Danse Macabre” in Theater and the Macabre, edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 207–22. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2014. “Charles Dickens and the Invention of the Modern Stage Ghost” in Theater and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 27–45. Chemers, Michael. 2018. The Monster in Theater History. London: Routledge. Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Delusion. 2022. “Delusion” . Accessed August 21, 2022. Dickey, Paul, and Charles W. Goddard. 2010. The Ghost Breaker: A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts. New York: F.Q. Books. Forry, Steven Earl. 1990. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gordon, Mel. 2016. Theater of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897–1962. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. 2002. Grand Guignol: The French Theater of Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ———. 2016. Performing Grand-Guignol: Playing the Theater of Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ———. 2022. Grand-Guignolesque: Classic and Contemporary Horror Theater. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Hatcher, Jeffrey. 2008. The Turn of the Screw. New York: Dramatists Play Service.

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Kerr, Margee. 2017. Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. New York: Public Affairs. Larkin, Colin. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Stage and Film Musicals. London: Virgin Books. Lawrence, Amy. 2022. Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First Century America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Leslie, F. Andrew. 1959. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Mandelbaum, Ken. 1991. Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops. New York: St. Martin’s. Norris, David. “Liveness and Aliveness: Chasing the Uncanny in the Contemporary Haunt Industry” in Theater and the Macabre, edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 223–36. Ouellette, Jennifer 2022. “Haunted House Study Sheds Light on How Human Body Responds to Threats.” Ars Technica (February 25) . Accessed February 23, 2022. Reinblatt, George. 2007. Evil Dead: The Musical. New York: Samuel French. Robins, Danny. 2022. 2:22: A Ghost Story. London: Nick Hern Books. Rylah, Juliet Bennett. 2018. “After a Year Hiatus, One of L.A.’s Scariest Theater Experiences Is Returning” Los Angeles Magazine. June 22. . Accessed 21 August 2022. Stuart, Roxana. 1994. Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century Stage. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Thacker, Eugene. 2011. In the Dust of This Planet. Hampshire: Zero Books. Venning, Dan. 2022. “‘Black and Deep Desires’: Sleep No More and the Immersive Macabre” in Theater and the Macabre, edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 193–206. Wyver, Kate. 2021. “2:22: A Ghost Story Review—Lily Allen Gives You the Chills in Slick, Clever Horror.” The Independent. August 12. . Accessed August 21, 2022.

Chapter Nine

Hauntify the World New Directions in Video Game Horror Gwyneth Peaty

GAMES AND HORROR The relationship between video games and horror has always been a close one. Horror tropes have informed the construction of video games for over fifty years, providing inspiration for game designers and meaningful content for players since the inception of the medium. The Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s very first home gaming console, came with a game called Haunted House (1972) that is often credited as the first horror game (Stobbart 2019, 12–13; Garcia 2012). Of course, the experiences offered by the Odyssey are very different to those presented by contemporary video games. When connected to a television, this device could conjure only dots and a line on the blank screen. To bring these simple shapes to life, transparent plastic overlays were placed on the television screen and held firm on the glass by static electricity (Garcia 2012). The Haunted House overlay image depicted the form and interior of an abandoned mansion full of cobwebs, skeletons, and antique furniture. Although they remained basic lights on a screen, the dots that glowed through this transparent image were reframed by its evocative lines; they came to represent a detective and a ghost, competing for clues and treasure as two players explore the mysterious space (for gameplay footage, see Odyssey Now 2020). A haunted house worked well on the Odyssey because it is iconic and easily recognizable. As an established trope in film and literature, the image needed little explanation and was likely to call up a number of expectations and associations for players (Mariconda 2006; Curtis 2008). But the relationship between horror and video games goes beyond symbolic convenience: they are 129

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connected at more intrinsic structural levels. As video game designer Richard Rouse III observes, “the goals of video games and the goals of horror fiction directly overlap, making them ideal bedfellows” (2009, 15). The horror genre is replete with meaningful spaces defined by constraint, in which characters have limited choices and movements available to them; this fits very well with the function of games as rule-based systems (Juul 2003). Games are also, after all, spaces of constraint. Limitations are imposed on players in the form of rules, and it is these rules that transform free play into a game. Through sets of rules, “games provide context for actions,” and these actions become “much more meaningful in a game environment than in an empty space” (Juul 2003). This is clearly evidenced by Haunted House, where the movement of simple dots on a screen is transformed into a spooky adventure via the boundaries, goals, and interactive possibilities of the overlayed game. In the decades following Haunted House, game designers have continued to incorporate horror conventions, especially from film. Video game scholar Bernard Perron (2006) notes that this is not a one-way transference, as “many film scholars have made references to a game analogy in order to explain contemporary horror cinema.” Leading into the twenty-first century, an ongoing cycle of “cross-fertilization” between films and games found its most direct relationship in the sphere of horror (Krzywinska 2002). This trend continues as digital convergence facilitates closer integration between media industries (Brookey 2010). Every genre has its customs, but there is something about horror in particular that lends itself to gameplay and gaming analogies. As Randy (Jamie Kennedy) famously exhorts in Scream (1996), “there are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie!” The often-formulaic structure of popular horror films translates well into the rule systems of video games, where specific actions are rewarded and punished (Weise 2009). Despite this kinship, it is important to remember that video games are fundamentally different from cinema in crucial ways. Most obviously, “the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player” (Ermi and Mäyrä 2005). A player experiences a game through active participation; “you” are always implicated and involved in whatever unfolds. In this sense, video games offer a form of dynamic immediacy that can lead to deeply engaging and disturbing horror encounters. As time has passed and new technologies evolved, the relationship between video games and horror has become more sophisticated. Some commentators propose that “games have only become more frightening as technology has evolved” (Petite and Yaden 2021). Improved speed and graphics, more powerful gaming consoles, and increasingly realistic virtual environments have certainly enhanced the quality and impact of horror games. While this chapter acknowledges such advances, it also suggests we consider more subtle developments emerging in horror gaming. Technological advancements

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have expanded the contexts in which horror can be experienced, blurring the perceived boundaries between reality and fiction, life and game (Botting 2015). Taking part in this process, horror video games are on the cutting edge of epistemological and ontological shifts in how we understand ourselves as mediated beings in the world. Ultimately, this chapter argues that twenty-first-century video games are on the path to delivering more complex experiences of horror than ever before, although not always in forms that are welcomed by all. NEW WORLDS: VR HORROR GAMES Recent developments in the implementation and accessibility of Virtual Reality (VR) devices are among the most dramatic examples of technological evolution in video games. VR represents a huge shift in how horror is experienced, as it pushes the immersive potential of gaming to its most advanced point yet. Some have argued that “few mediums are as perfectly suited to horror as VR” (Hood et al. 2022), and indeed the characteristics of this technology directly facilitate many of the horror genre’s core preoccupations. VR games typically involve wearing a specialized headset that covers the player’s eyes, using motion tracking software to create the sensation of being “inside” a game space. This, as Dawn Stobbart notes, “allows the player to become enveloped completely in the game, auditorily, visually and even mentally, which, in turn, enables the visceral experience of horror to be heightened” (2019, 21). Exploring a haunted house feels rather different when it is no longer on a screen in front of you, but all around you. For example, Phasmophobia (Kinetic Games 2020) is a VR ghost hunting game in which the player (and up to three friends) explores various haunted spaces in an effort to record and catalogue the spirits within. This game contains little in the way of narrative, instead putting most of its resources into sound, space, and lighting design. With no weapons and only a torch to light the way, players venture down dark corridors and search seemingly empty rooms, all the while listening for strange noises or signs of movement, which can come from any direction. The result is a terrifying experience, and what one reviewer called “the best ghost game ever made” (Stanton 2020). Phasmophobia “is a game that gets into your head. When you’re playing the real world doesn’t exist. When you stop, some aspect has seeped into reality. This game has left me and companions not so much stunned as scrambled, jacked on adrenaline” (Stanton 2020). This embodied sense of horror is not uncommon among VR players, resulting from the interaction between technology and the human body.

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By simulating an encompassing three-dimensional environment, VR horror games increase a player’s sense of paranoia and fear (Bender and Sung 2021). Participant research indicates that strong physiological arousal is induced during play, because “VR games allow players to experience vivid threats that feel identical to reality, causing players to instinctively adapt their physiology to the perceived threat” (Lemmens et al. 2021). If horror is defined, as Noel Carroll (1990, 17) argues, as a visceral sensation—an affective response that horror texts are explicitly designed to elicit from audiences—VR would indeed appear to be an ideal medium. As Carroll points out, the term “horror” originates in the Latin “horrere” and Old French “orror,” referring to the physical experience of one’s hair rising or bristling. Horror has its roots in an embodied experience of fear connected “with an abnormal (from the subject’s point of view) physiological state of felt agitation” (Carroll 1990, 24). Both anecdotal accounts and formal studies show that VR is capable of evoking precisely this state in players, who not only experience physical fear during gameplay, but sometimes afterward as well. In one study, a number of participants reported residual anxieties in the days after playing a VR horror game; they noted a lingering sensitivity to “perceived strange sounds” and experienced “fear of sudden attack from behind” (Lin 2017, 359). For these individuals the VR experience blurred the perceived line between game and reality, extending their affective responses and anticipation of horror into everyday life. Despite its impact, there are several barriers preventing VR from becoming the most popular form of horror gaming. For one, the positive excitement derived from mediated horror is predicated, at least partially, on a sense of distance. Isabel Pinedo describes horror as: an exercise in recreational terror, a simulation of danger not unlike a roller coaster ride. In both, the conviction that there is nothing to fear turns stress/ arousal into a pleasurable experience. Fear and pleasure commingle. (1996, 25)

While it may offer a realistic simulation, VR is not necessarily the most enjoyable form of “recreational terror” for players, because it threatens this core assumption of safety. In their participant study, Lemmens et al. observe with surprise that, against expectations, “playing in VR generally did not result in more enjoyment than playing on a TV” (2021, 232). The researchers suggest that, while “playing a horror game does not present any real danger to the player [. . .] the higher sense of presence in VR may cause more trouble adopting a frame of mind that allows for detachment from harm, thereby causing anxiety instead of excitement for some players” (2021, 232). The affects such games can elicit in players are very real. Like a roller coaster, VR can cause nausea, dizziness, and motion sickness. The headsets

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themselves present a physical sensation, covering the player’s eyes and, for larger devices, gripping their whole head like a helmet, potentially causing discomfort or claustrophobia.1 As one critic put it, “people don’t like wearing stuff on their face and getting sick doing it, and having to pay a lot of money for the privilege” (Peddie, cited in McGowan 2022). The cost of hardware has indeed been prohibitive for many, although this is slowly improving.2 Risk of physical injury or property damage is also an issue with VR games, as players cannot easily perceive real obstacles around them (Needleman and Rodriguez 2022). Raucous online video compilations show what happens when VR players forget their surroundings; people are jumping, stumbling, falling, running into walls, or striking out and hitting things in their vicinity. Although this footage is often represented as comedic, the potential impact can be serious. As confirmed in the Journal of Medical Case Reports, at least one player has fractured their spine while engrossed in a VR game (Baur et al. 2021). Because not everyone is willing or able to participate in such gameplay, VR has not yet taken over the horror game industry but exists as a growing tentacle on the back of a larger beast. HYBRID REALITIES: AR HORROR GAMES Augmented Reality (AR) offers another example of how technological evolutions have impacted representations of horror in video games. Where VR aims to construct a whole new perceptual model of reality, AR works to blend layers of digital information with real-world environments. As Gregory Kipper and Joseph Rampolla explain, unlike Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world. Therefore, AR supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it. (2013, 1)

This is an important distinction, because AR horror games are typically defined as those that superimpose horror elements “on top” of, or within, everyday spaces and objects. Just as the transparent overlay turned a blank screen into a haunted house on the Magnavox Odyssey, AR provides a lens through which the world can be viewed differently. In this case, however, the lens is not a static image, but a networked mobile device with access to a camera, location data, and GPS technology. AR allows mobile games to access the player’s real location and layer gaming elements onto the physical environment around them, as seen through the device’s camera lens. The most successful example of this is Pokémon GO (Niantic 2016), which allows people to interact with Pokémon or “pocket

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monsters” via smartphone as they traverse their surroundings on foot. Downloaded over one billion times since its release (Burks 2019), this game continues to illustrate the tremendous potential of AR as an accessible and user-friendly technology. AR games do not require specialized equipment; they run on devices that many already own, such as smartphones and tablets. AR games also tend to be very affordable—available as free apps or for just a few dollars—and they can be played anywhere, even on public transport. While it deals with monsters, Pokémon GO is not a horror game, but a playful and nostalgic experience based on a popular existing franchise (Peaty and Leaver 2020). AR horror is yet to achieve mainstream success on the scale of Pokémon GO. However, these games now come in a variety of forms, most dedicated to generating horror within everyday spaces. Paranormal investigations are a recurring theme in AR horror games and apps, which often frame the smartphone as a supernatural device equipped to uncover and visualize hidden terrors. The earliest examples of AR horror were quite rudimentary in appearance, relying primarily on the power of suggestion to induce fear. For instance, Ghost Radar (Spud Pickles 2009) is a simple phone app that provides spectral “readings” of the player’s surroundings, as presented on a basic radar crosshair. As you move around holding the phone, markers appear on the radar screen, revealing the physical location of invisible spirits in the world surrounding you. A changing series of numbers represents fluctuations in psychic energy. Occasionally, a mumbled word emerges from the device, representing a nearby ghost’s attempt to communicate. Later iterations were designed to assist you in corroborating these close encounters and sharing them with friends. The updated Ghost Radar: Connect includes a detailed interface with audio recording capability, image capture, links to social media, and an LED flashlight. “With a touch of a button share your readings with the rest of your world” prompt the designers, inviting players to locate the supernatural in everyday spaces not only for themselves, but others as well. More recent AR games, such as Night Terrors: Bloody Mary (Imprezario 2018), present vivid visual depictions of spectral horror as integrated with both physical reality and personal technologies. Making full use of the smartphone: [Night Terrors] uses state-of-the-art augmented reality (AR) mobile technology to immerse you into a real-life survival horror game by taking the player’s environment, mapping it and filling it with terrifying creatures—ghouls, ghosts and other petrifying entities. The technology then uses your device’s camera and LED light to create personalized scares by manipulating devices sending eerie text messages, phone calls, photos/videos, and further enhancing the experience with 360 audio. (Imprezario 2018)

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With horror film director and screenwriter Oren Peli as its executive producer (Jagneux 2018), Night Terrors loosely adapts the story of “Bloody Mary,” a popular folklore narrative about a malevolent spirit that inhabits bathroom mirrors and can be summoned via ritual (de Vos 2012, 155; Dundes 2002, 77–78). In the case of Night Terrors, the game itself acts as a ritual summons to Bloody Mary. To play, it is recommended to wear headphones and walk around indoors at night. Looking through the smartphone lens reveals the landscape of your home transformed into a sinister realm of static and spectral interference. The game uses the phone’s torch to create visual effects (such as lightning flashes) and sounds (such as creaks, breathing, doors closing, a doorbell ringing) to create the feeling entities are present around you. Horrifying apparitions appear on the phone screen at regular intervals as Bloody Mary, her devilish acolytes, and her victims reach out to you. As you move around, the phone also receives mysterious anonymous calls, and text messages pop up alerting you to danger (“BEHIND YOU!!!”). These elements work together to build the sense that “Mary” has indeed perforated the player’s reality, saturating a familiar domestic space with blood. AT THE BOUNDARIES OF HORROR AND PLAY By presenting a way of engaging with the world that combines real and simulated elements, AR offers new ways of experiencing “recreational terror” (Pinedo 1996, 25). Horror impacts players differently in AR than in VR, as well as in more traditional forms of video game play. While all media forms present a mediation of perception to some degree, Heemsbergen, Bowtell, and Vincent point out that “AR’s mediation of space and time differs from media that came before in that there is an active (dis)integration of mediated environment via perceptual integration of computational spatial data environments” (2021, 838). Where VR aims to temporarily replicate/replace the perceived world in its entirety, AR facilitates a rejection of “organic perception” in favor of a model of “computational perception” that expands human sensory and epistemological frameworks (Heemsbergen et al. 2021, 837–38). Players are encouraged to accept reality as a hybrid experience, viewing physical and digital elements as part of the same mediated environment.3 As a result, the player’s sense of fear can be considerably heightened: “Instead of transporting you to another world—a place you can easily remind yourself is fake—AR horror games instead invade your real world” (Jagneux 2018). Such a move threatens the very nature of play, potentially disturbing the balance of fear and confidence on which our consumption of horror depends. In his analysis of play as a cultural phenomenon, Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga (1938) famously asserted that play is defined by clear

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boundaries separating it from everyday life. Indeed, he argues that one of the core characteristics of play is its “limitedness” in time and space (Huizinga 2013, 9). Play represents the freezing of “normal” life and rules, which are superseded by a “magic circle” in which “the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count” (2013, 10–11). The ontological border between game and reality is understood as firm in this context, and this clarity is what lends play its joyous and sacred role in human society. Paradoxically, a game’s rules and limits facilitate experiences of freedom from other forms of control. One might draw a comparison to horror here, which also contains a paradox at its heart: Normally, we shun what causes distress; most of us don’t play in traffic to entertain ourselves, nor do we attend autopsies to while away the hours. So why do we subject ourselves to fictions that will horrify us? (Carroll 1990, 10).

Horror represents that which is frightening, shocking, and disgusting, but many people enjoy exposure to it. How, Carroll asks, can people be attracted to things that are repulsive? (1990, 160). He concludes that this fascination is “rendered intelligible” by an awareness of the border between fiction and reality: “audiences know horrific beings are not in their presence, and, indeed, that they do not exist, and, therefore, their description or depiction in horror fictions may be a cause for interest rather than either flight or any other prophylactic enterprise” (1990, 206). Just like play, it is horror’s strict “limitedness” in time and space that allow it to offer an enjoyable experience free from real concerns about pain, danger, or survival. Horror belongs to the world of “let’s pretend”—the world of games. Scholars have noted that video games increasingly challenge the concept of the “magic circle” on multiple levels (Liebe 2008; Calleja 2012). AR games, in particular, demand a “rethinking [of] the different frame layers and elasticity of the magic circle” (Larsen and Majgaard 2019, 47). AR deliberately blurs the perceived line between fiction and reality, play and everyday life, transforming the entire “ordinary” world into a potential game space. If one adopts Pinedo’s argument that enjoyment of horror depends upon “the conviction that there is nothing to fear” (1996, 25), or indeed Carroll’s assertion that knowing fictional horrors do not really exist is what makes them fun, you might well question how the potential dissolution of this confidence in AR impacts experiences of horror. A truly horrific AR game threatens to “transform your surroundings into a terrifying hellscape” (Guest 2017). As the perceptual walls of the “magic circle” collapse, the line between reality and fiction seems destined to follow. The implications of dissolving ontological boundaries in relation to horror are yet to be fully explored, in part because AR technology is still in its early

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stages. Quality AR games can be expensive and time-consuming to create, require ongoing work to maintain, and often encounter technical issues and bugs. This makes them difficult for independent game developers and smaller teams to attempt. As a result, the most consistently playable horror-themed AR games are those supported by existing franchises and large media companies. These include AMC’s official The Walking Dead: Our World (Next Games 2018), based on the popular television series, and Jurassic World: Alive (Ludia 2018), which is supported by NBC Universal. A consequence of this monopoly has been the dilution of horror content and limitations on how AR is used. There are indications that large companies are shying away from embracing the full potential of AR horror due to their apprehension over its affects. Brett Tomberlin and Bryce Katz, the cofounders of Imprezario, noted that they were initially rejected by Apple after submitting Night Terrors: Bloody Mary for review, because it was “too real”: Some of the fake texts and messages that came through while you’re playing really do seem real [. . .]. That was the whole point, but it was too much. They actually established a new rule after we met with them . . . saying that you can’t replicate the iOS UI look. They don’t want users thinking their actual contacts are in trouble. (Katz, cited in Jagneux 2018)

That a company like Apple would actively restrict AR content in this manner suggests that there are indeed anxieties circling over the degree to which mediated horror impacts players and extends its dangerous limbs a step “too far” into the real world.4 CONCLUSION VR and AR are often identified as two points on a larger spectrum of technologies known as Mixed Reality or MR. While still emerging and developing, MR is increasingly being studied for its potential to “establish new configurations of perception and agency through the interplay between digital and physical space” (Egliston and Carter 2022, 1). Video games are well placed to take part in this era of experimentation. In a digitized world, being able to understand all space as mediated arguably represents a core “visual fluency” (Heemsbergen et al 2021, 837–38). Playful interactions with MR technologies can facilitate such understanding and encourage greater investment in new visions of the world as infused with networked data. At the same time, it is possible to detect glitches in this process of naturalizing new ways of seeing and being, particularly in the realm of horror. As this chapter has shown, VR and AR games are producing a series of terrors that are not always

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comfortable or welcome. Anxiety and uncertainty haunt these hybrids, reflecting not only the realism of their content but their ability to transgress existing categories of experience, such as play and even horror itself. Fred Botting has pointed out that “a double movement—looking backwards and hurrying forwards—is evident in techno-spectral media” (2015, 18). While technological advances in the first decades of the twenty-first century have facilitated significant advances in horror games, they have also revealed a deepening preoccupation with historical themes. As this chapter has illustrated, the shift into MR frequently takes place alongside a fresh investment in the supernatural and occult. Mobile horror games play at the time-honored role of psychic medium, offering a conduit between the realms of living and dead. The haunted house motif is reimagined again and again, rebuilding a now ancient structure within increasingly complex digital environments. A concern with uncovering what is hidden, what lies “beneath” the surface of our world, has long shadowed the horror genre. Video games seem destined to push this endeavor as far as technology will allow, especially in regard to domestic spaces. Hauntify (VirtualGo 2021) is an early example of what may be coming—an MR app that allows you to precisely scan and map the interior of your home (or any building) and transform it into a horror game. Created by one young independent developer, Hauntify offers a genuinely frightening experience in which the player is both auteur and victim of their own uncanny terrorscape. As the tools required for MR game development and play become more accessible, it seems likely that game designers and players will continue to push the limits of horror and play. Accordingly, these new creations provide exciting new directions in video game and horror research. NOTES 1. Simply using a VR headset can present risks. In July 2021, Facebook recalled approximately four million Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets because the foam insert was found to cause “rashes, swelling, burning, itching, hives, and bumps” on thousands of players’ skin (US Consumer Product Safety Commission 2021). 2. Forbes declared 2019 as “The Year Virtual Reality Gets Real” due to the increasing availability of affordable VR headsets and the switch from tethered to standalone devices (Rogers 2019). 3. Another example of this in practice, albeit for a younger audience, is the Hidden Side™ building kit series (2019–2020) from toy company LEGO. Promoted for children “who dare see the unseen,” the kits included various “haunted” buildings to construct, from the traditional haunted house to a lighthouse, a subway tunnel, and a fairground. Each was sold with an AR app that could scan the finished model and infuse it with ghosts and challenges: “Activating the free augmented reality app

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brings the models to life, revealing a hidden world of interactive mysteries and challenges to solve. When combined, the two worlds make each other even more compelling and fun” (LEGO 2019). 4. Notably, Night Terrors is no longer available for download at the time of writing this article and Imprezario have moved on to focus on the (much less realistic) franchise-based AR game Ghostbusters: Afterlife ScARe (2021).

WORKS CITED Baur, D., C. Pfeifle, and C.E. Heyde. 2021. “Cervical Spine Injury after Virtual Reality Gaming: A Case Report.” Journal of Medical Case Reports, 15: 312. jmedicalcasereports.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13256-021–02880–9. Accessed August 21, 2022. Bender, Stuart M., and Billy Sung. 2021. “Fright, Attention, and Joy While Killing Zombies in Virtual Reality: A Psychophysiological Analysis of VR User Experience.” Psychology and Marketing, 38, no. 6: 937–47. Botting, Fred. 2015. “Technospectrality: Essay on Uncannimedia,” in Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics, edited by Justin D. Edwards. New York: Routledge, 17–34. Brookey, Robert Alan. 2010. Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries. Indiana University Press. Burk, Robin. (2019). “Pokémon Go Surpasses 1 Billion Downloads.” Screen Rant. https:​//​screenrant​.com​/pokemon​-go​-downloads​-1​-billion​-lifetime​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Calleja, Gordon. 2012. “Erasing the Magic Circle,” in The Philosophy of Computer Games, edited by John Richard Sageng, Hallvard Fossheim, and Tarjei Mandt Larsen. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 77–91. Carroll, Noel. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. Curtis, Barry. 2008. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books. De Vos, Gail. 2012. What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture. ABC-CLIO. Dundes, Alan. 2002. Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Egliston, B., and M. Carter. 2022. “‘The Interface of the Future’: Mixed Reality, Intimate Data and Imagined Temporalities.” Big Data & Society. 1–15. Ermi, Laura, and Frans Mäyrä. 2005. “Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion” in Changing Views: Worlds in Play. Selected Papers of the 2005 Digital Games Research Association’s International Conference, edited by Suzanne De Castell and Jennifer Jenson. http:​ //​ www​ .digra​ .org​ /digital​-library​/publications​/fundamental​-components​-of​-the​-gameplay​-experience​ -analysing​-immersion​/. Accessed August 21, 2022.

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Garcia, Chris. 2012. The Haunted House. Computer History Museum. CHM Blog. https:​//​computerhistory​.org​/blog​/the​-haunted​-house​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Guest Writer. 2017. “Night Terrors: The Beginning Is the Augmented Reality Horror Game You’ve Been Waiting For.” Gear Brain. https:​//​www​.gearbrain​.com​/review​ -night​-terrors​-ar​-game​-2423102505​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. Heemsbergen, L., G. Bowtell, and J. Vincent. 2021. “Conceptualising Augmented Reality: From Virtual Divides to Mediated Dynamics.” Convergence, 27, no. 3: 830–46. Hood, Vic, Malindy Hetfeld, Henry St Leger, Max Slater-Robins, and Emma Boyle. 2022. “Best Horror Games: the Scariest Games to Play Right Now.” Tech Radar. https:​//​www​.techradar​.com​/au​/news​/best​-horror​-games. Accessed August 21, 2022. Huizinga, Johan. 2013. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture [1938]. London: Routledge. Imprezario Entertainment. 2018. Night Terrors: Bloody Mary—Official Teaser Trailer. [YouTube Video]. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=WIibzkve4y4. Accessed August 21, 2022. Jagneux, David. 2018. “Night Terrors: Bloody Mary Is AR Horror from Paranormal Activity’s Director.” Venture Beat. https:​//​venturebeat​.com​/2018​/10​/13​/night​ -terrors​-bloody​-mary​-is​-ar​-horror​-from​-paranormal​-activitys​-director​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Juul, Jesper. 2003. “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness,” in Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings, edited by Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens. Utrecht: Utrecht University, 30–45. https:​ //​www​.jesperjuul​.net​/text​/gameplayerworld​/. Accessed 21 August 2022. Kipper, Gregory, and Joseph Rampolla. 2013. Augmented Reality: An Emerging Technologies Guide to AR. Waltham, MA: Syngress. Krzywinska, Tanya. 2002. “Hands-on Horror,” in ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/ Interfaces, edited by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. London: Wallflower, 206–23. Larsen, Lasse Juel, and Gunver Majgaard. 2019. “The Concept of the Magic Circle and the Pokémon GO Phenomenon,” in Augmented Reality Games I: Understanding the Pokémon GO Phenomenon, edited by Vladimir Geroimenko. Springer Publishing, 33–50. LEGO. 2019. “The LEGO Group Introduces LEGO® HIDDEN SIDE™, Combining Building with Augmented Reality to Create a New Way to Play.” Lego.com, February 14.  https://www.lego.com/en-tw/aboutus/news/2019/february/legogroup-introduces-lego-hidden-side. Accessed October 28, 2022. Lemmens, Jeroen S., Monika Simon, and Sindy R. Sumter. 2021. “Fear and Loathing in VR: The Emotional and Physiological Effects of Immersive Games.” Virtual Reality: the Journal of the Virtual Reality Society, 26: 223–34. Liebe, Michael. 2008. “There Is No Magic Circle: On the Difference between Computer Games and Traditional Games,” in The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference Proceedings, edited by Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe, and Dieter Mersch. Potsdam University Press, 324–40.

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Lin, Jih-Hsuan Tammy. 2017. “Fear in Virtual Reality (VR): Fear Elements, Coping Reactions, Immediate and Next-Day Fright Responses toward a Survival Horror Zombie Virtual Reality Game.” Computers in Human Behavior, 72: 350–61. Marak, Katarzyna. 2021. “Independent Horror Games between 2010 and 2020: Selected Characteristic Features and Discernible Trends.” Images: The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication, 29, no. 38: 175–90. Mariconda, Steven. 2006. “The Haunted House,” in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Greenwood Press, 267–306. McGowan, Chris. 2022. “Steady Growth Edges VR Closer to Mainstream Waters.” VFX: The Magazine of the Visual Effects Society. https:​//​www​.vfxvoice​.com​/steady​ -growth​-edges​-vr​-closer​-to​-deeper​-mainstream​-waters​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Needleman, Sarah E., and Salvador Rodriguez. 2022. “VR to the ER: Metaverse Early Adopters Prove Accident-Prone.” Wall Street Journal. https:​//​www​.wsj​ .com​/articles​/metaverse​-virtual​-reality​-vr​-accident​-prone​-meta​-11643730489​?mod​ =e2tw. Accessed August 21, 2022. Odyssey Now. 2020. Let’s Play: Haunted House (Magnavox Odyssey 1972). [YouTube Video]. University of Pittsburgh. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =6ltYIXh4BQI. Accessed August 21, 2022. Peaty, Gwyneth, and Tama Leaver. 2020. “The Familiar Places We Dream About: Pokémon GO and Nostalgia during a Global Pandemic.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 9, no. 2: 127–43. Perron, Bernard. 2006. “Coming to Play at Frightening Yourself: Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games.” Aesthetics of Play Conference Proceedings. Berger, Norway. https:​//​www​.aestheticsofplay​.org​/papers​/perron2​.htm. Accessed August 21, 2022. Petite, Steven, and Joseph Yaden. 2021. “The Best Horror Games of All Time.” Digital Trends. https:​//​www​.digitaltrends​.com​/gaming​/best​-horror​-games​-of​-all​ -time​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Pinedo, Isabel. 1996. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, 48, no. 1: 17–31. Rogers, Sol. 2019. “2019: The Year Virtual Reality Gets Real.” Forbes, June 21. https:​//​www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/solrogers​/2019​/06​/21​/2019​-the​-year​-virtual​-reality​ -gets​-real​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Rouse III, Richard. 2009. “Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games,” in Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, edited by Bernard Perron. London: McFarland, 15–25. Stanton, Rich. 2020. “Phasmophobia Is the Best Ghost Game Ever Made.” PC Gamer. https:​//​www​.pcgamer​.com​/au​/phasmophobia​-is​-the​-best​-ghost​-game​-ever​ -made​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Stobbart, Dawn. 2019. Videogames and Horror: From Amnesia to Zombies, Run! University of Wales Press. US Consumer Product Safety Commission. 2021. “Facebook Technologies Recalls Removable Foam Facial Interfaces for Oculus Quest 2 Virtual Reality Headsets

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Due to Skin Irritation Hazard.” [Recall Alert] https:​//​www​.cpsc​.gov​/Recalls​/2021​ /Facebook​-Technologies​-Recalls​-Removable​-Foam​-Facial​-Interfaces​-for​-Oculus​ -Quest​-2​-Virtual​-Reality​-Headsets​-Due​-to​-Skin​-Irritation​-Hazard​-Recall​-Alert. Accessed August 21, 2022. Weise, Matthew. 2009. “The Rules of Horror: Procedural Adaptation in Clock Tower, Resident Evil, and Dead Rising,” in Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, edited by Bernard Perron. London: McFarland, 238–66.

Chapter Ten

The Evolution of Horror and New Media Carlos Littles

NEW MEDIA Horror is dead, and fans are left holding the machete that dealt the cleaving blow. Now, this isn’t necessarily true, but at the very least, this is what people like to tell themselves periodically when there is a sense of stagnation or degradation of the facets that they have come to love about a style of art. There exists a potentiality to blame consumerism for corrupting the horror media that people adore. By prioritizing pecuniary gain, creators are not incentivized to engage in risks that are outside of those decisions that have been proven to be successful. Corporate greed is one of the most cited culprits for this supposed corruption of any genre, resulting in series being extended well past their popularity or sacrifices being made of some other quality that made the content special. While film is in the spotlight of the critique above, some films are millennium defining. The found-footage craze that erupted toward the close of the twentieth century is largely to thank for the waves in media that are popular today. The Blair Witch Project (1999) has inspired many pranks, films, spoofs, and blogs in spaces like TikTok and Tumblr. The argument here and throughout is that there has been a great democratization of horror that is a defining element of New Horror Media. The sense of attraction to “unheimlichkeit,” or allure of the uncanny, is only heightened by this sense of “being there” that first-person point-of-view filming can provide with relative ease. The use of a Hi8 camcorder and marketing that presented the content within the film of The Blair Witch Project as legitimate (complete with a mockumentary and website that came out ahead of the film’s release), only added to the sense of realism that 143

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sold the premise of authenticity to fans. The tradition of “fakelore” in the digital age, which is the intentionally crafted folklore that is presented and received as if it were real for amusement or pecuniary gain, owes much to this film and its predecessors. Recognition of The Blair Witch Project’s impact is not an implicit adoration for its end product. Nearly universally panned, the consensus is that the film suffers from predictable issues such as poor acting, failure to maintain interest throughout the movie, and being too close to the detested found-footage titles that came before, such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980). While one can acknowledge the shortcomings of this film, the argument remains firm that this work helped kick off new innovations in horror media such as commercially successful “mockbusters” and social media accounts that are popular for their ability to command overt voyeuristic potential. Audiences continue to enjoy having monsters to fear, just as there had been fascinations with folkloric figures in the past, as with characters like Dracula. In some cases, this melds into a state of adoration as evidenced by the fandom around cryptid creatures. The celebration of such cryptids results in festivals, the creation of communities such as Squatchers, or museums to mythical folklore like the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or Zak Bagans’s The Haunted Museum. This celebration also extends into fanfiction, skits, and recreations of “found footage” that manifest in clip media as seen on Vine or TikTok, audio horror in the form of podcasting, forums found on 4Chan or Reddit, and long-form content creation on Twitch and YouTube. The introduction of cryptozoological museums has helped serve as tourist destinations for the small towns that many of these creatures are rumored to have been seen in, but also legitimize them as an area of study for hobbyists and more. NEW MEDIA, NEW AUDIENCE? With the arrival of the digital age, there has been a major transformation in how any given medium is shared, created, and promoted in large part to its seemingly infinite permutations. More than ever before the genre is not there just to be consumed by its audience, but open to their taking part within it at all stages of funding, production, creation, marketing, and distribution. Consequently, the new wave of horror has thrived on the inventiveness and outspoken nature of its audience. Perhaps more appropriately referred to as “fandoms,” those who either rabidly or casually consume the content are “seizing the means of production” by making it more accessible to interact with than ever on publicly available platforms such as YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and more. Fan or “stan” accounts, merchandise purchases, cosplays,

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conventions, and festivals are all ways that consumers can support their favorites beyond the box office or bookstore. This support (or at other times outward disdain) boosts the visibility of the genre which affords it more power to shape the outlook of popular culture. What emerges as a constant about horror is its attachment to tradition and folklore—also resulting in the newfound popularity of Folk Horror—and its potential to plumb the depths of our fears irrespective if it takes the form of visual, auditory, or some combination of the two. As Adam Hart notes in Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, though cinema may be the most widely known expression of the horror genre, it ought not be regarded as the most transformative (Hart 2019, 215). Indeed, the bigger share of credit for these movements, however marginal, must be given to the innovations made by smaller creators on a variety of platforms. Under the skies of the new millennia come new gags and old haunts. The digital age has created a realm of bountiful possibilities in which to explore horror. This is not to say that the written word and the silver screen are obsolete—quite the opposite. Harkening back to this cycle of homage through language, trope, and even cinematographic angles, we see that the possibilities through forums, video websites, and more often take novels and films as inspiration. As a result, their virality and the possibility of short form content like memes has expanded access to the genre in a manner never before seen. Should creators seek to pursue horror content, virtually anyone with a camera or access to a forum can contribute to the ever-expanding library of visual horror. Audio horror is also popular and can be tackled by those who have access to a recording device. Captioning and translation are making horror classics instantly more accessible for the hearing impaired and across cultures. When interpreting new media, we ought to be cognizant of the many ways that it’s transformed the manner in which we take in information through our senses. Horror is a genre poised, perhaps more than any other, to strike at our senses to fulfil its aims, whatever we understand those to be. With following shifts, largely in technology, we can track the evolution of horror through the creation of new mediums to share and interact with the beloved style. FORUMS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEW HORROR What constitutes New Media? The introduction of novel ways of both communication and presentation have spurred the transformation of the way that horror comes to be consumed, the success of which is directly tied to the expansive nature of what we might consider to be horror. Forums, podcasts, streaming/games, and digital video catalogs all tie into the most prominent forms of New Media. In this section, there will be an emphasis on the written

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form of horror and the most transformative instruments the twenty-first century has provided. While the virality of clip media tends to hog the limelight in the current digital age, it is important not to understate the impact that message boards had (and still have) in setting the stage for the transformation of how horror is experienced in the other forms of New Media. Be it Wattpad, Reddit, or Tumblr, communal spaces are often the origin sources of the most infamous tales of the internet such as Slenderman on the website Something Awful in 2009 or Jeff the Killer who came to light a year earlier on YouTube (Tolbert 2018, 28). Websites like Creepypasta.com and fandom wikis host detailed descriptions of these stories and include their variations. Internet forums are at once fantastic places for discovering the horror genre and also frightening in and of themselves, with the sites 4Chan and Reddit being among the most popular. Launched in 2003, 4chan has grown to have 22,000,000 unique users per month (“Advertise-4chan” 2022). As Bernstein et al. note, the design of the most popular pages on 4chan make it difficult to navigate and even more so if one is strictly familiar with Alphabet (Google) or Meta (Facebook/Instagram) apps and websites (Bernstein et al. 2011, 50). While anonymity and ephemerality are the rule in spaces like 4chan, and perhaps the rule may be applied to the internet more generally, these additions do not stifle potentiality of a viral moment. While the oldest and most popular page, “/b/,” has a subculture that deserves more attention than this essay’s scope permits, researchers find that those threads which focus on horror tend to have the longest lifespan. Found on boards such as “/x/” (a popular board for paranormal posts), these threads on horror topics remain active by constant and repetitive spam interaction, a technique known as “bumping.” Organic opinion sharing can also keep a thread alive, denoting that a topic is either novel or contentious. In terms of its larger contribution, the site and internet forums in general have spawned the creation of many “creepypastas” (Bernstein et al. 2011, 55). The term creepypasta is a portmanteau of “copy” and “paste” of local legend, internet folklore, or some imaginative combination of the two. More than a digital game of telephone where something changes with each iteration, creepypastas are the stuff of internet legend. Many involve rituals that, if done, may ward off an unnatural entity from giving you an unwelcome visit, while others are simply created to scare in the hopes of becoming viral. Capitalizing on the many ways to interact with anonymity and the difficulty to prove or disprove certain claims, creators hijack the written word for a myriad of reasons. Tolbert cites Dégh and Vazsonyi in relaying that ostension is “showing the reality itself instead of using any kind of signification” (Dégh and Vázsonyi 1983, 6). Tolbert argues that creepypasta figures like Slenderman represent “reverse” ostension such that a figure or legend is communally cultivated

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and modeled intentionally after existing standards of folklore. By mirroring what audiences are already familiar with accepting, creators can usher in new figures of horror. PODCASTS AND AUDIO HORROR One of the oldest and most intimate forms of horror storytelling, the spoken word, is given new life in the realm of podcasting. While the “audioblog” has existed for some time, the podcast hit its stride with the integration of the medium with Apple. At the D3 Expo in May 2005, Steve Jobs described the etymology of podcast as being derived from “iPod” and “broadcast” and demonstrates the simplicity with which podcasts might be incorporated and accessed on Apple software (SteveJobsArchive 2005). News media flocked in via the extremely popular RSS channels and the horror fans were not too far behind with podcasts such as Archive 81, NoSleep, and Pseudopod following soon after. In her article, “Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First Steps in Exploring the Horror Podcast,” Danielle Hancock directly explores the ability of audio to meaningfully deliver horror themed content. Evocative of the radio shows of yesteryear, the world of Night Vale is filled with both comedic beats and terrifying tales. “Cecil,” the radio host, draws the listener in by addressing them as “citizens of Night Vale” and speaks to the listener as if they might truly access Cecil’s reality. Hancock regards Cecil’s omnipotence as a large part of his disturbing undertone given that the radio host ought to be more limited in his knowledge of the events that occur in spaces that he does not “physically” occupy (Hancock 2016, 224). Nonetheless, Cecil remains adept at predicting the listener’s potential reactions and future, issuing warnings such as “keep a spare flashlight near you just in case” and is at times cognizant of the happenings of what is occurring in our dimension. Though fictive, this direction offers a deeper level of immersion for the listener and becomes a methodological tool to bring the listener back into the realm that has been crafted for them on the part of the production team. As Hancock notes, “The ease with which Cecil ‘finds’ his listeners’ thoughts and locations reflect well radio’s uncanny ability to span vast spaces and enter, unseeable, homes and private spaces, instantaneously enacting a relationship between physically disconnected people” (Hancock 2016, 224). What the success of the found footage genre made glaringly apparent at the start of the new century was that there was a desire to have such intimate connections with horror. The success of the in-person performance seems to contrast with this, however. Night Vale’s production has been successful as a touring group, despite its intended delivery by way of radio. Through this, we

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see that the appeal has transcended the intimate nature of the purely auditory and fandoms have accrued followers out of adoration for the contributions of the voice acting, writing, and sound production. An example of this is Aaron Mahnke who is a horror superstar with a Midas touch when it comes to making hit content. The content from his company, Grim and Mild, in his words, “sits on the intersection between the dark and the historical” (Mahnke 2022). Despite only starting in 2015, his podcasts, books, television shows, and more are all widely successful. By interpreting local mysteries and folklore, Mahnke’s production house is able to transform the existing canon of skin-tingling tales into podcasts, live shows, as well as television specials. In the world of podcasting, both short- and long-form audio tracks are available, which is part of the popularity of the medium. The length of content is sold as a convenience factor, helping market the podcast as a minimal commitment with maximum upside in education and entertainment. In their performance, podcast hosts act as moderators, lecturers, and show hosts. Listeners select their favorite hosts based on their interests, but the decision is largely made on affect and mood. Again, consumers are confronted with how they are made to feel in evaluating their consumption of horror. Yet, it is not simply the existence of discomforting content or the existence of a monster by which we understand our phenomenological experience, but the addition of a human filter who is tasked with delivering this effectively through audio alone. Whether True Crime ought to be included in this list is contentious, given True Crime can elicit similar feelings of uneasy, disgust, or fear that more traditional and novel forms of horror include. That being said, there are certainly many worthwhile and transformative podcasts that deal not only with the True Crime subcategory but lean into the supernatural as well such as Cult Liter and No Sleep. FOUND-FOOTAGE VIDEOS The intimate nature of familiar resolutions as seen through camcorders or screen captures typify the found-footage genre. The allure of the genre seems to come from the affective qualities indicative of the shooting and acting, specifically. The style of cinematography is only half of the story, though it accounts for the name given to the genre. Performers who “get it right,” a subjective determination, surely, are able to elicit in the audience the most dreadful and entertaining emotions such as terror and anxiety. Such a style is instantly recognizable in TBW (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), V/H/S (2012), and Unfriended (2014) where the action takes place in a space that demands that the viewer become something other than a mere spectator,

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given the lack of intermediary space typically explicitly understood by the viewer. As Surace offers of the horrific subject, “There is a violent situation that firmly requires watching, witnessing” (Surace 2019, 33). The lack of discernible editing in films like Unfriended fits well within the frame of New Media as it replicates the clip/video media that is hosted on sites such as YouTube. In this way, the new “mockumentaries” that involve social media like Skype calls in the aforementioned Unfriended, capitalize on the “caught on camera” trope indicative of the form and provide further immersion as recognizable interfaces that aid in storytelling. For example, in the second Unfriended film, Unfriended: Dark Web, the use of the “dark web” in the narrative was not simply a choice akin to choosing to replicate Target or Walmart but acts as supplementary to the development of the “Charon” character. As Surace notes, the elevated sense of truth comes not simply by the introduction of a widely available camera and its UI (when an Apple phone is seen to be recording) to shoot the material from, but in the level of immersion that it brings (Surace 2019, 26). This apparent sense of intimacy (despite its manufactured nature) allows the viewer to do what Merleau-Ponty recognizes as an avoidance of self-reflection which necessarily comes about on the acknowledgment of oneself being apart from the other (Merleau-Ponty 2005 [1945], 411). Sensing oneself as directly involved kickstarts a series of affirmation that accumulates, ultimately adding to the level of immersion and perhaps altering one’s entertainment experience. STREAMING AND HORROR VIDEO GAMING Though streaming and video gaming are much more closely linked in today’s age, horror video games set the stage for streamers to have seemingly endless hours of content for their viewers. The streaming website Twitch came on the scene in 2011 out of a need to rebrand and expand from the limitations of the original site called Justin.tv. With gaming being the most popular area of the site in its infancy, it’s no wonder that the two grew to be virtually synonymous a decade later. JackSepticEye, Markiplier, PewDiePie, and ybbaaabby all occupy a sizable portion of the horror game streaming space. Though not a comprehensive list by any means, titles such as Alien: Isolation, the Resident Evil Series, and Dead by Daylight all serve as great “Let’s Play” material. “Let’s Play” is a genre of content where streamers record themselves playing through video games so that you can experience the channel owner’s reaction. The use of jump scares, disquieting liminal spaces, and adaptive audio engineering are all methods used to invoke feelings within the viewer that are evocative of existing iterations of horror media. Resident Evil (1996), Silent Hill (1999), Fatal Frame (2001), Manhunt (2003), Condemned

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(2005), F.E.A.R. (2005), Dead Rising (2006), Dead Space (2008), Left for Dead (2008), Dead Island (2011), Outlast (2014), The Evil Within 2 (2017), and Phasmophobia (2020) are all standout titles that have been not simply commercially successful but have contributed to popular culture in significant ways chief among which have been clippable moments for promotion through streaming. Seemingly unfiltered, the fanbase for Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, more commonly known as PewDiePie, creates an air of authenticity that is heightened by watching his live reaction to the events that occur in his streams. Comedic sound effects, improvised voice characterizations, and willingness to lean into spontaneity no matter the game he is streaming all typify the experience that consumers come to know and follow PewDiePie for. Mark Fischbach, or Markiplier, offers streams that do not directly contrast with PewDiePie’s but offer something different. Since joining YouTube in March of 2012, Markiplier has become a giant in the streaming world. With horror games being his niche, he does playthroughs which have expanded the Let’s Play genre as well as the horror game genre simultaneously. Twitch in particular allows for lots of interactivity, such that audience members can actually affect what happens in real time through the Crowd Control feature. For example, in games such as Dark Souls, the viewing audience can help or hinder progress by affecting the ability to use weapons or items, grant Health Points or drain them, or offer cosmetic changes for their enjoyment. The audience, then, are no longer simply spectators of entertainment, as they have now coopted the experience in some meaningful way for themselves. This circles back to the desire for voyeuristic satisfaction through engaging in the facilitation of a self-imposed panopticism on the part of creators (Sawczuk 2020, 233). Satisfaction is not only found in both the passive viewing and direct control of streaming content, but of the squeals and jumps seen in Let’s Play streamers, but one may argue that the horror genre and the “fun of fear” has a unique role to play. COMMENTARY MEDIA ON YOUTUBE AND TIKTOK YouTube accounts like Chills and Mr. Nightmare collate and offer explanations via voiceover narration of the clips media that they collect. This subgenre grips the viewer and demands their attention. As observed in the purely aural mediums of horror, special attention is given to the intonation of the speaker/ narrator. Chills has become an internet sensation and exists as a quasi-meme for his monotone delivery of voiceovers on his channel. In reviewing comments, one can grasp that many viewers find that it adds to the “creep factor”

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that they are looking for in his content. Other visual media commentary channels such as Dead Meat, LetMeExplain, Amanda the Jedi, and others are standing on the foundations of communal commentary that exploded in online message boards of the early 2000s. In videos as short as six minutes to longer uploads that approach thirty minutes and more, these channels offer intriguing and substantial reviews of movies and television shows and transform the original media into reflective video essays. This review style had existed previously and hosted by sites like Chiller and Bloody Disgusting, though it is worth noting that Chiller offered much shorter clips and Bloody Disgusting was more firmly rooted in exclusive interviews. MTV’s Fear started in 2000 and provided the basis for paranormal investigations such as Ghost Hunters and Overnight. Ghost Hunters, in particular, as Lauro and Paul argue, has a positive relationship with fans not because they try to convince the viewer that something is true, as found footage often does, but in that it attempts to disprove supernatural causes (Lauro and Paul 2013, 229). By using technology and common-sense explanations of physics that make a viewer feel like an expert after binging a night of episodic television, they are able to manufacture a sense of trust which enables its own horror when they come across something otherwise unexplainable. Shane Dawson, a now disgraced YouTuber due to a plethora of scandals, averages tens of millions of views on videos related to conspiracies and the paranormal. His casual approach and absence of a recognizable desire to “prove” the existence of the supernatural mirrors that of the Ghost Hunters crews. TIKTOK HORROR With the burgeoning rise of content creation platform TikTok, this march toward the power to create, delight, and terrify audiences the world over has been thrust in the hands of millions in ways that were simply unforeseen. Still at the early stages of its lifespan, searching the hashtag horror on TikTok results in a figure that boasts an accumulation of 92.1 billion views across its videos with related searches of “scary” and “creepy” having 115 billion and 64.5 billion views, respectively. The ascendance of TikTok as a content powerhouse is owed to its unique contribution in shaping our entertainment spaces. Since Chris Messina’s introduction of the hashtag on Twitter for categorization in 2007, the capacity for “finding your own crowd” on massive sites like these has expanded immensely. On TikTok, sound reigns supreme. Just as memes have a recognizable and predictable structure to denote a certain semiotic experience, so too, do sound bites. While an explanation for this phenomenon is warranted, it is beyond the scope of the present text. Songs and audio clips act to invite particular moods, and in this sense are just

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as directive as the use of a lo-fi camera. Nested under the horror hashtag are videos with eerie sounds such as distorted sailing songs, more jovial sound edits like “Chrissy wake up,” an edit of a byte inspired by a Stranger Things quote, and your standard faire of horror audio such as 23’s “Pink Soldiers” and Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe through the Tulips.” Users can “stitch” videos, which allows posts to be easily formatted for video commentary as it clips the original post so that a commenter can intercede with their own video at any point or superimpose one on top of the original. All topics of horror are explored, from film and creepypasta to the ethereal “Backrooms”—these are liminal spaces that give a feeling of dread and fear but also read as familiar due to many hallways and lobbies appearing as places from the 1990s and early 2000s that are unnaturally dreary and empty. Accounts such as Whiterabbitapp, Shortest Blockbusters, Heidi Wong, and lights.are.off all have created their own pockets on the app, at once resembling the other mediums in terms of sensory and extrasensory engagement, but also creating something novel. Building on the six seconds of content that Vine had provided, which also maintained a sizable region of horror themed content, TikTok’s short form offers creators the ability to spam the feeds of their followers hundreds of times a day with short bursts of information. With the data of the most popular songs and hashtags already at their disposal, horror creators on TikTok also benefit from an erratic yet quasi-egalitarian algorithm. Creators who have average views and followers that number in the tens can suddenly be stitched, tagged, and have their sound reposted by more popular creators and have their content viewed by millions. For accounts that make animated icons of creepypasta fame or other original horror clips, this proves to be the medium with the most upside that has yet to be introduced. CONCLUSION AND THE FUTURE OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HORROR MEDIA Because the definition of horror is so elusive, this essay has shown how it has only served to expand the genre and foster creativity. In New Media, comments and audience reception have more influence than perhaps ever before. Support for beloved creators on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Patreon alongside donations on Twitch and YouTube have helped pump financial incentives into the space for those that contribute to the genre in ways that weren’t easily marketable or well monitored in the early 2000s. Creator support born out of the age of the “influencer” will be interesting to keep up with in the coming years. As of yet, FearHQ, sponsored by AMC, boasts a Twitter account as well as a YouTube and Twitch channel with hosts who cycle out according to a rotating schedule. They, like the aforementioned

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streamers, document themselves playing horror video games and provide commentary. This builds on the forum culture of commentary, the existence of horror video games, and the voyeuristic satisfaction discussed above. The Dead Meat Podcast has hosted the Dead Meat Awards with the backing of streaming newcomer Shudder (Dead Meat 2022). This provides not only an added layer of legitimacy to the work that has gone into creation by hosts James A. Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca but is validating toward this shift in horror media at large. Horror fans likely acknowledge that despite the many new options for consuming the macabre in the twenty-first century, film comes close to reigning supreme. YouTube accounts such as Alter provide a platform for aspiring content creators to host their developments. With platforms on the most widely available social media sites, streaming compatible televisions, podcasts, and their own phone app, Alter is one of the most extensive hosts of horror. Filmmakers submit their completed creations of five to twenty minutes for review and if selected, have their creations selected and promoted on their platforms. While at the time of writing these do not reach the number of eyes that a viral TikTok might, one might expect to see glimpses of freedom and inventiveness in larger arthouses. While larger sponsorships can certainly support and expand the genre, thus producing incentive to create and transform, there exists a budding issue. One of the “big bads” of horror happens to be larger corporate interference. Defunct horror-defining staples such as Chiller, suffered from this issue. Franchises like American Horror Story, Black Mirror, and Saw have all been criticized for not knowing when to pull the plug or allow someone else to transform the space. Sceptics have disaster in mind and the fear that financial incentives will supersede the place of art. An example to counteract such worries, and return us to where we started, is The Blair Witch Project. With a modest budget, new technology, guerrilla marketing, and a push from those who wished to see it succeed, any creator has the potential to shape the next twenty years of horror. WORKS CITED “Advertise-4chan.” 2022. 4chan.org. 2022. https:​//​www​.4chan​.org​/advertise. Accessed August 21, 2022. Bernstein, Michael, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. 2011. “4chan and /B/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 5, no. 1: 50–7.

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Dégh, Linda, and Andrew Vázsonyi. 1983. “Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite? Ostensive Action: A Means of Legend-Telling.” Journal of Folklore Research 20, no. 1: 5–34. Hancock, Danielle. 2016. “Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First Steps in Exploring the Horror Podcast.” Horror Studies 7, no. 2: 219–34. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​ .1386​/host​.7​.2​.219​_1. Hart, Adam Charles. 2019. Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror across Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190916237.001.0001. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Catherine Paul. 2013. “‘Make Me Believe!’: Ghost-Hunting Technology and the Postmodern Fantastic.” Horror Studies 4, no. 2: 221–39. doi. org/10.1386/host.4.2.221_1. Mahnke. Aaron. 2022. “REMASTERED—Episode 33: A Dead End.” Lore. Spotify, July 25. open.spotify.com/episode/5zSng0IfMUUep6cAIN3yET?si=b2dc412ea4 7344d1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge. Myrick, Daniel, and Eduardo Sánchez, dirs. 1999. The Blair Witch Project. Film. Lionsgate. Sawczuk, Tomasz. 2020. “Taking Horror as You Find It: From Found Manuscripts to Found Footage Aesthetics.” Text Matters 10, no. 10: 223–35. doi. org/10.18778/2083–2931.10.14. SteveJobsArchive. 2005. “Steve Jobs Previews Podcasting All Things D3 2005.” www​.youtube​.com. May 22, 2005. www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=B8WCRXCdDz4. Surace, Bruno. 2019. “The Flesh of the Film: The Camera as a Body in Neo-Horror Mockumentary and Beyond.” Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 17, no. 1: 25–41. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1386​/nl​_00003​_1. Tolbert, Jeffery A. 2018. “‘The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors’: The Case of Slender Man.” In Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill. ­‌​ Logan: Utah State University Press.

PART III

Recognition and Evolution

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Figure 0.2. Visual Intervention II: Mother. Source: Drawing by Gemma Files. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Chapter Eleven

The Future of Horror Evolution or Revolution? Carina Bissett

WOMEN As the days counted down the final hours of 1999, the world held its collective breath. Sensationalist news coverage and dramatic doomsday predictions dampened the orgiastic decadence of traditional New Year’s celebrations. The 1980s, also known as the “lost decade” in the United States, was a period marked by conservative politics, global economic instability, geopolitical tension, corporate greed, sanctioned homophobia, and racial discrimination. The 1990s weren’t much better, despite the end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet. Hip young writers of the time pushed back against mainstream culture with a new type of horror that relied on psychological and phantasmagorical elements instead of the shock value presented in the guts and gore that dominated the 1980s boom. From this displaced and disaffected generation, a different style of horror emerged to reflect the attitudes of those determined to change the literary landscape. This was especially true when it came to stories being told by women. Although the new millennium offered an opportunity for fresh starts and a recalibration of gender representation, especially in the field of horror, the lack of female voices looked much as it had in the prior two decades. The year 2000 welcomed a few bestsellers on the dark side including Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling, Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark, and The Last Precinct by Patricia Cornwell, among others. However, although female authors could be found working in the genres of dark fantasy, thrillers, and crime fiction, their presence in horror remained scarce. 157

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Despite the dramatic decline of horror in the late eighties, there were those who persisted, continuing their work as one century transitioned to the next. With a career spanning three decades and still counting, Nancy Holder has witnessed the changes in the field as time progresses. “Horror is supposed to be cutting edge and groovy, so it was cool to include us in the nineties,” says Holder.1 “Men would say, ‘isn’t it interesting that they, too, can write horror.’ But even then, we were still ‘they.’ We were like this additional weird thing.” Although she’s most known for her tie-in books based on the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Holder has written everything from romance to splatterpunk,2 and she continues to evolve. Easily moving between mediums, Holder recently won a Bram Stoker award for the graphic novel Mary Shelley Presents Tales of the Supernatural (2020). She also garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award (2021)3 from the Horror Writers Association (HWA), proving that persistence pays off. However, she is no longer one of only a few women writing horror, a shift long overdue. “When I first started out, you were an island unto yourself,” says Holder. “Now it’s much more ‘we all are doing this,’ and that is a good weapon for women.” Like many movements, the representation of women in horror started as a grassroots initiative. In 2009, February was named as Women in Horror Month, and a coalition of authors and editors worked to spread the word. Twelve years later, the official organization disbanded with an announcement “that not only is there enough content, traffic, and engagement for one month, we believe there is enough to take celebrations year round.” Several independent publishers run by women contributed to the visibility of female authors as well. By the year 2000, UK publisher Tartarus Press, managed by Rosalie Parker and R. B. Russell, had a full decade of supernatural and strange fiction publications to their credit. In 1999, Rose O’Keefe founded Eraserhead Press, an independent publisher of bizarro fiction and cutting-edge horror. And in 2003, Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) opened under the direction of Jennifer Barnes and John Edward Lawson. Like many small presses, the diversity in the titles published by RDSP is the result of a conscious effort. “If we don’t think about what we’re doing in the larger context, where we came from and where we want to be headed then who knows where we’ll end up,” says Barnes.4 When seeking a clear picture of diversity and representation, an accounting of specialty organizations offers insight into the ever-changing, sociopolitical literary landscape. This is especially true in genre fiction. When it comes to science fiction and fantasy, the most coveted annual honors include the Hugo awards (1953–present), presented at the World Science Fiction Convention; the Nebula awards (1966–present), announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA); and the World Fantasy awards (1975–present), organized and conferred by the World Fantasy Convention.

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However, in the world of horror, the most prominent honors are distributed by the HWA’s Bram Stoker awards (1987–present) and the Shirley Jackson awards (2007–present). Although dark fantasy and horror rarely appear on longlists at the Hugo or Nebula awards, they have been serious contenders with other candidates in the “field of the fantastic” at the World Fantasy awards from the beginning. However, the domination of horror at the awards in the eighties created dissension among authors, editors, and publishers, which eventually led to the formation of the HWA in 1987. In the introduction to Fantasy: First Annual Collection, coeditor Ellen Datlow opens with an overview of this divide: “Whether or not this breaking off of horror writers into a new organization will make a difference to the character of the World Fantasy Convention and the World Fantasy Awards remains to be seen” (Datlow and Windling 1988). Over the course of the remaining years of the twentieth century, 120 authors and creators took home a Bram Stoker Award. Unlike the distribution of World Fantasy awards bestowed in those same years, only a third of the Stoker winners were women, a grim tally that would unfortunately continue to plague female representation within the ranks of horror for more than a decade into the new millennium. In 2002, Linda D. Addison made history as the first Black woman to win a coveted Bram Stoker Award. She was also the first woman to win in the category of poetry5 with her collection Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (2001). “The strength of women writing is that we’ve had to watch the horror in the world around us, be victimized by it,” says Addison,6 “Who’s going to write that point of view if not us?” With her win, it appeared that strides in equity were finally being made. Unfortunately, the three-to-one ratio of male to female authors on the final Stoker ballot remained consistent for the rest of the first decade. “One of the problems of being a woman writer is that we are brought up in a culture that tells us to step back and that men should dominate. For many of us, it’s very hard to overcome,” says Lisa Morton,7 past president of the HWA (2014–2019) and a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker awards in five separate categories (graphic novel, nonfiction, first novel, long fiction, and short fiction), “[Writers] like Lauren Beukes and Alma Katsu are not marketed in the same way their male peers are marketed. The cover design for their books seems to be strikingly different. There seems to be a slight reluctance to label women as horror at all.” This issue can also be seen in mainstream perceptions and crossover appeal when compared with recognition at the Bram Stoker awards during the first part of the twenty-first century. The only two bestseller works written by women to garner these awards were The Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold (first novel) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) by J. K.

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Rowling (work for young readers). The Lovely Bones, a story about a brutally murdered teenage girl watching her family and friends continue with their lives from the vantage point of her own personal heaven, is labeled as a supernatural thriller. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the wildly popular Harry Potter series and the titular character’s adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is firmly rooted in fantasy. Neither was categorized as horror by the general public. Over the next several years, the Bram Stoker awards moved away from this momentary alignment with popular fiction trends and returned to its regular line-up. In stark contrast, the World Fantasy awards continued to offer strong support for women’s horror, even though it often wore the guise of dark fantasy. However, there was a small measure of crossover between the two award systems. For instance, Bibliomancy (2003) by Elizabeth Hand made the final ballot at the Stokers and went on to win a World Fantasy Award (novel), and Margo Lanagan’s short story “Singing My Sister Down” (2004) also made the Stoker final ballot while winning a World Fantasy Award (short fiction). An examination of the common touchstones in these renowned authors’ works offers insight into the complexities that define the source of contention when it comes to the appreciation and classification of women’s writing, especially in a genre long dominated by white, cisgender men. In a pushback against this persistent domination of male writers at the HWA annual ceremony, a new awards system for horror was announced at the 2007 Readercon Conference on Imaginative Literature. Named after the acclaimed author of The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the Shirley Jackson awards were created to commend “outstanding achievement in the literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense.” Unlike the Bram Stoker awards, the Shirley Jackson awards do not consider the popular vote. Instead, these honors are granted by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, which may explain the general lack of overlap between the two organizations. In fact, there are several notable winners of the Shirley Jackson awards who didn’t even make the Bram Stoker final ballots: Experimental Film (2014) by Gemma Files, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016) edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, both the short story collection All the Fabulous Beasts (2018) and the novella Ormeshadow (2019) by Priya Sharma, Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado, and Little Eve (2018) by Catriona Ward. Since the beginning, representation at the Shirley Jackson awards has featured a balanced mix of authors. Unfortunately, it took much longer for the presence of diverse voices, especially those of women and people of color, to receive that same recognition at the Bram Stoker awards.

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Linda D. Addison made news again when she won a second Stoker with her poetry collection Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (2007). She was not alone, but her female peers were few and far between. Other notable works by women writers in the first decade to win the Bram Stoker award include The Missing (2007) by Sarah Langan, The Gentling Box (2008) by Lisa Mannetti, Audrey’s Door (2009) by Sarah Langan, and The Castle of Los Angeles (2010) by Lisa Morton. However, it wasn’t until the 2013 awards that the constraints of traditional gender norms were defied by Caitlín R. Kiernan’s semi-autobiographical novel The Drowning Girl! (2012).8 And then, a year later, Rena Mason became the first Asian woman to take home the Stoker for her debut novel, The Evolutionist (2013). That it took twenty-six years for an Asian woman to make it this far is a prime example of the problems that continued to plague the HWA. In recognition of the imbalance and the “unseen, but real, barriers” women horror writers face, the organization established the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship in 2014, and the movement toward gender parity crept forward. As horror slowly regained the interest of the general public in the second decade of the twenty-first century, women authors rose up to shape this new voice. In the United States, Damien Angelica Walters and Kristi DeMeester quickly became familiar names in pages of magazines dedicated to the dark. After accumulating numerous honorable mentions and making her way onto a multitude of recommended reading lists, Walters reprinted a collection of her highly acclaimed short stories in the collection Sing Me Your Scars (2015), which she followed up with her second collection, Cry Your Way Home (2018). Both received glowing reviews commending Walters for her unflinching examinations of female agency, human frailty, anatomical experimentations, societal constraints, and the male gaze. Around the same time, Kristi DeMeester, whose work has been featured in several annual anthologies, also released her first full-length collection. In Everything That’s Underneath (2017), DeMeester uses vivid imagery and rich language to effectively draw the reader into the unexplored reaches of the Weird. With successful careers in short fiction, both women broke into mainstream publication with their most recent novels: Walters’s The Dead Girls Club (2019) and DeMeester’s Such a Pretty Smile (2022). In sharp contrast to the representation of their short fiction, both novels received lukewarm reviews. The dramatic difference points to a general disconnect in popular consumer culture, especially when it comes to women in horror. This divide appears to have held true with many other highly acclaimed women writers working in the field around the same time. Since publishing her first short story in 2014, Gwendolyn Kiste has risen through the closely knit ranks to become one of horror’s brightest stars. This incredibly prolific author has produced a stunning oeuvre of work ranging from drabbles9

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to full-length novels. Her first short fiction collection And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe (2017) received rave reviews and award nominations. She followed this up a year later with her award-winning debut novel The Rust Maidens (2018). However, it has taken much longer to find recognition among general readers, as Kiste entered the genre when horror was still generally shunned as a label. In reflection Kiste10 says, “You had to call it either thriller or dark fantasy for a while. There was no horror.” However, in recent years, small publishers began expanding their offerings. Traditional publishing houses took notice, and as the second decade of the twenty-first century arrived, horror finally hit its stride. “It really felt like it happened very quickly. Suddenly everybody was acting like horror was marketable,” says Kiste. “What will be interesting, and I think about this a lot, is to see in ten or twenty years how many of the books from women, writers of color, LGBTQ writers stay in print. The people who tend to fall out of print the quickest are women or anybody who is marginalized, so that’s going to be a real test for horror. That’s a much more long-term project of seeing if we are really committed to diversity or is this just something people want to do right now.” Kiste’s work is archived at the University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Collection, and has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and Czech. Her newest title, Reluctant Immortals (2022), riffs off her award-winning short story “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary).”11 Set in 1960s California, Lucy Westenra, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), work together to overcome the monstrous men who stole their humanity, damning them to an eternity of hunger and decay. “Femininity can be horrifying,” says Kiste, “We’ve all been taught to be beautiful, placid, and quiet. I think people who are into horror understand not only the danger of that mentality, but also how to subvert it.” This trend of retellings continues as women return to the classics intent on reclaiming voices of women and other marginalized characters. For instance, Silvia Moreno-Garcia examines concepts of eugenics and scientific responsibility set in nineteenth-century Mexico with The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022). T. Kingfisher reimagines Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) through the eyes of a nonbinary protagonist in What Moves the Dead (2022). And Kathe Koja, author of the acclaimed existential novel The Cipher (1991), returns to the horror scene with a “love letter” to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in Catherine the Ghost, slated for publication by Clash Books in 2024.

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“In some ways, people think of horror as kind of a monochrome; it’s all this one thing, whereas other genres are seen as being more expansive. I don’t think that’s so at all, especially with the group of writers who are writing now,” says Koja,12 “We will continue doing the things we do so very well. Whatever genre confines still exist, whatever artificial boundaries are being put up, we’ll just ignore them, keep going, keep expanding.” At the 2019 Bram Stoker awards ceremony (for works written in 2018), the scales finally tipped in women’s favor and, for the first time since the inception of the Stokers, women took the lead, winning seven of the eleven categories: first novel, young adult novel, long fiction, short fiction, screenplay, anthology, and poetry collection. “In specific reference to the horror genre, women are everywhere: [they are] writers, publishers, podcast producers, screenwriters, directors,” says Marge Simon,13 a Grand Master poet14 and past member of the HWA Board of Trustees, “Men are no longer taking for granted that they are the main voices of horror.” By the 2020 awards, women and nonbinary authors advanced even more, outnumbering their male counterparts in representation, and winning nine of the twelve judged categories.15 So, what does this mean for the future of women writing horror? “Women writing today are in a much better position to put all their cards on the table, to muscle aside genres and just do whatever they want, explode the categories that might have restricted them in the past,” says Elizabeth Hand,16 an acclaimed author known for her award-winning, genre-spanning work. “Women have gained more readers and, in doing that, they’ve gained more power. They don’t want to put up with the old tropes of writing that we had to deal with [in the past], so they are just ignoring them, or they’re creating new forms, new ideas.” Moving deftly between form and function, Elizabeth Hand won the first Shirley Jackson award in the category of novel for Generation Loss (2007), the debut of her Cass Neary crime series. She also earned Shirley Jackson awards for her novellas Near Zennor (2011) and Wylding Hall (2015). In addition, Hand has several Nebula and World Fantasy awards to her credit, further testifying to the breadth and depth of her work. This diversity in genre crossover and accumulated accolades is becoming more and more common, which provides insight to the increasing scope of horror and the wide range of readers that it attracts. Today, women writing horror are no longer confined to strict genre conventions. For instance, a closer look at past winners of the Shirley Jackson awards reveals an extraordinary list of authors whose work often straddles or even defies trends in mainstream horror. Karen Russell17 secured a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2012); Karen Joy Fowler18 won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize (2014); and Kelly Link19 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2016). Like their predecessor Shirley

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Jackson, these women step into the literary side of dread and terror; they refuse to be defined by what they write. After all, when it comes to writing, women have always stretched beyond traditional boundaries. In the award-winning book Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction (2019), Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson offer an overview of the wide range of narrative forms explored by women over time. “Women are accused of being transgressive all the time—or at the very least, they are used to stepping outside of the carefully drawn boundaries that society has set for them” (Kröger and Anderson 2019). In addition to paying respect to the founding mothers of horror and the Gothic, Kröger and Anderson feature women writers working in the field today: Kathe Koja’s Kafkaesque take on the weird, Helen Oyeyemi’s feminist fairy tales, and Jewelle Gomez’s Afrofuturist horror, among others. “In any era, women become accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces, including territory that they’ve been told not to enter,” write Kröger and Anderson, “For women especially, writing is a kind of noncompliance. When writing is an off-limits act, writing one’s story becomes a form of rebellion and taking back power.” Horror is currently enjoying a healthy renaissance thanks in part to the current sociopolitical climate. After all, horror offers strategies for survival. It offers a safe place for discourse on impactful issues such as gender inequities, women’s rights, racial discrimination, global warming, and economic instability. As more and more women enter the field, this defiance against constraints has become more commonplace. This is especially true when it comes through the representation of marginalized voices. Take for instance, the slipstream20 surrealism in the collection The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories (2020) by the award-winning African Australian author Eugen Bacon or the cultural representation of the GullahGeechee nation in Eden Royce’s children’s novel Root Magic (2021). Examples of women writers from disenfranchised groups abound: Cynthia Pelayo’s Children of Chicago (2021), winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery, retells “The Pied Piper” through the lens of a crime scene; Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (2018),21 winner of the Western Heritage Award, offers a supernatural take on the terrible tragedy that befell the Donner party; Filipino writer Isabel Yap’s debut collection Never Have I Ever (2021) dances in the interstitial spaces with stories drawing from folklore and myth; and New Zealand author Tamsyn Muir’s debut, Gideon the Ninth (2019), seamlessly blends Lovecraftian Gothic and romantic comedy in a fantasy story about necromancy in space. Literary, science fiction, magical realism, historical fiction, Southern Gothic, mystery, thriller, Western, folklore, fantasy, romance, and black

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comedy—yet still, all of these stories have one thing in common: they are all bound together by horror. In addition to the incredible list of female authors producing diverse and powerful works today, no discussion on the place of women in horror would be complete without also looking at the role female editors have played in bringing attention to these marginalized writers in the first place. And when it comes to editors of speculative fiction, perhaps no one is as influential as Ellen Datlow. Over the course of her career, she has garnered multiple honors (World Fantasy, Hugo, Locus, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and Splatterpunk awards) along with recognition for her contributions with Life Achievement awards from both the Horror Writers Association (2010) and the World Fantasy Convention (2014). With more than one hundred anthologies to her credit, it is an indisputable fact that Datlow has introduced numerous emerging writers as well as established voices to audiences worldwide. She has also shone the spotlight on authors from the past with such work as the carefully curated anthology When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson (2021). “I’ve come to realize that Jackson’s influence has filtered—consciously or unconsciously— into the work of many contemporary fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror writers,” writes Datlow, “Some more obviously than others” (When Things Get Dark 2021). What follows is a superb homage to Jackson by a star-studded cast of authors including Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hand, and Gemma Files. Along with Datlow, another well-respected editor of note in the field of dark fantasy is Paula Guran. In addition to the Prime Books annual anthology The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2010–2019) and Pyr’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2020–present), Guran is known for her contributions to the Mammoth Book series: The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons (2013), The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction (2016), and The Mammoth Book of the Mummy (2017). With more than fifty anthologies under her belt, Guran continues to bring a wide range of fiction to the attention of modern readers. In addition to carefully curated, themed anthologies, the twenty-first century has seen an increasing presence of books dedicated to raising awareness of underrepresented voices. In 2015, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles teamed up with a new take on the Lovecraft mythos collected in the anthology She Walks in Darkness (2015). “There is a paucity of women in Lovecraft’s tales,” write Moreno-Garcia and Stiles, “Women have emerged from the shadows to claim the night. We welcome them gladly.” A few years later, award-winning poet and author Sara Tantlinger started her own mission to showcase women horror writers with Not All Monsters (2020), which she followed up with Chromophobia (2022). Black Spot Books, created in 2017,

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took a similar approach in its inaugural poetry collection, Under Her Skin (2022). In addition, publisher and Lindy Ryan curated an all-female line-up for Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (2022) and Black Spot Books’ second planned poetry collection, Under Her Eye (2023). In addition to general anthologies edited and written by female creatives, women of color are taking this a step further with curated collections dedicated to shattering preconceptions and stereotypes of marginalized groups. In 2017, coeditors Dr. Kinitra Brooks, Linda D. Addison, and Dr. Susana Morris collected twenty-eight dark stories and fourteen poems written by African American women writers in the acclaimed anthology Sycorax’s Daughters. “It was a major thing for me,” says Linda D. Addison, “Sycorax’s Daughters introduced over thirty Black women to the horror field, and that was great. I was tired of being the only one.” Another recent example is Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (2020), edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn. “For women, horror is subjective, subversive, and very, very personal,” says Lee Murray,22 “Women of color face cultural barriers, so there are different fears there, too.” Black Cranes features ten women with fourteen stories, all of which explore the identity of Asian women from different perspectives. “Just as there is no one type of woman, there is no single, all-encompassing notion of Asia,” writes Alma Katsu in the introduction, “It is too multifaceted to be contained in one identity.” This seminal collection won both the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards in addition to an Aurealis Award for Australian speculative fiction, ensuring its place as a representative of female Asian voices for years to come. The influx of new authors and the prominence of horror in recent times reflects the continuing evolution of horror. In 2022, Catriona Ward followed up her acclaimed novel The Last House on Needless Street (2021) with her equally impressive and terrifying psychological thriller Sundial, a story centered on generational secrets and hereditary trauma. But just as striking as the additions to the canon by established writers like Ward, new authors are also coming out with first novels climbing bestsellers lists and earning praise in such popular venues as NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, and The Mary Sue. It is clear people are no longer hiding their penchant for horror. The themes of these debuts reflect contemporary issues with clarity, precision, and wit. For instance, in Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating (2022), a mixed-race vampire struggles with feeling of isolation and disconnect through a burgeoning obsession with food. Isabel Cañas, also new to the scene, explores colonialism, social status, and religion with supernatural suspense in her first novel The Hacienda (2022). And Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters (2022) offers an unflinching look at motherhood, trauma, and tradition. An instant bestseller, Dean’s debut reveals truths women live with

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on a regular basis: fairy tales rarely have happy endings, and mothers and monsters are often interchangeable. This fierce generation of women horror writers refuses to be pushed back into the shadows. They write about their hungers, bodies, and desires, and they do so without fear of judgment or recrimination. “[There] is a huge struggle being played out right now in our culture on this idea of who gets to define what our life is about, who gets the power, who gets to control,” says Kathe Koja, a powerhouse producer and author who has always embraced the transgressive nature of horror and the women who write it. “We don’t have to claim a space,” Koja affirms, “It belongs to us. It has always belonged to us.” Koja and writers like her refuse be silenced any longer. They will not be erased from the pages of their own stories, nor will they bear the domination of patriarchal conventions and genre constraints. Those times are relics of the past. The future is progress, and women in horror are determined to pave the way. NOTES 1. Nancy Holder in discussion with the author, July 2022. 2. Coined by David J. Schow in 1986, splatterpunk is a subgenre of horror distinguished by the depiction of graphic violence and transgressive acts. 3. The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented by the HWA to honor creatives who have substantially influenced the horror genre with their work. 4. Jennifer Barnes in discussion with the author, August 2022. 5. The category for “superior achievement” in a poetry collection was added in 2000. 6. Linda D. Addison in discussion with the author, July 2022. 7. Lisa Morton in discussion with the author, July 2022. 8. In 2020, Kiernan made a statement on their online journal, Dear Sweet Filthy World, that they no longer identify as transgender but as gender fluid: “I no longer consider myself transgender (or transsexual). I would say that I’m gender fluid, if I had to say anything.” greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1544222.html. Accessed 1 August 2021, 9. A work of fiction of exactly 100 words. 10. Gwendolyn Kiste in discussion with the author, July 2022. 11. “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)” was published in Nightmare Magazine, Issue 85 in Nov. 2019. It won a Bram Stoker Award in the category of short fiction. 12. Kathe Koja in discussion with the author, July 2022. 13. Marge Simon in discussion with the author, August 2022. 14. Marge Simon was awarded the title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). She also garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award from the HWA in 2020.

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15. The HWA added short nonfiction as a category separate from long-form nonfiction in 2019. 16. Elizabeth Hand in discussion with the author, July 2022. 17. Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia! was published by Knopf in 2011. Russell also received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2013. 18. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2012), originally published by Serpent’s Tail, was reprinted in 2014 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 19. Get in Trouble (Random House, 2016) includes a reprint of the short story “The Summer People,” which won the 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards for best novelette. Link received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2018. 20. Coined by Richard Dorsett, slipstream is sub-genre that crosses conventional genre boundaries between literary and speculative fiction. 21. The Hunger was reprinted in 2019 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 22. Lee Murray in discussion with the author, August 2022.

RECOMMENDED READING Bacon, Eugen. 2020. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories. Atlanta, Meerkat Press. Brooks, Kinitra, Linda D. Addison, and Susana Morris. 2017. Sycorax’s Daughters. San Francisco: Cedar Grove Publishing. Cañas, Isabel. 2022. The Hacienda. New York, Berkley. Datlow, Ellen. 2021. When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson. London: Titan Books. Datlow, Ellen, and Terri Windling (eds.). The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. Dean, Sunyi. 2022. The Book Eaters. New York: Tor. DeMeester, Kristi. 2017. Everything That’s Underneath. Lexington: Apex Publications. Files, Gemma. 2014. Experimental Film. Toronto: ChiZine Publications. Hand, Elizabeth. 2007. Generation Loss. Northampton, Small Beer Press. Katsu, Alma. 2018. The Hunger. New York: Penguin Random House. Kiernan, Caitlín R. 2012. The Drowning Girl. New York: Roc. Kingfisher, T. 2022. What Moves the Dead. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. Kiste, Gwendolyn. 2017. And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe. Carbondale: Journalstone. ———. 2022. Reluctant Immortals: A Novel. New York: Saga Press. Kohda, Claire. 2022. Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel. New York: HarperVia. Kröger, Lisa, and Melanie R. Anderson. 2019. Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Lanagan, Margo. 2004. Black Juice. New York: HarperCollins. Link, Kelly. 2016. Get in Trouble. New York, Random House. Machado, Carmen Maria. 2017. Her Body and Other Parties. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

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Mason, Rena. 2013. The Evolutionist. Nightscape Press. Miller, Toni, and Lindy Ryan, eds. 2022. Under Her Skin (A Women in Horror Poetry Collection, 1). Juneau: Black Spot Books. Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, and Paula R. Stiles, eds. 2015. She Walks in Darkness. Vancouver: Innsmouth Free Press. Murray, Lee, and Geneve Flynn (eds). 2020. Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. Los Angeles: Omnium Gatherum Media. Royce, Eden. 2021. Root Magic. New York: Walden Pond. Ryan, Lindy, ed. 2022. Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga. Juneau: Black Spot Books. Sharma, Priya. 2018. All the Fabulous Beasts. Ontario: Undertow Publications. Tantlinger, Sara, ed. 2022. Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror. Bunker Hill: Rooster Republic Press. ———. 2020. Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror. Bunker Hill: Rooster Republic Press. Walters, Damien Angelica. 2015. Sing Me Your Scars. Lexington: Apex Publications. ———. 2018. Cry Your Way Home. Lexington: Apex Publications. Ward, Catriona. 2021. The Last House on Needless Street. Tor Nightfire. Yap, Isabel. 2021. Never Have I Ever. Northampton: Small Beer Press.

Chapter Twelve

Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror Maisha Wester

“Once upon a time, a man got fucked. Now how is that for a story? Cause that’s the story of Black people in America.” —American Gods, “The Secret of Spoons” ‌‌Amadou Diallo, February 4, 1999, New York, New York1 Anthony Dwain Lee, October 28, 2000, Los Angeles, California2 Kathryn Johnston, November 21, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia3 Deaunta T. Farrow, June 22, 2007, West Memphis, Arizona4

Episode two of American Gods begins on a slave ship as Anansi (Orlando Jones) tells enslaved Africans the story that will be African American history, charting the consistent disenfranchisement and dehumanization plaguing generations of African Americans. Based upon Neil Gaiman’s novel by the same name, the scene makes an important intervention in the text, introducing a narrative absent from the original novel (see epigraph). Other episodes specifically focused on African American history and struggle likewise provided stark and painful critiques of the systemic racial oppression undergirding American culture, urging African Americans to understand and confront the monstrosity which assaults them and to “rise up and slit every one of these Dutch motherfuckers throats” (“The Secret of Spoons” 2017). While American Gods eventually eschewed Anansi’s/Jones’s revolutionary, disruptive rage, and ideologies, those Black-focused episodes are part of a significant shift in Black filmmaking. Unable to continue stomaching the perpetual, state-sanctioned murder of Blacks, these filmmakers added their 171

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voices to a growing movement: Black Lives Matter. The list which starts this essay barely begins to touch the hundreds of African Americans murdered at the hands of police officers alone, not to mention private citizens. We might add other notable names to this list, such as seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, thirteen-year old Darius Simmons, and the numerous victims of the June 17, 2015, attack on Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.5 According to CBS news, in 2020 police killed 164 Black people between January 1 and August 31. Notably the list only includes reported and verified cases, and “does not necessarily account for all incidents in which a person was killed by police” (Cohen 2020). Furthermore, most of the assailing police officers are either not prosecuted or are found “not guilty” when they are charged. The Black Lives Matter movement arose in response to this blood-tide, despairing at the unchecked violence African Americans are consistently subjected to across the United States. As a subgenre, Black Lives Matter Horror voices the terrors of the violence and the systemic structures and ideologies which not only makes it conceivable, but which ultimately enables and maintains the slaughter. Building upon the sociopolitical critiques of Social Thrillers/Horrors and independent Blaxploitation Horror films like Ganja and Hess (1973) and Tales from the Hood (1995), films such as “Everybody Dies!” (2016), The First Purge (2018), Two Distant Strangers (2020), Candyman (2021), and series such as Lovecraft Country (2020) and Them (2021)—to name just a few of the films and series collected under this subgenre—meditate on the nature of US systemic whiteness and its will to destroy Black subjects. The series and films belonging to this group reiterate Anansi’s sense of America as a cursed place for Black people and his consequent rage: Let me paint a picture of what’s waiting for you on the shore. You all get to be slaves. Split up, sold off and worked to death. The lucky ones get Sunday off to sleep and fuck and make mo’ slaves and all for what? For cotton? Indigo? For a Fucking purple shirt? [. . .] A hundred year later, you’re fucked. A hundred years after that . . . fucked. A hundred years after that, you get free, you still getting’ fucked outta’ jobs and shot at by police. [. . .] You are staring down the barrel of 300 years of subjugation, racist bullshit, and heart disease. (American Gods, “The Secret of Spoons” 2017)

Like Anansi, who demands the enslaved Africans rise up to confront their tormenting captors, BLM Horror ultimately urges Blacks to organize and resists the onslaught. Yet unlike Anansi, who can specify the monstrous villains at the source of the African’s misery, the “Dutch motherfuckers,” BLM Horror often terrifyingly finds that either the rationale or the true villain ultimately

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escapes. This, then, is the decisive horror of the subgenre: knowing that correctly identifying and dissecting the primary antagonists could help end the 400 years of Black slaughter, only to have the monster continually slip your grip. DEFINING BLACK LIVES MATTER HORROR In some ways, we might argue Black Lives Matter Horror is part of what Sheri-Marie Harrison defines as the “New Black Gothic” in which, unlike previous eras of Black writing, “there is no buried trauma that must be converted into language for its victims to move on. Instead, racial violence has never gone away. [. . .] Gothic violence remains a part of everyday black life” (Harrison 2018). The New Black Gothic, much like earlier Black Gothic, considers how whiteness has and continues to violate and exploit Black populations in service to white supremacy, laying bare the horrific “realities of our time and their roots in systems that depend on the criminalization and disenfranchisement of black people” (Harrison 2018). Black Lives Matter Horror—as the meeting of the Social Thriller/Horror film6 with Black Gothic—achieves much of these same ends, working to record and demystify the sociopolitical forces dooming Black life to vicious bio- and necropolitics. It differs from Harrison’s vision of the New Black Gothic in one significant way, however: whereas the New Black Gothic “does not offer correctives or hope for a brighter future” (Harrison, 2018), BLM Horror, while not exactly offering hope, does offer a kind of corrective in the form of Black will and agency to resist. Indeed, unlike previous Blaxploitation films and Social Thrillers/Horrors, this new subgenre stresses the importance in fighting back, presenting Black (anti-)hero(in)es who violently confront their antagonists and survive to fight another day. Black Lives Matter Horror uses many of the same tropes common in Horror and the Gothic but with important differences. To begin with, the subgenre often focuses as much on the survival plight of individuals as it does on groups, collectives, and/or communities. Films such as Get Out, Us, Candyman, and Two Distant Strangers feature (seemingly) lone hero(in)es confronting a terrifying assailant. While these individuals may have friends, as in traditional Horror cinema, the protagonists are consistently isolated from their support systems. Unique to BLM Horror, however, is the extent to which the protagonist is isolated among a sea of people. Two Distant Strangers, for instance, takes place on the public, very populated streets of New York as bystanders watch Officer Merk (Andrew Howard) kill Carter (Joey Basda$$) in each loop. Candyman’s Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) circulates among art critics rudely interrogating his work even as they all

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ignore his obviously worsening condition. While Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is removed from the booming metropolis to the suburbs in Get Out, he nonetheless finds himself at the center of a party attended largely by wealthy white locals but also by a few people of color. In isolating the hero(in)es in highly populated spaces, the subgenre remarks upon the biopolitics at play in American culture which renders Black people invisible humans even as they are hypervisible others and objects of surveillance. Yet as noted, many of the texts also focus upon communities under assault. Films like The First Purge, “Everybody Dies!,” and Us as well as series such as Lovecraft Country and Them center upon multiple Black protagonists fighting in concert for their survival. Lovecraft Country, for example, sees Atticus (Jonathan Majors) joined by his lover, his friends, his aunt and uncle, his father, and, eventually, his former Korean lover. While Them focuses primarily on a Black family, we follow the tribulations of each individually before we are introduced to other Black families in neighboring, similarly hostile, white-dominated communities. These series and films ultimately reveal the deadly systemic targeting and isolation of Black populations as a whole, thus confronting the necropolitical stakes of white oppression. Equally important, the exploration of group struggle also provides moments of reflection upon intraracial oppression to consider how anti-Black biopolitical messaging has turned community members into agents of racist necropolitics. Thus, for example, The First Purge emphasizes Skeletor (Rotimi Paul) as the immediate villain, though the film’s opening interview reveals that he is merely the Frankenstein-like creation of white scientists and politicians. Likewise, Nya (Lex Scott Davis) frequently critiques Dimitri (Y’lan Noel) as a traitor, noting that his drug dealing has killed as many community members as outside perpetrators of violence. When Christina (Abbey Lee) masks herself as Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) in “Full Circle,” Lovecraft Country provides not just as a gasp-invoking plot twist but reminds us of previous conversations on community allegiance versus individual interests, especially given the number of times Christina argues for Ruby’s help in foiling Letia (Jurnee Smollett) and Atticus in pursuit of Ruby’s own self-interests and personal empowerment. In general BLM Horror is set in real locations, such as Brooklyn and upstate New York (Get Out), Staten Island (The First Purge), Santa Cruz (Us), New York City (Two Distant Strangers), Oakland (Them), Tulsa (Lovecraft Country), and Chicago (Candyman, Lovecraft Country). The consistent choice to set these texts in specific and readily recognizable locales stresses the uncanniness of the US landscape for Blacks. The subgenre thus recalls Toni Morrison’s comment, via Baby Suggs, in Beloved: “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (Morrison 1988, 5). Indeed, the title, opening, and conclusion of the film Us puns on this, as the title doubles as the acronym for the United States. The

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film’s opening and conclusion also makes this explicitly apparent, as it begins with the 1980s advertisement for President Ronald Reagan’s “Hands Across America” campaign to end homelessness and poverty and concludes with the doppelgängers’ enactment of that very idea, the camera panning back to show them standing with linked hands across the whole of the US landscape. Especially notable about the subgenre is the prevalence of northern settings. In doing so, the films and series challenge and disrupt the mythic ideal of the US North as a space of racial equality and freedom. Thus, Lovecraft Country reminds us that Chicago, for example, suffered more than its share of racist horrors; in fact, it was home to one of the largest, bloodiest anti-Black race riots during the Red Summer of 1919. Likewise, New York’s Wall Street owes its existence and prosperity to the sale and trading of Black people during the era when slavery was still legal in the region. Even in the few cases when Black Lives Matter Horror uses generalized and/or entirely fictitious settings, these locales signify ideological and existential states of being. For example, while largely set in Chicago, Lovecraft Country’s action actually starts off in the fictional location of Ardham, Massachusetts. The series calls attention to the ways that even fictitious names signify real locations through Atticus’s misreading of his father’s letter as he at first thinks Montrose is imprisoned in Arkham, a fictitious location popularized by H. P. Lovecraft. When George corrects him, naming a site which the series designates as real, they situate Ardham among a number of actual Massachusetts cities. This sleight of hand serves to designate the whole of the region as Ardham—or, more specifically, racist Lovecraftian country, as the title iterates—as any number of actual locales within the area they describe could be the place in question. Similarly, the netherworld setting for “Everybody Dies!” comments upon the racial ideology governing public response to Black death. Set on a game show stage, a grim reaper performs as show host as a number of Black children traverse across her stage. The setting—everywhere and nowhere but populated only by African American children7 who wander across the stage against a laugh track—marks how Blacks are reduced to entertainment even, or especially, in their deaths. Lastly, Us, like Lovecraft Country also fluctuates between actual locations and fictitious spaces, as the doppelgängers inhabit a subterranean space which seems to stretch across the whole of the country, thus reiterating the message conveyed through the title and “Hands Across America” references. Like many Horror films, the Black Lives Matter subgenre typically feature humans as their supreme villains. But unlike traditional Horror,8 there is nothing particularly exceptional about the majority of villains in BLM Horror. Most commonly the antagonists and assailants are white, although they are occasionally aided and abetted by people of color. The antagonists range the gamut from wealthy people (Get Out, Lovecraft Country, Candyman) to

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politicians and industry leaders (The First Purge, Lovecraft Country, Us), to police officers (in nearly all of them) to average suburbanites (Them) and rural folk (Lovecraft Country, Them). In using an array of average whiteness as antagonists, the subgenre stresses both the range and horror of white privilege, noting how deadly systemic oppression is maintained across a broad network of varying socioeconomic levels even as seemingly individual actors perform the actual violence. Further, the only thing exceptional about these antagonists is the excessiveness of the violence itself which, notably, is often no more extreme than what actually happens in reality. Thus, although Officer Merk in Two Distant Strangers is ultimately a superhuman force— given he too repeats the loop each day after he kills Carter but with pleasure about the next day’s hunt—his murderous methods are drawn directly from actual violence officers have used against Black victims in recent years. If anything, Merk’s recurrent onslaught serves to figure for the numerous ways every assailing officer is an iteration of the same ideological processing and training, leading them to register Black subjects as deadly threats regardless of the victims’ age or actual behavior. That is not to say Black Lives Matter Horror never turns to supernatural or imagined monsters for its antagonists; yet when such creatures arise, they are often tools and/or products of white villainy. Lovecraft Country is the best example of this phenomenon, as all of the ghosts and otherworldly creatures are quite literally created and summoned by the Sons of Adam or the renegade offshoot branch. That we are meant to read such monsters as mere extensions of whiteness is most apparent in Officer Lancaster (Mac Brandt), who is both monstrous villain—as an officer who willfully seeks Black Death—and villainous monster—as a self-created Frankensteinian creature, his body augmented by bits and pieces of his Black victim’s bodies. Similarly, the grotesque assailants throughout The First Purge are largely white militia men in costume. The film iterates their seemingly excessive, abhuman monstrosity as normative when they don the outfits of helmeted officers for one of their attacks. As grotesque and otherworldly as they may seem, the film insists that this is the nightmarish reality for African Americans. That such assailing villains function as part of a larger hegemonic system of anti-Blackness is apparent in their numbers. Most often, the white antagonists function as part of a larger network; as in the case of Get Out, Candyman, Lovecraft Country, and Them, these networks reach beyond their contemporary moment well into history. Most notable about the 2021 iteration of Candyman is the recasting of Candyman’s story. The first Candyman we meet is not nineteenth-century Daniel Robitaille but a man beaten to death by officers in the 1970s. As the film’s concluding shadow puppet show reveals, the current iteration of Candyman is just one amid a whole swarm

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reaching well into the past, products of a long and gruesome history of anti-Black violence. Films like “Everybody Dies!” and Us never reveal the faces of their organizing assailants but focus instead on the products of their treachery. Indeed, each film suggests an organized, systemic group behind the suffering. “Everybody Dies!” observes that the Black death show is part of a larger system with differently equipped rooms for different populations. That white children are not allowed on the Black game stage also implies a set of rules governing the whole. Us similarly posits a networked system; given it ranges across state borders and hints at national scientific experimentation, the film suggests the oppression is the work of governmental initiatives involving many linked hands. The invisibility of the organizing actors in the two films reiterates violent anti-Blackness as a hegemonic imperative stretching across many diverse locations and structures. Perhaps most notable in Black Lives Matter Horror is its shifts away from previous eras of Blaxploitation Horror films which seemed to urge a rejection of violence, stressing instead the power of community and self-acceptance.9 The new subgenre repeatedly sees a turn to violence as inevitable though undesirable. The protagonists in the films begin as largely nonviolent figures seeking to avoid physical conflict even as they are being actively assailed. In Get Out, Andre turns and walks the other way when he realizes he is being followed; Chris quietly endures various racist statements and questions from the Armitage family and their friends, though some of these statements prove an open invitation to physical confrontation. Similarly, throughout most of The First Purge Nya engages in peaceful protests even as police barricade her community in preparation for a night of lawless violence. Furthermore, community members seek shelter in churches instead of confronting their violent assailants once the actual assault begins. Even Purge participants among the Staten Island population are largely nonviolent against each other. Most use the monetary incentive to chaos and the absence of law enforcement as an opportunity to throw massive block parties featuring loud music, open drinking, and public sex, while others engage in frightening but otherwise harmless pranks or, at worse, looting. In Lovecraft Country, Uncle George uses wits to force an intellectual confrontation with the Sons of Adam; the violence that destroys the mansion is not Atticus’s doing but Christina’s manipulation of the ceremony. Candyman’s Anthony refuses to even raise his voice in warranted anger though his work is intellectually assaulted, and his pain reduced to a fetish for consumption. Like Atticus, most of Anthony’s and Brianna’s (Teyonah Parris) time is spent investigating rather than fighting back against obvious assaults. Lastly, Them sees Henry (Ashley Thomas) repeatedly pleading with his newly gun-toting wife Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) not to physically confront the neighbors.

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Yet by the end, the characters must inevitably turn to violence, sometimes sooner rather than later. Thus, by episode 3 of Lovecraft Country, Leti is wielding a bat against her racist neighbors, supported by some of the gun-toting guests at her party. The series’ conclusion reiterates the necessity of violence as Dee snaps Christina’s neck, declaring “You will never learn” (Lovecraft Country, “Full Circle” 2020). Though the ghostly, grotesque Blackfaced Tap Dance Man in Them tricks shell-shocked Henry into killing an officer, Henry chooses violence in ridding himself of the specter before confronting the neighbors who have set fire to their house. Furthermore, the series insists his turn is forced, rather than chosen, as Henry must confront his accosting neighbors in increasingly threatening verbal exchanges. In Get Out, Chris can only escape the house through killing Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), the same person who initially attempted to goad Chris to violence during an earlier conversation, in a hand-to-hand fight. And The First Purge reveals that there is no safe place from the marauding groups of antagonists, abetted as they are by systemic surveillance and political support. Thus, at the end, Nya and friends arm themselves to fight back against the invading murderers. At no point do the films argue that Black turns to violence are joyous; rather they are explosions of a long-repressed rage and mandated by continuous onslaught. In this way, BLM Horror embodies Anansi’s call to action, ultimately arguing that the time for peaceful resolution and traditional political negotiations has passed. Black violent reaction is, like Candyman, the inevitable response to “the fact that these things happened to us. Are still happening!” (Candyman 2021). Nonetheless, as in the New Black Gothic, the ultimate source of oppression evades confrontation in these films and series. However, when we consider films and series such as Us and Lovecraft Country, which emphasize collective and cross-coalition resistance, alongside films like The First Purge and series like Them, which center on individuals and isolated community fights, we can see the theory of a corrective among the collection. Indeed, the individual fights lead to communal fights which, hopefully, can build to a larger social revolution which, as in Us and Lovecraft Country, is capable of dismantling violent hegemonic racism and oppression to claim “magic”/power for the oppressed. Thus, unlike previous eras of Black Horror, the subgenre does not eschew anger and force but rather suggests that when working as a collective and a coalition, “Angry is good. Angry get’s . . . shit . . . done” (American Gods, “The Secret of Spoons” 2017).

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GETTING SHIT DONE Given the long, problematic history of racial representation in Horror film, it might seem an unlikely medium through which to engage critiques of social and systemic racism. However, as Caetlin Benson-Allott notes, Horror at its best “can also drive a personal commitment to change” (2016, 58). Gothic fiction and Horror films can serve as a monitor of developmental and social progress (or its lack). Black Lives Matter Horror does just this, revealing the numerous ways that, despite pretensions of progress, American society remains brutal, marred by regressive ideologies. Thus, for example, the Purge is enabled by sophisticated technological progress which abets violence and makes its users appear like uncanny creatures. The Armitage family perfects surgical brain transplantation that reduces its host to occupied zombies. The absent scientists of Us create doppelgängers who are notably inarticulate— communicating only through grunts and gestures—and ultimately incomplete. And despite all of her intellect and power, Christina’s magic still relies on sacrifice and blood rites to function. American progress, the subgenre argues, is far from progressive; its modern technological culture merely masks the persistence of barbaric practices and ideologies that continue to voraciously consume Black subjects. Black Lives Matter Horror reminds audiences—especially Black viewers—of the power of Horror as that which incapacitates by proving “unassimilable, because one cannot respond to that which one cannot understand” (Benson-Allott 2016, 58). As such, the subgenre relies upon and iterates Robert Solomon’s understanding of Real Horror, as defined in his 2003 essay by that very name. The subgenre’s reproductions of actual scenes of senseless assaults confront us with the irrationality and inconceivability of the violence recurrent in encounters between police officers and Black citizens across the nation. Their horror “paralyze[s] and dumbfound[s] as people struggle to understand how something so unthinkable, so beyond any expectations, could come to pass” (Benson-Allott 2016, 61) in fiction and, more importantly, reality. The films and series challenges the popular reduction of Horror to “shock” films relying on fleeting sensations of disgust, anxiety and dread; instead, they stress Horror as haunting and pervasive, as that which uncannily reappears beyond the fictions in the world around you. Thus, the subgenre returns us to an important function of Horror as a “‘recognition that things are not as they ought to be” (Solomon 2003, 243). Yet, as Daniel Shaw reminds us in his response to Solomon’s essay, “real horror isn’t pleasurable, because our moral outrage is so great that it overwhelms any attraction we may have to its cause” (Shaw 2003, 262). That is not to say there is no pleasure in Black Lives Matter Horror. Indeed,

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viewers may take vicarious pleasure in seeing the protagonists rise to resist their antagonists: in witnessing Chris’s final fight to get out; in seeing Lucky turn her gun towards her obnoxious neighbors; in hearing Carter resolutely declare, after rising from being slaughtered yet again, that one day he will get home to his dog. As Solomon explains, while the experience of Horror is akin to self-inflicted pain, these films also convey a sense of control to audiences through identification with the hero(ine)s’ victory over monstrous forces. Yet the contentious reviews of many of the BLM films and series reveals that they are not altogether pleasurable viewing experiences. For instance, Lovecraft Country—particularly the episode “Rewind Tulsa 1921”—Them, and Two Distant Strangers were met with criticism of being Black Trauma Porn for their unflinching portrayal of Black suffering,10 while other critics called Candyman “cluttered” and “preachy” (Daniels 2021), an “overly instructive” (Cambpell 2021) film that “overreaches” (Collins 2021). Likewise, critics deemed The First Purge exploitative in its depictions of Trump-era antiBlackness.11 This, of course, is to cite only the negative reviews, but they nonetheless reveal anxiety about the intense focus upon and reproduction of Black pain on screen as part of a genre otherwise understood as pleasurable despite its grotesque depictions. What BLM Horror hopes to achieve is to remind us, through our displeasure at their reproduction of headlines, that we should also be equally displeased and morally outraged when we encounter these scenes in our waking lives. Perhaps if Americans become disgusted and outraged enough, we can collectively make some changes and head toward actual socioeconomic progress. This is perhaps where the Black Lives Matter Horror proves the most destabilizing. While the films and series hope to awaken the larger US populace to the horrors of the oppression they perpetuate either actively or passively, there is no certainty of success at the end of any of the fictions. The central protagonists survive the Purge but, given the length of the franchise as well as the films that precede and follow it, audiences know the Purge nonetheless became a national practice. While Carter declares his determination to make it home, we only see him make it as far as the building before Merk cruelly executes him once again. Though Death throws down her scythe, the game show stage remains intact. Leti defeats Christina, claiming “magic is ours now” (“Full Circle”), but we never see what that tomorrow looks like. Instead, we are left desperately hoping for a glimpse of that future even as we are haunted by the subgenre’s reminders of our present reality.12

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NOTES 1. Plainclothes officers shot Diallo nineteen times (out of forty-one shots fired) in front of his apartment when he reached for his wallet; witnesses noted that officers continued firing even after Diallo was down. 2. Officers shot Lee while he was at a Halloween Party when they glimpsed the plastic gun that was part of his costume; the officers were responding to a noise complaint. 3. An elderly woman, plainclothes officers shot her in her home during a botched drug raid. They entered her house using a No-Knock warrant. Startled, Johnston fired a shot from an old pistol, hitting no one. The officers unleashed thirty-nine shots in return. After the shooting, they planted marijuana and cocaine at the scene. 4. This 12-year old child was on his way home with his 14-year old cousin when they were stopped by officers on a narcotics investigation. One officer noticed a bulge in the child’s pocket and shot him when Farrow went to show him the object. The boy was taking out the soda and chips he’d just purchased on his way home. 5. For a full list, see the “Say Every Name Project” at sayevery.name. The project designates which were the victims of police officers and which were the victims of private citizens. 6. Social Thriller or Horror is a subgenre of film using suspense and horror to call attention to different kinds of social oppressions. Early iterations of the subgenre appear in American Horror film starting in the late 1960s and include notable films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Stepford Wives (1975). Significantly, though not often included in the list, some Blaxploitation films, like Blacula (1972) and Ganja and Hess (1973) also qualify as Social Thrillers/Horrors. For more, see: Lidia Kyzlinkovà’s “Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine: Social Thriller, Ethnicity and Englishness” (2005), Jessica Ferri’s “Stepford Whites: On Get Out and the Social Thriller” (2017), and “Jordan Peele: The Art of the Social Thriller” at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017). 7. At one point, a few white children wander onto the stage; Death explains that they are meant to be in another room where cookies and treats await them, before quickly ushering them out. 8. There are, of course, exceptions to this. For example, most Torture Porn of the early 2000s featured normal people as their villains. However, this subgenre also arose at a time when America was forced to confront its own monstrous behaviour, thanks to revelations about the US military’s use of torture during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, like Black Lives Matter Horror, Torture Porn arose out of a period when Americans were confronted with the very real, daily uses of nightmarish violence by those deemed “heroes” in dominant imagination. 9. Blacula (1972) and Ganja and Hess (1973) both conclude with a call to reject bloodshed. Blacula finally sees that his war against the anti-Blackness which created him only does more harm to those he should protect; thus, he commits suicide by sunlight. Later sequels see him resurrected in defence of that same community. Ganja and Hess is perhaps more complicated but ends with a similar rejection of the ideological violence which allows the two blood-addicts to feed freely on others.

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Later films like Def By Temptation (1990) and Tales from the Hood (1995) similarly argue for peaceful communal action against the destructive forces preying on Black populations. Tales from the Hood is especially moralising in this feature, declaring that intra-racial violence is merely the internalisation of interracial violence, both of which condemn its perpetrators to hell. In a film largely absent of traditional masculine heroes, the one man praised in the film is also non-violent and intellectual. Of course, this list does not include those Blaxploitation films with extremely limited Black input, and which thus fell more on the “exploitation” side of Blaxploitation. To this list we might add, for instance, The Thing with Two Heads (1972), Sugar Hill (1974), and JD’s Revenge (1976). 10. See, for example Braxton, Greg. 2021. “Media images of Black death come at a cost, experts say. And many viewers are fed up.” Los Angeles Times April 19, 2021. https:​//​www​.latimes​.com​/entertainment​-arts​/tv​/story​/2021–04–19​/them​-amazon​-two​ -distant​-strangers​-netflix​-debate. Okundaye, Jason. 2021. “‘Black trauma Porn’: Them and the danger of Jordan Peele imitators.” The Guardian April 21, 2021. https:​//​amp​.theguardian​.com​/tv​-and​ -radio​/2021​/apr​/21​/black​-trauma​-porn​-them​-jordan​-peele​-amazon 11. Also see: Gleiberman, Owen (2018) “Film Review: ‘The First Purge’” in Variety; Benjamin, Lee (2018) “The First Purge review—patchy, dour prequel is a nihilistic Trumpian horror” in The Gaurdian. 12. This vacillation between optimism and pessimism is a common feature of contemporary American discussion of racial struggles for equality. See, for instance, “Paybacks a B*,” in which the hosts comment at various moments on both the potential and (un)likelihood of seeing such a change in their lifetime: I do think that more and more white people are recognizing that the actual structures are no longer functional and they’re damaging our country. [. . .] An increasing number of white people do recognize that the path we’re on is unsustainable. Now whether that’s going to be actually enough, as you say, 70 million people voted for Donald Trump, whether that’s going to be enough to actually turn the tide and actually have real changes, I vacillate back and forth about being optimistic and pessimistic.

“Paybacks a B” feat. Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow. Code Switch. NPR. 26 Feb 2021.

WORKS CITED Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2016. “Learning from Horror.” Film Quarterly 70, no. 2 (Winter): 58–62. Bodomo, Nuotama, dir. 2016. “Everybody Dies!” In Collective Unconscious. Aired March 13, at South by Southwest Film Festival. Bouie, Jamelle. 2014. “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon.” Slate. November 26. https:​//​slate​.com​/news​-and​-politics​/2014​/11​/darren​-wilsons​-racial​ -portrayal​ - of​ - michael​ - brown​ - as​ - a​ - superhuman​ - demon​ - the​ - ferguson​ - police​

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-officers​-account​-is​-a​-common​-projection​-of​-racial​-fears​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. Campbell, Kambole. 2021. “Candyman (2021) Review.” Empire. Aug 27, 2021. https:​//​www​.empireonline​.com​/movies​/reviews​/candyman​-2021​/. Cohen, Li. 2020. “Police in the US Killed 164 Black People in the First 8 Months of 2020. These Are Their Names.” CBS News. Sept 10, 2020. https:​//​www​.cbsnews​ .com​/pictures​/black​-people​-killed​-by​-police​-in​-the​-us​-in​-2020​-part​-2​/​?intcid​ =CNM​-00–10abd1h Collins, K Austin. 2021. “‘Candyman’: Yes, This Remake Is Brutal and Timely. But It Also Overreaches for Relevance.” RollingStone. Aug. 26, 2021. https:​//​www​ .rollingstone​.com​/movies​/movie​-reviews​/candyman​-review​-nia​-dacosta​-1217019​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. DaCosta, Nia. dir. 2021. Candyman. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures. Daniels, Robert. 2021. “The New Candyman Was Modernized for the Wrong Audience.” Polygon. Aug 25, 2021. https:​//​www​.polygon​.com​/reviews​/22641277​ /candyman​-review​-2021. Accessed August 21, 2022. Free, Trayvon, dir. 2020. Two Distant Strangers. Los Angeles: Dirty Robber. Green, Misha, creator. 2020. Lovecraft Country. Los Angele: Monkeypaw Productions. Harrison, Sheri-Marie. 2018. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books. June 23. https:​//​lareviewofbooks​.org​/article​/new​-black​-gothic​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Hitchens, Brooklyn K. 2017. “Contextualizing Police Use of Force and Black Vulnerability: A Response to Whitesel.” Sociological Forum 32, no. 2 (June): 434–48. Marvin, Little, creator. 2021. Them. Los Angeles: Sony Pictures Television. McMurray, Gerard, dir. 2018. The First Purge. Universal City: Universal Pictures. Morrison, Toni. 1988. Beloved. New York: Plume. NPR. 2021. “Paybacks a B” feat. Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow. Code Switch, Feb 26. Subscription Only. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions. ———. 2019. Us. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions. Shaw, Daniel. 2003. “A Reply to ‘Real Horror.’” In Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 260–64. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Slade, David, dir. 2017. American Gods. Season 1. Episode 2, “The Secret of Spoons.” SantacMonica: Lionsgate Television. Solomon, Robert C. 2003. “Real Horror.” In Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 230–59. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

Chapter Thirteen

Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century Jacob Floyd

At the start of the new decade, Indigenous horror has achieved greater recognition in popular awareness and critical attention. Perhaps more than any other work, Mi'kmaq director Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum (2019) has signaled the rise of Indigenous horror cinema. Yet, Barnaby worries that: “a lot of people are not ‘getting’ the film because they don’t know the contextual history underlying the ideas. That’s always the issue when you’re dealing with a non-Native audience; they’re not going to understand where you’re coming from” (Black 2020). Barnaby, and the filmmakers I discuss in this chapter, are informed by specific histories and cultures. In order to discuss, and hopefully better understand contemporary Indigenous horror, I want to first briefly summarize key terms and issues that contextualize Indigenous media.1 These concepts illuminate Native horror media makers’ culturally situated approaches to the genre and the history that informs their practices. The cultural specificities of Indigenous cinema animate how its creators engage with the horror genre, complicate its tropes, and provide new potential for its future. CONTEXT “Indigenous” is a complex term. Generally, it refers to a “political category that enables solidarity among diverse indigenous peoples and nations,” and differentiates Indigenous populations in settler colonial nations from other groups in order to call attention to the legacies of colonialism (Teves, Smith, and Raheja 2015, 109). Indigeneity also suggests a continuity of culture, 185

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language, and spirituality that is deeply connected to land, as well as the kinship relationships among people and nonhuman kin on those lands (Justice 2018, 6). The vitality of spirituality, politics, land, language, culture, and history comprise the fundamental interests of Indigenous media, horror and otherwise. While resonances exist among Indigenous Peoples, it is important to note the diversity of Indigenous cultures, even within close geographic areas. Critics of the term worry that it may erase specifics, especially legal ones, among Indigenous groups (Teves, Smith, and Raheja 2015, 112–113). There is power in coalitions between Indigenous peoples, but there are important insights that may be missed by not looking at specifics. For instance, while Barnaby’s film can be generally seen as a metaphor for the Indigenous experience in settler colonialism, it is also particularly informed by Mi’kmaq history and culture. Thus, what I identify as Indigenous horror in this chapter is based on my own experience and background, and other Native people will bring their own, different insights to these films. Given my focus as a scholar of Native American media, this chapter will primarily look at works shared by Indigenous Peoples in a global Indigenous media flow across the settler colonial nations of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Works from these filmmakers are generally featured at the same festivals and increasingly on the same cable networks and streaming platforms, and a flow also exists through co-productions between them. This obviously does not account for all filmmakers who may be considered, or consider themselves, Indigenous. I will primarily survey works produced or directed by Indigenous filmmakers, recognizing that this is a limiting framework. There are films that others might include here not produced or directed by Indigenous people, and to focus solely on films from producers/directors is too dismissive of Native people in other areas. For instance, Indigenous actors have had roles in horror films that have, in varying degrees, provided an important place in the genre and popular culture, challenging the vanishing tropes endemic in the genre by their very presence. Ultimately, I agree with Houston Wood, that when deciding what an Indigenous film is, “it seems best to allow the community being represented to decide” (Wood 2013, 37). Genre A notable aspect of Blood Quantum is that it is clearly a horror movie. This has not always been the case, as Indigenous works often resist generic categorization. Many films I will discuss here have been described as dramas with supernatural elements (like Samson Cree filmmaker Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America [2008]), fit better into horror-adjacent genres like fantasy

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(Inuk director Marc Rosbach’s Among Us films [2017 and 2020]), suspense/ thrillers (Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls [2014]), supernatural thrillers (how Choctaw director Mark Williams describes his films like Violet [2015]), or science fiction (Danis Goulet’s [Cree-Métis] Wakening [2013]). Naomi Borwein notes that Aboriginal horror novels are often “classified by publishers as anything but horror” (Borwein 2018, 72), an issue also true of Indigenous media works. This is partly due to expectations related to distribution, but partly because they have been misunderstood when viewed through Western lenses rather than the older epistemologies that inform Indigenous stories (Borwein 2018, 62). Native media is also influenced by Indigenous art and storytelling that are deeply hybrid and dynamic and arise from traditions that may have different ideas of what constitutes horror. As Tabish Khair notes, the feelings used to describe horror are culturally informed and applying a universal definition of horror would “further universalise the culturally specific perspectives of a section of Europeans” which is foundationally informed by “the Non-European Other” (Khair 2018, 433). Horror operates differently for Indigenous Peoples because of cultural specifics, but also because of genre history. The Other that was the object of horror or associated with the otherness of wilderness, was Indigenous Peoples and lands. It makes sense then, that Indigenous filmmakers would have a different relationship to a genre that has presented them as objects of fear or disgust (Porter 2018, 48–52). The difficulty in categorization also points to purposes of Indigenous storytelling. To better describe works of Indigenous speculative fiction, Cherokee scholar and novelist Daniel Heath Justice suggests using the term “wonderworks” because “wonderous things are other and otherwise; they’re outside the bounds of the everyday and the mundane, perhaps unpredictable, but not necessarily alien, not necessarily foreign or dangerous—but not necessarily comforting and safe, either..” These works, both in film and literature, “offer hopeful alternatives to the oppressive structures and conditions we are told are inevitable, material “reality,” and “remind us of that there are other ways of looking at and living in the world. . . . They carry the past forward. They give us a future if it’s only an imagined one” (Justice 2018, 155–56). In this way, horror is a form of Indigenous futurism. While I see value in considering Native works in relation to horror, and some works I discuss situate themselves as such, others do not, and I recognize that labeling them “horror” risks making problematic assumptions about Indigenous worldviews. While the zombies in Blood Quantum are clearly monstrous, using “supernatural” or “paranormal” to describe beings from works based on traditional stories may not adequately define how they fit into Native knowledge. As Standing Rock Sioux poet Tiffany Midge notes,

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“there’s certainly a great many so-called ‘horror’ elements to a great many different Native legends. But imposing Western interpretations on them flattens and diminishes them to some extent” (Tranchell 2018). Attributes One significant attribute of Native horror is dynamic connection between past, present, and future. In the opening of Danis Goulet’s dystopian thriller Night Raiders (2021), a young girl asks her mother, “what’s the difference between a vampire and a werewolf?” (Goulet 2021). Later in the film, she is taken to a re-education center where children are brainwashed to serve a totalitarian regime. Beginning the film by discussing two classic horror creatures who were humans but have undergone monstrous transformations informs the film thematically, as a loss of culture and identity is equated with a loss of humanity. As in this film, Indigenous dystopian fiction draws connections from past colonization into future contexts. In themselves they may not be horror, but the history told as metaphor is horrific to Native audiences, many of whom still carry it in memory. Like Night Raiders, many Native works explore the traumatic legacy of colonialism and forced assimilation through metaphor using generic tropes. When asked why he told history in a horror film, Barnaby answered “because I think it’s a horrific history” (Fisher 2020). Describing the vampires on the TV series Firebite (2021), cocreator Brendan Fletcher stated that: When you first get turned as a human being into a vampire, you lose all of your identity. You lose your language, you lose your stories, you lose your sense of self, you lose your memories—much like colonization. When the imperial force comes into your body, that gets taken from you. . . . We looked at the idea of the body being colonized . . . and that fit into our worldbuilding of the show. (Lennon 2021)

The series’ Kaytetye cocreator Warwick Thornton credits learning that the first colonial fleet to arrive in Australia in 1788 brought eleven vials of smallpox with them, laid the foundation for the show’s mythology (Lennon 2021). In the series, the vials are replaced with eleven vampires who arrived with the First Fleet. In the show, an Aboriginal man and his adopted teenage daughter attempt to kill the last of the vampire kings, now hiding in a series of abandoned mines. Mining, a legacy of colonial resource extraction on Indigenous lands, adds another layer to the narrative’s connection to reality. Our Indigenous heroes must go underground to expose what has been draining the life from their community in order to bring it to light and destroy it.

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A move paralleled by Native filmmakers who bring horrific history to light through cinema. Perhaps more than any other subject, the trauma of boarding/residential schools has informed Native horror. This may be through metaphor, like Comanche/Pawnee/Shawnee director Rodrick Pocowatchit setting the zombie comedy The Dead Can’t Dance (2010) in a school, or films that directly engage with historical trauma like Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2014). A frequent approach are films where characters uncover historical injustice through paranormal intervention. In films like Older Than America (2008), The Unrest (2012), The Candy Meister (2014), and Cornhusk (2018), supernatural elements are used explore the lasting, horrific legacy of the boarding/ residential school experience. In works that feature ghosts, the fear and disgust does not come from the spirits, but from history and the effects of the that history on Native people in the present. As Laura Beadling observes, “the history itself is terrifying while the ghostly manifestations are sources of knowledge, empowerment, and connection with the past” (Beadling 2018, 114). Cree director Shirley Cheechoo’s Backroads (aka Bearwalker [2000]) also demonstrates history’s impact on the present through horror. The film is about a Bearwalker, a supernatural force that possesses and destroys human lives. While the Bearwalker throws the sisters at the center of the film into a horrific series of murders, the majority of the violence in the film is enacted by oppressive structures: racism, domestic violence, and police brutality. Within the film, the Bearwalker often appears as a Model A car, an object that invites a connection between the history that fostered those structures with the horror experienced by its contemporary Native characters. Michele Raheja, a scholar of Seneca descent, notes the balance that Native filmmakers must have when using ghosts, one of several negotiations Indigenous media makers must make working in the genre. As Gerry Turcotte notes, colonialism “‘ghosted’ Aboriginal peoples in real terms— either through exterminating practices, in political processes such as terra nullius where it was argued that they had never quite existed” (Turcotte 2008, 9). This “ghosting” continued profoundly in literature and film. Native filmmakers use ghosts as reminders of the past but also “as a means to draw attention to the embodied present and future” (Raheja 2010, 146). This is the major difference between Indigenous ghost stories and Native-themed ghost stories made by non-Natives: Native-themed ghost stories suggest, but never quite reconcile historical injustices against Indigenous peoples, ultimately “ghosting” Native people, while Indigenous ghost stories portray continuity between past and future. Raheja, in reading the Chris Eyre (CheyenneArapaho)–produced Imprint (2007) and Mohawk director Shelly Niro’s It Starts with a Whisper (1993), calls this “prophecy,” the act whereby Native filmmakers recuperate the past, while reimagining the present and future

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according to traditional concepts of space and time that differ from settlers (Raheja 2010, 184–85). In addition to navigating the colonial baggage of ghost stories, Native filmmakers must also deal with stereotypes portraying Native peoples as inherently spiritual. Featuring Native people in such stories risks reinforcing this trope, one frequently used in horror media. An approach that complicates such representation, and the binaries between supernatural and natural, can be seen in Sterlin Harjo’s (Seminole/Muscogee[Creek]) Mekko (2015). In the film, Harjo refers to the estekini (a shapeshifting witch) to frame the conflicts in the film, between protagonist and antagonist, as well as environmental poisoning of Indigenous land. Harjo’s film demonstrates Indigenous knowledge by engaging with tradition to explore forms of violence in the contemporary world. The focus on the past’s connection to the future helps explain the popularity of dystopian Indigenous media. For the Native survivors of the zombie apocalypses in Blood Quantum and The Dead Can’t Dance, or the Native resistance fighters in the dystopian worlds of Night Raiders and The Red Hand (2017), their resistance is nothing new but part of a process that has occurred for centuries. It is their experience resisting settler colonialism that has provided practice for resisting zombies or dystopian governments. These works visualize popular metaphors used by Indigenous writers that situate their history as already postapocalyptic. As Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis), author of The Marrow Thieves (2017), states: “everything that we create, write and produce is post-apocalyptic because we survived an apocalypse. We’re the survivors” (Simonpillai 2019). Not all films that explore history are metaphors for colonialism, as Indigenous histories are not solely defined by contact with settlers, and span time beyond their relationship to colonial history. One example is Edge of the Knife [SG̲ aawaay Ḵ’uuna] (2018), a Haida film directed by Gwaai Edenshaw (Haida) and Helen Haig-Brown (Tsilhqotʼin). Set in the eighteenth century, the film is about Adiits’ii (Tylor York), a Haida man who accidentally causes the death of the son of his best friend, Kwa (Willy Russ). Consumed by guilt, he retreats to the forest where he turns into the Gaagiixiid, a creature with an insatiable appetite. While set in the past, Edge of the Knife has an eye to the future as its creators hoped the film would bring awareness to the Haida language, especially to youth. As Diane Brown, an actress in the film stated, “our dream right at the start was it would help our children learn the language. That we help teach them” (Blunt 2019). The cultural use of the film points to Indigenous works’ profound engagement envisioning a future connected to tradition; an interest that extends to the production and distribution of works.

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Cooperations Another attribute of Indigenous horror is a complication or rejection of binaries, particularly in regard to supernatural beings. This nuance has led has led game designer Allen Turner (Black/Lakota/Irish) to argue that Native horror has more in common with Japanese than American horror, “because there tends to be this interesting relationship between the people and the entities that they are dealing with. It’s not just kind of a ‘boo’ . . . there’s this cultural sensibility that is in the way that the horror manifests itself” a cultural sensibility illustrated in the presentation of monsters and supernatural creatures in Native horror (Marin 2019). Summarizing how Native authors resist binaries, Thomas King has noted they “suggest that there are other ways of imagining the world, ways that do not depend so much on oppositions as they do on cooperations” (King 2005, 110). Monsters, tricksters, nonhuman kin, and other creatures are important figures in Indigenous worldviews. For Indigenous Peoples, humans are part of an interconnected world with nonhuman beings, and this often informs Native media’s representation of them. In Edge of the Knife, Adiits’ii’s transformation is, by traditional genre expectations, frightening, but portrayed with a culturally informed nuance. Even after, he is still part of the community, which takes precedence over individual desires; Kwa has to learn to let go of his desire for revenge and forgive Adiits’ii, refusing to kill him. Instead, Adiits’ii is captured, and the community performs a ceremony to free him. The TV series Trickster (2020) places supernatural beings into a contemporary Indigenous community, and the short films This Wild Season (2017) and When the Shadows Dance at Night (2021) explore the implications family members undergoing supernatural transformations. In this context, one might see the Indigenous aspect to Taika Waititi (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) and Jemaine Clement’s (Ngāti Kahungunu) What We Do in the Shadows franchise (the 2014 feature film and its two spin-off series, What We Do in the Shadows, 2019–present, and Wellington Paranormal, 2018–present). In these works, vampires and other creatures are presented as complex agents in our world who have hopes and dreams beyond existing merely as antagonists to human beings with whom they often coexist ambivalently. The comedy draws upon this ambivalence and their experience as supernatural creatures experiencing the mundane aspects of life. As genre parodies, these works also explore the irony between representation and reality, and legacies of misrepresentation. This is directly seen in episode 3 of season 1, “Werewolf Feud,” where a vampire asks a group of werewolves if they are all Indians, whereupon the werewolves express their annoyance at Twilight for perpetuating the stereotype. Indigenous filmmakers must work to reconcile their films with the history and assumptions of the

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genre, as well as the lasting legacy of its archive of images. Indian humor is one strategy to accomplish this because it is self-reflexive and draws attention to the difference between reality and stereotypes (McClinton-Temple and Velie 2007, 176). While some Native horror works are primarily comedic, like The Dead Can’t Dance, even noncomedies like The Dead Lands (2020), Firebite, and Trickster all contain healthy doses of humor. Humor is just one example of a general playfulness in Indigenous approaches to the genre. Playfulness is also demonstrated in the way Native filmmakers experiment with film form, often by mixing media. Blood Quantum uses animated sequences as a way to explore storied time, as does Firebite in its alternative retelling of Australian colonization, and Backroads superimposes paintings of the Bearwalker to signal its arrival. Perhaps the most extreme example of experimenting with the film medium and genre, one that pushes those concepts to their limits, is not a movie at all but Blackfoot writer Stephen Graham Jones’s Demon Theory (2006), a novel comprised of a trilogy of three horror screenplays that uses his imagined films to, through abundant footnotes, explore not only the horror genre in depth, but also film form and language. Protocols When creating horror, and specifically when adapting traditional stories, Native filmmakers face unique concerns as they must navigate culturally specific protocols. In Indigenous cultures, supernatural beings (though supernatural is perhaps a misnomer because in certain worldviews they are quite natural) that lend themselves to horror narratives are often subject to restrictions. They figure into stories that can only be told by certain people or to certain people, or in specific places and times. In other cases, representations, outside of specific contexts, are forbidden or may result in harm. Stories have power, and as King notes, “a story told one way could cure . . . the same story told another way could injure” (King 2003, 92). Utilizing these stories as the basis of popular genre fiction aimed at a non-Native audience may be viewed as unethical or irresponsible to Indigenous knowledge structures. As such, there is tension between perpetuating these stories through media, and respecting cultural protocols. Tohono O'odham filmmaker Jennifer Varenchik summarizes her approach to this negotiation in the following way: As long as you have a good intention . . . and you don’t cross that line of sharing anything that you know you shouldn’t, that is considered sacred . . . I think each tribe has their own protocol but definitely always ask for permission and find the cultural protocols that you need to, but at the same time we cannot be

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complaining that there are no Native horror films and yet we’re not going to make them, so we can’t always please everybody. (Marin 2019)

These concerns are explored in her short film, Crossers (2019). In the film, Annie (Joanna DeLane), a Diné woman in Los Angeles, watches an episode of a fictional TV show called In Search of Ghost Stories filmed on the Navajo reservation about creatures called “crossers,” beings who enjoy making humans miserable. When her roommate, Kelsey (Susan Jackson), walks in on her watching the show, she tells her she shouldn’t be watching it because its “bad medicine” and suggests the tribal council “sold out” by granting permission for the show to film there. That night, Annie is possessed by a crosser and kills Kelsey. When the crosser leaves Annie’s body, it says “thanks for tuning in” before disappearing. In this work, the power of screen media is directly tied to unleashing a violent spiritual outcome. An added element of negotiation is that, as the end credits note, crossers are not traditional Diné beings, but were created by Varenchik for the film. Given the history of misrepresentation and erasure, there is acute concern among Indigenous people in how they are represented in media, a concern that is heightened when traditional stories are involved. This can be seen in the controversy over Rebecca Roanhorse’s novels that critics charge misuse sacred Diné stories not intended for outsiders in service of genre fiction (Shapiro 2020), or the controversy surrounding the TV series Trickster (2020). Danis Goulet, a consulting producer on the show, and cocreator Tony Elliot, resigned after questions arose about showrunner Michelle Latimer’s Native identity. While the show was renewed for a second season, it was cancelled amid the controversy, a move itself criticized by Indigenous media makers who felt that the CBC could have continued the show with a Native showrunner (Weaver 2021). Production and Distribution While in recent years there have been more Native horror films, Indigenous horror is not new. An absence of works in the past has not been from a lack of interest but rather media presence and infrastructure. Indigenous-made horror films have been a part of film history in various forms, from Wallace Fox’s (Chickasaw) Bowery at Midnight (1942) to Sequoyah Guess’ (United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee) shot-on-video Kho:lvn (1998). However, increased opportunities for Indigenous media makers have allowed for more Native works, especially those in different genres. Indigenous filmmakers have historically struggled to access key positions within the industry, and even then, distribution has proved difficult. In this instance, working within a genre opens up Native filmmaking beyond

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specialized audiences. The genre label has likely helped Indigenous works reach wide audiences, and Thornton directly noted the transnational popularity of the genre for his decision to make Firebite (Lennon 2021). Similarly, Barnaby felt a zombie film allowed him to “show a non-Native audience their history in a way that hopefully didn’t alienate them” (Fisher 2020). Because genre fans watch a diversity of films within a genre, one wonders how many horror fans saw their first Indigenous film when they watched Blood Quantum. While genre filmmaking may expose films to new audiences, there are still assumptions about genre works. Regarding Native speculative fiction, Justice suggests that there is concern that Indigenous literature is already seen as “deficient” and some Native storytellers may fear adding “the scorn of genre snobbery on top of it” (Justice 2018, 147). Similarly, with few Indigenous filmmakers, it is understandable that they, and more importantly the financial backers of those works, would want to invest in stories about real issues facing Indigenous populations. Traditionally, producers, national film organizations, and tribal nations, are more likely to fund realist dramas or documentaries rather than horror films. The rise of Indigenous horror not only runs parallel to greater opportunities for Native filmmakers, but a greater legitimation of the genre itself in terms of critical recognition, festival exhibition, or the expectation that horror (tied to the box-office success demonstrated by directors like Jordan Peele) is a legitimate, and financially viable, means to discuss race and historical trauma on screen. In the 1980s, Ngāti Apa filmmaker Barry Barclay wrote about the anxieties faced by Māori filmmakers looking to fund their projects. In addition to concerns experienced by every filmmaker, Māori filmmakers had to also be concerned with how they will try to sell their films to non-Māoris who have their own assumptions about what makes a film sufficiently Māori. Barclay wrote that he dreamed of one day making a Māori martial arts movie, The Taiaha Kid, but noted that despite the tradition of Māori martial arts, “I fear the script . . . might be too impious for some of the assessors. It would not be a worthy Māori film. It would not reflect real Māori values” (Barclay 2015, 21). For a long time, Indigenous filmmakers wishing to make genre films likely felt the same anxiety. Things have changed enough that not only was Tao Frasier (Fijian) able to make his own Māori martial arts epic The Dead Lands (2014), but it was adapted into a martial arts zombie series as the first New Zealand television series produced for an American network, marking the nation’s major foray into the international TV market (“Unique New Zealand The Dead Lands Launches” 2020). The face of New Zealand television for American audiences was Māori horror. Producer Tainui Stephens (Māori) wrote, “we’re pretty sure audiences will find it dramatic and rollicking. It’s a mix of carnage

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and self-mockery. It’s darkness with a light touch. It’s a Māori colonisation of the action-horror genre” (Stephens 2020). Stephens notes the potential for the genre to appeal to wide audiences, and for Indigenous media makers to inflect it with cultural elements and worldviews to, through a significant reversal, “colonize” it. Television has become an important outlet for Native filmmakers. In addition to exposure, television shows are significant because they provide valuable opportunities for a generation of Indigenous filmmakers, presenting continued hope for the future of Indigenous media, especially within genres. Yet, Native filmmakers still face difficulties in terms of access, especially in significant positions, and in accessing funding. As Barnaby notes, Blood Quantum was “billed as the biggest budget for a Native film in Canada . . . but that being said, there are other Native stories told by non-Native filmmakers that were exponentially better funded” (Swanson 2020). As they have throughout history, Indigenous filmmakers continue creating works outside of the industry. Marc Fussing Rosbach, made his first feature, the dark fantasy Among Us: In the Land of Our Shadows, in 2017 at the age of twenty-two, creating CGI he learned from YouTube tutorials (IAQ 2018). The DIY Native horror scene is documented in Mike J. Marin’s (Navajo/ Laguna Pueblo/ Washoe) Cinema Red: Full Native Horror, a documentary that explores a group of Native filmmakers working outside the industry to create horror films that have found audiences in festivals and online. The film was screened as part of the American Indian Film Festival’s “Thrilling Indigenous Horrors” program, and the presence of Native horror programs at festivals suggests the genre’s popularity. Marin’s film stands as both a document of and hope for the future of the genre; a Native horror, not just a “native version” of horror, that is informed by and continues to serve the cultural and political purposes of its Indigenous creators (Marin 2021). NOTE 1. I will use Indigenous and Native interchangeably.

WORKS CITED Barclay, Barry. 2015. Our Own Image: A Story of a Māori Filmmaker. First University of Minnesota Press Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beadling, Laura. 2018. “Native American Gothic on Screen: Revising Gothic Conventions in Two Recent Indigenous-Centered Films.” Gothic Studies 20, no. 1: 111–23. doi.org/10.7227/GS.0038.

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Black, Sarah-Tai. 2020. “Blood Quantum’s Jeff Barnaby on the History and Horror of His Indigenous Zombie Movie: ‘I Feel like I Barely Got out of This One Alive.’” The Globe and Mail, May 4. www​.theglobeandmail​.com​/arts​/film​/article​-blood​ -quantums​-jeff​-barnaby​-on​-the​-history​-and​-horror​-of​-his​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Blunt, Rosie. 2019. “Edge of the Knife: The Film in a Language Only 20 People Speak.” BBC, April 29. www​.bbc​.com​/news​/world​-us​-canada​-48028970. Accessed August 21, 2022. Borwein, Naomi Simone. 2018. “Vampires, Shape-Shifters, and Sinister Light: Mistranslating Australian Aboriginal Horror in Theory and Literary Practice.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel, 61–75. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi. org/10.1007/978-3–319–97406–4_5. Clement, Jermaine, dir. 2019. What We Do in the Shadows. Season 1. Episode 3, “Werewolf Feud.” Los Angeles: 20th Television. Fisher, Ariel. 2020. “A Shovel between the Eyes: The Writer/Director of BLOOD QUANTUM Speaks.” Fangoria, May 3. www​.fangoria​.com​/original​/blood​ -quantum​-director​-interview​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Goulet, Danis. 2021. Night Raiders. Culver City: Samuel Goldwyn Films. IAQ. 2018. “Circumpolar Indigenous Film at ImagineNATIVE 2018.” InuitArt Quarterly (blog). September 19. www​.inuitartfoundation​.org​/iaq​-online​/spotlight​ -circumpolar​-indigenous​-film​-at​-imaginenative​-2018. Accessed August 21, 2022. Justice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter—Indigenous Studies Series. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Khair, Tabish. 2018. “Postcolonial Horror.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel, 433–39. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi.org/10.1007/978-3–319–97406–4_33. King, Thomas. 2005. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lennon, Mads. 2021. “Firebite Interview with Creators Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher.” Fansided, December 22. 1428elm.com/2021/12/22/firebiteinterview-creators-warwick-thornton-brendan-fletcher/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Marin, Mike J. 2019. Cinema Red: Natives & Horror. https:​//​youtu​.be​/7T7uQqM6Gng. Accessed August 21, 2022. ———. 2021. Cinema Red: Full Native Horror. www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=KvYZ​ _0uIT​_I. Accessed August 21, 2022. McClinton-Temple, Jennifer, and Alan R. Velie, eds. 2007. “Humor.” In Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, 175–78. New York: Facts on File. Porter, Joy. 2018. “The Horror Genre and Aspects of Native American Indian Literature.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel, 45–60. Cham: Springer International Publishing. link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3–319–97406–4_33. Raheja, Michelle H. 2010. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representation of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Shapiro, Lila. 2020. “The Sci-Fi Author Reimagining Native History.” Vulture, October 20. www​.vulture​.com​/article​/rebecca​-roanhorse​-black​-sun​-profile​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. Simonpillai, Radheyan. 2019. “TIFF 2019: Indigenous Artists Are Using Horror to Unpack Colonial Trauma.” Now Toronto, September 4. https:​//​nowtoronto​ .com​/movies​/news​-features​/indigenous​-horror​-blood​-quantum​-tiff​-2019. Accessed August 21, 2022. Stephens, Tainui. 2020. “Tell the Dead I’m Coming!” E-Tangata, January 26. https:​ //​e​-tangata​.co​.nz​/reflections​/tell​-the​-dead​-im​-coming​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Swanson, Anna. 2020. “Jeff Barnaby on Bringing ‘Blood Quantum’ to the Screen and the Relevance of Zombie Movies.” Film School Rejects, May 5. filmschoolrejects.com/jeff-barnaby-blood-quantum/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Teves, Stephanie Nohelani, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja. 2015. “Indigeneity.” In Indigenous Studies Keywords, 109–18. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Tranchell, T.J. 2018. “Horror Older Than America: Whitewashing Native Tales for a Mass-Market Audience.” Northwest Public Broadcasting, October 26. www​.nwpb​ .org​/2018​/10​/26​/horror​-older​-than​-america​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Turcotte, Gary. 2008. “Spectrality in Indigenous Women’s Cinema: Tracey Moffatt and Beck Cole.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43, no. 1. doi. org/10.1177/0021989407087822. “Unique New Zealand The Dead Lands Launches.” 2020. Manatu Taonga Ministry for Culture & Heritage. January 23. mch.govt.nz/unique-new-zealand-dead-landslaunches. Accessed August 21, 2022. Weaver, Jackson. 2021. “Trickster’s 2nd Season Cancelled by CBC.” CBC News, January 29. www​.cbc​.ca​/news​/entertainment​/trickster​-cancelled​-1​.5893752​#:​​~:​text​ =CBC's​%20television​%20series​%20Trickster​%2C​%20launched​,with​%20producers​%2C​%20writers​%20and​%20actors. Accessed August 21, 2022. Wells, Paul. 2007. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Repr. Short Cuts 1. London: Wallflower Press. Wood, Houston. “Dimensions of Difference in Indigenous film.” In Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory, edited by M. Elise Marubbio and Eric L. Buffalohead, 35–57. Lexington: Universityty press of Kentucky, 2013.

Chapter Fourteen

“Stepping out of the Closet” The Evolution of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century Horror TV Natasha C. Marchini

QUEER Throughout its history, links have formed between the horror genre and queerness. From the conception of Gothic literature in the late 1700s to the media we consume today, queerness has latched onto horror at its core and continues to flow through each branch of subgenre horror has to offer. As BJ Colangelo writes in her article “The History of Horror Is Gay,” “If we go back to the very foundations of the horror genre, we’ll find a constant theme running through the most inspirational works and essential creators—queerness” (Colangelo 2021). With the consistent theme of queerness inherent at the core horror, it was inevitable that certain analogies would arise. These analogies would later turn into common queer tropes that are still present in modern-day horror. Often when queerness was present in twentieth-century horror, it would lay in the body of the monster. This trope would later be named the Monster Queer or Monster-as-Metaphor by Benshoff in his book Monsters in the Closet (1997). Benshoff discusses the commonalities between queerness and the monster, and the threat that society believes each pose to the heteronormative nuclear family, stating “to create a broad analogy, monster is to ‘normality’ as homosexual is to heterosexual” (Benshoff 1997, 2). Benshoff’s analogy replaces the literal queer body with that of the monster, deeming the monster queer indicative of the anxieties felt by a heteronormative society when 199

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in the presence of queerness. While Benshoff’s analogy fits the narrative through which the monster queer was often portrayed in twentieth-century horror, Darren Elliot-Smith posits that “in a more enlightened age of cultural acceptance and assimilation, queer horror reveals the fears prescient within LGBTQ+ communities—offering up new monstrous metaphors” (ElliotSmith and Browning 2020, 6). Elliot-Smith’s hypothesis surrounding the monster queer provides a better understanding of how queerness and the monster are interlinked in a modern society, placing the monster as a symbol of the oppression faced by those within the LGBTQ+ community. And it is these new monstrous metaphors that have followed the metaphorical monster queer into the twenty-first century. Other than the monster queer, one of the most common queer tropes that has followed LGBTQ+ characters throughout history both in literature and film, is the “Bury Your Gays” trope. Bury your gays began as a literary trope in the late nineteenth century, gained substantial traction in the twentieth century and continues to plague our screens in modern genre films, not excluding the horror genre. The trope works as a narrative tool that features a queer romantic couple, one of which must die or be destroyed by the end of the story. Bury Your Gays is often enacted within the narrative once the couple’s relationship has been confirmed for the audience, such as a confession of feelings or a first kiss. In the twentieth century the trope would be used to show an absence of queerness in the lead character, whereby queerness would be used as an experiment or to show a momentary lapse of judgement. However, in modern media, Bury Your Gays, or Dead Lesbian Syndrome as it is often referred to due to a disproportionate number of queer women who fall victim to the trope; is regularly used for shock value, often lending nothing to the overall narrative. As Hulan notes “Bury Your Gays . . . was ‘put in place’ as it were to allow LGBTQ+ authors to tell stories which featured characters like them without risking social backlash, breaking laws regarding ‘promoting’ homosexuality, or the loss of their career” (Hulan 2017, 17). However, even in a society that has become more accepting of queerness and in which the author/writer or director no longer needs to punish their queer characters to avoid social outcry, the trope still persists in modern horror films and series. This chapter seeks to explore common queer tropes that continue to arise in twenty-first-century horror, while also looking at the recent endeavor to break away from stereotypical storylines. The primary focus of this chapter will be to explore queer tropes, while also examining the ways in which queer representation has evolved on screen and will consider an array television shows from the past twenty-two years, dividing them into three distinct sections. Each section will explore a specific trope, the first section will explore the use of the Bury Your Gays/Dead Lesbian Syndrome trope, the second will look at the Monster-as-Metaphor, and the third will delve into the culmination

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of queer tropes and the rise in queer representation in American Horror Story (Murphy and Falchuk 2011–present). Each section will draw examples from the early 2000s throughout the 2020s and aims to explore the ever-evolving world of LGBTQ+ identities being represented within the genre. SEX, THE SUPERNATURAL, AND DEAD LESBIANS The early 2000s was, in many ways, a turning point for queer representation in horror, or so we were led to believe. Once LGBT characters began to step out of the closet and place themselves firmly at the forefront of the narrative, so too did the tropes we have all come to expect. With subtext, Bury Your Gays, Dead Lesbian Syndrome, and queer baiting, the past twenty-two years of horror follows on from the same patterns of representation as those that came before. However, since the dawn of the new millennia queerness in horror has become more apparent to the everyday viewer and often no longer requires explanation of its presence. Bury Your Gays or as it is commonly known Dead Lesbian Syndrome, due to the frequency of which lesbian and bisexual women are killed in violent ways, often in service of another characters’ development, is one of the most commonly used tropes in the horror genre (Birchmore and Kettrey 2021, 2). Loosely explained in the introduction to this chapter, the Bury Your Gays trope is a narrative tool that is used to extinguish queer characters before they can experience the happiness that is often afforded to their heterosexual counterparts (Hulan 2017, 17). Often taking place after an admission of love or, more frequently in the horror genre, after the couple has had sex for the first time. The trope has been utilized periodically throughout horror’s history and has become even more common in the twenty-first century with queer characters being killed off for shock value or to augment the future of another character. At present there is very little theory on the Bury Your Gays trope, so this section of the chapter aims to work off the theory available while also drawing my own hypothesis of its usage within the horror genre. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Queer Punishment In 1997 writer and director Joss Whedon released Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that saw a high school student Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) become a slayer, attending school by day and killing vampires by night. The show followed Buffy and two other main characters, Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon) and Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan). It explored friendship, relationships, and strong female characters. Throughout the shows history

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it alluded to several queer characters, with the most memorable being the relationship between Willow and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson). Don Tresca discusses the relationship between Tara and Willow, stating “they were the longest-lasting, most realistically depicted lesbian couple in the history of network television” (Tresca 2016). While it was obvious to the viewer that Tara and Willow’s affinity for one another was more than platonic, in the beginning their relationship was steeped in subtext and metaphors, bringing magic as metaphor for intimacy into the narrative. Many scholars have argued against the use of supernaturality/magic as metaphor for queer couplings, deeming it a negative outlook on lesbian and gay relationships through demonization and positing them as unnatural or potentially evil (Bartlem 2003). Although others have argued that by depicting Willow and Tara’s relationship as subtextual through magic as metaphor for intimacy allowed the show to transcend identity politics, as Keegan states that “Buffy’s melodramatic representation of supernatural queer desire allowed the show to refuse the normative identity politics . . . while also surviving in a hostile network environment” (2016, 14). In February 2001 Buffy moved past the use of subtext and aired one of the first on screen lesbian kiss scenes on broadcast television, making it a monumental episode in queer horror history. In spite of this significant shift in queer representation, Buffy quickly fell victim to the Bury Your Gays trope. A mere year after Willow and Tara are seen sharing a kiss for the first time on screen, we are greeted with a devastating death scene. As with season five, season six sees a queer relationship grow and just as queer fans of the show are given hope for a better future of LGBTQ+ representation, Tara is killed by a stray bullet immediately after another first for the show, a nonsexualized lesbian sex scene. Tresca notes, “Tara is murdered immediately in the aftermath of the first intimate sex scene between the pair in the episode ‘Seeing Red,’ and Willow is driven into a violent, murderous, dark-magic induced rage” (2016, 36). Not only does Buffy strip Willow of her happiness with Tara, but the narrative throws her into a downward spiral of revenge and murder. This perpetuates another common trope that often befalls queer women in horror the Psycho Lesbian trope. A trope that sees queer women in horror and other genres turn into either a depraved killer or obsessed stalker. In Willow’s case, the aftermath of Tara’s death is too much to deal with, so she turns to dark magic to seek revenge on the person that took her love away from her. The Psycho Lesbian trope is one that often appears alongside the Bury Your Gays/Dead Lesbian Syndrome trope and supports Benshoff’s theory that queerness is often used as a negative driving force to destroy the heteronormative “nuclear family” (1997, 1). Although these tropes tend to have negative connotations in the representation of queer identities Buffy still

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stands as one of the most monumental series in queer horror history for its authentic portrayal of sapphic love. The Haunting of Bly Manor and Queer Celebration Seventeen years after the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another supernatural horror television series with sapphic main characters graced our screens. In October 2020 Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor was released on Netflix. The series follows Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), a young governess who moves to Bly Manor to take care of two children and begins to see apparitions haunting the grounds. It’s not long before the show introduces us to Dani’s love interest, Bly Manor’s gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve), but unlike Buffy there is nothing subtextual about their relationship. The show treats its queer audience to authentic representations of sapphic relationships and does so in a literal sense. However, much like Willow and Tara’s relationship and countless other sapphic relationships in horror and the wider film and television industry, Dani and Jamie’s story meets a tragic end. While Bly Manor utilizes the Bury Your Gays trope it also challenges it and changes the way we view the use of queer tragedy. Bly Manor does not utilize it as a character development plot point, nor does it murder either of its queer characters as punishment. Throughout the nine-episode run of Bly Manor we follow the life of Dani as she flees a tragic event in hopes of escaping her ghosts, but ends up as a governess for two young, orphaned children in the British countryside. Dani quickly realizes that she fled one ghost from her past only to face others that will ultimately cause her own demise. The story is told from a female narrator’s perspective, whom we find out in the end is Jamie, Dani’s love interest. From the beginning of the season Flanagan makes it obvious that this is a queer show, that will follow the life of two queer women and at the climax of the show we are granted a glimpse into the life these women have shared together, albeit a short one, but one that would change the way in which queer characters are portrayed in the future. The Haunting of Bly Manor ends with the tragic self-sacrifice of Dani in order to protect the woman she loves. But where the show differs is Dani’s death is her own choice. It’s her sacrifice and her promise—she is not simply murdered by a stray bullet, a jealous man, or to augment the future of another character. Her time had merely come to an end. The narration of the story then comes full circle when Jamie as a middle-aged woman is shown attending the wedding of the young girl Dani swore to protect, who proclaims that Jamie and Dani’s story was not that of a ghost story, but love. As Dana Piccoli notes in an article for Queer Media Matters, “Mike Flanagan . . . managed to create a nuanced story about love

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and loss that, while sad and difficult, respects the pain that queer audiences have been subjected to” (Piccoli 2020). Flanagan does what Whedon failed to—Bly Manor celebrates its queer characters, it allows their relationships and interactions to develop, and it grants them the right to make their own choices and sacrifices for the ones they love. From Buffy to Bly Manor, it is evident that the use of the Bury Your Gays trope still persists in horror; however, we can also see that the trope has evolved and can be used in ways that portray queer tragedy in a more authentic way that offers queer characters not only closure but absolution. Flanagan’s Bly Manor proves that tropes like Bury Your Gays are no longer necessary in modern horror, and if they are going to be used, they should be challenged instead of strengthened. Monsters, Queers, and Homoeroticism Coined as the Monster Queer by Benshoff in 1997, the Monster-as-Metaphor concept is the second most commonly used trope in queer horror and can be traced back to the beginnings of Gothic literature. Monsters have always stood as a convenient metaphor for all aspects of otherness and non-normative identities, from the homoerotic nature of the vampire lurking and desiring from the shadows to the transformative essence of the werewolf standing as a figure of budding sexual desire and puberty. However, the Monster Queer can also take on the form of the human monster. Characters such as the literal yet monstrous queer Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) or the subtextual homoerotic Hannibal Lecter from the TV series Hannibal (2013) are overt manifestations of the human monster queer. Scholars such as Alexander Doty have argued against queer assimilation with the monster, suggesting that it keeps members of queer communities marginalized, stating “connotation has been the representational and interpretive closet of mass culture for too long. . . . This shadowy realm of connotation allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to it” (Doty 1993, xi–xii). While Benshoff also places the idea of connotation with that of the Monster Queer as a negative reading, he also argues: it is also precisely this type of connotation (conscious of otherwise) which allows for and fosters the multiplicity of various readings and reading positions . . . in the case of horror films and monster movies, this “complex range of queerness” circulates through and around the figure of the monster, and in his/ her relation to normality. (Benshoff 1997, 15)

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This reading essentially places queerness in the realm of being a threat to, and anxieties felt by, a heteronormative society and the nuclear family. However, recent scholars such as Darren Elliot-Smith place the Monster Queer as a more positive reading tool. Discussing the Monster Queer’s position from the queer male perspective, Elliot-Smith argues “queer appropriations of horror conventions foreground gay men’s anxieties about their judgement by heteronormative standards” (Elliot-Smith 2016, 3). This section will look at the Monster-as-Metaphor concept using Elliot-Smith’s reading method but will also include the reading from a queer woman’s perspective. True Blood, Vamp Eroticism and Coming out of the Coffin The image of the vampire is one that for centuries has been seen as an outsider and is widely known for being transgressive, so it is only natural that the iconography of the vampire would be considered the perfect metaphor for queerness. As Sabrina Boyer notes “the representation of the vampire in popular culture is one that, like its monster, seems eternal. . . . Often represented as an outsider or ‘other,’ the vampire archetype is one that has established itself in our collective unconscious to represent different” (Boyer 2011, 21). Renée Vincent also postulates: The very fiber of the vampire’s otherness has the ability to embody subverted cultural norms, radiating luminosity capable of penetrating the closet door of repressed sexuality, the social hetero-normative, and the gender binary that arbitrarily dictates traditional male and female roles. (Vincent 2015, 1)

One of the most popular vampire TV series, Alan Ball’s True Blood (2008– 2014), penetrates the metaphorical closet by placing queerness at the forefront of the narrative. True Blood is a series that took the idea of the Monster Queer and combined it with the literal depiction of queerness through both its vampire and human characters. The series is based around telepathic character Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), and centers on the “coming out of the coffin” of vampires in a pronouncement of their existence and fight for equality in the eyes of the law and human society. There is a clear connection to be made between the symbolism of “coming out of the coffin” as it is labeled in the show and the act of “coming out of the closet” in queer communities. For Milly Williamson, this resonation with the vampire’s plight denotes with those “who do not occupy the normative identity—white, middle-class, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, and successful and it combines arresting pathos and a glamours pose” (Williamson 2005, 2). Other comparisons can be drawn between storylines within the True Blood series and the queer experience,

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from the use of the phrase “God hates fangs” to the use of organized religions demonizing the existence of vampires and waging a war on the species. Queer communities have faced oppression from religion for centuries, this is evident at pride marches, through political debates and the teachings of the Christian church. The phrase “God hates fangs” can be directly compared to “God hates fags” and the appearance of Christian camp “The Fellowship of the Sun” can be read as a fictitious depiction of the Westboro Baptist church. By using analogies of real-life events and organizations alongside the vampire mythos, True Blood combines the act of “coming out” and the fight for queer liberation, making our resonation with that of the vampire not only lay with the fear felt by those within the show or the push back from a “normative” society, but it clearly emulates the same struggles those of us within the LGBTQ+ community face on a daily basis, making the series’ primary narrative the perfect metaphor for the queer experience. Alongside the metaphorical aspect of the Monster Queer and the comparativeness of “coming out of the coffin” with “coming out of the closet,” True Blood also depicts queerness through literal on-screen representation, with fan-favorite human queer characters Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis) and Jesus Velasquez (Kevin Alejandro) and a long list of openly queer vampire characters, pansexual Viking vampire Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard), bisexual female vampires Pam Swynford De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer Van Straten) and Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), and political lesbian vampire Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck), as well as a host of smaller queer characters appearing throughout the series’ seven seasons. Despite the shows inclusive list of varying sexual identities, its one downfall is that it does fall victim to the Bury Your Gays trope with the death of Jesus at the end of season four. In the episode Lafayette, while possessed by a witch named Marnie, stabs Jesus in order to obtain his brujo powers. Consequently, not only does the show utilize an outdated trope, but it does so by having Lafayette murder his own boyfriend and in doing so sees his character fall into a pit of despair. However, True Blood’s expansive list of queer characters makes the series one of the most diverse in its depiction of “non-normative” identities and therefore places it on the list of monumental horror tv series, alongside Buffy. Murder, Cannibalism, and Homoromanticism Unlike True Blood, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013–2015) does not employ its queerness in the literal sense but does so through subtextual queer coding and through the use of the humanized Monster Queer. The human Monster Queer is an extension of the Monster-as-Metaphor concept by placing the human body in place of the monster and subverting the trope to show the monstrous nature of the human psyche. Often when queerness is portrayed

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through this method, much like it is through the monster it is metaphorical, coded and subtextual, requiring a queer interpretation or reading in order to unearth its presence. As Sean Donovan notes “it all happens inside the closet” (Donovan 2016, 38), meaning the queer undertones of the relationship between Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelson) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) lay just below the surface of the series narrative and dared not speak its name until the penultimate episode, “The Number of the Beast Is 666,” when Will Graham asks psychiatrist Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) “Is Hannibal . . . in love with me?” The closeted homoromanticism between Hannibal and Will is one that does not need to be searched for—it is evident from the beginning of the pair’s “platonic” frenemy relationship. It is as if the viewer has been allowed a glimpse into a shared kinship, a coming together of two people that fit together like an absorbed puzzle. Despite the shows stance on placing both Will and Hannibal firmly in the heterosexual side of the sexuality spectrum, it is indisputable that the two stand firmly in the realm of the subtextual coded queer. From the first moment the two are introduced, it is apparent that Hannibal’s interests have been peeked and a possible obsession has begun. In the fifth episode of season one, queer undertones begin to appear in a scene that involves an eloquent psychiatrist sensuously sniffing his patient. In this scene we are shown an exchange between Will and Hannibal that most would relate to Hannibal’s yet unknown cannibalistic tendencies, but to a queer viewer this scene shows the dawn of an unspoken back and forth of queer interest and obsession. As Donovan notes regarding this particular scene, “a queer moment has been activated, fully demonstrated, and then ‘resolved’ within the text” (Donovan 2016, 38). It is these small yet obvious queer moments that run at the core of the series, often fluctuating between carnivorous and primal, almost lustful desire. In season two episode ten, “Naka-Choko,” a scene that may appear to further push the idea of both Will and Hannibal’s heterosexuality ends up being one of the most homoerotic sequences of the series as portrayed in a montage sexual encounter. While both parties are shown to be with members of the opposite sex, Hannibal with psychiatrist Alana Bloom (Caroline Dharvernas) and Will with Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle), the scene’s editing blurs the lines between each of the parties involved and when viewed through a queer lens would suggest that both women only exist in this scene to act as a conduit between the men. As Messimer notes, “The passion in the scene occurs in visions of the two men connecting, and their physical absence closets their illicit desire” (Messimer 2018, 177). Casey describes this scene as a blurring of sexual boundaries, stating “visually the sequence blurs the erotic boundaries between everyone involved and echoes a recurring theme of the series—the subversion of normative boundaries” (Casey 2015, 560). By placing the relationship between Hannibal and Will within the subtext and coding

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their relationship as homoerotic/homoromantic the series ultimately denies its queer audience the on-screen literal representation that it craves, especially in a climate where queer audiences are looking to TV and film to nourish openly queer relationships on screen. However, it is also important to note that as the series develops throughout season three, the homoeroticism between all of the characters involved in this quasi-queer sex scene are unveiled, finally stepping out into the light of day. In season three of Hannibal, both Alana and Margot share an intimate sex scene that is both erotic and sensual, with depiction of vulvic imagery and face morphing effects. Moreover, the series also removes the subtextual nature of the relationship between Hannibal and Will during its climax and while removing the presence of one trope in its final ever episode, the series, like many before it, conforms to the Bury Your Gays trope. In season three episode thirteen, “The Wrath of the Lamb,” Will and Hannibal work together to bring down the “Red Dragon” killer, and after a battle to the death, the two men drenched in blood embrace for the first time, treating queer fans to the first on screen queer male kiss of the series. The moment is fleeting and used as a ploy of distraction by Will, as he uses the time to passionately topple the pair over a cliff, ultimately killing them both and ending their three-season-long subtextual queer relationship. Donovan notes, “in its final statement . . . Hannibal prioritises the unknowable fantasy of oblique queer presentation over any code of secure identity” (Donovan 2016, 58). Not only does this scene confirm the queer coding of each of these characters up until this point, it also, like Bly Manor, subverts the use of the Bury Your Gays trope. By one of the characters making the choice to kill both of them, the trope cannot be used to further the narrative of the other, nor allow them to return to a heteronormative lifestyle. True Blood and Hannibal are proof that the presence of both the Monster Queer and the subtextual coded queer are still present in modern-day horror. However, while both of the series use these tropes, they also work to subvert their usage. True Blood utilizes the Monster Queer through its vampire and “coming out of the coffin” narrative, while also placing an extensive list of queer characters at the forefront, providing both metaphorical and literal representation. True Blood must also be hailed for flipping the script on Benshoff’s theory of queerness being a threat to a heteronormative society, as the series can be read as a depiction of the anxieties felt by those within the community when faced with oppression. And despite Hannibal not only making use of the subtextual human Monster Queer but also falling victim to the Bury Your Gays trope, it still prioritized the relationships between its coded characters and allowed them to step out from the darkness, if for only a short period of time. Much like Buffy and Bly Manor, these two series show an evolution in the way queer tropes and queer representation is being handled in modern TV horror.

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AMERICAN HORROR STORY AND THE CULTIVATION OF QUEERNESS In 2011, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk graced our screens with American Horror Story (AHS), a series that would not only become one of the longest-running horror anthology series but would also be responsible for bringing both literal and metaphorical queer representation to the forefront of television. Like the horror genre, AHS has a sprawling queer legacy at its core, presenting strong and complex queer characters throughout each season. While the series is an anthology, meaning each season follows different storylines, the core ideologies remain the same. AHS explores family, sex, sexuality, the idea of those “othered” and persecuted by society. All of these ideologies can be considered a mirror image, whether presented literally or metaphorical, as the reality of identifying as part of the LGBTQ+. While being instrumental in cultivating queerness into the mainstream, not all of AHS’s queer representation can be considered pragmatic, often using stereotypes of violence and perversion. However, the show can be read from two varying perspectives: the negative side of possibly promoting a homophobic rhetoric to the more pragmatic of depicting queerness as the norm and highlighting queer anxieties more than heterosexual anxieties surrounding queerness. Tosha R. Taylor notes, “it would be easy to accuse the series of corresponding uncritically to latent homophobic discourses, but it is equally easy to find in it compelling explorations of, simultaneously, queer fears and fears of queerness” (Taylor 2019, 22–23). Murder House, Hotel, and Queer Brutality Season one of American Horror Story, named “Murder House” by fans of the series and season five, “Hotel,” share many similarities, the first being both series revolve around buildings that are haunted by those that have perished within their walls and the second being the sheer brutality that their queer men face. “Murder House” combined the quintessential horror element of a haunted house, with the sordid contemporary reality of American school shootings, inspired by real-life events the series lived up to its name of an American Horror Story. Alongside the events that inspired the series and its monstrous murderers, the show also depicts short scenes of violence perpetrated towards its minor, and few, queer characters. However, through the display of sexual violence, disloyalty, and homophobia, “Murder House” tortures and ultimately punishes both of its queer male characters Chad Warwick (Zachery Quinto) and Patrick (Teddy Sears). Their characters appear undeveloped,

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leaving much to the viewers’ imagination, but their presentation does not surpass that of the stereotypical queer man. As Tosha Taylor posits, “Both men exhibit queer coding via mannerisms and expressed attitudes and both emerge as villains who threaten the heterosexual Harmon family” (Taylor 2019, 13). The portrayal of queer characters in “Murder House” perpetuates outdated tropes used throughout the history of queer horror and draws our attention to Benshoff’s theory of the nuclear family in which he notes queers were seen as “a threat to the community and other components of culture” and that they “supposedly represent the destruction of the procreative nuclear family, traditional gender roles and family values” (Benshoff 1997, 1). Moreover, it is the stereotypical portrayal of Patrick’s character that ultimately leads to both men’s demise within the series. We are introduced to the characters of Chad and Patrick across the span of two episodes, “Halloween, Part 1” and “Rubber Man.” In these episodes we are given a glimpse into their life and death within the house, as the two men appear as spectral forms to torment the hetero-nuclear family of the Harmon’s. Across the two episodes, which are portrayed through flashbacks before the death of the characters, the viewer is invited into the home of the couple, where we learn that Chad was happily preparing a home for his partner so that they could live out their monogamous life together and ultimately start a family. However, unbeknownst to him Patrick has been having sordid affairs and seeking out domination from other men in online chatrooms. The breakdown and annihilation of their relationship is given visual form through Chad’s purchase of a latex BDSM suit in the hopes of seducing and winning back the love of his partner Patrick. This suit would later become the epitome of violence within the season, from the trickery and rape of Vivian Harmon (Connie Britton) in episode one, to the brutality of the rape and murder of both Chad and Patrick in episode eight, “Rubber Man.” While the rape of Vivian Harmon by the rubber man, whom she assumes is her husband Ben dressed up to seduce her, is depicted through close-up shots of erotic and sensual facial expression that evoke both terror and pleasure, the rape and murder of Chad and Patrick can be considered nothing more than queer brutality and punishment. As Taylor notes, “where Vivian’s rape confronts the viewer with a troubling question of consent . . . Patrick’s is focused purely on violence” (Taylor 2019, 14). As the scene plays out the viewer is forced to witness the Rubber Man snapping the neck of Chad, before mercilessly beating his boyfriend Patrick with a fire poker, that would eventually take the place of the phallus in Patrick’s rape. Unlike the rape of Vivian Harmon, Patrick’s rape is never shown on screen. We are shown the fire poker placed in the position of the Rubber Man’s phallus, before cutting to Patrick’s lifeless body being thrown down the basement stairs. The end of the scene confirms what we already knew. Patrick’s body lays facedown on the basement floor, his trousers below his bloody

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and beaten buttocks. It is this scene that confirms the brutality that is only afforded to the show’s queer characters. Both Chad and Patrick have been brutalized for their queerness, Patrick’s betrayal of the house, and its original inhabitant’s need for a child. The maltreatment of the show’s only queer male characters becomes even more evident when we view how other adulterous men have been treated within the same four walls. Both Ben Harmon and Hugo are cheating spouses that have lived in and betrayed the inhabitants of the house; however, both men are heterosexual and therefore are not afforded the same brutalization as that of the queer men. These scenes of queer brutalization follow the show into its fifth season where queer men are forced to endure torture and rape at the hands of a paranormal demon with a violent weapon in place of its phallus. AHS “Hotel” had many similarities with its first season “Murder House” from its haunting by inhabitants that died within its walls, to the real-life murderers and places that inspired the core ideology of “Hotel.” The Hotel Cortez is based on the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles where many patrons have perished, as well as America’s first serial killer H. H. Holmes’ “Murder Castle,” With one of the primary ghosts of the series, James Patrick March (Evan Peters), also based on Holmes. Much like “Murder House,” “Hotel” follows the lives of the ghosts trapped within the walls of the Hotel Cortez, their pasts, deaths, and the continuation of their brutalities toward other visitors to the building. Guests of the Cortez include people from all backgrounds, ethnicities, and sexual proclivities, and in a similar yet more barbarous fashion to “Murder House,” the guests that receive the brunt of the torture at the hands of the inhabitants are the show’s queer men. While the first season afforded viewers with a reprieve from witnessing the brutality of Patrick’s rape, “Hotel” does not offer the same comfort. Instead we are forced to witness inhumane acts carried out by an inhuman creature. “Murder House” brought us the Rubber Man, one of the house’s ghostly inhabitants in a latex BDSM suit carrying out heinous acts in service of the house’s needs, while “Hotel” presents us with the Addiction Demon, a ghastly creature with a drill in place of its phallus. Taylor describes the demon as “featureless, humanoid body covered in scars. Its flesh is interrupted only by a harness about its waist that . . . holds a large, spiralling drill bit” (Taylor 2019, 17). It is this drill bit, acting as the demon’s phallus, that is used to brutalize the queer men within the narrative, and the inhumane acts the demon carries out appear to be for the sole purpose of entertainment and queer punishment. The demon’s heinous acts are carried out in the first episode of “Hotel” and again in episode eleven when his attention is turned toward a bisexual female character. Again, a queer character is subjected to the brutality of rape at the hands of this hideous demon as punishment for how she chooses to live. The only difference between the assault of Sally and the queer male characters is

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the viewer is not subjected to watch as Sally is brutalized. Instead the scene is carried out in a series of close-up shots. The difference in these scenes shows the contrast between the treatment of queer women and queer men in the world of American Horror Story. Queer women are often celebrated and given prominence within each season, even when facing vicious attacks, while the queer men are tortured and brutalized as punishment for their “lifestyle” choices. The treatment of the queer male characters in both “Murder House” and “Hotel” call Elliot-Smith’s theory of anxieties into question, in which he states, “queer horror and its representations of masculinity reveals more about gay male anxieties in the early twenty-first century than heterosexual ones” (Elliot-Smith 2016, 3). The rape scenes call our attention to the anxieties felt by queer men, when faced with a heteronormative society and the demonization of gay sex. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the horror genre has come a long way in its representation of queerness. Although mostly present through the use of tropes and stereotypes, queerness in the twenty-first century has finally outed itself from the shadowy realm of subtext. With that being said, the representation of queer women tends to be more favorable than that of queer men, which is evident in the examples above. The representation of queer women in horror has come a long way, from the oversexualization of female sexuality to the celebration of queer female relationships. These representations are changing the way we view tropes such as queer tragedy. However, we also must acknowledge the lack of positive representation of queer men in series such as AHS and the brutality that queer men still face within the horror genre, or how their relationships can only be shown through metaphors in order to gain a positive response from a heteronormative society. At present the horror genre in TV format is leading the way in inclusive and diverse representation. However, we cannot truly say queer representation has fully evolved until that representation is positive for all members in the LGBTQ+ community. While filmmakers such as Mike Flanagan are helping pave the way for a change in the way we view queer tragedy and his pragmatic views on female queer relationships, others such as Murphy and Falchuk are holding the genre back with their brutalization of queer men and celebration of queer women. While American Horror Story has been fundamental in bringing queerness to the forefront of prime-time television, the show needs to work to equalize the scales of its queer representation in order to continue normalizing queerness in mainstream media. Each of the case studies mentioned in this chapter are queer-helmed series that feature queer characters and actors and explicitly

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depict queerness in both pragmatic and problematic ways. However, each of the TV shows mentioned invite us to question the realm of queerness in horror, how far we have come and how far we still have to go. WORKS CITED Ball, Alan, creator. 2008–2014. True Blood. New York: HBO Entertainment. Bartlem, Edwina. 2003. “Coming Out on a Hellmouth.” Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 2, March, n.p. Benshoff, Harry. 1997. Monsters in the Closet. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Birchmore, Ansley, and Heather Hensman Kettrey. 2021. “Exploring the Boundaries of the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis: An Experimental Analysis of the Effects of the ‘Bury Your Gays’ Media Trope on Homophobic and Sexist Attitudes.” Feminist Media Studies, 1–17. Boyer, Sabrina. 2011. “Thou Shalt Not Crave Thy Neighbour: ‘True Blood,’ Abjection, and Otherness.” Studies In Popular Culture 33, no. 2: 21–24. Buffyverse Wiki. 2022. Mutant Enemy Productions. buffy.fandom.com/wiki/Mutant_ Enemy_Productions. Accessed May 23, 2022. Casey, Jeff. 2015. “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives: Subversion and Homosocial Desire in NBC’s Hannibal.” Quarterly Review of Film And Video 36, no. 2: 550–67. Colangelo, BJ. 2021. “The History of Horror Is Gay.”  Whattowatch.Com. www​ .whattowatch​.com​/watching​-guides​/the​-history​-of​-horror​-is​-gay. Accessed May 20, 2022. Donovan, Sean. 2016. “Becoming Unknown: Hannibal and Queer Epistemology.”  Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 59: 38– 62. genderforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/COMPLETE_ISSUE_59.pdf#p age=41. Accessed May 25, 2022. Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making Things Perfectly Queer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elliot-Smith, Darren. 2016. Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins. London: I.B Tauris. Elliot-Smith, Darren, and John Edgar Browning. 2020. New Queer Horror Film and Television. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Flanagan, Mike, dir. 2020.  The Haunting of Bly Manor. Los Angeles: Intrepid Pictures. Fuller, Bryan, creator. 2013–2015. Hannibal. New York: NBC. History.com Editors. 2020. “Murder Castle.” HISTORY. https:​//​www​.history​.com​/ topics​/crime​/murder​-castle. Accessed June 10, 2022. Hulan, H. 2017. “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context.” McNair Scholars Journal, 21, no. 1: 17–24.

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Keegan, Cael M. 2016. “Emptying The Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer.’” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 1, no. 1: 9–22. Messimer, Mary-Kate. 2018. “‘Did You Just Smell Me?’: Queer Embodiment in NBC’s Hannibal.” Popculture  51, no. 1: 175–93. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ full/10.1111/jpcu.12632?saml_referrer. Accessed 25 May 2022. Murphy, Ryan, and Brad Falchuk. 2011–present.  American Horror Story. Los Angeles: FX Networks. Piccoli, Dana. 2020. “‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ Handles Queer Love and Loss with Compassion and Challenges Old Tropes.” Queer Media Matters. www​ .queermediamatters​.com​/post​/the​-haunting​-of​-bly​-manor​-deals​-with​-queer​-love​ -and​-loss​-with​-compassion​-and​-challenges​-old​-tropes. Accessed May 23, 2022. Sharman, Jim. 1975. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. Taylor, Tosha R. 2019. “Drill-Do Horror: Abjection, Queer Bodies, and Sexual Violence in ‘Murder House,’ ‘Freak Show,’ and ‘Hotel.’” In Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in American Horror Story, 9–25. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc. Tresca, Don. 2016. “Skeletons in the Closet: The Contradictory Views of the Queer in the Works of Joss Whedon.” In Queer TV in the 21st Century: Essays on Broadcasting from Taboo to Acceptance, 26–40. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc. Vincent, Renee. 2015. “Vampires as a Tool to Destabilize Contemporary Notions of Gender and Sexuality.” Ellipsis: A Journal of Art, Ideas, And Literature  42, no. 25: 1–9. Whedon, Joss. 1997–2003.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Los Angeles: Mutant Enemy Productions. Williamson, Milly. 2005.  The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction, and Fandom From Bram Stoker to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. London: Wallflower Press.

Chapter Fifteen

Involution, Adaptation, Mutation Horror’s Disability Dynamics Angela Marie Smith‌‌‌

DISABILITY Horror movies have long exploited ableist representations of disability. The genre’s monsters are often violent, threatening, and/or vengeful creatures with histories of trauma, disordered minds, and/or physical deformity. The genre’s victims experience terrorizing and cumulative injury, often landing in mental and physical breakdown or even death. The genre’s defining affects— of horror, disgust, and fear—are tied to reductive, misleading, and intensely negative disability images and stories. So, it might seem futile to look to horror cinema for an “evolving”—that is, increasingly progressive or complex—imagining of disability. A journey through its subgenres offers a decidedly regressive disability logic. In classic mad doctor films, for instance, hysterical or megalomaniac scientists generate physically deformed or mentally unstable creatures who, finding themselves outcast, enact deadly or traumatizing violence on others. In slasher and serial-killer movies, “psychos” prey on the objects of their violent desires, obsessively re-enacting their traumatizing behaviors in sequels and reboots. In vampire and zombie films, diseased or decaying bodies besiege “healthy” ones. In sci-fi horrors, alien monsters flout human norms of appearance and movement while destroying the human world. And in haunting or possession movies, mad/disabled protagonists are at once monster and victim, transforming uncontrollably, suffering demonic possession, or experiencing visceral hallucinations of disabled and irregular forms. Many twenty-first-century horrors thus contribute to an “involution” rather than “evolution” in the genre’s disability politics. Split (2016), Hereditary 215

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(2018), and Midsommar (2019) provide instructive examples, representing characters with mental disabilities as examples of atavistic human regression who embody violent threats to social normalcy. However, other contemporary horror films, including Hush (2018), A Quiet Place (2018), and Run (2020), associate disabled characters with the potentiality of human adaptation. While these films continue to understand disability as a physiological difference contained in singular bodies, they hint at human futures in which disability is intrinsic to a resilient and creative world. Another recent set of horror movies even further broadens—or productively “mutates”—understandings of disability. Films such as The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) and His House (2020) locate horror in racist and ableist systems that damage and corral certain “bodyminds” (Price 2011) for the benefit and comfort of more privileged others. In these films, disabled bodies also offer powerful if monstrous figures by which traumatic experience can be recognized, communicated, and reconciled with persistence into an uncertain future. In contrast to other films’ individualized disability portraits, these movies offer promising depictions of disabled collectives: communities in which shared vulnerability and accepted mutation becomes the grounds for a vital, if precarious, human continuity. INVOLUTION: MADNESS AND DISABILITY REGRESSIONS “The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice!” (The Beast [James McAvoy], Split, Shyamalan [2016]).

The twenty-first century has not evolved beyond ableist horror fantasies. Indeed, many films featuring monsters with physical or mental disabilities participate in a kind of generic involution, in the sense of “retrograde development” or “degeneration.” These films reiterate themes of disability as inherent biological pathology. They tie deviance from a standardized norm to moral corruption and inevitable violent threat to normative people. And they often imagine disabled people in terms of evolutionary, physical, and psychological regression or degeneracy. Accordingly, these films reanimate a “backward” eugenic philosophy we might have believed left behind. Split (2016), directed by M. Night Shyamalan, offers an example aptly invested in the rhetoric of evolution. It depicts Kevin (James McAvoy), a young man with dissociative identity disorder (DID). Through Kevin’s psychiatrist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), we learn that Kevin was abandoned by his father to an abusive mother. Describing people with DID whose alternate personalities, or “alters,” have impossibly different bodily conditions and capacities, Dr. Fletcher uses Kevin’s case to advance her theory that patients

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who have experienced trauma are “supernaturally gifted” and “capable of something we’re not.” Dr. Fletcher’s philosophy appears to interpret disability, including psychological disability engendered by trauma, as a site of potential and human improvement. This perspective aligns with aspects of neurodiversity discourse and madness studies (Price 2011, Bascom 2012, LeFrançois and Menzies 2013, Russo and Sweeney 2016, and Bruce 2021). It challenges ableist presumptions that disability is only a site of suffering and limitation, instead perceiving disability experience and mental difference as sites of potentiality and valuable human diversity. But the film posits this possibility only to debunk it. Two of Kevin’s most sinister alters gain control of his body and prepare for the emergence of another personality, The Beast. As Dennis explains to Dr. Fletcher, “The Beast is a sentient creature who represents the highest form of human’s evolution. He believes the time of ordinary humanity is over.” Confronted with Dennis’s assertions of The Beast’s great strength, speed, and physical impermeability, Dr. Fletcher is alarmed, chiding, “He can’t be real. There must be limits to what a human being can become.” In exceeding normative limits, Kevin/The Beast thus appears not as an evolutionary progression of the human species but as an utterly inhuman monstrous threat to “normal” others. This threat is realized when Dennis kidnaps and imprisons three young women he considers “impure” because of their “protected” lives free of suffering: that is, their apparent normalcy. When The Beast manifests, he kills Dr. Fletcher and two of the captives. Thus, the doctor pays the ultimate price for denying that DID renders people animalistic and dangerous, and the film reconfirms popular assumptions that people with mental illness are aberrant and inhuman. The film does contemplate a more sympathetic figure of trauma and mental illness in Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), one of the kidnapped women. Flashbacks reveal that Casey has in fact suffered sexual abuse from her uncle since a young age. When The Beast sees scars across Casey’s upper arms and stomach, he spares her. But the film’s narrative arc separates more palatable traumatized characters, like Casey, from the irredeemably animalistic mad person, represented by Kevin and his alters. The film’s conclusion implies Casey will refuse to return to her uncle, extricating herself from the mire of madness and abuse. As she is ushered out of her prison in the zoo basement, snarling caged animals invoke “mad” people like Kevin, bestial threats best contained and corralled away from human society. And Kevin’s destructive alternate personalities survive; their determination to unleash The Beast on the world confirms the inextricability of disability, animality, and evil. Depictions of mental illness as deviant monstrosity also persist in more prestigious contemporary horrors. Ari Aster’s films Hereditary and Midsommar, for example, are animated by narratives and spectacles of madness. Both begin with protagonists’ experiences of loss and trauma. In

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Hereditary, Annie (Toni Collette) grieves the death of her difficult mother, a loss soon followed by the horrific death of her daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), in an accident caused by Charlie’s brother Peter (Alex Wolff). In Midsommar, Dani (Florence Pugh) experiences extreme mental distress after her sister kills her parents and herself. Both films represent the psychological aftermath of tragedy in terms of cult rituals, demonic possession, and supernatural occurrences. In Hereditary, we learn that Annie’s mother led a coven, while cultivating Charlie as the vehicle for a demon-king, Paimon. Mysterious happenings lead to the death by fire of Annie’s husband (Gabriel Byrne), her own self-decapitation, and the crowning of Peter as the new Paimon. In Midsommar, Dani’s sojourn with the commune of the Hårga in rural Sweden both addresses and intensifies her grief, as she is drawn deeper into the group’s sacrificial rituals, eventually sanctioning her boyfriend’s murder in a fiery ritual she appears to find cathartic. As we have seen, Split teases the possibility of a future human species made stronger through mental illness and disability, only to reconfirm disability as a monstrous regression to an animalistic state. Hereditary and Midsommar similarly hint at progressive disability representations before changing tack. In parts, the films glimpse the possibility of marginal communities in which those with PTSD and other mental disabilities sustain and support one another. In Hereditary, Annie finds solace in a grief support group, and in Midsommar, Dani finds healing in rituals of collective mourning, where Hårga community members surround and embrace her, echoing her cries of panic or sorrow. But these communal acts of disability recognition and acceptance morph into rituals presented as grotesque, atavistic, and destructive. Annie’s support-group friend, Joan (Ann Dowd), is revealed as a coven member bent on resurrecting Paimon, and the ritual of emotional release and support that comforts Dani is overlaid by other communal ceremonies designed to shock and horrify viewers, including the Hårgas’ drugging and rape of Dani’s boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor). Communities forged from shared marginalization and trauma thus appear as inevitably warped, regressive, and violent. In Midsommar, disability is also used reductively and sensationally to confirm the Hårgas’ deviance, notably in the jump-scare revelation of their “oracle,” Ruben (Levente Puczkó-Smith), a boy with facial difference and implied cognitive disabilities. Both films thus transform common physical or mental disabilities— Charlie’s anaphylaxis, which prompts the wild car ride leading to her death; Peter’s PTSD after his sister’s death; Annie’s sleepwalking; Dani’s depression—into phantasmagoric spectacles of bodily dismemberment and mental alteration. And while Annie and Dani might be seen as victims of entities that capture and control them—the witches’ coven and the Hårga cult—their

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madness ultimately seems to drive and exacerbate the communities’ ritualistic or supernatural powers. Further, the films’ conclusions, which depict the survival of the damaged and deranged monster—Kevin’s dangerous alters; Peter/Paimon, sustained by the coven; Annie as the Hårgas’ new May Queen—portray the persistence of disabled people as something to be feared, a titillating but horrifying continuation of a pathological force. As figureheads for their menacing collectives, each disabled character threatens degeneration and destruction for the human world. ADAPTATION: DISABLED SURVIVORSHIP Will the rest of humanity evolve? Will we adapt to this new world? (Ally [Kiernan Shipka], The Silence, Leonetti [2019]).

Contemporary horror films still associate disability with atavism, human degeneration, and psychological aberration. But despite horror’s regressions, disability also emerges in the genre as a dynamic embodiment that is responsive and adaptive to a changing and often hostile world. This kind of disability representation is apparent in a recent set of films featuring disabled female protagonists subjected to traumatizing attacks. In Hush, directed by Mike Flanagan, Maddie (Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the film with husband Flanagan) is described as “deaf and mute” due to teenage meningitis. A writer living alone, Maddie finds her home and body besieged by a murderous stranger (John Gallagher Jr.). Hush takes its place in a long line of horror/thrillers featuring disabled women under siege, especially blind-woman-in-peril offerings such as Wait Until Dark (1967), See No Evil (1971), In the Dark (2013), Sightless (2020), and See for Me (2022). It also continues a tendency to cast nondisabled/hearing actors in disabled/ deaf roles. The film offers a series of tense scenes in which Maddie’s attacker leverages his hearing advantage, lurking unobserved behind Maddie in her living room and later entering her home noisily through a skylight. But Maddie defiantly endures a crossbow to her leg and the crushing of her hand to fight him off and injure him with his own weapon. She also exploits the stranger’s hearing status, for instance, triggering her car alarm to distract him from her escape attempt. An assistive device for deaf people proves useful when Maddie temporarily blinds the attacker with a smoke alarm that flashes brightly. And Maddie’s other senses serve her well, as when she registers the breath of the would-be killer on the back of her neck. Maddie withstands serious wounds and escalating attacks, eventually killing her attacker with a corkscrew.

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Maddie is an example of Carol Clover’s Final Girl in deaf/disabled form (Clover 1992). The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of such characters: disabled/deaf female protagonists struggle and triumph in recent and contemporary horror films such as A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II (2020), The Silence, and Run. These movies offer engaging disabled characters who are at once sympathetic victims and determined fighters, emblems not of passivity or regression, but a desirable adaptability and resourcefulness in a hostile world. In both A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, and The Silence, directed by John Leonetti, powerful and predatory creatures (aliens in A Quiet Place, prehistoric “vesps” in The Silence) have taken over the earth and are drawn to the slightest noise. Each film features a family navigating this dangerous new world, and each family includes a deaf daughter who proves a determined and astute survivor. A Quiet Place’s Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and The Silence’s Ally (Kiernan Shipka) are at times further endangered by their deafness, as when they cannot hear the aliens approach. But their deafness also becomes an asset. Sign language provides a means of communication that does not attract the aliens’ attention. And in A Quiet Place, Regan learns that her cochlear processor produces feedback unpleasant to the invaders. In a climactic scene, she uses it to debilitate the attacking alien and survive. A Quiet Place and The Silence received markedly different critical and audience responses, a divergence that may relate to the dynamics of their deaf representation. Kiernan Shipka, whose character is depicted as late deafened, is a hearing actor who learned ASL for her performance. Director Leonetti enthused of Shipka, “She learned to sign for the film, and now she’s flawless, like she’s been signing her entire life” (Roxborough 2017). But Deaf commenters pointed out the recurrence of misused signs in the movie and criticized the film’s use of ASL as “incidental,” given that “Ally is a Magical Lipreader” who unrealistically perfectly “modulate[s] her volume” when speaking or whispering (“‘The Silence’ Movie Review” 2019). This inauthentic representation of Ally’s deafness and vulnerabilities likely contributes to the sense that The Silence, in the words of one reviewer, “is barely a horror movie. . . . A horror movie needs stakes, and you just never feel them here” (Tallerico 2019). Ally’s concluding voiceover, in which she wonders whether humans will adapt to this dangerous new world, as she did to her deafness, makes explicit her deaf character’s function as an instance of valuable human adaptability. But the film’s failure to credibly convey deaf experience also registers as another generic involution: a New York Times review concludes, “‘The Silence’ posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression” (Tobias 2019). In contrast, A Quiet Place’s employment of deaf actor Millicent Simmonds makes more palpable the difficulty of survival for a deaf person in an

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exceptionally hostile world, while also motivating the film’s compelling incorporation of non-normative sensory experiences. For instance, New York Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis notes that director Krasinski “forces us to pay attention to facial expressions in a way that hearing audiences are rarely required to do” (2018). The Vox reviewer observes that the film “toys with how we hear the world around us, in ways that are startling and creative and tense,” and that it conveys how “silence comes in different varieties.” Still, when Alison Wilde, a reviewer with tinnitus, observes of A Quiet Place Part II that “the lack of sound . . . was orchestrated in such a powerful way as to render it one of the most horrifying aspects of the film,” she reveals how deafness is still mobilized for hearing viewers as emblematic of an aberrant and horrifying state. That the portrait of deafness in A Quiet Place and its sequel is designed to enhance the cinematic experience of hearing viewers is evident from the lack of subtitles in most theatrical showings. Nonetheless, A Quiet Place and its sequel firmly link Regan’s deafness to her adaptability and ingenuity. As Wilde asserts of the sequel, “Regan’s fully-fledged ownership of expertise in sound and technology was fundamental in making her the hero of the story” (2021). It is not only deaf protagonists that appear as enduring Final Girls in contemporary horror. The movie Run, directed by Aneesh Chaganty, focuses on Chloe (Kiera Allen), a young wheelchair-using woman with several diagnoses who lives with her mother Diane (Sarah Paulson). Over the course of the film, Chloe discovers that Diane, having lost her infant soon after birth, kidnapped Chloe as a baby and has been giving her drugs that cause her impairments. Like A Quiet Place, Run casts an actor who shares her character’s disability status and foregrounds its disabled character’s appeal, determination, and admirable action. Chloe repeatedly demonstrates ingenuity and grit, escaping Diane’s attention long enough to prevail on others—a pharmacist, a stranger on the phone—to give her information about the medications forced on her. Chloe also demonstrates physical strength and capacity, crawling across the roof of her house and throwing her wheelchair downstairs to escape imprisonment. Nonetheless, Run also exhibits regressive disability politics. In having its central disabled character revealed as not “really” disabled, the film contributes to the harmful notion of the “disability con,” wherein disability is typically something fraudulently simulated (Samuels 2014). And in its conclusion, Run confirms notions of disability as a deserved punishment and/or fate worse than death. Diane falls down a set of stairs while being captured by law enforcement and, at the film’s end, is seen incarcerated and bedbound. Chloe, now free, but still limping, visits Diane and forces her to swallow some pills, an act of vengeance that perhaps contributes to Diane’s ongoing impairment. The twist reaffirms disability as a terrible condition tied to moral

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corruption. Run’s use of a disabled actor to play a plucky disabled character must be set alongside this return to a conflation of disability with horror. Disabled-survivor horror films thus portray compelling disabled protagonists who adapt to hostile incursions, in a generic adaptation that imagines disabled people as vital to and valuable within human futures. In these films, however, disabled protagonists remain singular figures, and their impairments a matter of biological rather than social, political, and racial systems. And disability persists as a horrific embodiment in other bodies: the blind vesps of The Silence, the blind aliens of A Quiet Place, and the monstrous “mother” in Run. Other recent horrors, however, glimpse more complex understandings of disability as a product of dynamic political/social systems and human interdependencies. These films’ visions of human futurity thus depend less on the elevation of singular disabled individuals and more on reimagining the world in terms of shared vulnerability and interdependence. MUTATION: DISABLED COLLECTIVES AND HUMAN TRANSFORMATION “Why should it be us who die for you?” (Melanie [Sennia Nanua] in The Girl with All the Gifts, McCarthy [2016]). ‌‌‌‌‌“We will be new here.” (Bol [Sope Dirisu] in His House, Weekes [2020]).

Selected recent horror films convey a more diffuse and contextual understanding of disability as a dynamic product of colonialism, militarism, forced migration, and racial injustice. One example is The Girl with All the Gifts, directed by Colm McCarthy, a British sci-fi horror based on Mike Carey’s novel of the same name. A fungal contagion has turned many humans into zombies or “hungries.” In a military facility, a group of hybrid youngsters, infected in utero, are studied by scientist Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close). The children appear “normal.” But when they catch a human scent, they transform into one of the hungries, trying to bite and consume their prey. Dr. Caldwell theorizes that the children aren’t human at all, instead driven by the fungus to mimic human behavior. She hopes to study them to find an antidote for the fungus and thus save humanity. Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is a bright and appealing hybrid child who has captured the interest of her teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton). After hungries overrun the military complex, a group of soldiers accompany Dr. Caldwell, Ms. Justineau, and Melanie in search of refuge. Melanie’s hybrid status is an asset, enabling her to protect the others from hungries and feral hybrid children. Ultimately, however, Melanie refuses to sacrifice her life

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to Dr. Caldwell’s project. When Caldwell admits that Melanie is “alive” in her own right, Melanie retorts, “Then why should it be us that die for you?” Setting fire to a vast fungal plant that releases its spores, Melanie precipitates what Sergeant Parks (Paddy Consadine) heralds as apocalypse: “It’s over. It’s all over.” But for Melanie, a new and changed world is emerging: “It’s not over. It’s just not yours anymore.” As with A Quiet Place, casting affects the film’s disability dynamics. While Carey’s novel depicts Ms. Justineau as Black and Melanie as white, the film inverts the characters’ racial identities. As a Black child, Melanie comes to figure historic and contemporary experiences of racialized debilitation. In the film’s opening scenes, we watch in bemused horror as this child in a prison-style jumpsuit is held at gunpoint by yelling guards, shackled into a wheelchair, and abusively labeled a “friggin’ abortion.” Since viewers don’t yet have the explanatory context of the fungal infection, they feel shock and anger at this brutal incarceration. As Sami Schalk contends, Melanie is a disabled character: while she is in some ways hyper-able, she “is treated as disabled and dangerously so because she poses the threat of both death . . . and contagion.” Further, “To the majority of the adults around her, she is too different and too threatening; she must be contained, studied, treated, and cured—or used as a cure for others” (2018, 14). This initial cruelty encourages viewers to question the apparent naturalness by which those pathologized are deemed dangerous threats requiring incarceration. The film compellingly illustrates the connected functions of schools, clinics, and prisons in creating/presenting racialized and disabled bodyminds: imagined as both inferior and potently dangerous. Nirmala Erevelles has noted the formative role of whites’ enslavement of Africans in the continuing “conceptualization of black subjectivity as impaired subjectivity.” She asserts, “it is precisely at that moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo that black bodies became disabled and disabled bodies became black” (2014, 87). In the opening sequence, the imprisoned children are restrained in wheelchairs and taken to a classroom. As the guards repeatedly call “Transit!” while shipping the pathologized children from cell to schoolroom and back, they literally map the “school-to-prison pipeline” that, Erevelles argues, today orchestrates “the simultaneous process of ‘becoming black’ AND ‘becoming disabled’” (emphasis in original, 2014, 88). The spectacle of the children in jumpsuits and wheelchairs, organized in linear rows, beholden to a teacher trained to distrust them, also realizes what Subini Annamma calls the “pedagogy of pathologization,” via which disabled students of color are segregated within or excluded from schools and directed to carceral institutions. The film’s school and prison are linked to a third site of disciplinary power, that of medicine, as Dr. Caldwell’s plans for Melanie’s body and brain recall colonial displays of Black bodies for white medical

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and freak-show audiences (Fausto-Sterling 1995; Qureshi 2004); modern gynecology’s origins in violent experimentation on enslaved women (Owens 2017); the theft of Henrietta Lacks’ exceptional cells for genetic and disease research (Skloot 2010); and continuing medical neglect of Black patients (Washington, 2008; Presser, 2020). The zombie metaphor thus viscerally manifests what Jasbir Puar (2017) calls “debilitation”: an extractive wearing down of poor and racialized populations that secures others’ protected and privileged status. It is this process that Melanie ultimately refuses, choosing instead to release the spores that will mutate the world. While The Girl with All the Gifts shares with Hush, The Silence, and A Quiet Place an adaptable disabled protagonist who withstands traumatic and violent assault, then, it far more dramatically foregrounds the complex social and political systems that render our contemporary world inhospitable and dangerous for racialized and disabled bodyminds. And its conclusion is far more radical, suggesting the necessary mutation of humankind, including the inevitable and vital incorporation of disability in a significantly transformed human future. The film’s closing scene warns of the difficulty of extricating from the horrific operations of institutional coercion and control. Ms. Justineau, the sole surviving “human” character, is installed in a protective scientific pod, from which she teaches an array of hybrid and feral children. When she begins by stating, “We’re gonna continue with getting the new kids up to speed. Everyone else, if you can just be patient while they catch up,” her words suggest an inclusive educational environment, promising a more humane future for a transformed humanity. Nonetheless, the children are arranged in rows and Melanie now surveils and polices them, grabbing, pushing, and snarling to keep the feral children in line. Even here, traces of coercion and disability hierarchy persist. The Girl with All the Gifts thus participates in an ongoing mutation of disability representations in the horror genre, in which sympathetic disabled characters represent human potentiality, while racist and ableist systems are revealed as the locus of horror and destructive violence. Aspects of this generic mutation are even more evident in such critically acclaimed films by Black creators as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Remi Weekes’ His House (2020), Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021), and Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022). Each of these films locates horror particularly in ableist systems of whiteness: social structures and spaces designed to foster white privilege and disadvantage Black bodyminds. To focus on just one of these examples, in the British film His House, a mutating understanding of disability—caught up in dynamics of globalization, immigration, racialization, and war—is realized in complex disabled characters and culturally specific horror forms. Adapted by Weekes from a

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story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables, His House depicts Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) and Bol (Sope Dirisu), who have escaped ethnic violence and civil war in South Sudan, endured a difficult and dangerous boat crossing to England, and been granted a home in dilapidated state housing, where they must remain to avoid deportation. The couple struggle to settle and assimilate but find themselves patronized by their case worker Mark (Matt Smith), insulted by neighbors, and haunted by visions of a strange man and their daughter, Nyagak (Malaika Abigaba), who drowned on the crossing. The decrepit house appears haunted even on their arrival. The walls feature dark spots and holes, lights work inconsistently, and creaks and thumps punctuate the silence. But soon Nyagak peeks out from the damaged walls, runs unseen across the ceiling, hums songs, and makes sudden, gasping cries. Zombie-like creatures with masks or painted faces appear, invoking those lost to the violence and migration that Rial and Bol survived. Bol tries to eject the spirits by ripping apart the walls, yelling angrily, “This is my house!” But the possessing forces transform his house into an ocean, the scene of his daughter’s loss. Bodies rise around him, growling and moaning, and Nyagak clambers to the top of the writhing mass to hold a knife to his throat. These visceral nightmares hint at the ethnic-racial contexts for Bol’s increasingly apparent illness and debilitation, while making clear that white bureaucracies have no space or sympathy for his trauma. Bol goes to his case worker to request a different house. In a gray office, white men looking on with disgust, Bol appears abject, hand bandaged, leg and arm jittering nervously, blaming his problems on rats. Mark observes, “Look at the state of you, you’re a mess. You don’t look well, mate, you look ill. You don’t smell good. You smell bad. You’re not making any sense.” Bol’s request is interpreted as ingratitude, and, in his effort to contain his wild emotions, he crushes a glass in his hand, confirming his irrationality and pathology in the eyes of the onlookers. While the British state can offer no support, Rial makes sense of their experiences through Dinka folklore, explaining to Bol that they are haunted by an apeth, or night witch, who terrorizes and consumes thieves and debtors: RIAL: An apeth has arisen from the ocean. It has followed us here. It spoke to me. BOL: What did it say? RIAL: We don’t belong here. If we leave, and repay our debt, it would guide us back to her. To Nyagak.

Flashbacks reveal that Nyagak is not Bol and Rial’s daughter but was stolen by Bol to access refugee transport accepting only families with children.

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Guilt over this theft and Nyagak’s subsequent death are the specific traumas haunting the couple, along with their more generalized experience of bereavement and displacement. Rial’s haunting, like Bol’s, is made more debilitating by an uncaring and sometimes actively hostile environment. Leaving the house, Rial finds herself in an uncanny concrete maze, repeatedly encountering the same child kicking a ball against a wall. She asks her way of three Black teens who mock her accent and tell her, “Go back to Africa!” A medical appointment reveals only the vast gulf between a well-intentioned white female doctor and Rial, who has to explain that she marked herself with another ethnic group’s facial scarifications to avoid the fate of her massacred family. Rial is also briefly imprisoned by her husband, who denies their haunting and paints his wife as “mad” and “sick.” In the midst of such harm, Rial finds sustenance in a hallucinated community. Escaping from her husband, Rial runs into a sunny courtyard in South Sudan, where she reunites in a classroom with a group of women, friends she lost to a massacre. In this now-lost space of support, Rial comes to acknowledge the theft of Nyagak and refuse the predations of the apeth and the most impairing aspects of her trauma. The apeth offers Nyagak in exchange for Bol, and Bol eventually consents to this sacrifice, surrendering himself to the apeth who rises from the kitchen floor. But Rial saves Bol, bidding the women of her town farewell before taking a kitchen knife to slice the apeth’s throat. Like The Girl with All the Gifts, His House concludes with a disabled community evolving—mutating—beyond the normative human subject. Rial and Bol plead their case to retain their house, informing Mark that Rial has killed the witch. Mark’s response—“Are you completely mad?”—recognizes the couple’s persisting mental disability and, in its amazed and even admiring undertone, suggests an acceptance or validation of their narrative. He listens intently as Bol explains, “Your ghosts follow you. They never leave. They live with you. It’s when I let them in, I could start to face myself. This is our home.” Rial adds, “We are happy here.” In the film’s final sequence, Rial and Bol stand alone in the living room, looking into the kitchen, where Nyagak, alone, gazes back at them. A second shot shows the couple surrounded by people, and a second shot of Nyagak shows her similarly enveloped. The ghosts of the lost and betrayed calmly take their place in the shabby council home, signaling Bol and Rial’s adaptation of Dinka worldviews to their immigrant and disabled state. Bol’s declaration, “This is our home” contrasts his earlier effort to lay individual claim to the house and shut out his trauma. The scene’s visualization of the hurt and dead, a group that includes Bol and Rial, testifies to the immigrant capacity to make home in hostile spaces and to live with collective experiences of physical and mental vulnerability.

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In contemporary horror cinema, disability remains central to the imagining of monsters as well as sympathetic victims. The hungries in The Girl with All the Gifts and the undead in His House appear distorted, move atypically, and make non-normative sounds. Notably, the apeth in His House is portrayed by Javier Botet López, a Spanish actor with Marfan syndrome, whose elongated limbs have qualified him for several horror roles. But the disabled collectives led by Melanie and the apeth are not irredeemably monstrous or inhuman: the former is constituted of disabled and neglected children and the latter victims of violence and injustice, and their calls for reckoning require viewers to contemplate necessary mutations in the human world and its inhabitants. The conclusion of His House suggests that the future of horror lies not only with intrepid disabled protagonists but also diverse and diversely disabled communities. These groups’ members refuse categorization as monsters and resist relegation to carceral and institutional spaces, instead making themselves at home in the heart of a colonial and ableist world. WORKS CITED Annamma, Subini Ancy. 2018. The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/Abled Girls of Color in the School-Prison Nexus. New York: Routledge. Aster, Ari, dir. 2018. Hereditary. New York: A24. ———. 2019. Midsommar. New York: A24. Bascom, Julia, ed. 2012. Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking. Washington, DC: The Autistic Press. Bruce, La Marr Jurelle. 2021. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Catsoulis, Jeanette. 2019. “In John Krasinski’s ‘A Quiet Place,’ Silence Means Survival.” New York Times, April 4. www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/04​/04​/movies​/a​-quiet​ -place​-review​-john​-krasinski​-emily​-blunt​.htm. Accessed August 21, 2022. Clover, Carol. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Erevelles, Nirmala. “Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, Dislocation, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” 2014. In  Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 81–99. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1995. “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, 19–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Krasinski, John, dir. 2018. A Quiet Place. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. ———. A Quiet Place, Part II. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. LeFrançois, Brenda A., Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume. 2013. Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

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Leonetti, John R., dir. 2019. The Silence. Netflix. McCarthy, Colm, dir. 2016. The Girl with All the Gifts. London: Warner Bros. Presser, Lizzie. 2020. “The Black American Amputation Epidemic.” ProPublica, 19 May. Price, Margaret. 2011. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Qureshi, Sadiah. 2004. “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus.’” History of Science 42, no. 2: 233–57. Roxborough, Scott. 2017. “How Deafness Is Adding Extra Scares to John Leonetti’s Horror Movie ‘The Silence.’” The Hollywood Reporter, November 3. www​ .hollywoodreporter​.com​/news​/general​-news​/john​-leonettis​-horror​-movie​-silence​ -deafness​-is​-adding​-extra​-scares​-afm​-2017–1054521​/. Accessed August 21, 2021. Russo, Jasna, and Angela Sweeney, eds. 2016. Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies. Monmouth, PCCS Books. Samuels, Ellen. 2014. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York University Press. Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. “‘The Silence’ Movie Review.” 2019. Deaf in Media, 10 April. deafinmedia.com/blog/general/the-silence-movie-review/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Shaganty, Aneesh, dir. 2020. Run. Hulu and Netflix. Shyamalan, M. Night, dir. 2017. Split. Universal City: Universal Pictures. Skloot, Rebecca. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Paperbacks. Tallerico, Brian. 2019. “The Silence.” RogerEbert.com, 10 April. www​.rogerebert​ .com​/reviews​/the​-silence​-2019. Accessed August 21, 2022. Tobias, Scott. 2019. “‘The Silence’ Review: Fleeing Winged Peril for a Quieter Place.” New York Times, 12 April. www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/04​/12​/movies​/the​ -silence​-review​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. Washington, Harriet. 2008. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Harlem Moon. Weekes, Remi, dir. 2020. His House. Netflix. Wilde, Allison. 2021. “A Quiet Place Part II—A Film with the Value of Deaf Culture Woven Through It.” Disability Arts Online. disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion /a-quiet-place-part-ii/. Accessed August 21, 2022.

Chapter Sixteen

Sympathy for the Candyman The Politics of the Past in Supernatural Horror Brandon R. Grafius

TRAUMA With the horror box office recently being dominated by slasher throwbacks— Halloween Kills (Greene 2021), Scream (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2022)— or our ongoing fascination with dystopian hellscapes—A Quiet Place, Part II (Krasinski 2020), The Forever Purge (Gout 2021)—we’ve still seen some high-profile hauntings in the multiplexes. One of 2021’s biggest hits was the Jordan Peele-produced Candyman (DaCosta), a re-imagining of Bernard Rose’s classic 1992 film. The new Candyman assumes the diagetic world of its predecessor (while ignoring the convoluted storylines of the sequels) but makes significant strides in how it incorporates the conventions of the ghost story and reinvents them for the twenty-first century. This essay will locate the conventional ghost story in the gap between the present and the past and note the frequency with which the ghostly antagonist expresses the injustice they suffered in their lives through a sympathetic connection with the film’s main character. The essay will then demonstrate how this same formula is at play in the 1992 version of Candyman, before arguing that Candyman (2021) repurposes this formula in crucial ways to convey its message regarding the injustices of systemic racism.

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EARLY CINEMATIC HAUNTINGS It took a surprisingly long time to catch up with the traditions of M. R. James and other authors who established the template of the ghost story. For most of silent cinema, hauntings turned out to be everyday criminals causing trouble, or other such decidedly nonsupernatural events (Phillips 2018, 87–109). In the taxonomy developed by Tzvetan Todorov (1975), the ghost stories of early cinema begin in the realm of the fantastic, in which the audience is suspended between rational and nonrational explanations for the film’s events. But by the end, they always fell down on the side of the “uncanny,” in which the events are explained through purely rational mechanisms. The “Old Dark House” films of the late 1920s and the 1930s, such as The Cat and the Canary (Leni 1927) and The Old Dark House (Whale 1932), follow this trajectory in presenting a threatening world of cobwebbed-filled hallways, secret passages, and imminent danger, but which was always resolved by the unravelling of a very human plot (Aldana Reyes 2020, 126–53). The Uninvited (Lewis 1944) is generally regarded as the first ghostly horror film; while there’s some unfortunate silliness at the end, through most of the film the ghostly presence is taken seriously, and there’s no swerve into the area of the uncanny. It remains in the realm that Todorov has identified as the “marvelous” throughout. The film bears many of the hallmarks of the conventional ghost story, including a ghost who has experienced an injustice in the past, and is breaking into the present to demand the characters remember this buried history. Robin Roberts has noted the frequency with which the wronged ghosts are female, having suffered various forms of gender-based violence in their lives (Roberts 2018). The ghosts reach across the divide that separates the past from the present, hoping to in some way affect a change that will provide some measure of justice. In The Uninvited, the ghosts seemed to be willing to reach out to whoever happened to inhabit their space, hoping to convey the message of what they had lost in life. The 1963 film The Haunting (directed by Robert Wise and based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, much more faithfully than the Flanagan-adapted Netflix series) adds an important element: the ghostly presences feel a particular connection with one of the visitors to the house, the fragile Eleanor, due to the shared and sometimes overlapping experiences of trauma they have shared. As Michael Walker has noted, “it is as though the house ‘knows’ Eleanor” (Walker 2017, 24). This motif has been traced through Gothic literature back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Ilse Bussing (2016), but The Haunting seems to be the first instance of its usage in film. Because of their shared experiences, the inhabitants of the house and Eleanor seem to have

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a sympathetic connection from the beginning. The house reaches out to her directly, as if connecting with a friend. In some ways, this motif can be read as a sinister twist on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (2014), a philosophical and poetic attempt to explore the connections we feel with our houses. For Bachelard, the house of our birth is where we first learned to dream, and we develop a deep and abiding psychic connection with its spaces. The house is a repository of memories and helps us grow into adulthood. As Matt Bernico summarizes, “Houses, in his view, are sheltering and overwhelmingly positive spaces that inform one’s body and imagination” (2020, 41). For Bachelard, the dreams that are fostered by the houses he envisions are always pleasant daydreams. But in haunted house narratives, they have been transformed into nightmares. Examples of the phenomenon of a sympathetic connection between the ghosts of a house and one of the film’s protagonists are numerous. The Shining (Kubrick 1980) is a famous example, where Jack Torrance is so in tune with the haunted space that the ghostly butler is able to tell him, “You’ve always been the caretaker.” Jack’s rage and frustration with his life mark him as having belonged to the Overlook Hotel all along. He clearly feels the strongest connection with Grady, the former hotel caretaker who murdered his family several years previously. But the Overlook Hotel is such a wild blend of overlapping supernatural entities that it’s hard to sort out the individual backstories and discover what, precisely, has made Jack so in sync with the hotel. For a deeper exploration of how these connections function in modern cinema, we’ll briefly discuss the films The Woman in Black and Mama, both of which center on a protagonist whose experience, in some way, is portrayed as a matching mirror of the ghost’s, before turning to a discussion of how the 1992 version of Candyman attempts to make this same connection. MISMATCHED SYMPATHIES: THE WOMAN IN BLACK AND MAMA The films discussed in this section share in common with The Haunting and The Shining the connection between the films’ protagonists and the ghostly presences; however, whereas the earlier films discussed developed a connection centered around the character of a house, the films in this section make direct connections with the films’ protagonists and an individual ghost. In this regard, they more closely resemble Candyman, in which significant emphasis is placed on the character of the ghost. Based on Susan Hill’s novel (and the British stage production), The Woman in Black starts with a very sad Daniel Radcliffe. Arthur (Radcliffe) is a single father, widowed after his wife died in childbirth. We’re first introduced to

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him as his large, weepy eyes regard himself in the mirror; he briefly holds a straight razor to his throat, seemingly wavering between finishing his morning shave or taking a more dramatic action. He’s preparing to leave home for an assignment from his law firm in a remote village, where he is expected to settle the affairs of an elderly woman named Alice Drablow (Alisa Khazanova), the recently deceased owner of Eel Marsh House. The local villagers, in good local villager fashion, try to warn Arthur away from the mansion on the outskirts of town, but Arthur knows his job is at risk if he doesn’t follow through on his task. While alone in the house at night, he sees the woman in black, and learns the truth of what the townsfolk tried to warn him of: whenever someone sees this woman, a local child dies in a horrible accident. Arthur digs through Alice’s papers to uncover the backstory of this woman. She was Alice’s sister, Jennet (Liz White); Jennet’s child was adopted by Alice after Jennet was consigned to an asylum. The child later died in an accident, for which Jennet blamed her sister. Jennet then committed suicide after vowing she would never forgive her sister and continues to haunt the village and spread her anger to its children. Arthur locates the body of Jennet’s child and attempts to provide it with a proper burial, hoping this will assuage Jennet’s rage. But when Arthur’s son arrives at the village to meet him, it becomes clear that Jennet was not placated by this burial, and her ghost lures Arthur’s child to his death. Arthur is killed as well when he tries to save the boy, but the two of them are greeted in the afterlife by the friendly spirit of their wife/mother, telling the viewers that all will be okay. This backstory demonstrates one of the key points made by Roberts (2018) and emphasized by much scholarship on ghost stories: in many cases, the ghost is motivated by an injustice in the past, which they feel the burning need to have acknowledged in the present. In Barry Curtis’s words, films on hauntings center on “the encounter with a history that is an aggressive opponent of amnesia and has antagonistic claims on the present” (2008, 192). While this is true in some ways, in other ways Hollywood films have become very adept at nodding towards this “encounter with a history,” while also keeping the injustice of this history safely confined to the past. One of the primary means of achieving this is through the relationship between the ghost and the protagonist. In The Woman in Black, this ideological segmenting off of the present from the past is accomplished through the mismatch between the experiences of Jennet and Arthur. Both of them share in the grief of having lost a loved one, and as such seem like they should be in a sympathetic relationship with each other. The film, in fact, presents them in such a relationship; Arthur clearly has privileged insight into Jennet’s experience. But Jennet’s loss is due to the deep injustice of a misogynistic system that punished unwed mothers;

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Arthur’s is a result of a tragedy during his wife’s labor. In the eighteenth century, having unwed mothers declared mentally unfit and their children taken from them was a far-too common practice (Robinson 2015). It takes little reading between the lines to interpret Jennet’s experience within the parameters of this history. This shifts her backstory from personal tragedy to that of deep, systemic injustice. Jennet has been victimized by a misogynistic system which sought to punish women for unsanctioned expressions of sexuality, while Arthur is sad. By connecting these characters across the span of time, the film risks minimizing the injustice suffered by Jennet, and placing it on the same level as the tragedy suffered by Arthur and his wife, for which no one is to blame. While most likely unintentional on the part of the film, this structure has the effect of dismissing Jennet’s experience, and refusing to bring the injustice of her life into the present. Perhaps an even stronger example of mismatched sympathy is found in Mama. Victoria and Lilly were orphaned at a young age when their father, seemingly as the result of the financial crisis of the 2000s, went on a shooting spree, killed their mother, and tried to escape with his two daughters to a remote cabin in the woods. But the cabin was already inhabited by a fiercely protective maternal spirit, who kills the girls’ father, and raises them to the best of her ghostly abilities. They are found several years later by their uncle (Nikolaj Coster-Walder), who attempts to reintegrate them into society. His girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), is less than pleased at the prospect of becoming a mother; she’s more interested in playing bass in her punk rock band (For more on the discourse of motherhood in this film see Grafius [2017]). Of course, the horror of the film comes when the spirit of mama follows the girls into their new home, attempting to reclaim them. The sympathetic connection in this film is between the ghost and Annabel, as Annabel struggles to accept her new role as stepmother. It is through Annabel’s dream that we learn of mama’s backstory, a tragedy with strong echoes of the story of Jennet. Edith Brennan was committed to an asylum, and her child taken from her. We can only assume this was because she was an unwed mother, similar to the horrifying (and historically plausible) tale of injustice that makes up the backstory of The Woman in Black. Edith attempted to escape from her captors, grabbing her baby as she fled from the asylum. Facing certain capture, she jumps off a cliff with her baby, plunging both of them to their deaths. Her desire to nurture Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) is thus seen as emanating from this loss. Problematically, Annabel’s unique connection with the ghost of Edith invites us to read Annabel’s experience as a mirror of Edith’s. While Edith sacrificed her life in an attempt to keep her child with her, Annabel has spent her adult life running away from motherhood—which the film presents as the natural state to which a mature, self-actualized woman should aspire. Both

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women seek to “adopt” Victoria and Lilly, and much of the drama of the film is consumed with the question of whether Annabel will accept her role as mother for these two children. They are sympathetically connected through their roles as mothers, but this connection has the simultaneous effect of diminishing the injustice done to Edith and valorizing the state of motherhood as the self-actualization to which Annabel should aspire. These two characters prove to be poorly matched. SYMPATHY FOR THE CANDYMAN The question of sympathetic relationships looms large in both the 1992 and 2021 versions; problematically so in the earlier film, and with a tightly constructed and brilliantly executed connection in the later. The rest of this essay will explore these two connections in depth and inquire as to what makes the latter version more successful, before finally suggestion that the sympathetic relationship in the 2021 version of Candyman points toward new directions in supernatural horror which filmmakers should consider exploring. Loosely based on a short story by Clive Barker, Bernard Rose’s 1992 film follows a graduate student, Helen (Virginia Madsen) researching urban legends in the Cabrini Green project of Chicago. As Jon Towlson (2018) and others have discussed, this combination of a horror grounded in a community’s oral tradition and the strong importance of the setting make this a premier example of urban folk horror. Helen’s research leads her to the story of Candyman. The son of a formerly enslaved person, Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) made his fortune providing portraits for wealthy (white) families until he and one of his subjects fall in love with each other. Robitaille is lynched by a mob who severs his hand and replaces it with a rusty blade, then slathers him with honey and leaves him for a swarm of bees to kill. He returns as the ghost, ready to be summoned whenever his name is invoked in a mirror. Horror has a long history of treating black bodies as disposable, a history that continues to the present day. In discussing the film Bird Box, Mikal Gaines notes how it participates in much-used trope of “black characters who will be asked to give up their lives so that white characters may live more fully.” Gaines remarks: “Over and over again, black death animates white redemption. It is a kind of labor for which black bodies seem especially suited” (Gaines 2019). So frequently, black characters are relegated to secondary status, where their primary role is to serve as a sidekick for the white protagonist until they are, inevitably, killed off. Candyman stood against these tropes in some ways, while embodying them in others (Means Coleman 2011, 188–91). While the film features a number of black characters, the main character is still a white woman, with a black best friend

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(Kasi Lemmons) who is killed midway through the film. And while the film exhibited a good deal of sympathy for the poverty of Cabrini Green and even suggested the systematic racism that lay behind its creation, it also treats this predominantly black space as inherently frightening (Briefel and Ngai 1996; Humphrey 2013). Either in spite of or because of its problematical nature (or more likely a mixture of both), scholars have found much of interest in Candyman’s discourse on race. Most intriguing, and troubling, is the Candyman’s relationship with Helen. In many ways, she is another in a long line of white women being menaced by monsters who are either explicitly or implicitly black. The 1992 version of Candyman has simply taken the racial subtext of King Kong and made it explicit. Like many of its predecessor films, Candyman asks its audience to sympathize, at least to a degree, with its monstrous figure. Candyman, aside from having a highly sympathetic backstory, is portrayed throughout as a figure of both dignity and attraction. Throughout the film, he demonstrates a single-minded obsession with Helen; this is first ascribed to her refusal to believe in him, but we later see Helen’s face in a mural depicting Daniel Robitaille’s earthly story, over which Candyman’s voice intones, “It was always you, Helen.” Clearly, a sympathetic connection has been made between these two figures, along the lines of the connections made between the ghosts and the protagonists of such films as The Haunting and The Shining. But as in The Woman in Black and Mama, the nature of this connection causes the relationship to problematize the film’s message regarding the injustices of the past. Helen’s character lives a life marked with both oppression and privilege, as do many. She is married to Trevor, a professor who seems to be inappropriately supervising her dissertation. The couple is quite well-off, as evidenced by the offhand remark she makes regarding how much she paid for her apartment. (“Don’t ask,” she tells her fellow graduate student Bernadette, with a smirk.) And her status as student marks her as privileged, particularly when contrasted with the single mother she meets in Cabrini Green. Nevertheless, her lower status as both graduate student and female is highlighted during a dinner with her husband and his colleague Dr. Purcell, in which Dr. Purcell pompously dismisses Helen as not knowing enough to wade into academic debate. This exchange serves as a thinly veiled pretext for Purcell to provide Candyman’s backstory; even so, it highlights Helen’s position near the bottom of the ladder in her social circle. This position is further emphasized when Helen finds her husband has left her for a much younger student. It is this betrayal which serves as the final push for Helen to assume her own role as avenging ghost in the film’s conclusion. By the end, Helen has assumed Daniel Robitaille’s former role as Candyman. The residents of Cabrini Green seem to understand this, as they

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take part in Helen’s funeral and deposit Candyman’s hook into her unfilled grave. And the film confirms this understanding when poor Trevor, realizing that domestic bliss with his undergraduate paramour is not quite what he was hoping for, incants Helen’s name in the mirror. His ex-wife appears behind him as a monstrous apparition, slicing him up in the style of Candyman. Clearly, the film seeks to establish a connection between Helen and Daniel; however, this connection seems to shift throughout the film. At some points, Helen serves as an analogue to the love Daniel had taken away from him, at others she is the victim he needs to perpetuate belief in himself, and by the conclusion she has claimed his role as monster. This can be read as an intriguing exploration of how these roles—lover, victim, monster—are intertwining and permeable, with slippage occurring between all three. But it’s also problematic, in that it aligns the experience of Helen with that of Daniel. Helen becomes the new Candyman at least partially as a result of the victimization she suffered at the hands of her husband; her thirst for vengeance is what compels her to assume a role in the Candyman mythos after her death. And while her treatment was certainly appalling, it doesn’t equate to the injustice that Robitaille suffered. Attempting to make this equation serves as a way to minimize the systems of oppression that Robitaille fell victim to, and collapse both experiences into the category of mistreated lover. In this comparison, Candyman proves itself incapable of fully grasping the depth of the historical injustices it invokes for Daniel Robitaille’s backstory. Sara Ahmed describes a similar dynamic in the concept of national shame. While nations frequently express regret for past actions, such as slavery or the treatment of indigenous peoples, Ahmed notes that these statements frequently have the effect of “bypassing . . . responsibility for historical injustice.” She continues: “History is assumed to be ‘long ago’; it is cut off from injustice in the present. . . . We can condemn what is in the present, but only regret what is in the past” (Ahmed 2015, 118). In a similar way, the injustices of the past—the systemic racism that led to Daniel Robitaille’s lynching, or the misogynistic views of single mothers that led to Jennet and Edith having their children taken away—are aligned with present experiences which are sad, rather than representative of systemic injustice. In these narratives, the injustices of the past are transformed into the individual grief of the present. SYMPATHY AND INJUSTICE The 2021 version of Candyman seems well aware of this problem and works to ensure that the injustices of the past are connected with the injustices of the present. They are living, breathing injustices that continue into the present, not walled off as a relic of a long-ago past. This becomes clear through

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an examination of the relationship between Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and the Candyman, a relationship that sees Anthony becoming more and more aware of the continuing effects of systemic racism. While Anthony might be only mildly discontented at the beginning of the film, by the end he has fully connected with the injustices of the past and present, forcing him to assume the mantle of Candyman. In this way, the two Candyman films share a similar trajectory. The difference lies in the manner in which the 2021 version pushes its protagonist to reckon with the continuing power of systemic injustice. When we first meet Anthony, he is a struggling artist, trying to duplicate the success of his first show but finding himself uninspired. He is unprepared for the show he has found a spot in; when he shows a few pieces to the (white) curator, the curator responds with disdain. “This is Anthony McCoy of two years ago. . . . Dig into that history of yours, dude!” Anthony responds in the way the curator is hoping, saying that “I’m thinking about doing something about the projects, and about, how, uh . . . white supremacy,” at which point the curator interjects, enthusiastically, “White people.” Anthony continues, “And, it . . . it . . . it . . . creates these rampant spaces of neglect for communities of color, and particularly black communities.” The curator is excited about these ideas, but it’s clear from Anthony’s fumbling presentation, filled with clichéd generalities and non-specific buzzwords, that he hasn’t given much thought to the legacy of this injustice; he’s just hoping it can be his ticket to a successful exhibit. He is inspired by a story he heard at a dinner party of the night before about Cabrini Green (depicted in the 1992 film), and he realizes that this could be the theme around which to center his upcoming exhibit. But at this point in the film, this has nothing to do with Anthony himself. It’s only a story, an urban legend he can use to produce the art he thinks white people (especially potential collectors) expect of him. He’s more successful than he thought possible; it’s through these new works that Candyman is summoned, and which seem to draw the vengeful spirit to Anthony. But the vengeful spirit in this film has a new identity. The Candyman is now the spirit of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), who was beaten to death by police in Cabrini Greene. As we learn later, many spirits have inhabited the role of Candyman, all of them victims of an unjust social system. The initial connections between Anthony and Candyman occur when aspects of Robitaille’s backstory bleed into the present. As Anthony visits Cabrini Greene for research, he is stung by a bee, just as Daniel Robitaille was stung to death by a swarm of angry bees in the backstory of the first film. This initially small puncture wound continues to fester throughout the film, leading to some Cronenberg-esque body horror. As a connection with Robitaille’s lynching from the 1992 film, Anthony has now been infected with the history of racial injustice, and it is festering into an ever-growing

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wound. This is the beginning of Candyman’s story becoming Anthony’s own. Anthony becomes further connected with the Candyman mythos when his exhibit becomes the portal through which Candyman is summoned. These connections are strengthened through a series of encounters between Anthony and Candyman involving mirrors, the first when Anthony is visiting the library in search of more research material. Anthony is leaving the library in an elevator, surrounded by mirrors on all sides, while listening to a recording of Helen narrating her own experiences in Cabrini Greene. When the elevator stops in mid-descent, a razor-embedded piece of candy falls from the ceiling. As Anthony looks up, he sees not himself, but Candyman reflected in the mirror. He recoils, but his own reflection returns to him just as quickly as it had left. A second incident involving mirrors occurs at the home of a prominent art critic. After the show’s curator and one of his interns are murdered in front of Anthony’s exhibit, Anthony becomes associated with the subject of his show in the news stories; he also achieves his dream of becoming a sought-after artist. This leads him to the apartment of prominent critic Finley (Rebecca Spence). Anthony suddenly sees himself confronted with a reflection—but instead of being a reflection of himself, it is a reflection of Sherman, embodying the role of Candyman. At first, Anthony covers his face in horror, as does his Sherman-reflection. But Anthony then steps back, lowers his hands, and regards the bloody, hook-handed figure he sees in the mirror. In an attempt to resist this identification, Anthony returns to his apartment and smashes all of the mirrors he can find. But while this visual connection reinforces the sympathetic relationship between Anthony and Candyman, the mirrors are only a symbol of their rapidly intertwining stories. Anthony’s hand turns into a deepening infection, as the history of Candyman is now an inextricable part of his body. The transformation is complete by the film’s conclusion, when Anthony is killed by police officers, then summoned through the mirror in the squad car to wreak his vengeance. Throughout the film, we see several white gatekeepers of the art world who only seem to understand black suffering as a trendy hook for artwork. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the scene between Anthony and the show’s curator; when Anthony suggests he could do a show focused on his experience growing up in the South Side, the curator responds, “Nah, the South Side’s played out.” Anthony’s biographical experience of struggle is only a commodity and is only useful as long as it maintains its novelty as something exciting for the art world. Since the South Side has been “played out” in recent art, there’s no room for any further exploration of it. For the first part of the film, Anthony is only too happy to play along with this commodification of injustice, focusing primarily on its potential impact on his rising stardom. But when he gets too close to the mythos of Candyman,

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he learns that the injustices of the past can’t be confined to a space outside of the present. The effects and systems of injustice continue into the present day, a reality that Anthony learns when these injustices inhabit his own body. By the end of the film, Anthony has fully embraced his place within the Candyman mythos, being summoned to dispatch a group of abusive police officers. While Helen’s first victim was directly responsible for her individual anger, Anthony’s victims are representatives of the system, and thus connect to the systemic racism that is responsible for the creation of Candyman in the first place. This thread of injustice was first picked up by Daniel Robitaille (as far as the audience knows), then embodied by many others until reaching Sherman Fields, and through him to Anthony. These threads of injustice are clearly strung from the present into the past, in a way that the narratives of the earlier version of Candyman did not allow for. CONCLUSION: INJUSTICES IN THE PAST, SYMPATHY IN THE PRESENT This essay has used a handful of films to demonstrate the frequency with which ghost story films relegate injustices to the past. Through the trope of a sympathetic connection, the ghost and the protagonist are tethered together across time. But this connection is often built on the mismatch of a past injustice to a present melancholy or personal misfortune. We see this play out strongly in films such as The Woman in Black, Mama, and the 1992 version of Candyman. This has the effect of minimizing the injustice experienced by the ghost and avoids the need for the film to reckon with ongoing injustice in the present. The ghost reminds us of these lingering injustices, but it seems that too often the film itself has forgotten. The 2021 version of Candyman offers a new model, in which the protagonist is forced to confront this history of injustice. While it would obviously not be advisable for all future ghost stories to result in the protagonist making a dramatic transformation into the ghost, as does Anthony in Candyman, the film still suggests that bringing the injustices of the past into the present is work that can be done by Hollywood ghost films. This seems like an area that is ripe for exploration by future filmmakers, and one that I would hope audiences would reward. Ghost stories offer such a strong potential for a radical critique of systems of injustice, with the inherent possibility of demonstrating how these systems persist through time and generations. If this critique continues to be relegated to the past, confined to a backstory, then the ghost’s demands for justice will continue to go unheard.

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WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second Edition. London: Routledge. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2020. Gothic Cinema: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Allen, Lewis, dir. 1944. The Uninvited. Chicago: Criterion. Bachelard, Gaston. 2014. The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Classics. French Original 1958. Bernico, Matt. 2020. “It’s Coming from Inside the House: Houses as Bodies without Organs.” In The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 39–49. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Bettinelli-Olpin, Matt, dir. 2022. Scream. Los Angeles: Spyglass Entertainment. Briefel, Aviva, and Sianne Ngai. 1996. ‘“How Much Did You Pay for This Place?’ Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman.”  Camera Obscura 13, no. 1: 71–91. Bussing, Ilse M. 2016. “Complicit Bodies: Excessive Sensibilities and Haunted Space.” Horror Studies 7, no. 1: 41–59. Curtis, Barry (2008). Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books. DaCosta, Nia, dir. 2021.Candyman. Universal City: Universal. Gaines, Mikal J. 2019. “Another Problem with Bird Box: Dying while Black in Horror Film.” Horror Homeroom, www​.horrorhomeroom​.com​/another​-problem​-with​-bird​ -box​-dying​-while​-black​-in​-horror​-film​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Gout, Everado, dir. 2021. The Forever Purge. Santa Monica: Platinum Dunes. Grafius, Brandon R. 2017. “Mama and Kristeva: Matricide in the Horror Film.” Post Script: Essays in Literature and Film 36, no. 1: 52–64. Green, David Gordon, dir. 2022. Halloween Kills. New York: Miramax. Humphrey, Caroline. 2013. “Fear as Property and as Entitlement.” Social Anthropology 21, no. 3: 285–304. Krasinski, John, dir. 2020. A Quiet Place, Part II. Santa Monica: Platinum Dunes. Leni, Paul, dir. 1927. The Cat and the Canary. New York: Kino. Means Coleman, Robin R. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. London: Routledge. Muschetti, Andy, dir. 2013. Mama. Universal City: Universal. Phillips, Kendall R. 2018. A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. Roberts, Robin. 2018. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Robinson, Jane. 2015. In the Family Way: Illegitimacy between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties. London: Viking. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. Culver City: TriStar. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1980. The Shining. Burbank: Warner Brothers. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [1970]. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Towlson, Jon. 2018. Candyman. Devil’s Advocates. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Walker, Michael. 2017. Modern Ghost Melodramas: What Lies Beneath. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Watkins, James, dir. 2012. The Woman in Black. Culver City: Sony Pictures. Whale, James, dir. 1932. The Old Dark House. New York: Cohen Media Group. Wise, Robert, dir. 1963. The Haunting. Burbank: Universal.

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Figure 0.3. Visual Intervention III: Sinew. Source: Drawing by Gemma Files. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Chapter Seventeen

The Futures for Folk Horror Mikel J. Koven

FOLK HORROR Is folk horror a subgenre, a transnational film movement, or certain style of storytelling about similar topics? I am not convinced that folk horror is any of those things exclusively, although obviously, the films labeled “folk horror” may very well feature generic, narrative, or thematic comparations. Instead, I would like to consider folk horror to be a discursive methodology: a means of discussing these films, opening the texts up for continued discussion. These discussions, which folk horror films provoke, often challenge our preconceived conventions about horror cinema at one level, but ideally also are challenges to our entire worldview. The films discussed in this chapter point towards future promises for folk horror; highlighting what folk horror does best in giving voice to those who often struggle to be heard. I have written elsewhere that folk horror exists at the convergence of three discourses: the Pagan, the Rural, and the Folkloric/Traditional (see Koven 2022, 2023a, 2023b). Space does not permit me to reiterate in its entirety those arguments, but as a summation, each discourse is rarely given epistemological agency and instead is almost always defined antonymically, by which I mean, the discourse is defined by its opposite. In this reasoning, the Pagan is defined by Christianity (at least in the Western cinemas currently examined), the Rural by the Urban, and the Folkloristic/Traditional with the Modern. Furthermore, each discourse is often dependent on the others: the Pagan echoes concerns of the Rural, both of which echo the Folkloristic. Rather than Adam Scovell’s “chain” (2017, 8), these interactions are more cyclical than linear. Each film then is a series of provocations from which we can reconsider the text. In this regard, I am using discourse analysis as suggested by Michel Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972), in 245

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exploring the power imbalances in any discursive presentation, including silences and lacunae, while also focusing on the significance, and limitations, of language. In looking to the future for folk horror, despite the obvious impossibility of such a task without a functioning crystal ball, I will discuss four contemporary films from four different minority group languages in Europe: these films are in Basque, Welsh, Estonian, and Icelandic. These countries lie not only on the fringes of European geography but are marginalized linguistically too. The films discussed are Akelarre [Coven, Coven of Sisters] (Pablo Agüero 2020), Gwledd [The Feast] (Lee Haven Jones 2021), Rehepapp [November] (Rainer Sarnet 2017), and Dýrið [Lamb] (Vladimar Jóhannsson 2021). Each film will be discussed in terms of its discursive presentation of these three suggested discourses—Pagan, Rural, Folkoristic—in order to recognize the cultural marginality of their respective origins. AKELARRE [COVEN, COVEN OF SISTERS] (PABLO AGÜERO 2020) Loosely based on true accounts, Akelarre is about six young women who are captured by the Inquisition and tried as witches (cf Monter 1990; Scholz Williams 2020). The accusation runs that they engaged in a witches’ Sabbat in a forest glade (Akelarre means “Witches’ Sabbat”), but in reality, the girls were just playing around and dreaming of transforming into gulls and traveling with their fathers to the fishing banks off of Newfoundland. Much like Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the “storyteller” among them, Ana (Amaia Aberasturi), is persuaded by another of the girls, Maria (Yune Nogueiras), to try and hold off their execution by telling an extended narrative about what happened at their Sabbat for a week until the next full moon, when the tides will bring their fathers back to the village and rescue them from the Inquisition. While the stories they weave to befuddle the Inquisition begin as harmless fun, Ana discovers that she may be in over her head once the horrors of the witch-finding torture start. Having captured the imagination of the presiding judge, Rostegui (Alex Brendemühl), he persuades Ana to reinvoke her demons and demonstrate the Sabbat to him personally. This culminates in a frenzied mock Sabbat where the girls writhe and speak “unintelligibly” (significantly, they are speaking Basque, which is unintelligible to the Spanish-speaking Inquisition). At the very beginning of the film, the Inquisition’s Consejero (Daniel Fanego), off-handedly and confidentially, asks Rostegui, “What if there was no Sabbath?” while the two oversee the burning of several convicted witches. If there never were any “real” witches, and if no actual Sabbats took place,

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what was any of this for? Rostegui brushes off the Consejero’s question, but it niggles in our minds as we watch the film. Akelarre suggests that imagined Sabbats are just as real for the Inquisition as actual ones; but despite any personal doubts the men may have, they must fulfill their office, ordained, as they see it, by the Roman Catholic Church itself. Thinking about the film’s discourse on Paganism (in this case, specifically witchcraft), it would be too trite to simply observe that innocents were convicted by the Inquisition, and that, true to the Consejero’s question, there were no Sabbats. Instead, we can read the film as an illustration of how “the witch” was (and is) antonymically imposed (cf Cameron 2011). The girls in the film do not declare themselves as “witches,” nor do they intentionally invoke a Sabbat during their frolic in the glade which sparked the accusation. Instead, they become witches the moment they are defined as such by the Inquisition. Ana’s confession to the churchmen is juxtaposed with the images from her memory of the afternoon’s playfulness. While Ana may tell stories of the girls’ diabolical transformations into different beasts, we see them play-acting, pretending to be these animals. In this regard, it was the Inquisition that created the witches, not the girls turning away from their God. When we get to the film’s conclusion, the fake Sabbat the girls perform for the Inquisition, which Rostegui is only too ready to accept as genuine, and thus the suggestion that any witches’ Sabbat was more than likely a construct for the Inquisition than any actual summoning to the Devil. While the faux Sabbat convinces the Inquisition (or at least Rostegui, which is ultimately the same thing) that they are in fact dealing with witches, rather than the girls executed for their performance by the Church, they take their own deaths into their hands and leap from the cliff at the edge of the clearing. We never see their bodies fall, however, and while it is a safe assumption to say bodies may very well wash up on shore the next morning, the girls effectively disappear into the air, transformed into gulls, as they wish for in the (faux) folk song they sing throughout the film. In this regard, Akelarre’s conclusion ends much like Robert Egger’s The Witch which sees Thomasin likewise take flight in the company of other women/witches. It is worth noting, parenthetically at least, the dependence Egger’s has on images suggested by Spanish painter Francisco Goya series of “Black Paintings” (1819–1822); one in particular, features the Devil depicted as a goat worshipped at a Sabbat, was titled “Akelarre.” Within the film’s diegesis, the Inquisition is travelling from village to village searching for witches. While the film narrative’s specific location is left unmentioned, we are told this is the Basque country, an area of northern (modern) Spain and southern France which developed its own culture and language and has been fighting for independence (Woodworth 2007). The Basque country lies on the margins of both Spain and France, and in this liminal space, within the discourses of folk horror, this is where the “Pagan”

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flourishes. But the marginality of the Basque country is not just geographical, it is also linguistic: the girls and other villagers speak Basque, not Spanish. While the Basque are multilingual and can speak and understand Spanish, the Spanish cannot understand Basque. The linguistic becomes political: the invocations to the Devil in the girls’ mock Sabbat are simply random words in Basque which to the Inquisition’s Spanish ears might as well be a demonic language for all they can understand of it. In Akelarre, rather than the rural becoming the site for superstition and “folk belief,” the Argentinian-born Agüero reverses this folk horror trope by making the hegemonic elite (here, it is the Spanish-speaking Inquisition) into the gullible who believe in fairy tales, like the existence of witches. Padre Cristóbel (Asier Oruesagasti) sits between the Inquisition and the accused witches: he is the connection between the two groups who can translate one for the other. But Cristóbel is liminal too: ostensibly, he works for the Church and therefore the Inquisition; however, he is also the local parish priest who knows and (to a certain degree) understand the local population, including the accused. Throughout the film, but particularly in the mock Sabbat, he is torn between the sincerity of his belief in the Church, with an understanding of what the girls appear to be doing (although he does not understand why they are intentionally putting themselves in jeopardy by pretending to be witches). What Cristobel does not understand, in this regard, is that the girls’ lives, including their deaths, are in their own hands, and not at the mercy of the Patriarchy, in the guise of the Roman Catholic church. The folklore in Akelarre can mostly be found in the depictions of seventeenth-century witch-hunting procedures and how these are suggestive of the belief traditions rife during the Spanish Inquisition. The belief that witches can bewitch an innocent man by looking at them, for example, manifests itself in the beliefs of both the guards and Inquisition officers who command that the girls keep their eyes averted to prevent such bewitchment. Is this procedure and attendant belief truly to prevent bewitchment, or as a means for the Inquisition officers to ignore any humanity in the eyes of their victims, of feeling pity for those they condemn to death? The folk belief suggests the girls/women possess the diabolic power of bewitchment, but the reality is at the expense of the court’s humanity. The sin, as it were, lies in the eyes of the Court which refuses to take responsibility for its actions in torturing and then condemning innocent women to death, rather than the sin of bewitchment. Ana does not always avert her eyes while under interrogation, and this ignites Rostegui’s (intellectual and physical) passion, and his desire to witness the Sabbat itself. But it is also this power of looking that enables Cristóbel to also witness the games Ana and the others are playing with the Inquisition, much to his confusion. We also bear witness to the girls having their heads shaved to look for the Devil’s mark and the puncturing of

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their skin to see if the victim bleeds: Ana, in particular, knows not to react to the pain these pricks cause in order for her to convince the Court that these are, in fact, Devil’s marks (which should cause neither pain nor bloodletting), but her winces tell us these do, indeed, hurt. Cristóbel sees this too, while Rostequi and the Consejero are too distracted by the scopophilic spectacle of a young naked woman tortured. The observation is a rather obvious one: that the procedures and practices of the Inquisition, like the British witchfinders (Gaskill 2015), were never about the preservation of the soul and Christ’s triumph over the Devil, as much as it was about creating a spectacle for the entertainment of men and emphasizing their power over women. What is particularly interesting in Akelarre is the role of Cristóbel who both sincerely believes in his mission, but also recognizes the abuses of the Church in executing this mission. GWLEDD [THE FEAST] (LEE HAVEN JONES 2021) Gwledd is a semiotically dense film; although British, it is a Welsh language production and touches upon a deeper aspect of belonging to the land than simply geography or language can. The film is clearly metaphorical and presented as an “elevated” or “prestige” form of horror with which folk horror cinema seems to sit well (Church 2020, also Erlich 2019). This is not to say that all “elevated” horror films are folk horror, although many of them are, nor that all folk horror is “elevated..” The film opens with the mysterious arrival of Cadi (Annes Elwy) appearing at the country mansion of Glenda (Nia Roberts) and Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) as the replacement servant hired for an important dinner party the couple is hosting. Much like Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Cadi’s presence disrupts the spiritually empty lives of this bourgeois household: destroying both Glenda and Gwyn, and seducing, before murdering, their two adult sons, Guto (Steffan Cennydd) and Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies). The Pagan versus Christian motif, prevalent in the majority of folk horror films, is not apparent in Gwledd, at least not explicitly. There is no mention of anyone’s religious or cultural background from which one can extrapolate assumptions regarding their religious backgrounds. To understand the role of the Pagan in the film is to take a step back. The land on which Glenda and Gwyn have built a very modern-styled mansion in the middle of the Welsh countryside, we learn, is land Glenda inherited from her family: she and Gwyn tore down the old farmhouse (presumably where Glenda was raised) to build their current modernist monstrosity. The disavowel Glenda has orchestrated from her past, in true “return of the repressed” fashion, begins to creep back (Wood 2018): a (faux) Welsh folk song that Cadi sings in the kitchen,

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reminds Glenda that her mother used to sing her the same song, a song she had not thought about since she was a little girl. The song itself is a “warning song,” with the refrain “you better watch out.” The singing of this song awakens the idea of cultural heritage in Glenda, if only momentarily. Earlier in the film, Glenda tells Cadi that she kept a few “bits and bobs” from her mother, including the tablecloth she intends on serving dinner on. But most of the detritus of her earlier life, the family traditions she was raised in, simply “don’t go with the house anymore,” that they are too out of place. Glenda uses the word “primitive” to describe them. Glenda has effectively separated herself from everything which made her: her home, her family, the artifacts that her mother had carefully taken care of for years, and even the folk songs she sang with her are all lost. The warning of the folk song, to “better watch out,” is a warning about the return of all that was thought lost, but, particularly in films like this, begin to creep back into the present. While this particular discourse has one foot firmly placed in the folklore area, with the rejection of tradition for the dazzle of the new, and tradition’s return of the repressed, it is also part of the Pagan debate insofar as Glenda deludes herself that she can be both insider and outsider to this land. While she was born to it, and “owns” it by right of legal entitlement, she exists outside of the community too: by razing her family home to the ground, discarding the artifacts of the home, and, as I shall come to discuss momentarily, giving the land over to mining speculators rather than traditional farming. Consider Glenda’s husband, Gwyn: while he is a local Member of Parliament (MP), Glenda tells Cadi they spend most of their time in London, rather than at the Welsh country house. The rarely used “constituency home” suggests the “holiday home” controversies in Wales: second homes, usually owned by wealthy English nonresidents, have been controversial in Wales for decades due to the impact such ownership has on local house prices, taxation, and in the 1970s and ’80s, Welsh nationalists firebombed many English-owned homes in protest. Guto, in particular, wants to return to London as soon as possible and resents being in the middle of nowhere; this, in fact, reignites his addiction to illegal drugs, which Cadi facilitates by supplying him with strong hallucinogenic mushrooms. What is inconsistent with the reality of English-owned holiday homes in Wales is that this family is fully conversant in Welsh, as the majority of visitors to Wales rarely are. But again, despite legal “ownership” of the land, Gwyn and Guto both belong and do not belong to this place. In this regard, the character names are reflective of larger linguistic discourses: in the Welsh language, the C (as in Cymru—the Welsh name for Wales) mutates to a G under certain grammatical circumstances (as in Croeso i Gymru—Welcome to Wales). Each family member’s name begins with G—Glenda, Gwyn, Guto, and Gweirydd—they

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are “mutated Welsh,” still Welsh (and Welsh is spoken at home) but they are no longer a part of the country. Who, then, is Cadi? Or rather, what does Cadi represent? We learn very little about her for most of the film. We know she is a local woman who works shifts at the local pub. But not much more. She is the prism through which we see Glenda and Gwyn and their family. At one point, we see Cadi in what appears to be ecstasy rolling on the green earth outside the house; while the earth itself seems to embrace her. She is associated with nature: she knows the right mushrooms to harvest to feed Guto’s addiction. Twice in the film, we see Cadi associated with the earth explicitly: in the first, as she spreads out Glenda’s mother’s tablecloth ready for the dinner setting, when she stands up, she has left a soiled mark on the material (which Glenda is furious about). Later in the film, she leaves a trail of dirt in the pristine kitchen. If folk horror, or indeed all horror, is ultimately about the return of the repressed, Cadi represents the reclamation of the house for the land; she brings the outside in, she is the earth, not just from the earth. While a deeply rich and fecund green color palate is used for the exterior scenes, inside the house the green is more muted and faded. On one of the walls of the living room is a modern art monstrosity which Glenda says represents the land they are on (she refers to it as “the district”), although it is an abstract representation, not a realist one. Cadi is drawn to the painting, and at one point, leans her forehead to the picture, as if communing with it. We find out, at the very end of the film, that a car accident earlier in the day, wherein the car went into the local lake, was in fact Cadi’s car; that Cadi was dead, and what we had assumed to be the young woman was actually her reanimated corpse. Glenda’s neighbor, Mair (Lisa Palfrey), who had been one of the guests at the evening’s dinner party, tells Glenda, “They said if she returned, she’d need a body to live in.” But to whom is Mair referring to? The film does not tell us. The suggestion is that Cadi is the resurrected soul of Wales itself, coming to reclaim what had been stolen from the Welsh centuries before. Returning to the linguistic point I made earlier regarding Cs and Gs in the Welsh language, Cadi in this regard is “pure Welsh”—Welsh in an unmutated form. In the very first images in the film, we see a drilling operation occurring, followed by a man in a hard hat being taken ill, presumably by some gas that has escaped the drilling rig. Later in the film, we discover that, while Mair was one of the dinner party’s guests, the other was Glenda and Gwyn’s friend Euros (Rhodri Meilir): Euros has made Gwyn and Glenda exceptionally wealthy due to mining gems and precious metals from the land and they want to expand this drilling onto Mair’s land, on an area known as “The Rise” which borders both properties. Mair is horrified, for local legend says that no one has ever even farmed on The Rise, because that is where “she” is resting, although she never identifies who “she” is. The speculation

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drilling Euros has been doing appears to have “awakened” whoever “she” is, and this is who has returned in Cadi’s body. It is also likely that “she” was the gas that emanated from the drilling operation which made the worker sick at the very beginning of the film. So, we return to the Pagan/Christian discourse in folk horror: at one level, obviously, the sleeping soul of Wales which was awakened by the drilling is Pagan, in that it is not part of the Christian worldview (regardless of denomination). Gwledd reflects the nominal normative Christian recognition that Old Gods can return to places they thought they had successfully colonized (i.e., Wales). Those who respect the land as pre-Christians respected the land are welcome to live there. Disrespecting the land, by drilling into it, tearing down the old farmhouses, throwing away those “old-fashioned” and “primitive” reminders of a previous life, gentrifying Wales for the sake of London-based rich people (even if they do speak Welsh, they are still mutated Welsh), will cause the land to take back what it had once given. REHEPAPP [NOVEMBER] (RAINER SARNET, 2017) Based on the Estonian novel by Andrus Kivirähk (which, at the time of writing, has yet to be translated into English), Rainer Sarnet’s Rehepapp is certainly one of the stranger folk horror films in the last ten years. Filmed in a gloriously beautiful infrared monochrome, the film ostensibly tells the tragic love story of Liina (Rea Lest), a young peasant woman, who is deeply in love with the peasant boy Hans (Jörgen Liik), but Hans is in love with the young Baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis). Surrounding this tale of unrequited love are little subplots that give us insight into Estonian folktales, and—at least this was my experience—work as a primer or introduction to Estonian folklore. While nominal Christianity is a manifest foundation for much Estonian lore (the country is dominated by Eastern Orthodox and Lutheran churches), presumably some of the stories are even older and reflect pre-Christian ideas. But, at least in Rehepapp, everyone in the village attends the same church, nobility and peasant alike. Where the Pagan discourse begins to show is the centrality of the Devil in many of these narratives; it is not so much “Satanism” which permeates the film, as much as the Devil’s role as the folkloristic tempter. One of the major folk tale characters in the film, and one which is unique to Estonian folklore, is the kratt. A kratt is a creature made from unused and discarded farm detritus brought to life by the Devil in order to do menial work for the peasants. A farmer looking to build a kratt must go to the crossroads and sell his soul for this power. Once the creature has been animated, it must be continually given work; otherwise, it will turn on its creator. However, even peasants get tired of giving orders, and to get rid of the

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kratt, the farmer must give it an impossible task—the example in Rehepapp is a ladder out of bread. Obviously, such a task is impossible and the kratt explodes in frustration. At least this is the fate of Rein’s (Arvo Kukumägi) kratt. But Hans too makes a kratt, this time out of a snowman who proceeds to give the young lover advice on how to woo the Baroness: the snow out of which Hans’s kratt is fashioned tells him about his life as river water and all the tragic love stories he has witnessed as water. This kratt is destroyed during a warm spell in November when the poor creature melts away back into river water. Liina uses a witches’ ointment to shape-shift into a wolf, procured from Miina (Klara Eighorn), which enables her to spy on Hans and the Baroness. She also consults Miina for a spell that will cause Hans to forget about the Baroness and love her again. But far from being an evil character, or the embodiment of temptation, Miina is, while certainly a witch, really the village spinster. She tells her story to Hans’s father, Sander (Keino Kalm), about her own unrequited love for a young man, but he loved another, in a seemingly recurrent cycle of unrequited loves. With village witches and crossroad devils permeating the interconnected stories in Rehepapp, are any of these stories a discourse around/about Paganism? Kivirähk’s original novel, published in 2000, is a self-conscious retelling of these Estonian folktales from a very modern perspective, and (despite the absence of an English translation) we need to recognize Sarnet’s film to be based on Kivirähks novel, not the original folktales themselves. There is, therefore, a continuity in the text’s use of para-Christian helpers: while both witches and devils are part of Christianity, they lie outside of Church orthodoxy; it is unlikely the local priest would advise any of the village peasants to consult Miina or the crossroad’s Devil for help, despite the Church being no real help in the first place. Selling one’s soul to make a kratt or using a witch’s shape-shifting ointment are treated as, at worst, misdemeanors in the village. But everyone is doing it, or so it seems. Early on in the film, immediately following the priest delivering communion to the villagers, each villager exits the church and spits the wafer into Rein’s waiting hand. The Baroness witnesses this and shocked by its apparent blasphemy asks the Church’s curate what they are doing. The curate answers that if a bullet is rubbed with the host, it will never miss in hunting, because it is Jesus who brings the animal down. Unlike in the film Kladivo na čarodĕjníce (Witchhammer) (Otakar Vávra 1970), where the uneaten wafer is used specifically in witchcraft secretively, not only does the entire village participate in helping Rein get his communion wafers, even the curate is aware of it, and, although this happens on church land, it is not happening inside the church itself, which is why the practice is allowed to continue. But, as the

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curate notes, while this folk belief is certainly unorthodox, it still recognizes Christianity as the agency of the bullet itself. Pagan and Christian are not so easily separated in Rehepapp; and discursively, the film suggests, both are needed in these small Estonian villages. What the Church cannot accomplish, the para-Christian resources (witches, devils, transubstantiated/consubstantiated consecrated hosts) might. For the (Estonian) peasant, any opportunity to lighten their load needs to be celebrated. What God cannot (or will not) do, the Devil might, and what the priest is unable to deliver, the local witch might be more reliable. DÝRIÐ [LAMB] (VLADIMAR JÓHANNSSON 2021) The Icelandic film Dýrið marks the feature film debut of Vladimar Jóhannsson, and like Jones’s Gwledd, is that fusion between a European “art” film and horror movie, what some critics have called “prestige (or elevated) horror” (Church 2020; Ehrlich 2019). Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðanson) own a sheep farm in the Icelandic wilderness. The childless couple are “lambing” (when farmers assist the ewes in giving birth) through the Christmas season. In this lambing season, one ewe gives birth to a “monstrous” creature who is half lamb and half human. Maria and Ingvar adopt this creature, naming her Ada, and raise her as their own child, despite having a lamb’s head and right arm. Melodrama ensues when Ingvar’s brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), arrives and is initially taken aback by Ada, but ultimately begins to love her as his niece. The film ends with Ingvar shot in the neck and killed by a creature that comes out of the fog: a fully grown, half-ram half-man, creature who takes his (obviously) bloodrelated daughter back with him. Until the arrival of the half-ram half-man creature, the premise of the film suggests that Ada is Ingvar’s daughter, which, despite the film’s artistic pretensions, is not much more than a juvenile joke about the results of bestiality. The creature’s reclamation of his daughter, and the murder of Ada’s adopted father, however, turns Dýrið into folk horror worth consideration. The film begins on Christmas Eve, as we hear on the radio. And, away in (quite literally) a manger, a miraculous birth is about to take place. Despite the absence of dialogue or voice narration, we see one ewe isolated from the others, not by the shepherds, but seemingly by the other ewes themselves. A clear edit of two lengthy shots establishes this: the first is of the ewe, lying on her side, alone in the barn; the next shot is of the flock outside the barn, looking in, not daring to enter. Via the logic implicit in an eye-line match, the flock is watching this ewe’s difficult birth, but from the outside. Despite Ada’s actual birth a day or so after this, the connection of her fantastic birth

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to the Christmas story is obvious. In Dýrið, the discourse of the Pagan is an indirect one: while there is little to no evidence suggesting explicit church attendance, Maria does make the sign of the cross on her own baby’s grave, also named Ada. The grave, and seemingly graves of other family members, is on the farmland, and not in a consecrated church graveyard (a typical practice in Iceland, at least traditionally). From the traditional definition of the Pagan, Maria and Ingvar are not only “country dwellers” but literally outside of the norms of Christian practice. They are not part of a Christian community, despite being Christian themselves (at least Maria is). In this regard, the couple are (nominally) Christian, but equally Pagan as they are outside of organized, mainstream Christian worship. While the original Icelandic title Dýrið simply means “beast” or “animal,” on the one hand, a literal reference to the “creature” Ada; but on the other hand, the Icelandic also suggests our own bestial and animalistic tendencies. In English, the film’s title was changed to “Lamb” (which is how the film is better known). While Ada is literally half-lamb, the English title has further associative suggestions of the biblical lamb who is simultaneously an embodiment of innocence, while also sacrificial. And in this regard, a connection is made between Ada and the Christ myth; in this suggestion, the half-ram half-man god-like figure reclaims its miraculous child and returns home with her. The English-language poster for the film continues this connection: the image is a painterly portrait of Maria holding a swaddled Ada (however, in the way the child is held, we cannot see any evidence of Ada’s hybridity). The image is clearly meant to evoke a Madonna and Child portrait. And naming the female lead character “Maria” just adds to that connection. While “Ada” may be connected to “Agnes” (and in Latin agnus means “lamb”), Ingvar is a more traditional Nordic name, taken from the first king of Sweden, Yngvi. But in the family’s fusion of Christian and Norse names, we get a further suggestion of the kind of fusion that is Ada: human-lamb, Norse-Christian. What is Ada? The question is ontological, and we are unable to name what she is. The half-lamb Ada lies beyond our language (be it English or Icelandic): she is monstrous because she lies outside of our ability to define her. Her behavior and emerging personality are anything but monstrous; for all intents and purposes, she becomes a delightful, curious, and a rather sweet toddler. She is innocence personified. When Uncle Pétur takes her out into the countryside, his intention is to kill this creature, Ada’s charms and innocence steal his heart and he is unable to do it. Pétur needed Ada dead because she could not fit into his existing ontological categories. To him, she was simply monstrous. At one level then, Dýrið can be read as an allegory for the Christ story: does not Christ also defy ontology? But such an interpretation is too superficial. Ada is not Jesus, nor is she a savior of any kind. She simply exists

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but occupies a space beyond our language and conceptual categories in which to define her. In this regard, perhaps Dýrið is the most Pagan of any of the folk horror films: the film interpellates us as assumed Christians (however nominally or vaguely), with a sense of “normal” having to contend with a family that is anything but normal. We use “Pagan” in this sense to simply refer to that which is outside of our worldview. Ada’s biological father, who kills Ingvar and takes Ada away, also defies our ontologies. What is he? Iceland does not have a folk tradition of ram-headed deities. The Egyptian god of fertility, Khnum, is often represented with a ram’s head; and the Greek story of the Minotaur features a bull’s head on a man’s body, but there is no apparent connection to anything specific in Norse mythology. Nor is there any tradition of a ram-headed cryptid in Icelandic, or other, culture(s). Satanic literature and myth denote Baphomet as having a goat’s head, but not a ram’s head. Each avenue we begin to follow leads to a dead end in trying to tie Ada’s father to one single meaning. Instead, Ada and her father signify what Todorov refers to as “the fantastic”: the suspension of belief between the uncanny and the marvelous, between what we can explain rationally or by supernatural agency (Todorov 1973). Ada and her father cannot be explained either rationally nor via recourse to supernatural or mythological creatures. Dýrið demands we confront the limits of our understanding and recognize that there may exist an entire world beyond our comprehension, which not even our language can help us with. Ada’s father simply reclaims his rightful parenthood away from those who stole her away from him and her ewe mother. And in this regard, Dýrið suggests a Pagan reclamation from the modern Christian world. CONCLUSIONS In any given film, a particular discourse may take precedence, but never fully replaces the others. So, in Akelarre, the Pagan discourse is dominant, in Rehepapp it is the Folkloristic that is dominant, and in both Gwledd and Dýrið, the Rural isolation and the importance of landscape are the primary discourse. But none of these discourses are mutually exclusive. It is my hope that the preceding analyses illustrate how all three discourses reflect and comment on one another. Folk horror as a concept, a paradigm through which to analyze certain (appropriate) films, enables these discourses to be identified and discussed. And when the cinema of marginalized groups or nation states on the fringes of Europe use folk horror in this way, apparent subaltern voices across the continent can be heard. I was asked to write on the “future” of folk horror: if folk horror indeed does have any future, it is as a mechanism for these

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voices from the periphery to be heard. And not just in Europe, but around the world too. WORKS CITED Cameron, Alan. 2011. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Church, David. 2020. “Apprehension Engines: The New Independent ‘Prestige’ Horror.” In Eddie Falvey, Joe Hickenbottom, and Jonathan Wroot (eds.), New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, 15–33. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Ehrlich, David. 2019. “The Evils of ‘Elevated Horror’—IndieWire Critics Survey.” IndieWire. www​.indiewire​.com​/2019​/03​/elevated​-horror​-movies​-us​-1202053471​/. Accessed August 21, 2022. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language. A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. New York: Pantheon Books. Gaskill, Malcolm. 2015. Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Koven, Mikel. 2022. “Folk Horror & the Undead” In Simon Bacon (ed.), The Undead in the 21st Century. Bern: Peter Lang (forthcoming, 2022). ———. 2023a. “Folk Horror: a Discursive Approach, with Application to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves.” In Louis Bayman and Kevin Donnelly (eds.), Folk Horror: Return of the British Repressed. Manchester: Manchester University Press (forthcoming, 2023). ———. 2023b. “The Hills Have Eyes as Folk Horror, a Discursive Approach.” In Calum Waddell (ed.), Re-Focus: The Films of Wes Craven. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming, 2023). Monter, William. 1990. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scholz Williams, Gerhild. 2020. “Pierre de Lancre and the Basque Witch-hunts.” In Darren Oldridge (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, 3rd edition, 195–199. London: Routledge. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University. Wood, Robin. 2018. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In B. K. Grant (ed.), Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, 73–110. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Woodworth, Paddy. 2007. The Basque Country: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter Eighteen

The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism Teresa Fitzpatrick

A NEW (GOTHIC) DAWN Despite centuries of gloomy atmospheres and eerie settings that resonate with the ecophobic imagination (Estok 2009), Gothic critical enquiry of nature only began to emerge with the development of an ecogothic. Andrew Smith and William Hughes first defined this new term in their introduction to this ground-breaking collection as a theoretical framework that “explor[es] the Gothic through theories of ecocriticism” (2013, 3), a framework that “acknowledges a number of theoretical paradigms that help to critically reinvigorate debate about the class, gender and national identities that inhere within representations of the landscape” (4). While the essays themselves lean heavily towards the Gothic, they nevertheless, begin to interrogate the ecophobic tendencies within the genre. David Del Principe subsequently defined ecogothic in his introduction of Gothic Studies as a framework akin to ecofeminism wherein “the construction of the Gothic body—unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid” can be considered “through a more inclusive lens . . . as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity” (2014, 1). Following on from this theorists have increasingly widened and defined the nature of the ecogothic with Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils (2018) recentering the term ecogothic to “expose the darker aspects of the human cultural relationship with the North American natural world” (16), while Sue Edney explores gothic gardens using “the distinctive combination of ecocriticism with Gothic and the uncanny, alongside the ‘material turn’ in cultural theory” (2020, 7), and Elizabeth Parker, turning her focus to forests, sees the ecogothic as a way to examine “our darker, 259

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more complicated cultural representations of the nonhuman world” (2020, 36) and asserting that unlike ecohorror, ecogothic encompasses a nature “independent of human presence” (Ibid.). As the term moves from vague ecocritical perspectives of Gothic landscapes and/or bodies and confidence in the use of combined theories grows, distinctive critical frameworks such as ecofeminist Gothic and material ecogothic are emerging to interrogate the human–nonhuman interconnectedness. In contrast to ecogothic, then, ecohorror encapsulates “revenge-of-nature” narratives that imply the centrality of human protagonists as both agitator and victim, vital in evoking the “feelings of loathing, repugnance, aversion, dread, and outright terror” associated with horror (Rust and Soles 2014, 509). Yet, the same authors recognize the need for “[a] more expansive definition of ecohorror” to include “texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/nonhuman distinctions” (Rust and Soles 2014, 509–10). Ecohorror as a mode as well as a genre broadens the scope considerably, and with ecophobia playing an equally crucial role in ecohorror, there are inevitable overlaps with ecogothic. However, as Tidwell and Soles note, “ecohorror is not defined solely by human fear of nonhuman nature but is also frequently concerned with human fear for nonhuman nature” (2021, 5, emphasis in original). While ecohorror and ecogothic share a concern with the human-nonhuman dynamic, ecohorror has a focus on the uneasy relationship between human and nonhuman, where the natural world is viewed as monstrous/monstrously wronged with humanity at its center. BATTLING THE ELEMENTS: NATURAL DISASTER, ECO-APOCALYPSE Often categorized as eco-disaster or cli-fi films (Murray and Heumann 2016, 191–92) wherein nature’s revenge takes the form of a natural albeit exaggeratedly dramatized catastrophe or weather event, ecohorror readings can help reveal social and cultural misanthropy of their moment. While the eco-disaster scenarios found in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Into the Storm (2014), and San Andreas (2015) highlight the inevitable environmental repercussions in the age of the Anthropocene with global freezing, erratic tornadoes, and earthquakes of unimaginable magnitude, the wanton destruction of these events succeed more in exposing the rupture in the human relationships of the characters as the social and familial breakdowns are resolved in combatting the elements. The horror produced by such spectacular natural phenomena serve to underline the message that things must change to save

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not only the planet from environmental degradation, but the fabric of society perceived as disintegrating in terms of conservative ideals. Adopting an ecohorror approach to such texts focuses on this apparent mirroring of nature and culture, shattering the illusion of separateness in demonstrating how “natural” phenomena is rather the consequence of human negligence, in much the same way as the estranged familial relations. Examining a very real natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, material ecofeminist Nancy Tuana argues that the concept of “viscous porosity” reveals that “there is no sharp ontological divide” between “social practices and natural phenomena” but rather “a complex interaction” through material agents, both human and nonhuman (2008, 192–93). Just like the fictional disasters, the social and natural boundaries are porous as human actions contribute to, and are determined by, the environmental event, bound up in a way that is hard to distinguish whether humanity or nature is in control. This entanglement of human and nonhuman agency underlining the horror of destruction faced by the human characters is, nevertheless, viscous in the sense that there “remains an emphasis on resistance to changing form” (Tuana 2008, 194). In the aftermath of destruction, estranged and ruptured familial relations may be restored as they pick up the pieces and continue, but whether the event has provoked the required change in attitudes towards nature remains elusive—in both the fictional and very real scenario. Through an ecohorror lens these natural disaster narratives query whether the catastrophe is a natural or man-made phenomena, destabilizing human– nonhuman, nature–culture boundaries, viewing these events as an apparent self-destructive response to predominantly Western hubris in the face of any number of (class, racial, gender, sexual) paradigms. Bernice M. Murphy (2013) has suggested that American ecohorror has become “much more nebulous, and . . . downright apocalyptic” (193), is exampled in films like The Last Winter (2006) and The Happening (2008) that allude to a clear disruption of human-nature relationships and where the human is a deliberate target of inexplicable natural phenomena. In both these films, nature’s agency is demonstrated not through a severe weather event but an “invisible monster” (Weinstock 2020, 358–73) released by nature intent on inducing mass suicide in retaliation for human encroachment and environmental degradation. In Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter (2006) the Alaskan wilderness apparently strikes back at the group of environmental scientists and oil company workers evaluating the feasibility of extracting the dwindling fossil fuel, when one by one the group succumb to a pattern of self-annihilation. Blaming a poisonous gas released by the melting permafrost for the hallucinations of ghostly caribou and the disturbing deaths, the narrative offers a sense of material agency in determining nature is sentient in its intentionality.

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Human victims are not wiped out en masse, but singularly targeted with increasing fervor to remove humanity from the area. This is a revenge of nature past as the ghosts of the fossil fuels in the form of phantom reindeer are the apparent active agent, disrupting the boundaries of human/nonhuman, life/death, past/present, in defending the natural world by provoking the characters’ deaths. Similarly, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) presents nature as an active agent in controlling ironic self-destructive human behavior, reversing the perspective of ecological destruction as swathes of humans are compelled to acts of suicide. Perceived initially to be a chemical terrorist attack in Central Park prompting mass evacuation from New York City, it emerges as the protagonists flee further into the rural zones that the cause of the madness is a plant neurotoxin. As the knowledgeable hero explains, what should originally be a way to ward off pests has evolved to combat nature’s biggest threat: humanity. In both these films, the boundaries between human and nature collapse revealing the susceptibility of the human body to environmental agency. In her concept of trans-corporeality charting toxins from pesticide through food to manifest in the human body, Stacy Alaimo argues “the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world” shows that the two “can by no means be considered as separate” (2010, 2). As these two films highlight specifically, the invisible monster lurks not necessarily as a separate powerful act of nature but as a material entity that transgresses the boundaries of the human body, requiring its audience and characters to reconsider their place within the natural world. CREATURE FEATURES: MONSTROUS MAMMALS, FIENDISH FISH, INSIDIOUS INSECTS Although the 1960s and 1970s are the decades renowned for animal attack horror with the success of The Birds (1963), Jaws (1975), and Grizzly (1976) tapping into the primordial fear of claws and teeth, the popularity of animal horror has not waned in the twenty-first century. Reminding the human tourist that they are invaders in their commodification of nature, films like Prey (2007), The Grey (2011), and Backcountry (2014) pit humans against the nonhuman in the latter’s own territory, continuing to underline the fallacy of human control over nature. While bears and canines remain territorial defenders against the persistent human visitor, their bloody rampages underline several ecocritical paradigms not least of which is the unsettling notion of humans as food. Unlike other animal prey that have evolved some form of defense mechanism (hard shells, agility, speed, camouflage), humans have relied on their position as a superior intelligence. Yet, unlike their predecessors where there is an all-out human retaliation to obliterate the monster and

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re-establish human control, post-2000 animal attack movies, for all their body horror, suggest a survival narrative coupled with new-found respect for wild nature. Despite the monstrous animal attacks, these films “also frequently prompt sympathy for the creatures” (Tidwell and Soles 2021, 6) suggesting the attacks are to some extent a justified response to human treatment of the natural world and the shrinking of animal territory in favor of urbanization and agriculture. An inherent part of animal attack narratives, as noted by Brittany Roberts, is that they “remind us not only that we too are edible animals attractive to predators but also that there are Other beings and agencies whom we cannot control” (2021, 180). Fear of animal agency is key in the CBS television series Zoo (2015–17), an invasion narrative depicting a global animal rebellion. Based on the novel by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge (2012), the show portrays the human as prey when both wild and domestic animals are mutated by a pandemic that enables them to coordinate their attack on humans. In the novel, their new-found self-awareness is illustrated by the narration by a chimpanzee character while in the series this is achieved through close-ups of the animal eye showing a distinctive human resemblance. This blurring of human–nonhuman boundaries is most obvious when companion and wild animals plan murder. Arguably the most unsettling moments in the show are when the companion animals turn on their owners through a seemingly planned coordinated attack redolent of very human actions. Although large predators have been the focus of much horror scholarship and animal studies, creepy crawly horror has received less attention, perhaps because these have often tended toward comedy horror. Ecohorror criticism is beginning to re-examine entomophobic and body horror of the twentieth century and would do well to encompass the more recent comedy horror films within these analyses. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (2005) assert how Gothic writing engages with the comic in various ways, offering an opening for ecohorror to explore the ridiculous side to insect body horror in Eight Legged Freaks (2002), Slither (2006), Attack of the Giant Leeches (2008), and Stung (2015), where the human–insect hierarchy is overturned to comic effect even as they emphasize disgust in bodily transgression. In the twenty-first century such films are more likely to be categorized as science fiction, with Deadly Swarm (2003), Parasite (2004), Larva (2005), The Hive (2008), and From Beneath (2012) underlining our latent fear of creatures so alien to ourselves yet so important to our ecosystems. The mob attacks of these tiny critters are clearly nature-revenge narratives; a species rebellion for all those times humans have stepped on, swatted, crushed, or sprayed one of their brethren, inviting ecohorror criticism into the sphere of science/speculative fiction. What makes insect horror unsettling is that these beings remain outside human control, “resist[ing] anthropomorphism, and are usually presented as

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little more than biological machines” (Jancovich 1996, 27). Like vegetation and reptiles, insectoid monsters lack empathy for the human and inevitably highlight our vulnerability through bodily invasion, warranting further ecohorror criticism. Perhaps one of the most popular ecophobic settings in Australian and American ecohorror is the water and the monsters that lurk beneath the surface. Rogue (2007), Black Water (2007), and the slightly earlier Lake Placid (1999) draw on fears of the primeval reptile to whom the fleshy human invader is but another tasty snack. Having survived a crocodilian attack worthy of any ecohorror narrative, Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood argues that “[i]n the West, the human is set apart from nature as radically other” and much of the horror stems from the dominant presumption that “[h]umans may themselves be foremost among predators, but they themselves must not be food for worms, and especially they must not be prey for crocodiles” (1995, 34). These liminal creatures—crocodiles inhabit both water and land—in fictional accounts confront us not just with human encroachment on natural zones but can also offer ways of interrogating colonial, gender, and sexual oppression through their monstrous reduction of the human body as food. The shark in films like Open Water (2003), The Reef (2010), and The Shallows (2016) operates in a very similar manner. The gory body horror of such attacks, an ecohorror lens suggests, also forces us to rethink our place within the natural world and face our own vulnerability. Alongside the wealth of animal studies and horror scholarship on animal-attack narratives, our hesitant relationship with large bodies of water and the uncanny predatory monsters lurking beneath has sparked a growing subset of ecohorror scholarship and ecogothic explorations of the sea dubbed “Nautical Gothic” (Alder 2017). The establishment in 2020 of the global interdisciplinary Haunted Shores Research Network to include liminal coastal zones, and the theorization of Nautical Horror by Antonio Alcalá González (2021) to explore the monstrous cephalopod attest a growing interest in these nonhuman watery environments. Much broader than animal attack narratives, this scholarship explores the unsettling relationships of humanity and an environment that remains largely unchartered, with creatures that are radically different to the human form and often greatly misunderstood. The marginality of coastal spaces forms discursive sites for a range of issues, both ecological and social. Developing a nautical ecogothic approach navigates a gap in scholarship, Alder argues, since for example “[s]ymbolically, ships are liminal spaces, between life and death, inside and outside, while the sea can hide terrors beneath a continually shifting yet apparently timeless surface” (2017, 4). Human–nonhuman relations and interactions are explored through a thalassophobia that can be seen as offering historic context to broader long-standing ecophobia in Western philosophical and cultural ideology. We

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may not be especially welcome in the natural domains of the forest, jungle, desert, or tundra, ecohorror demonstrates, but we certainly no longer belong to (or have the natural capacity to survive in) the sea. Yet, “[e]ven though the long evolutionary arc that ties humans to their aquatic ancestors may evoke modes of kinship with the seas” (Alaimo 2014, 188), nautical ecohorror readings cast these kinships as “monstrous and horrifying encounter[s] with the nonhuman” (Alcalá González 2021, 161). Such encounters with monstrous sea creatures as giant cephalopods, argues Alcalá González “evidence the inferior position of humans when we are pitted against both the threatening creatures that emerge from the depths and the vastness of the oceanic waters that challenge the ability of human minds to comprehend size and volume” (2021, 162). This emerging body of scholarship offers a broadening of the sea monster attack narratives beyond the creature itself to considerations of kinship and human-nonhuman interactions in challenging anthropocentric claims of superiority and supremacy in our inconsiderate pillaging of natural sea resources. PLANT HORROR: VICIOUS VEGETABLES, FATAL FLOWERS, MONSTROUS MUSHROOMS Critical plant studies have moved the focus onto an equally alien, ambiguous relationship: the botanical. Like other nonhuman kinship, this too is riddled with uncertainty, with Western Enlightenment rationality “haunt[ing] our relation to plants” (Marder 2016, 120). Their rootedness to place has historically been associated with stagnancy, and underdeveloped thinking in Western philosophy, while cultural associations of femininity with flowers and reproduction alongside the wild, chaotic female gender with prolific vegetal growth have been perpetuated in literature and art for centuries. Today ironically echoing Estok’s ecophobia, Marder states, “[w]e escape into the plant world, from which we have been fleeing for millennia now” (2016, 120). While murderous intent and primeval intelligence is not immediately associated with the vegetal world, there is a growing focus on what Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga term “Plant Horror” (2016). Stories of vampiric orchids and man-eating trees were prolific in the late-nineteenth century, inspired by evolutionary biology as tropes engaging with anxieties pertaining to rising feminism, sexuality, class, and race, unsettling pervasive Western thinking by inverting the human–nonhuman power dynamic and blurring species, category, and social boundaries as they (attempt to) consume the human (Fitzpatrick 2020). Perhaps the distasteful notion of Earthbound plant intelligence explains why twentieth-century cinematic adaptations of iconic plant monsters in The Day of the Triffids (Sekely [1962]) and Little Shop

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of Horrors (Oz [1986]) take their cue from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel [1956]) and depict their vegetal menaces as extraterrestrial. An other-worldly plant alien offers a sense of rationale for what seems an impossible scenario. Yet, plants are already an “absolute alterity” (Keetley 2016, 6), as the horror invoked by this type of nature-revenge narrative stems from the realisation that our material bodies are already an inevitable source of plant food. Besides confronting such inevitability, plant horror also reminds us of the “implacable indifference” (Keetley 2016, 9) of plants toward humans. While the decomposed human body as plant food may be disturbing enough, when plants intentionally seek out humans as food or forcibly incorporate them into their own vegetal futures the levels of abjection increase dramatically, in part through highlighting the true place of humanity in plant-human interconnectedness, vegetal kinships and plant-becomings. New ecohorror anthologies explore this very corporeal interaction between plants and humans. The Growing Concerns collection (Hurst, ed. 2014) in particular, includes tales of corporeal ecohorror where plant and human boundaries are materially and conceptually challenged as they gruesomely merge to offer uncanny perceptions of plant-becoming. In these tales, a murdered skeleton transcorporeally reanimates for revenge with the help of vampiric vines; the body parts of a missing child and their searching father are reappropriated among the unusual human–plant hybrids of a strange death-garden; and other protagonists experience becoming-plant in more subtle posthuman mergings. The ecological epithet “at one with nature” takes an extreme uncanny turn when human and plant entanglements are depicted as a very physical transcorporeality, confronting material realities of eventual plant-becoming. As Karen Houle has argued, plant and human lives are inexorably linked; we “live by grace of the oxygen produced by said plants, and are built from the very carbons of them, and run our entire global economy off the backs of that carbon, [yet] we are unable to think let alone live the novel and profound truths of these vegetal relations” (2011, 92). These tales of plant-becoming serve to highlight the very real entanglements in memorable ways that demonstrate our persistent ecophobia: being part of the food chain rather than at its apex. Visceral plant-becomings also challenge cultural and social assumptions (gender, race, and sexual identities) when focusing on the transcorporeal transgressions of dualistic boundaries, proposing a web of becoming-other ripe for thematic analysis. However horrific the physical trans-corporeal becomings may be depicted in these tales, the protagonists (gardeners, scientists, environmentalists, nature-lovers extraordinaire) facilitating the plant-becomings within their monstrous vegetal progeny view the outcomes in a positive light, challenging predominant Western thinking and making it difficult to discern whether plant or human is the villain.

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While plant horror has literary leanings, thanks to computer-generated imaging the sentient plant can step off the pages and provide a visual, although gory and unsettling, reversal of human hierarchical assumptions. Carter Smith’s The Ruins (2008) depicts the plant-human interaction through a gruesome physicality that recasts plants “as agentive . . . even antagonistic subjects . . . blur[ring] boundaries between vegetable and animal, human and non-human” (Roberts 2020, 56, original emphasis). When a group of eco-tourists ascend the vegetation-covered ruins of a Mayan temple, an indigenous tribe refuses to allow them to descend on threat of death if/when they try. The carnivorous vines that cover the ruins revoke their benign vegetal stereotyping in becoming active agents. These vines take invasion to a new level when they penetrate the flesh of the characters one by one, having lured the group into sustaining physical injuries by mimicking first a cell phone and then human voices, thereby hindering the group’s escape. The group of backpackers are hesitant to believe that the vines are responsible for luring them with mimesis of modern-day technology. The scenario attests to what James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler refer to as “plant blindness” (1999)—a failure to see plants as individual beings in our daily lives relegating them to mere backdrop. Even when Stacy (Laura Ramsey) asserts that she can feel the vine inside her and they try to pull out the tendril that has entered her wound, disbelief remains until sometime later when it can be seen wriggling beneath the skin and flesh. A plant’s very rootedness (unless it is a triffid) means they are unable to chase the human from its territory hence, they employ some of their real-world behaviors hyperbolically. Humans, in their hubristic plant blindness, are lured to their demise by perfume, attractive color and floral displays, or the fascinating visual (and in the case of the vines, aural) mimicry. Like an insect to a Venus flytrap, humans place themselves within the plant’s sphere wherein they disable their human prey or at least slow them down, levelling the playing field. The vine’s gruesome live consumption and infestation of the humans offers a very corporeal reflection of the consumption of indigenous nature by Western capitalist consumerism, even as it emphasizes the fragility of the human body and its ultimate return to the earth as plant food. Yet, more disconcerting perhaps is the vine’s ability to vocalize, albeit through imitation. The capacity to communicate and hence, learn, not only signifies sentient intelligence supposedly unique to humans (and to some extent animals) provokes the question: if plants could talk, what would they say? The answer is speculated comically in Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horror (1962) with the iconic “pot plant” Audrey Junior, but vegetal communication and response to the Anthropocene underlies much of the twentyfirst century ecohorror through a posthuman narrative where plant and human transcorporeally merge, offering moments of ecological awareness

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in becoming-plant. While other plant horrors offer plant-becomings and transcorporeal mergings that highlight the vulnerability of the human form in its material decomposition, novels like A. J. Colucci’s Seeders (2014), Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), including the film adaptations of these last two, Annihilation (Garland [2018]) and The Girl with All the Gifts (McCarthy [2016]), depict transcorporeal mergings that create eco-posthumans who understand the desires and fears of the vegetal world. In these narratives, human and plant enter a (sometimes reluctant) symbiotic relationship that is facilitated by a fungus. Although not strictly a plant, but within the botanical sphere, there is a preoccupation within these ecohorror texts with the fungal body. This connection between two separate kingdoms is hardly surprising as plant and fungi already have a symbiotic association, predominantly the mycorrhizal network that scientists have nicknamed the Wood Wide Web (Wohlleben 2015) in recognition of its role in facilitating communication between plants through their roots and the vital role of fungi within plant ecology (Sheldrake 2021). In both Seeders and The Girl with All the Gifts, a known species of fungus has been scientifically altered with devastating consequences for the human population. The protagonists of Seeders become infected by ergot on the remote island home of Dr. George Brookes, an ostracized experimental plant scientist who has mysteriously committed suicide. Once infected by the fungus which spreads through the body to the brain, black mushrooms erupting through the skin, the characters can hear the island plants, becoming controlled by the plants’ instructions. As eco-posthumans connected to the natural world and compelled to do the vegetal world’s bidding, they must collect infected plant seedlings for mass distribution across the globe in a potentially insidious nature-revenge narrative that nevertheless carries a distinctive environmental message. The postapocalyptic scenario of The Girl with All the Gifts similarly involves out-of-control fungal infection of a real-life fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis or the zombie-ant fungus, which infects the human brain with uncontrollable cannibalism. The plot is a standard zombie apocalypse narrative with a small group of normal humans fighting for survival against a world overrun, but the group includes and focuses on the main protagonist, Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a second-generation “hungry” who has developed restraint through education and love for her teacher. Despite her attempts to protect the band of “normals” on their way to another base camp, she eventually realizes the futility of resisting change and instigates a final global wave of infection, paving the way for a new posthuman that might take better care of the planet. While both texts propose infection through close contact with the fungus or fungal-infected, Annihilation highlights the almost imperceptible

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reproductive aspect of fungus: the spores. When a team of women are sent into an environmental anomaly dubbed “Area X” or “The Shimmer” to investigate and search for previous expedition survivors, the spores of a mysterious fungus provoke a series of metabolic changes that create not only weird hybrid animal and plant life, but transcorporeally transformation the humans that have invaded the area, merging them with the environment. In novel and film, the main protagonist, a biologist/botanist discovers several human bodies that have been converted into a colorful array of strange cryptogams: mushrooms, lichens, mosses, and molds. While in the novel the biologist’s positive attitude to this strange but pristine environment is mirrored by a positive inner transformation (she glows), in the film it is Josie (Tessa Thompson) who willingly succumbs to the spores and refraction of her DNA as a posthuman of the Shimmer, turning her gradually into a flowering plant as these bud and flower through her skin. Being neither animal or vegetal, edible or poisonous, desired or loathed, fungal spores and mushrooms are disturbing in their ambiguity. Associated with decay, growing mostly underground, facilitating the decomposition of all matter, the fascination and trepidation around this unusual growth, which can survive on anything, makes it an ideal trope for exploring duality in ecohorror and ecogothic criticism. Although Anthony Camara has explored “the role fungi play” in “fin de siècle debates between vitalism and materialism” (2014, 9) in the writing of Arthur Machen, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) uses the environmental benefits of fungal ecology and their collaborative networks to explore the extent of capitalist destructive reach, literary scholarship on fungus to date has been slim. With an increasing body of ecohorror narratives underlining anxieties about global pandemics and ecological crises through depictions of fungal spores and trans-corporeal posthuman becomings, this is another area of enquiry that is beginning to have traction within ecogothic criticism. The most recent fungal ecohorror, The Spore (Cunningham [2021]), In the Earth (Wheatley [2021]), and Gaia (Bouwer [2021]) align infection with spores as mutated fungi invade the human body, spreading under the skin to eventually erupt in spectacular fungal growth. While these mushrooms extruding the body are unsettling, the monstrosity and horror come from the fact that the human remains alive during this species invasion; one that reduces the human to its mere materiality, repositioning the human as part of, rather than superior to, nature. BRAVE NEW WORLD: COSMIC ECOHORROR In his ecohorror reading of “Lovecraft’s weird depictions of encroaching forests and dangerously active vegetation,” Fredrik Blanc argues how Lovecraft’s “natural world can become monstrous, whether as the prime

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infector or . . . infected” (2022, 159), as landscape, plant and fungus combine in configurations of corruption and decay in narratives that “epitomize the general fear of nature’s ultimate otherness and agency” (168). This ecophobic view of nature as infectious embodies twenty-first-century anxieties around global health issues and underscores notions of climate crisis as “beyond humanity’s control and the cosmic indifference of an untameable universe” (Blanc 2022, 158). Cosmic horror is closely linked to Lovecraft’s penchant for exploring our fear of the unknown and humanity’s insignificance within the cosmos. As Bethany Doane outlines, a cosmic ecohorror borrows from weird fiction to take a different approach to nature-revenge, whereby nature itself does not exact revenge but offers a “specific ecology” wherein a “geographical space affects history, memory, thought, and perceptions” of human/ nonhuman entanglements “at a ‘cosmic’ scale of deep time” (2020, 46). Hence, cosmic ecohorror interrogates “a web of ontological inseparability” (Doane 2020, 47) in positing the issue of species extinction framed by the outside irruption of a cosmic indifference fielded through nature. Knowing (2009), The Endless (2017), Annihilation (2018), and Color Out of Space (2019) all engage with the unknowable universe challenging perceptions of time and space, as human, nonhuman and inhuman become entangled in ways that produce uncertainty about the future and disrupt preconceived ideologies and species boundaries. While the later narratives focus on a specific site that becomes distorted by a cosmic anomaly that forces the protagonists to recognize human inability to control a persistently random and unpredictable nature or cosmos, Knowing set the Earth’s inevitable destruction as the consequence of the Anthropocene. Ecological and extinction anxieties are frequently foreshadowed in the nature-loving Caleb’s nightmares of the forest and wildlife surrounding his home in flames. Cosmic intervention gives humanity a second chance though when an elusive life-form begins to migrate samples of the planet’s species, including children Caleb and Abby, echoing the religious stories of Noah’s Ark and Eden. Lovecraft’s preoccupation with the tentacle, not just for his primeval monsters, but in his descriptions of malignant and monstrous nature, offers a key feature in other cosmic ecohorror narratives that challenge ideas of natural order. Spring (2014), The Lighthouse (2019), and Sacrifice (2020) involve human entanglement with primordial cephalopods as unspeakable and indescribable creatures from beyond the known realm. These ancient beings suggest a pre-evolutionary kinship that unsettles human boundaries through their interstitial nature even as they question human ecology. This multilimbed horror persistently appears not just in Nautical Gothic, but in plant and fungal horror too. Roots, tendrils, and mycorrhizal hyphae are all invariably referred to as tentacles within literary texts and closely resemble this cephalopodic limb in visual narratives. Exploring how the tentacle trope

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depicts nature reaching out and entangling the human ultimately to enmesh human and nonhuman stipulates the need for “tentacular thinking,” argues Shelley Saguaro (2020) and is what Dawn Keetley refers to as “tentacular ecohorror” (2021, 24, original emphasis). For both Saguaro and Keetley the transformative encounters with nature that witness the entanglement of plant and human resembles a multilimbed embroilment—one that not only underlines the vulnerability of the human body but that offers a progressive mode of ecological thinking. THE FUTURE OF ECOHORROR Ecogothic and ecohorror scholarship is growing steadily and is not restricted to contemporary narratives. It has offered academics an alternative avenue with which to explore older material as well using critical frames that interrogate the interstices of fear and nature across a range of thematic narratives. While this chapter has primarily focused on ecohorror cinema and literature, there is scope to apply this transdisciplinary mode of enquiry to manga, graphic novels, poetry, and video games which equally exhibit an ecohorror mode. As this chapter has outlined, ecocritical studies in animal horror are expanding as human–nonhuman relationships recenter our ecophobic traditions, while plant studies continue to explore gothic/horror scholarship (including Weird and Science Fiction), illustrating how plant life “transforms our attitudes . . . questioning and shifting many traditional parameters” (Bishop 2020, 4–5) with fungal horror of growing interest. As concerns about ocean health hit the news headlines, nautical gothic/horror is on the rise, with insect horror and cosmic ecohorror emerging as critical frames with which to embrace the tentacular and further explore human anxieties over symbiotic and possible plant-human futures. WORKS CITED Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 186–203. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alcalá González, Antonio. 2021. “Tentacles from the Depths: The Nautical Horror of D. T. Neal’s Relict.” Gothic Nature 2: 156–74.

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Alder, Emily. 2017. “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic.” Gothic Studies 19/2 (November): 1–15. http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.7227​/GS​ .0025 Bishop, Katherine E. 2020. “Introduction.” In Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation, edited by Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins and Jerry Määttä, 1–8. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Blanc, Fredrik. 2022. “‘It Was the Vegetation’: Ecophobia and Monstrous Wilderness in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.” In Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, But Still Dreaming, edited by Antonio Alcalá González and Carl H. Sederholm, 158–71. New York: Routledge. Camara, Anthony. 2014. “Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams.” Gothic Studies 16/1 (May): 9–23. http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​ /10​.7227​/GS​.16​.1​.2 Carey, M. R. 2014. The Girl with All the Gifts. London: Orbit. Colucci, A. J. 2014. Seeders. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Del Principe, David. 2014. “Introduction: The Ecogothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 16/1 (May): 1–8. http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.7227​/GS​.16​.1​.1 Doane, Bethany. 2020. “Planetary Ecohorror and Sublime Annihilation.” Modern Language Studies 40, no. 2: 46–61. Edney, Sue. 2020. “Introduction: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers.” In EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney, 1–15. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Emmerich, Roland, dir. 2004. The Day After Tomorrow. Century City: 20th Century Fox. Estok, Simon C. 2009. “Theorising in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 4 (Spring): 203–25. Fessenden, Larry, dir. 2006. The Last Winter. New York: IFC Films. Fitzpatrick, Teresa. 2020. “Green Is the New Black: Plant Monsters as ecoGothic Tropes: Vampires and Femmes Fatales.” In EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney, 130–47. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fryers, Mark. 2020. “Thalassophobia: Jaws (1975) and the Nautical Spaces of Horror.” In The Spaces and Places of Horror, edited by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, 127–44. Wilmington: Vernon Press. Garland, Alex, dir. 2018. Annihilation. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures. Haunted Shores Research Network, https:​//​haunted​-shores​.com Hillard, Tom J. 2009. “‘Deep into the Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 4 (Autumn): 685–95. Horner, Avril and Zlosnik, Sue. 2005. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Houle, Karen L. F. 2011. “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies IX, no. 1/2: 89–116. Hurst, Alex, ed. 2014. Growing Concerns. Fort Smith, AR: Chupa Cabra House. Jancovich, Mark. 1996. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Keetley, Dawn. 2021. “Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name.” In Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles, 23–41. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University. ———. 2016. “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” In Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, 1–30. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Keetley, Dawn, and Wynn Sivils, Matthew. 2018. “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic.” In Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, 1–20. New York: Routledge. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marder, Michael. 2016. “Seeking Refuge in the Vegetal World” in Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives, Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, 117– 21. New York: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, Colm, dir. 2016. The Girl with All the Gifts. Nurbank: Warner Bros. Pictures. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Murphy, Bernice M. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, Robin L. and Heumann, Joseph K. 2016. Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Oz, Frank, dir. 1986. Little Shop of Horrors. Burbank: Warner Bros. Parker, Elizabeth. 2020. The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Patterson, James and Ledwidge, Michael. 2012. Zoo. London: Century. Plumwood, Val. 1995. “Human Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey.” Quadrant 29, no. 3: 29–34. Roberts, Brittany. 2020. “Human Trespass, Inhuman Space: Monstrous Vegetality in Carter Smith’s The Ruins.” In The Spaces and Places of Horror, edited by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, 55–74. Wilmington: Vernon Press. Roberts, Brittany R. 2021. “‘This Bird Made an Art of Being Vile’: Ontological Difference and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant.” In Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy

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Tidwell and Carter Soles, 174–94. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University. Rust, Stephen A., and Soles, Carter. 2014. “Ecohorror Special Cluster: ‘Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All Be Dead.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 3 (Summer): 509–12. Saguaro, Shelley. 2020. “‘Tentacular Thinking’ and the ‘Abcanny’ in Hawthorne’s Gothic Gardens of Masculine Egotism.” In EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney, 114–29. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sharp, Sharon. 2021. “Zoo: Television Ecohorror on and off the Screen.” In Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles, 237–56. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University. Sheldrake, Merlin. 2021. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. London: The Bodley Head. Shyamalan, M. Night, dir. 2008. The Happening. Century City: 20th Century Fox. Smith, Andrew and Hughes, William. 2013. “Introduction: Defining the ecoGothic.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, Carter, dir. 2008. The Ruins. Culver City: Sony Pictures Releasing. Tidwell, Christy, and Soles, Carter. 2021. “Introduction: Ecohorror in the Anthropocene.” In Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles, 1–20. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University. Tremblay, Paul. 2019. Growing Things and Other Stories. London: Titan Books. Tuana, Nancy. 2008. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014. Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy. London: Fourth Estate. Wandersee, James H. and Schussler, Elisabeth E. 1999. “Preventing Plant Blindness.” In The American Biology Teacher, 61, no. 2 (Feb.): 82–86. Ward, A. R., ed. 2021. Chlorophobia: An Eco-Horror Anthology. Great Britain: Ghost Orchid Press. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2020. “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture.” In The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 358–73. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wohlleben, Peter. 2015. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. London: William Collins.

Chapter Nineteen

Undying Earth Extinction Romances in the Age of Anthropocene Ian Fetters

SCIENCE FICTION “Once there was an explosion,” begins the 2019 video game Death Stranding, “a bang that gave birth to time and space. Once there was an explosion, a bang that set a planet spinning in that space.” The narration over a black screen, delivered by the game’s heroic protagonist, outlines 4.6 billion years of Earth history in a few terse sentences: the Big Bang origin of the universe; the planet’s nascent formation from raw cosmic material; the emergence and evolution of living organisms from primordial seas to newly oxygenated shores; and the cycle of mass extinctions that have laid the stratigraphic foundation for “life as we know it” on Earth. The scene cuts to a sweeping, panoramic view of wasteland Earth, a gray cratered landscape of nothingness, over which the protagonist speaks portentously of a final explosion, “an explosion that will be our last” (Kojima 2019). The brief, yet expansive in scale, narration of Earth’s deep time history ends with this scene of utter desolation: the aftermath of the final explosion, the titular death stranding extinction event—a mysterious, supernatural calamity that destroys civilization, kills most living beings, and completely upends the survivors’ relationships to the physical and metaphysical realms, to time and space itself. The game envisions Earth’s sixth mass extinction as a catastrophic boundary collapse between life, death, and undeath, a tripartite network of connections that comes to shape the “stranding” ecosystem of the game’s apocalyptic, posthuman world. 275

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But for hundreds of years, writers, poets, artists, and doomsayers alike have all produced dire visions of an Earth depleted of its vitality, the aftermath of the end; creative minds in the arts and letters have always a particular aptitude for forecasting apocalypses—the species extinction of Humanity foremost among those visions. These apocalyptic visions of a depleted planet are as varied as they are richly productive as sites of dread and horror. Attempting to reconcile new theories of geologic time and the concept of universal heat death with humanity’s seeming insignificance, Lord Byron writes in 1816 of “a dream, which was not all a dream./The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air,” a chilling prophecy of a postsolar Earth, now just a “lump of death—a chaos of hard clay” where human survivors resort to grim tribalism and clash over resources (Byron 1816). At the fin-de-siècle, H. G. Wells sends his time-traveling protagonist to a far-future epoch where the human species has gone extinct, and the trace of humanity that still exists in the world has evolved into the hybridized Eloi and terrifyingly bestial Morlocks. Olaf Stapledon further imagines the postextinction, hybrid human as unrecognizable in the 1930 novel Last and First Men, where billions of years of devolution and solar catastrophe have reduced humanity’s biological existence to a space-borne, genetic virus sent out into the void to repopulate via spores. Humanity is radically changed again in the posttechnological future-fantasy of Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique Cycle of tales—where the final dregs of human society occupy the last habitable continent on Earth in a pseudo-magical, postsolar dark age of necromancy, cannibalism, and olden gods that have supplanted “the science and machinery of the present civilization” (Wells 1895; Stapledon 1930; Murray 1995, 8). Writing to H. P. Lovecraft around the time of the first Zothique stories appearing in Weird Tales (circa 1930s), Smith contends that yet more of the stories set in his far-future, techno-barbaric world “will witness the intrusion of Things from galaxies not yet visible; and worse than this, a hideously chaotic breaking-down of dimensional barriers which will leave parts of our world in other dimensions, and vice versa” (Smith 1931, 304–305). As science advanced newly theorized relations of humanity to the nonhuman world at the fin-de-siècle and onward, successive generations of horror and science fiction writers have capitalized on the conundrum of human subjectivity arrayed against the vastness of deep time’s glacial advance, their work often highlighting perceptions of humanity’s physical and existential “stranding” in a system of inevitable and gradual decline. These texts belong to the genre tradition of dying earth narratives—fictionalized imaginings of humanity’s place in a far future Earth environment, often where the sun has blinked out of existence and the wasted planet is populated by a range of

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hybridized beings, hypernatural phenomena, and occultic powers from some inexplicable beyond. Far from the fiery apocalypses of Judeo-Christianity or the urgent collapses pictured in the modern postapocalyptic disaster genre, dying earth narratives offer a morbid glimpse into an unfamiliar and alien Earth future, in which only the merest traces of the human civilization survive after an apocalyptic rending of the veil; even the human subject is left transformed and abject to the reader, warped by species catastrophe and trauma over time. Timelines in dying earth narratives are measured in the millions and billions of years, rather than the diminutive units of time more recognizable to human experience—days, weeks, years. Scientific discoveries at the turn of each century since 1800 tend to inform the existentially charged motifs of extinction, evolutionary adaptation (or decline), and the awe-inspiring vastness of time that are the motive forces behind the creation of dying earth tales; however, the actual earth “science” undergirding the genre ends up warped and distorted in favor of a more fantastical future vision: futurism and primitivism interpolate in the vast chasm of deep time. In dying earth narratives, of the kind to be discussed in this chapter, humanity—or what is left of it—finds itself stranded in realms of unthinkable temporal and spatial weirdness, in the horror of the “vast chasm of deep time.” The human species is irrevocably stuck in a dynamic of upheaval with no referent for establishing a foothold: when the stars in the firmament disappear, the sun vanishes, and beings born of the darkness that remains creep up from chthonic abysses to inherit the Earth, how then can we humans ground ourselves? To which heavenly body do we turn our faces for some universal guarantor of stability? The extinction romance, an offshoot of the dying earth narrative, capitalizes on this horror in upheaval: typically, a lone protagonist is moved to “quest” far afield amidst the ruination and deadly hazards of a dying earth to liberate a beloved from their bondage, and to restore humanity to its place in the dark ecology of a posthuman world. This nightmare adventurism masquerading as romance tale is exemplified best by William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel, The Night Land, considered one of the richest and most befuddling examples of the extinction romance.1 Modern readers and gamers can draw comparison between The Night Land and Hideo Kojima’s video game Death Stranding, a contemporary, new media example of the extinction romance. The video game is one hundred years removed from novel’s publication, yet the game’s story bears striking resemblances to Hodgson’s epic in narrative structure and in existential theme: searching for hope (meaning) amid the ruins of humanity’s native habitat, our former evolutionary niche in a vast universe. But instead of hope at the end of all things, both tales find instead the futility of such questing in the face of species extinction: when all lines of flight are cut off, the sun is extinguished, and strange forces encroach upon the terminal

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thresholds of human existence, what meaning does heroism have then? In the extinction romance, the end of life as we know it is always already assured. But why talk about the extinction romance now? What bearing do these texts have on the evolutionary pathway of the horror and science fiction (fantasy) genres into the twenty-first century, and what of their future? Beyond just an exercise in genre taxonomy, this chapter seeks to establish a new understanding, a new context, for the extinction romance. By analyzing the two selected stories in the context of what is termed “the anthropocene”— a multidisciplinary framework drawing on earth science and ecological criticism that can be used to assign human culpability for the vast changes occurring to the Earth’s geosphere and biosphere over thousands of years of the human species’ existence—a new sense of urgency and dawning horror emerges: could we humans be responsible for bringing about the conditions for our own extinction?2 And even more so, in light of the seemingly irrevocable nature of anthropogenic harm to the earth ecosystem, might we humans be hastening our end (toward an apocalyptic “tipping point”) even sooner than the millions-of-years scale that extinction romances operate on? In many ways, as we will see throughout this chapter in close readings of the texts and real-world examples of the horror of the anthropocene, the end is already here; and like our far future compatriots in the fictional romances of human extinction, we are helpless to avert catastrophe—stranded, as we are, on an undying planet. THE HORROR OF THE ANTHROPOCENE The turn of the twenty-first century marks a significant shift in thinking about planet Earth for science, politics, economics, and metaphysics; no field of study is left untouched by the arrival of the Anthropocene. The term “anthropocene” was first introduced by Dutch chemist and meteorologist Paul Crutzen in a 2002 proposal to make firm the boundary between the Holocene age and a new geologic age characterized by human impact on the planet and its systems—the “Anthro-” age in which we currently reside. Nominally, the Anthropocene is an epoch on the Geological Time Scale, its boundary being determined by a “golden spike,” or GSSP (Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points). GSSPs for determining the boundaries of any geologic age are strictly defined by the scientific community, and the Anthropocene GSSP remains hotly contested to this day (Ellis 2018, 42–43). Some scientists and geologists have argued for a marker ranging from 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of widespread human agricultural activities, to just seventy years ago, the golden spike being the fine stratigraphic layer of radionuclides spread across the earth from fallout due to atmospheric nuclear weapons

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testing and the initial deposits of radioactive materials released from early commercial nuclear energy facilities. The thirty-seven-person Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), initially formed by Crutzen and a diverse array of geologists, biologists, chemists, and humanities experts, tends to favor the later time frame, an Anthropocene origin in the 1950s, for its own purposes (Thomas et al. 2020, 63). Beyond generating debate, however, on the usefulness or appropriateness of the boundary in geological terms, the Anthropocene as a conceptual framework has evolved over multiple decades to more broadly encapsulate the unique, and uniquely scary, aspects of change during this unprecedented time in the Earth’s history. Most crucially, the Anthropocene addresses human drivers of change that could be irrevocable to the Earth’s delicate and complex networks of life support systems: in a 2004 report, the IGBP (International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) proclaimed that the arrival of the anthropocene is heralded by the Earth entering a new state, one that has no resemblance to prior epochs: The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind [. . .]. The magnitude, spatial scale, and pace of human-induced change are unprecedented in human history and perhaps in the history of the Earth; the Earth system is now operating in a “no-analogue state.” (IGBP 2005, 332)

The report takes on a somber, even downright grim tone—the seventy-year “Great Acceleration” into a nonanalogous state is anxiety-inducing in its vague threat, eliciting fear that it is too late to stop what happens next.3 This ship has no captain, and the Earth seems to be careening toward the uncharted territory of future global calamity. Climate change, deforestation, colony collapse, microplastics pollution, overpopulation, environmental injustice, radioactive waste contamination, global pandemic: these are phrases that are likely familiar to modern readers, generating a sense of dread for a future populated by these and other anthropogenic catastrophe that have come to increasingly characterize modern humanity’s moment in the Earth’s history. However, the Anthropocene age is not universally or wholly negative. There are better and worse anthropocenes yet to be realized; the age of human impact is just an “observable reality” for some, a great Promethean opportunity for others to carve out a future in which the human and nonhuman worlds are brought into a closer harmony.4 The radicals who comprise the Voluntary Extinction Movement, environmental activists set on ending human breeding and reproduction to address overpopulation, might hail the Anthropocene age as a hopeful epoch: hope for the restoration of Earth and its natural systems, but not so much for humans:

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the movement envisions “an ecological utopia of mass death. That we could also call an apocalypse” (Miéville 2015, 8). But the anthropocene is a crisis, one which requires deft navigation on all fronts, especially in the humanities. Horror literature, and other media, allow us to safely confront frightening possibilities of the future as well as the more recognizable anxieties of our past and present; real social, cultural, political, environmental, and psychological fears about the world around us can be filtered through the language of the horrific and the weird. The anthropocene is an all-encompassing, multidisciplinary framework (melding scientific inquiry, sociopolitical observation, and speculative exploration via the arts and letters) that becomes a richly productive site for imagining what a posthuman, postsolar Earth might look like, and perhaps more importantly, who and what is responsible for that horror. However, one cannot help but wonder if the general “safety” of our literary confrontations with horrific futures has evaporated in the face of the urgent, on-the-ground reality of the Anthropocene age to which the present belongs. When the horror is right at the doorstep, in our own backyards and communities, the assumed “safe distance” literature once provided now breaks down considerably, coming ever closer to us. DAYS OF DARKENING Just as conceptualizations of the Earth’s actual age and its stratigraphy history on a geologic time scale at the turn of the twentieth century completely upset prior notions of humanity’s situatedness to our home, so too has the arrival of the anthropocene shaken up our temporal and spatial relations to the planet once again. The extinction romance is a form particularly well-suited to parsing out these fraught deep time relations. Both texts discussed herein deal in geologic conceptions of time and space that, while speculative in nature, speak to the anthropogenic anxieties about far and near future catastrophic loss for the human species. Planet Earth: untold millions of years into the future. The sun has extinguished, leaving only empty void hanging above a dark and ruined planet surface. The Earth, humanity’s ancestral home, is itself now a strange and unrecognizable place, incapable of supporting life. The last remaining survivors of an undisclosed apocalyptic event reside deep in a chasm at the bottom of what was once an oceanic seabed. There, they have constructed “The Great Redoubt,” a vast metallic pyramid home to the last million humans on Earth; the structure itself is powered by the “Earth-currents,” abstract, ferro-magnetic energies roiling beneath the Earth’s surface, utilized in part for life support systems—the only available source of postsolar light—as well as

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in fueling techno-barbaric energy weapons used in the perpetual fight against the encroachment of those dark forces (Hodgson 1912, 22–32). Such is the grim future setting for Hodgson’s The Night Land, a posthuman landscape that is at once millions of years dead and profoundly teeming with enigmatic and malevolent lifeforms. Early in the novel, the unnamed narrator recounts the events precipitating this end of life as we know it on Earth, and the subsequent flight of battered humanity to their pyramidal arcology: Of the coming of these monstrosities and evil Forces, no man could say much with verity [. . .]. The evil must surely have begun in the Days of Darkening (which I might liken to a story which was believed doubtfully, much as we of this day believe the story of Creation). A dim record there was of olden sciences (that are yet far off in our future) which, disturbing the unmeasurable Outward Powers, had allowed to pass the Barrier of Life some of those Monsters and Ab-human creatures [. . .] which now beset the humans of this world. (Hodgson 1912, 27–28)

This one passage represents the whole of the novel’s efforts to explain the origins of apocalypse that brought about the horrors of the Night Land. Readers are to assume, based on a lack of concrete information and the archaic styling of the passage, that an exact record of the apocalypse is so far removed from present human subjectivity, that its reality—the truth of what happened and why—is lost, seemingly unrecoverable. Only the most abstract (and fantastical) understanding of that time exists in the protagonist’s mind as it was passed down to him, no doubt evolving across the countless generations of storytelling it took to get to him. To take it one step further, the historical fact of the “Days of Darkening” is so radically anterior to the human subjectivity of the present (of the novel’s action), that those events can only be thought of in terms of primitive abstraction, likened at one point by the time-disjointed narrator to that of the Judeo-Christian creation myth—making for an even more fragmented and anachronism-inflected understanding of futuristic Earth timeline.5 Deep time chasms, of the kind that Hodgson imagine here, not only serve to distort the history of the past but to completely reclassify historical data—cultural artifacts, stories, and records—into the realm of mythmaking. The human reaction to the traumatic loss of cultural and historical knowledge over the course of millions of years is to create new knowledge out of the those “dim records,” impossible as it is to essentially “keep the story straight” across time spans that test the extreme limitations of human communications and meaning making. It is no wonder, then, why critic Leslie Keith Johnson describes Hodgson’s prose styling as if it were “a diorama constructed by an alien with an incomplete and garbled understanding of human history, who was working

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from fragments culled from disparate ages awkwardly sutured into a whole” (2016, 544). The protagonist may as well be an alien to his own history and species, so far removed in time and space from the very histories (myths) which shaped the horrors that he has inherited—the strange and regressive nature of the text itself is testament to the effect of that distance. Death Stranding also stages a confrontation with the unsettling cultural consequences of deep time erasure in its setting, but on a lesser timescale than that of Hodgson’s postsolar epic. Players take control of Sam Porter Bridges, the reluctant hero of the game, as he is tasked with assisting the seemingly benevolent Bridges organization to “reconnect America” in the poststranding wasteland that is the former United States untold years after the initial calamity of the death stranding extinction event. Sam travels far and wide across gray craters and landscapes ravaged by periodic “Timefall” rain, a supranatural-climatological phenomenon that rapidly ages all organic matter it touches into muck and tar, to deliver goods to survivors and other Bridges personnel, whilst linking up the “Chiral network,” a vaguely internet-like data streaming system that operates on Chiral death-matter at each stop along the way (Kojima 2019). As you make progress in Sam’s mission, travelling from coast to coast to reunite the country, you learn more about the origins of the death stranding from past data recovered through the strengthened Chiral network feed—that crucial why and how missing from The Night Land’s mythologized events. But the recovery and revelation of that knowledge ultimately produces more questions than answers. Like the catastrophic, world-ending events in Hodgson’s tale, the death stranding’s tipping point, or the catalyst for triggering the apocalypse, are also “olden sciences,” the disturbance of the Extinction Entities, hypernatural cosmic forces that have been goaded by human tampering with the natural world into initiating the sixth mass extinction, “a bang that would be our last” (Hodgson 1912, 27; Kojima 2019). The player learns that the early BB (Bridge Baby) program from the shadowy, but relatively recent, past is in some way correlated to the appearance of the BTs (Beached Things), those invisible antimatter specters that haunt the wastelands of the ruined world and prey on humanity’s remnants (Kojima 2019). Extinction Entities, BBs, BTs, DOOMS, Chiral matter: and this is just barely scratching the surface of the complex, deeply interconnected, and deeply confusing lore of the Death Stranding universe. It is a provocative mess that speaks less to a unified vision of what Death Stranding’s big themes are (the game has a lot on its mind), and more to the highly contested and fragmented nature of knowledge in a posthuman world, millennia in the making. The fact that players effectively gather the pieces of this vast, incongruent puzzle—some pieces of that puzzle ranging wildly from the deep fossil past of the Earth to records recovered from the early days of Bridges and the poststranding reconstruction effort—throughout forty-plus hours of intensely

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repetitive gameplay is not so much a glitch but a feature.6 It is deep time estrangement in real time, or as real as it can get behind a console. Dozens upon dozens of hours of gameplay delivering supplies, linking up the chiral network, and surviving encounters with BTs has the same distancing effect that the “garbled” alien history of The Night Land’s creation myth. EXTINCTION ROMANCES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE We do not have to imagine the passage of millions of years just to see what kinds of horror the anthropocene can wreak upon the human and nonhuman world now and in the more immediate future of the planet. In this section, I make comparison between the deep time aspects of extinction romances with real-world examples of a major anthropogenic object: high-level radioactive waste and its future management. While neither extinction romance discussed herein is explicitly making reference to radiation or nuclear materials, each in turn can be interpreted as having a strange glow; in other words, placing both the novel and video game in the context of the anthropocene opens the texts up to a nuclear-focused reading. For example, Hodgson’s Night Land is lit exclusively by the glow of the “Earth-currents,” abstract energetic forces that are at once energizing (powering the Great Redoubt’s “Air Clog” life support systems) as well as destructive, being the energy source for the “Diskos” weaponry (Hodgson 1912, 22–42). Given the publication date at the turn of the twentieth century, it is clear that Hodgson may have actually had radiation on his mind when developing the Earth-currents for his novel. In Death Stranding, the phosphorescent Chiralium death-matter that is seemingly integrated into every aspect of infrastructure of the Bridges organization is both a source of power and an allergen, destroying the cells in the body if a human comes into direct contact with it for a long enough period of time (Kojima 2019). But by reading these fiction texts in relation to a very real and problematic anthropogenic object like highly radioactive waste, the distance, the chasm, between their deep time entanglements closes. The horror of that deadly, strange glow is brought closer to home than originally thought. We shift from the bleak far futures of mankind to the here and now. Engineering a confrontation with the trauma of deep time loss of humanity’s knowledge is an ever-ongoing project for the semioticians and humanities experts tasked with developing a long-term communications strategy for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository site located in the glass-desert wastes of the Nevada Test Site, just eighty miles from Las Vegas. High-level nuclear waste from military and commercial sites all across the country is slated to be buried in deep geological tombs for all time at Yucca Mountain, locked away inside secure containers that will supposedly safeguard the

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water-table and surrounding areas from contamination for thousands of years while the hot radioactive material cools, though many of these “casks” have started to show compromised integrity after less than two decades of storage, according to Valerie Kuletz in her book, The Tainted Desert (1998, 265–66). Sara Ginsburg claims that since the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amendment passed, marking Yucca Mountain as the sole repository site in the continental United States, the long-term burial of this highly radioactive waste now represents one of the country’s, even the world’s, greatest techno-scientific challenges—a true anthropocene crisis—though some in the scientific community do not think Yucca is up to the task, given the mountain’s own geological disturbances (1995, 29). Despite misgivings about the project’s feasibility or success, to be measured in millennia, not years, the Yucca Mountain project is currently moving forward. The projected 70,000 tons of high-level waste will need to stay secured for at least 10,000 years, a bare minimum time requirement, given the half-lives of the radionuclides disposed therein; depending on the exact isotopes making up the radionuclide cocktails inside the casks, that time frame could be expanded up to 250,000 years before the deadly threat to the human and nonhuman world dissipates to a safe degree (Ginsburg 1995). At this point, the Yucca Mountain project is dealing with deep time scales incomprehensible to the modern-day human. How, then, can the danger be communicated to generations to come? A safety marker would be needed, one that could not only withstand the ravages of time and climate but would also potentially need to transcend language, the stability and longevity of which is questionable when compared to the scale of Earth’s geologic time, let alone vast cosmic deep time. According to Ginsburg, this problem of communication over multiple millennia facing policy and humanities experts is unprecedented in human history because history itself is not yet old enough that regard: The oldest Summerian cuneiform clay tablets are only about 5,000 years old. [. . .] The Great Wall of China is 2,200 years old. Stonehenge is a mere 1000 years old. The United States has only existed as a country for less than 220 years, and the Yucca Mountain repository would have to remain inviolate for 10,000 years, nearly two times longer than all recorded history. (1995, 104)

Such a revelation is a dreadful prospect, given the timescales associated with the strange and eternal nature of radioactivity and its exceedingly dangerous waste by-products. Ten thousand years does not come close to the vast time chasm, millions of years in the making, that fictional extinction romances like The Night Land subject their human survivors to, but all the same 10,000 years is just as unthinkable, especially in regard to predicting how culture

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and language will evolve over that timeframe. Will humanity be recognizably human at that point? Or better yet, a morbid thought that has preoccupied writers for centuries: will humanity even exist into an impossibly distant future where the radioactive dangers of the present day are just beginning to subside? The management of radioactivity’s deadly presence in our everyday lives is a serious, multidisciplinary issue—one that, to this day, still characterizes the past and future entanglements that human endeavor will have to navigate well into the Anthropocene age in Earth’s history. The experts tasked with the creation of a “safety marker” for the Yucca site proposed a number of different solutions, drawing on semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and comparative studies, in an attempt to transcend that 10,000-year chasm of deep geological time and humanity’s far-future progeny (or what remains of humanity) against nuclear danger. One solution required the erection of massive black spikes at the built-over entrance to the tomb, semiotics experts thinking that a “Landscape of Thorns” or “Field of Spikes” would be a forbidding enough symbolic barrier that no sentient, semi-intelligent life-form would brave such a place; another similar approach sought to build a deliberate “Rubble Landscape,” obviously communicating destruction and danger in a universal, visual sense (Ginsburg 1995, 103). The most potent, and possibly most provocative, was the idea to craft myths, fables, and legends of harmful presences surrounding the site, linking them to the surrounding Great Basin and test range areas, so that future generations might carry those stories forward into untold millennia, codifying the terrible hazards of the site into cultural memory. This outré theory was expanded upon with the proposed establishment of a long-term oversight group whose purpose was to ensure the myth’s generation and dissemination, “the creation of an atomic priesthood, through which a select group, similar to Tibetan monks, would be entrusted with knowledge or superstitions about the nuclear graveyard. The priesthood could keep alive through generations an oral legend that threatened supernatural retribution should the radioactive dump be violated” (Ginsburg 1995, 103). The very idea of a pseudoreligious order of monk-like protectors of humanity from the supernatural menace of the poisonous mountain sounds like it was taken directly from a Clark Ashton Smith science-fantasy tale, or it could even fit right at home in The Night Land’s mythology: the atomic priesthood shares similar traits with the “Monstruwacan” caste of scholar-wizards of the Great Redoubt who are tasked with managing the Night Land’s horrors from afar, passing down wisdom gained from their observations and theories by oral tradition over many generations (Hodgson 1912, 33). In essence, the “Monstruwacan” of today’s extinction romance is the atomic priest, a radical and regressive seeming contingency for a deep time future in which the stability of language

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and culture breaks down, leaving humanity’s last dregs to begin anew in a techno-barbaric dark age, where the natural, nonhuman world takes on supernatural qualities. IT’S YOUR FAULT THE WORLD IS ENDING. The two extinction romances discussed in this chapter are incredibly rich texts with too many aspects to cover all in one sitting. Both The Night Land and Death Stranding run parallel to each other in other striking ways, despite the hundred-year gap between them. Both novel and video game engage with a future devoid of hope for humanity on species-wide scale and an individual scale. The chivalric plots of each text, which I have failed to talk about up to this point, are effectively antiromance plots, where the recovery of the beloved by the heroic protagonist in each case does nothing to alleviate the ultimate horror of the existential crisis facing all humans. The anti-romance element, or “apocalyptic chivalry,” of an extinction romance effectively covers up the underlying trauma of performing the absurd role of “final hero” amid the ruins of a former world (that the notion of chivalry, of the Breton lai variety, should survive the total collapse of civilization and millions of years displacement from its cultural root is, on its face, evidence of this absurdity). As Johnson puts it in his analysis of the dying earth genre, the extinction romance is “less about survival than the ‘adventure’ of trauma itself, the characters’ fates secondary to the reader’s brute contemplation of our non-future [. . .] for all their breathtaking imaginative scope, their human meaning can only ever be insignificance, obsolescence, and abomination” (2016, 542). No matter how grand a gesture the protagonist makes by successfully rescuing the beloved or defeating countless Ab-human creatures of the night, or bringing honor to the last peoples of Earth, the “lines of flight” for human society are always already cut off (Johnson 2016). The sobering reality of existence at the end of the world, the end of culture, and the end of time, as presented by the texts, brings the reader to the fundamental question at the core of the extinction romance and dying earth narrative genre: “Can we think our non-human non-future in the human present?” How do extinction romances, particularly modern and future examples of the genre, “reprogram” readers to confront the horror of a non-future for humanity? (Johnson 2016, 548) Any future extinction romance will have to navigate the Anthropocene age. Right now, humanity finds itself in that “dream which was not all a dream,” of a moment in the Earth’s history where Nature has become radically redefined by human drivers of change in the environment. In effect, the global tragedies and catastrophes that scientists and artists alike are seeing take shape

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lay a solid, stratigraphic foundation for more extinction romances to come. Perhaps a lone protagonist ventures into a nuclear wasteland in search of a beloved captured by the Atomic Priesthood, whose long-forgotten origins are revealed to readers bit by bit as the story progresses. The “reprogramming” begins now, in this anthropogenic context, which has always-already doomed humanity to extinction—we see it in Hodgson’s cultural anxieties about a far future devolved into strange darkness, and in Death Stranding’s dreadful future where total isolation and quarantine from a cosmic epidemic of undeath is humanity’s only course of action, portending in 2019, as it were, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 (when every home became its own Great Redoubt against the deadly virus outside). As a form and genre, extinction romances are well-suited to expressing humanity’s fraught relationship to the postapocalyptic deep time chasm of far futures and the looming catastrophe of our present day, reminding contemporary readers—and apocalyptic doomsayers alike—of our species’ gradually shrinking niche in the Earth ecological network. In the age of the anthropocene, imagining our species’ terminus through horror literature and media can help us think the unthinkable: that the opening pages of the extinction romances of the future are being written now. NOTES 1. According to Lovecraft, The Night Land is “seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality,” while in the same breath praising the novel as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.” Writer and theorist China Miéville voices a similar critique of the novel almost a hundred years later, saying that “for all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding. A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been” (Lovecraft 1927; Miéville 2013). 2. Lowercase “the anthropocene” is often used to describe the concept and its general, multidisciplinary uses, while the uppercase, proper noun “the Anthropocene” is used in discussions of the geological age as proposed by the Anthropocene Working Group. In the context of this chapter, I use both lower- and uppercase forms of the term. 3. Experts from the sciences to the humanities have been ringing the alarm bells in recent years, bringing focus to the existential crisis at the core of this observation: “Earth has now crossed a point of no return, a ‘rupture’ in [. . .] functioning that should frighten us.” Or as geographer Erik Swyngedouw has written, “The Anthropocene is just another name for insisting on Nature’s death” (Ellis 2018, 130). 4. Ellis 2018, 156. Donna Haraway is one theorist who envisions an Anthropocene where humans can come to better understand their entanglements with the nonhuman world of objects and animals; by doing so, Haraway sees humans as becoming

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integrated with, rather than aggressively and blindly changing, the nonhuman world (Haraway 2016). 5. In addition to the vast, postsolar timescale that The Night Land’s plot operates on, Hodgson initially frames the narrative through the protagonist’s eighteenth-century persona—a choice that very often produces anachronisms in the text, like the Christian creation myth and references to “our future,” that serve to continually disrupt readers’ attempts to trudge through the archaic prose. 6. On the game’s seemingly endless tedium, theguardian.com reviewer, Dan Dawkins, says, “Despite everything, you keep going. Arduous ascents succumb to the undeniable impact of a stunning vista framed by an inverted rainbow. Your brain starts to blur the journey and focus on fleeting moments of reflection, pride and relief. Death Stranding’s mesmerizing scale and repetition starts to weigh on your subconscious” (2019).

WORKS CITED Byron, George Gordon. 1816. Darkness. www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/43825​/ darkness​-56d222aeeee1b. Accessed August 21, 2022. Dawkins, Dan. 2019. “Death Stranding Review—Hideo Kojima’s Radically Tough Slow Burning Epic.” Theguardian.com, November 1. www​ .theguardian​ .com​ /games​/2019​/nov​/01​/death​-stranding​-review​-playstation​-4​-pc​-kojima​-gameplay. Accessed August 21, 2022. Ellis, Erle C. 2018. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginsburg, Sara. 1995. Nuclear Waste Disposal: Gambling on Yucca Mountain. Laguna Hills: Aegean Park Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hodgson, William Hope. 1912. The Night Land, edited by Erik Davis. HiLoBooks. Hurley, Kelly. 2001. “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson.” In Gothic Modernisms, edited by A. Smith et al., 129–49. Palgrave MacMillan. IGBP [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme]. 2005. IGBP Annual Report 2004. July 1. http:​//​www​.igbp​.net​/publications​/annualreports​/annualreports​/annualreport2004​.5​.1b8ae20512db692f2a680006931​.html. Accessed August 21, 2022. Johnson, Keith Leslie. 2016. “The Extinction Romance.” Modernism/Modernity 23, no. 3: 539–53. Kojima, Hideo. Death Stranding. V.1. Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows. 2019. Kuletz, Valerie L. 1998. The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West. New York and London: Routledge Press. Lovecraft, Howard Philips. N. D. “Supernatural Horror in Literature [1927].” Hplovecraft.com. www​.hplovecraft​.com​/writings​/texts​/essays​/shil​.aspx. Accessed August 21, 2022. Miéville, China. 2018. “The Night Land (Intro),” edited by Erik Davis. HiLoBrow.com.

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———. 2015. “The Limits of Utopia.” Salvage 1, no. 1 (Spring): 1–13. Murray, Will. Introduction to Tales of Zothique, by Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Will Murray with Steve Behrends, 7–12. West Warwick: Necronomicon Press. 1995. Smith, Clark Ashton. “Letter from CAS to HPL, 15–23 February 1931.” Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press. 2017. Stapledon, Olaf. 1930. Last and First Men. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Thomas, Julia Adeney, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz. 2020. The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wells, H. G. 1895. The Time Machine. New York: The New American Library.

Chapter Twenty

Fear of Infection Negotiating between Community and Isolation in Gothic Contagion Narratives Laura R. Kremmel

CONTAGION At the time of writing, early 2022, the subgenres of medical gothic, viral horror, and contagion narratives have come to permeate everyday life, causing a vacillating trajectory of response, from panic and fear to negotiation and mundanity. Fear of disease has been met with ridicule and doubt, calling into question its legitimacy with accusations of hidden agendas. Amid loud claims of government conspiracy, to even speak of the COVID-19 pandemic and fictional texts that resemble it as Gothic horror has become a political act in itself. In this chapter, I argue that twenty-first-century Gothic literature is shifting toward this act by confronting disease, illness, and contagion as legitimate circumstances of horror, without hiding behind some of the supernatural metaphors and tropes relied on in the past. Susan Sontag writes, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” implying an enforceable divide between the two. But contagion disrupts that divide (1989, 3). As pandemics and other global disasters show us, human interdependence is undeniable and has real consequences: we cannot help but to be infected or affected by one another. These events also demonstrate how easily suffering and loss are dismissed when that interdependence is neglected. The acknowledgment of human connectivity determines drastically different reactions to global 291

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disaster. Horror and the Gothic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have responded to dismissals of public health crises by making disease extreme and supernatural. Gothic fiction has historically been well situated to depict contagion because of its obsession with an Otherness that is revealed to be entirely manufactured and forced. It, instead, reveals a frightening closeness and connectivity, disease making humanity afraid of the body’s simultaneous power and fragility. Donna Haraway calls the immune system that manages this precarious state “a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological,” referencing its conception in the twentieth century as a “natural” defense of selfhood (1991, 204). Contagious disease threatens individual identity and selfhood on multiple levels and scales. Fear of a loss of self is, of course, a common topic of concern within several areas of medicine and the Health Humanities, ranging from dementia to anesthesia.1 When the Gothic enters these conversations, it has frequently done so behind the shield of supernatural entity that threatens bodies and minds. I argue, however, that Gothic texts about contagion have begun to shift in the twenty-first century to directly contend with the fear of contagious disease, not only by illustrating the ways in which it might corporeally change notions of self (as graphic horror might) but also by amplifying the dreadful Gothic effects of witnessing that disease in other people, in anticipation of contracting it. The twenty-first-century gothic narratives of contagion not only highlight the fear that we cannot control our own vulnerable bodies but also the severe mental states (trauma, rage, repression) that result when the uncontrollable vulnerable bodies of others threaten our own. Whereas earlier Gothic texts may have applied the supernatural to medical crises and while the twentieth century may have used zombies to convey concerns about contagion, the twenty-first century begins to lift that narrative shield to legitimize these states as their own unsettling horrors. In this chapter, I will examine four Gothic horror novels published in the last decade whose plots centralize contagion: a pathogen that can be spread from person to person, resulting in a transformational and incurable condition that brings the infected’s humanity into question. Dahlia Schweitzer writes of this expansive topic, “Part of the pleasure of the outbreak narrative for the viewer is the way it manifests disease and information vectors, and the way it simplifies moral ambiguities, which allows the viewer to judge—and even despise—the ‘othered,’” but the texts I discuss refuse such clear boundaries between us and them (2018, 37). The nature of the pathogen and details about the condition differ in each case, and so I am less interested in the illness itself than the impact of its communicability on those who have not been infected, manifesting in behavioral responses to witnessing others contract

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it. Contagious disease turns witnesses into Others just waiting to happen. As one infected character awaiting symptoms in Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song says, “I’m not going to be me for much longer. How am I supposed to wrap my head around that? What makes me me? Who or what will I be? Am I a different me with each passing second? I don’t feel different, but how can I tell when I am?” (2020, 195). This chapter, then, explores just a segment of what Pricilla Wald calls “epidemiological horror” or “biohorror,” “in which the conventions of horror meet the dangers of contagion, as a devastating communicable disease turns the infected into predatory monsters” (2012, 99). As she argues, “Bioterror involving infectious agents, especially ones with incubation periods that last days, weeks, or even longer, capitalizes on the network effects, local and global, of communicable disease. It turns the networks of daily social interactions into augmented avenues of contagion” (2012, 111). In most cases, this presence of a contagious disease that forces humanity to acknowledge and fear its shared interconnection is in direct tension with a desirable striving for community comfort. On one hand, to maintain community and contract the disease results in a loss of self through the extreme impact of its symptoms; on the other hand, to attempt isolation as an act of self-protection cannot succeed and also threatens a self that is shaped by other people. The loss of self and the navigation of acknowledged and unacknowledged interdependence are at the root of the fear of contagion. When the zombie left the context of slavery in the Caribbean, it entered the context of disease, primarily in the United States, starting with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) zombies. Though the catalyst for these ghouls is indeterminant—possibly extra-terrestrial—it is clear that the agent that turns healthy humans into zombies is contagious: those who are bitten are turned. This notion, drawn from the vampiric version of contagious monstrosity in I Am Legend, becomes an inherent zombie feature. As Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz write, “The zombie emerges as an ideal replacement for the plague: the infectious spread of this fictional and personified virus becomes as metaphorically vital, fungible, and multivalent as the bubonic plague itself once was” (2010, 135). The zombie, as a metaphor for so many social, political, and economic issues, is an effective representation of contagion, threatening not just because it kills but because it changes the recipient of a bite. Zombies aren’t born monsters, and they completely lose their link to humanity, requiring the uninfected to repeatedly remind themselves that the people they knew are gone. “The transmission of the ‘virus’ between us and them indicates our closeness,” Jen Webb and Samuel Byrnand point out, “viruses (mostly) travel between like species, and the job of the average zombie seems to be to (1) eat as many people as possible and (2) infect as many people as possible” (2017, 112). In other words, they act as a reminder of connectivity, that anyone healthy can become sick at any

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time, through no fault of their own and regardless of any type of sociopolitical status, regardless of attempts to distance or isolate. What is unique and useful about the zombie contagion narrative from a public health standpoint is that its infected characters inspire fear and avoidance behavior: no one wants to become a zombie. The excess of the zombie erases sickness and replaces it with monstrosity. Putting a real-life event in the context of a zombie apocalypse can prompt life-saving measures. At the same time, the zombie contagion narrative instantly dehumanizes those who are infected, stripping them of all identity and human rights, including the right to live, even for characters well-liked prior to infection.2 So, while the zombie contagion narrative provides a model for avoidance behavior during a public health crisis, one would hope that model would not extend to how the public understands and treats those who are infected, but these narratives offer little guidance on how to separate one from the other. They do, however, provide a shift in perspective: while characters are torn between avoidance behavior and a striving for connection, the text itself avoids nothing, giving the reader an intimate look at the diseased body and the loss or transformation of self that those not infected fear most. These transitional texts still reliant on the zombie, then, may be torn between letting go of a reliance on the supernatural in order to validate contagion and predicting that the current historical moment, with its conflicting fear and dismissal of human interdependence, may still benefit from the extremity of the monster narrative. Monstrification of the infected and failed avoidance of contagion are both exhibited in M. R. Carey’s 2014 novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, in which the infected are called hungries and are widely discussed within zombie studies. This condition, fungal rather than bacterial, spreads through contact with bodily fluids like blood, saliva, and tears. A form of hybrid-hungry is found mostly in children, who are infected but retain their humanity unless their hunger is activated by human scent. They are treated as science experience or as dangerous and distasteful animals—“little bastards” or “friggin abortions”—by all but Miss Justineau, who treats them as human children. She actively builds connections with the children, despite their contagion, transgressing the fragile boundaries between the strict communities of humans, hungries, and hungry children. When the military base that maintains these boundaries falls, one group of humans and Melanie are exposed in a world full of contagious hungries. Though the stranded group distances itself from Melanie at first, her persistent humanity forces them to gradually see her as a dangerous, contagious, infected human. Even Melanie, only now beginning to realize that she is what she has been taught to fear, distinguishes herself from the others who are infected because “They’re not with each other. Not ever” (2015, 230). Others note that “They’re not pack animals. They’re solitaries that cluster

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accidentally because they’re responding to the same triggers” (2015, 186). Melanie values community. As the group spends time among the monsters and discover more pseudo-monsters like Melanie, their definitions of human begin to unravel. They discover hungries who have adopted human behaviors like pushing a baby carriage, singing, and flipping through old photos. While the group of humans may fear for the destruction of their identities, the hungries are haunted by past identities that no longer apply. Witnessing these uncanny acts merely reminds the humans that the hungries used to be exactly like them, that their own futures may not include their current senses of self. At the same time, their denial of interconnectivity’s relevance intentionally dehumanizes the hungries. One soldier, observing this human behavior, wonders “how [the doctor] squares it with that idea about the host mind dying as soon as the parasite shows up” (2015, 155). In this environment of violent ambiguity, Justineau’s treatment of Melanie as a human child is echoed by one of the soldiers who, upon finding another group of hungry children like her, refuses to fight back, claiming he does not want to hurt them. As they tear him apart, he thinks, “In a perfect world, he would have been one of them,” referencing the indiscriminate contagion that created them and a touch of envy at their strong connection to one another (2015, 332). These observations of hungry and hungry child behavior acknowledge and reevaluate the complex lives of the infected, their own communities, and what divides them from the uninfected. While the novel relies on the zombie narrative to legitimize contagion, it also reverses that narrative by elevating the zombie as superior to the human, the sick as superior to the well. More than anything, it demonstrates Annu Dahiya’s argument that “Rather than simply a deadly, avoidable, and dependent relationship that saps life of its novelty, a re-evaluation of parasite and contagion allows us to understand the interconnectedness and complexity of genomes—both living and nonliving” (2018, 53). Contagion threatens identity—individual and community—because it forces redefinition. Those in the kingdom of the well become the grotesque outsiders, while the fungal contagion reaches new levels of network, community, and connection. Carey begins to complicate the traditional zombie contagion narrative by reversing infection as a health abnormality, while other texts use that narrative to contextualize and disassociate medical abnormality as dangerously Other. This is especially true for texts without zombies or other supernatural characters, like Tremblay’s Survivor Song (2020), a novel about the outbreak of an accelerated form of rabies particularly dangerous to humans. While the physical and especially mental changes those who are infected exhibit can resemble a zombie at times, the supernatural threat is replaced by a wholly medical one. Those who are bitten have only an hour to become vaccinated before the virus breaches the brain barrier and the condition becomes

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contagious and fatal. At that point, the infected’s personality alters: after increasingly erratic behavior, they may no longer communicate in a coherent fashion or recognize those around them. The contagion is spread only through saliva, a potentially manageable fluid to avoid when members of society are obeying the social contract and acting within acceptable norms. No one expects strangers to just walk into their houses or turn on them with blunt objects while happily chattering away. The deviance from rules and manners, as much as any physical symptoms like embarrassing excretions or debilitations, exclude the infected from the norm, making their behavior seem inhuman and threatening to human identity. In an act of self-protection, those who witness this transformation psychologically distance themselves from the sick by calling them zombies, denying their humanity in an effort to preserve their own. Words influence behavior, and a “disease label, once applied, should operate like a visible sign of disease,” write Megan Oaten, Richard J. Stevenson, and Trevor I. Case (2011, 3436). Language can provoke an automatic, visceral response if it is associated with danger. When Dr. Ramola Sherman tries to get her friend, Natalie—who is heavily pregnant, bitten, and newly widowed—to the hospital, they encounter two young men along the way who call themselves zombie killers, not just speaking ill of the ill but physically assaulting them with makeshift weapons, clearly enacting horror film tropes. Though Ramola, aware that Natalie is likely infected, repeatedly corrects this approach, these characters lean on that monster narrative to maintain their own senses of self, to identify the sick as different creatures and easily kept at a distance by following zombie rules. However, while Ramola insists on strict rationality and compassion for the infected people she sees as patients, she follows a different set of rules, classifying and distancing using medical objectification. By attempting to diagnose each idiosyncrasy as a trivializing reduction to the disease that caused it, she reduces human patients to their symptoms. She begins questioning Natalie’s every move: is it rabies, is it pregnancy, is it trauma? Each one is a problem to be fixed, one that separates them as doctor and patient rather than bringing them together, despite the contagion looming between them. Ramola’s compulsion to analyze every act makes Natalie feel dismissed. This exchange matters because “working towards the production of a narrative reshapes the sick person’s selfhood by allowing them to insert their experiential selves back into their own (biomedical) story, to insist that the self is embodied, the body is self,” according to Kay Torney Souter (1998, 37). Seeking acknowledgment and legitimacy for her experiential self while clinging to her sense of wholistic identity, Natalie says, “please don’t explain it away. All you have to say is you know: you know I don’t feel well” (2020, 128). Natalie, herself invested in the zombie narrative and terrified of becoming one, makes a plea for her humanity: for connection, community,

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and the privilege of articulating her state of embodiment to someone unable to share in it. Witnessing is both essential and inadequate for understanding experiences of disorientation and pain.3 What a sufferer experiences and what an outsider observes can form the basis for new structures of inclusion or exclusion. However, the added promise of contagion may close these distances. While the excluding term “zombie” is not used in Nick Cutter’s 2014 novel, The Troop, the objectifying term, “thing,” is used instead, trading ex-human monstrosity for a completely undefinable entity. A small scouting troop and their scoutmaster are camping on a deserted island when an emaciated man carrying genetically designed super worms appears at their door. While one giant worm grows and attaches itself to the spine, tiny worms fill every other part of the body, easily spread through saliva or other fluids. Within the space of a few days, the scoutmaster and his scouts become infected until only one remains. The move away from the zombie narrative in The Troop—despite the presence of hunger and contagion through close contact with blood and saliva—does not require a move away from the body horror of physical transformation. Those who are infected become almost unrecognizable, misshapen in grotesque ways as the worms burrow and feed. Though some semblance of their minds does remain, their personalities and perceptions are altered to protect the inhuman intruder within. When the scout Kent shows signs of infection, he becomes the Kent-thing; when the psychopathic scout Shelley becomes infected, he becomes the Shelley-thing, defined by the abject bodies no longer their own. If witnessing the symptoms of rabies causes Tremblay’s characters to fight or flee, witnessing the presence of the worms in someone is a debilitating act of utter disbelief and terror. In fact, the horror of the worms is described just like the worms themselves: when scout Max observes them in another body, “His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside” (2016, 87–88). Max feels the invasive permeability and interdependence that contagion requires, anticipating the moment his own body’s barriers collapse. That collapse is, of course, an essential quality of community, which influences individual identities because they are connected. Contagion simply makes this connection visibly dangerous. “The germ theorists use the term population interchangeably with community,” says Wald, and continues: Epidemics, in their analyses, leave in their wake communities with a biological as well as social basis: individuals connected biologically, in something other than a kinship relationship. . . . These communities are populations conceived, in effect, as immunological ecosystems, interdependent organisms interacting within a closed environment marked by their adjustment to each other’s germs.

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Impending disequilibrium is fundamental to this depiction of community, since each new contact might upset the balance. (2008, 49)

The scout group, including scoutmaster, is a collection of outsiders in many ways, but patient zero underscores their shared community through his extreme repulsion in comparison. That community is further confirmed when they begin infecting one another. As in all these narratives, the horror lies not just in the physical pain and disorienting sensation of the infection but, more importantly, in the loss of identity and control, the fear that the body is about to be taken over by something that will alter it and leave it susceptible to the categorization, objectification, dehumanization, and exclusion mentioned above. Despite the undeniable connection of individual humans to one another that contagion makes evident, there is the tendency to exceptionalism the individual human body, to think it can remain isolated and in control. Any corruption by a pathogen becomes an unsettling, unacceptable intrusion. This is unrealistic in many senses, as Laurel Bollinger points out: “Being human, then, is not a matter of drawing boundaries between ourselves and a microbial ‘invasion’; we are human because of the microbes that have infected us, not despite those microbes” (2009, 378). Despite—or, perhaps, because of—this invisible networking, there is the fear that the body will become something so foreign to the human community it now inhabits, that it will be expelled to navigate a new state of being on its own. Insisting that exceptionalism is unfounded, Bollinger continues, “we do contain multitudes, and our complex relation to microbes challenges any definition of self that excludes infection” (2009, 379). When one of the scouts, Ephraim, punches the infected Kent, splitting the skin of his knuckles, he becomes convinced that the worms are inside him, despite the absence of any symptoms. The mere thought that the worms might do to his body what he saw it do to other bodies becomes more threatening to his sense of self and bodily wholeness than total self-destruction. He refuses to become Ephraim-thing, to lose his connection to his fellow human scouts and his own self-control. But, disease, sickness, and illness do not negotiate in their impacts, causing “powerlessness and alienation, not in institutional practices, but instead in regard to an out of control body; it vomits, it defecates, it sweats, it literally falls apart—all on its own accord,” describe Dennis D. Waskul and Pamela van der Riet (2002, 495). Desperate to maintain his identity, control, and dignity, Ephraim chooses to lose himself completely by his own hand rather than alter who he is. Self-destruction, then, is simultaneously a reclaiming and a loss of identity, an extreme striving for disconnection when connectivity—or desire for it— threatens the self. Characters in Bethany Clift’s Last One at the Party (2022) choose this option when the connectivity of contagion produces suffering that

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annihilates the self. Clift’s novel abandons the zombie and even “thing” narrative altogether in favor of full-blown medical horror. Comparing its disease to COVID-19, the novel opens with the appearance of the fatal disease 6DM, which begins as a cold and quickly becomes an agonizing fatal disease that causes vital organs to disintegrate, killing the infected within six days of the first symptom (6DM = 6 Days Maximum). Because it moves so quickly and is so contagions, there is no data on how it spreads or what might prevent it. While fear of one another is certainly prevalent, it soon becomes clear that everyone will get this disease and die from it. As Torney Souter explains, “no disease is lived and experienced in one body. Like other aspects of embodiment, disease exists in the realm of the interpersonal” (1998, 36). She describes the physical closeness required for spread, the shared experiences of all bodies despite the feeling of being alone in one’s own. In Clift’s novel, however, the realm of the interpersonal is temporal: to witness the suffering of the infected is to witness one’s own future. Isolated in their flat, the narrator and her husband hear a “long sorrowful wail. Then silence for a couple of days, before the regular moaning began,” keeping their TV on to drown out the communal devastation (2022, 16). Most people stay isolated in their homes with their loved ones, but others venture out to places they loved, forming new dying communities. Churches and museums fill as humanity seems to rediscover the concept of “we’re all in this together.” Individuals are exposed to the agony they will soon feel at every turn: violence is contained within the helplessness of the body attacking itself as its last act of life and within the traumatized mind of the soon-to-be-infected, haunted by paranoia until the signs become unmistakable. In such moments, striving for control of selfhood takes the form of desperation. As Waskul and van der Riet write of cancer patients, “If the body and the self should cease to exist, we would much prefer that they do so together in a condition where one does not have to endure the agonizing and humiliating decay of the other” (2002, 509). In a hopeless attempt to maintain body and self together, the government releases the suicide drug T600, so that those experiencing symptoms can end their lives before losing themselves. Though her sense of self mutates throughout the novel, the unnamed narrator remains uninfected, despite her close contacted with the sick. Left with no explanation of why everyone else in the world is dead, she must confront the possibility that all of humanity was closely connected through this contagion, all except for her. As Wald explains of sexually transmitted diseases in particular, “The human contact materialized by the spread of a communicable disease reveals an interactive and interconnected world. It makes visible the nature of those exchanges that are often concealed” (2008, 38). In the narrator’s case, then, it also reveals a disturbing absence of those connections. While searching for others, she repeatedly finds scenes of love, connection,

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and community. The corpses she finds, while showing clear signs of agony for those whose illness progressed, also indicate that people who took T600 chose to die together. Amid the disgust and horror of such scenes, she experiences admiration and envy, anticipating the lifelong denial of a similar intimacy. Her fears of losing herself in isolation echo Natalie’s fears of losing herself to disease: “No one has said my name in over three months. Is it still my name anymore? Do I still exist? I could be anyone. Am I even still me?” (Clift 2022, 227). This exclusion occurs even before she becomes the last one alive. During the most aggressive days of the illness, people shout at her in the street when they discover she isn’t sick. Her husband expresses relief rather than sadness when she fakes illness and joins him in his sickbed to experience the end of humanity together. But her body refuses to connect with the rest of humanity through disease. The fact that people automatically returned to their Coronavirus measures of masking and social distancing without any word from the government in this novel shows an acknowledgment that contagion had revealed to them their problematic and panic-inducing closeness. The unsettling Gothic aspect of interconnectivity is rooted in the experience of disease that is both collective and individual. In its characteristic ambivalence, the Gothic, then, becomes invested in the desirability of human connection when connection also becomes a source of terror and death. Characters in each of these novels experience excruciating periods of isolation, an ironic psychologically impactful situation considering the human connectedness upon which contagion constantly relies. Melanie is kept isolated for most of her short life; Natalie is expelled and isolated from the hospital when she shows signs of infection; the scouts are isolated and contained on their island by the military helicopters circling it; and the narrator of Last One at the Party is isolated for most of the novel, convinced she is the last person alive. She begins recording herself to have someone to talk to, despite the fact that no audience is possible.4 Many of these recordings devolve into sobs or silence or other sounds of distress that cannot be articulated in language alone. The instances of containment or remoteness that result from contagion necessitate a wide range of attempted communications with an imaginary outside world: voice recordings, journals, text messages, voicemails join other outside documents like interviews, court proceedings, and medical logs. The many voices attempting to find audiences, while created in isolation in the face of contagion’s extreme connectivity, create a shared experience from diverse perspectives. Arthur Frank references the common feeling of “being shipwrecked by the storm of disease,” offering storytelling as a “way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” He further explains that the “self-story is told both to others and to one’s self; each telling is enfolded within the other. The act of telling is a dual reaffirmation. Relationships with others are reaffirmed, and the self

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is reaffirmed,” but this is true only if that self-story can be read by the future self (2013, 53–56). In the moments before disease alters identity beyond even self-recognition, these stories redraw a map that can only be read by future survivors, disconnected from these same disease networks by time or distance. Recording for the baby she had hoped to give birth to, Natalie says, “not only am I not going to be around for you, but I have, um, foreknowledge of this” (2020, 170). Looked at together, these records become a future community of anticipated and feared illness narratives from which those who created them could never benefit themselves. Moments of isolation and striving for communication in these Gothic novels demonstrate a perverse preference for connectivity and community, despite the dangers, despite the probability of self-annihilation. Unlike attitudes to contagious diseases such as COVID-19 that dismiss the experience of suffering and illness—that deny human connectivity and the social responsibility that goes with it—this preference for community is both an acknowledgment and embrace of the consequences that go with it. While these novels exhibit the importance of recognizing human interconnectivity and interdependence through shared illness, they also acknowledge the difficulty of making human community truly felt and thereby perilously desirable. Gothic narratives, while reminding us that we have everything to fear from one another and our volatile, vulnerable human bodies, also make that connection necessarily inexorable. NOTES 1. For two examples, see Denise Tanner’s “Identity, Selfhood and Dementia: Messages for Social Work” and Jamie Sleigh, Catherine Warnaby, and Irene Tracey's “General Anaesthesia as Fragmentation of Selfhood: Insights from Electroencephalography and Neuro-imaging.” 2. Zombie scholars frequently point to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) to theorize the expendability of zombie life. 3. For more on the impossibility of accurately expressing pain, see Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). 4. Inexplicably, survivors do recover these recordings, making them an important part of medical history.

WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacre: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Bollinger, Laurel. 2009. “Containing Multitudes: Revising the Infection Metaphor in Science Fiction” Extrapolation 50, no. 3: 377–99. Boluk, Stephanie and Wylie Lenz. 2010. “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2: 126–47. Carey, M. R. 2015. The Girl with All the Gifts. New York: Orbit Books. Clift, Bethany. 2022. Last One at the Party. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Cutter, Nick. 2016. The Troop. New York: Gallery Books. Dahiya, Annu. 2018. “Before the Cell, There Was the Virus.” In Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations, edited by Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage, 42–55. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Frank, Arthur W. 2013. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Taylor & Francis. Oaten, Megan, Richard J. Stevenson, and Trevor I. Case. 2011. “Disease Avoidance as a Functional Basis for Stigmatization.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1583: 3433–52. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Pres Schweitzer, Dahlia. 2018. Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sleigh, Jamie, Catherine Warnaby, and Irene Tracey. 2018. “General Anaesthesia as Fragmentation of Selfhood: Insights from Electroencephalography and Neuroimaging.” British Journal of Anaesthesia 121, no. 1: 233–40. Sontag, Susan. 1989. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Tanner, Denise. 2013. “Identity, Selfhood and Dementia: Messages for Social Work.” European Journal of Social Work 16, no. 2: 1–16.  Torney Souter, Kay. 1998. “Narrating the Body: Disease as Interpersonal Event.” Health and History 1, no. 1: 35–42. Tremblay, Paul. 2020. Survivor Song. London: Titan Books. Wald, Pricilla. 2012. “Bio Terror: Hybridity in the Biohorror Narrative, Or What We Can Learn from Monsters.” In Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty, edited by Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua, 99–122. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wald, Pricilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Waskul, Dennis D., and Pamela van der Riet. 2002. “The Abject Embodiment of Cancer Patients: Dignity, Selfhood, and the Grotesque Body.” Symbolic Interaction 25, no. 4: 487–513. Webb, Jen, and Samuel Byrnand. 2017. “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope.” In Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 111–23. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Metal and the Flesh Techno-liminalities, Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced SuperBody as a Horror Space Lorna Piatti-Farnell

The fame of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a repository for fantastical superhero exploits is indeed undeniable. The MCU—as it is often colloquially referred to—is a vast and complex conglomerate of cinematic and multimedia narratives, which officially started in 2008 with the release of Iron Man, and has since enjoyed a prolific progression, with the creation of many big box-office hits, including the popular Avengers franchise (2012–2019). In spite of its success, however, the MCU is not commonly associated with horror narratives and iconographies. On the surface, the broad labels of superhero and horror seem to be distinctly at odds. Ordinarily, the tales of superheroes—from their origins in comics to the adaptations that now populate a variety of multimedia screens—are not readily catalogued within the genre bounds of horror. The latter, with its recurrent reliance on gore, torture, and the exploitation of fear for both shock value and entertainment, is not easily aligned with the feats of superheroes, whose exploits seems to be focused on the eternal battle between good and evil, and all that this entails. Horror seems to be largely concerned with provoking “outrage, fear, and disgust” (Nickel 2012, 14), in ways that seem alien to the traditional context of superhero narratives, concerned as they are with epic battles and larger-than-life, super-powered individuals, especially in the MCU. And yet, within the folds of the MCU superhero narrative in our twenty-first century, hides the presence of haunted, frightening, and conflicted figures, often sitting at the cusp between human and machine, human and animal, and human and alien. These 303

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figures would arguably find an easy home in horror film—one that, perhaps, does not indulge too much in overly bloody scenes, but that instead generates fear because of its representation of monstrous, uncanny, and often torturous exchanges. Indeed, the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has provided an unlikely, yet prolific arena for the noticeable intersection between superheroes and the horror genre. In particular, experimental bio-technologies are regularly associated with the creation and deeds of the “superhumans”—and, specifically, of what I would like to term the “super-body”—commonly marking physiological transformations that can be positioned productively within a horror framework. From the Hulk to Captain America, experimental bio-technologies, with all their transformative layers, sit at the center of the super-experience in the MCU, often proving to be the source of uneasiness and even fear. This liminal status is particularly evident in the character of Bucky Barnes (played by Sebastian Stan), the Winter Soldier of several MCU narratives; Bucky appears for the first time as his Winter Soldier alter-ego in the eponymously titled Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), and then takes central stage in several other narratives after that, including the recent series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), which streamed on Disney+. Bucky’s cybernetic-enhanced body brings to the surface the tacit conceptualization of the superhuman as a techno-liminal horror figure. Indeed, the bio-technological aspect of Bucky’s transformation into the Winter Soldier is even more pronounced and subversive as part of a horror trajectory. Taking that in-between status as a point of departure, this chapter will explore the representation of Bucky’s super-body as a horror space within the MCU. Bucky’s narrative is characterized by a recurrent “emphasis [on] enhancement” (Jeffery 2016, 2) that, while not necessarily unknown in the world of superheroes, continuously brings to the surface anxieties over the very nature of humanity, and complex social, cultural, and political renegotiations of identity. What makes Bucky stand out as a suggestively “horror figure” within the MCU is precisely the intermingling of substances and textures that define his body, which sits at the intersection of metal and flesh. Unavoidably identifiable by its iconic metal arm, and forever changed by the super-soldier serum that runs through it, Bucky’s body is transformative and transitional, and generates fear precisely because of its refusal to adhere to absolute categories.1 As a foundational starting point, it is essential to mention that, overall, the contemporary mingling of superheroes with horror is not as recent and as revolutionary as one may be tempted to think. Indeed, a variety of horror superheroes can be found within the broader spectrum of comics, as well as their cinematic adaptations. Obvious examples within this category include Hellboy and the Ghost Rider—especially as seen in their film incarnations,

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with Ron Perlman (2004) and Nicholas Cage (2007) in the title roles, respectively. Both sets of narratives feature characters who fight the forces of evil, while conspicuously occupying a liminal position themselves, as far as the orthodox distinction between good and evil goes. These examples are fully entangled with the horror framework, both narratively and iconographically. Hellboy is a hell demon, who sports appropriately red skin and cut off horns; the Ghost Rider, on the other hand, is a motorcycle-riding human, who possesses superhuman powers, and can turn into a skeleton wreathed in flames. While the category of superhero is indeed a slippery and nebulous one, both Hellboy and the Ghost Rider technically still fit into it, even if they are not “motivated by goodness,” as some other superheroes seem to be, but are instead “borne out of deep rage and intense hatred” (MacArthur 2015, 139–40). Indeed, observers will be quick to point out that, as far as the wider popular culture imagination goes, the label of superheroes is generally associated with examples such as Superman, Captain America, or Wonder Woman, as iconic examples of costumed justice defenders; these figures often embody notions of super-strength and heroism that not only rely on very specific looks and behaviors, but that also, in both expectation and actualization, have very little to do with horror and the supernatural. This discussion, of course, does not generally extend to the complicated status of what is often referred to as “undead superheroes,” as the latter seem to naturally fall into the broader limits of the horror genre. While considerable disagreement exists in regard to definitions and categorizations (Rosenberg and Coogan, 2013; Haslem, MacFarlane, and Richardson 2018), both comics and film scholars alike generally define “undead superheroes” as figures who exist as “undead” in virtue of their inherent inhumanity, such as vampires, zombies, ghouls, and other creatures of a similar nature. This category does not include superheroes who have died and been resurrected as humans, either by scientific or mystical forces, or who have been “enhanced” in bio-technological ways, making them essentially immortal. Being “Other,” in the human-centric sense, is a core characteristic of undead superheroes. Examples within the category of “undead superheroes” abound across the superhero genre, both in comics and in multimedia adaptations, and include Simon Dark, Dead Girl, Dr. Manhattan, The Spectre, Spawn, Deadman, the zombified versions well-known superheroes as seen in comic books DCeased (2019) and Marvel Zombies (2005–2006), and the animated series What If . . . ? (2021). In spite of these inclusions, however, iconic superheroes narratives, especially from industry giants such as Marvel and DC, do not openly engage with horror in both tone and conception, and rarely shift genres in an overt way across the board. All the same, one should not think that the dimension of horror is absent from the superhero world in the most traditional sense. Indeed, the transmedia adaptations of Marvel superhero narratives in the

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twenty-first century have maintained a tacit connection to horror, especially in the representation of techno-liminalities, and the bio-conceptualization of the “super-body” as a subversive space. Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier functions as an important example of this evolution, marking the transformation of the super-body in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as defined by Otherness.2 INTERSECTIONAL BODIES In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Bucky Barnes is Steve Rogers’s/Captain America’s childhood friend and later army companion, who was presumed dead in 1945, during the Second World War. This is shown in the events of The First Avenger (2011), when, during an army mission led by Captain America, Bucky falls from a moving train over a cliff edge and is never seen again. It is later revealed that Bucky didn’t die in the fall and was found by Soviet/Hydra scientists. In the hands of Hydra, at different moments in time, Bucky undergoes various procedures, including the administration of the super-soldier serum, to enhance his physical abilities, and the surgical addition of his iconic metal arm, to replace the organic arm that was damaged in the train accident. A similar version of the serum was of course given by the American military to Steve Rogers, to transform him into Captain America. Unlike Steve, however, Bucky’s identity and memories were erased in the process of transformation into the Winter Soldier. It also quickly emerges that he is regularly subjected to painful brainwashing procedures to ensure his compliance as an assassin; his mind can also be controlled by reciting a particular sequence of words, which effectively transform Bucky into a deadly and puppet-like weapon. The inclusion of both physical and emotional suffering here particularly heightens the horror dimension of the narrative, acting as a reminder of Elaine Scarry’s famous contention that the aim in inflicting pain is to make the body “crushingly present by destroying it, and to make [. . .] the voice absent” (1987, 51). From the onset, Bucky’s experience as the Winter Soldier in the MCU is characterized by a mixture of lack of consent, suffering, and torture. Xavier Aldana Reyes suggests that Gothic horror bodies “produce fear through their interstitiality” (2014, 5). The Gothic body is an in-between entity that is “scary” because it destabilizes “received notions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ or socially intelligible body” (Aldana Reyes 2014, 5). In this sense, the liminal body occupies a horror space and generates fear precisely because of its refusal to adhere to absolute categories. The lack of distinct categorization is something that is recurrent in the definition of super-bodies in the MCU, and specifically in the example of Bucky. Indeed, Bucky’s body

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can be seen a liminal in a variety of ways. Firstly, he occupies an in-between state in virtue of his prolonged life. Not only does the super-soldier serum give him added super-strength and agility, but also—and perhaps more hauntingly—his body has been made to age slowly and almost imperceptibly, due to being cryogenically frozen by Hydra between missions. As a result, Bucky still looks youthful, despite the fact that he is in fact almost 100 years old. This is a characteristic that, of course, Bucky shares with Steve as Captain America in the MCU, where the absence of ageing marks them as different and inevitably Other. Unlike Steve, however, who willingly sacrificed himself and was frozen for decades in the icy waters of the Atlantic, Bucky’s body is forced into its cryogenic status over and over, against his will. The abuse done to his body extends to its being interrupted as a living entity and denied what would be seen as the occurrence of otherwise “natural” processes such as ageing. In this sense, Bucky’s body can be understood as profoundly uncanny, evoking Nicholas Royle’s well-known claim that the uncanny signals “a crisis of the natural” (2003, 1). Bucky’s cryogenically induced youth signals his status as an almost dehumanized entity, which is used as a weapon and therefore treated as such. A critical comparison here may be brought forward between Bucky and the figure of Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), whose physical ability to regenerate makes his appearance youthful, and as we are told in X-Men (2000), makes his age almost impossible to determine. Although the twentyfirst-century X-Men films, while still being adapted from Marvel comics, have not technically been part of the MCU due to a studio rights issue, it would be unproductive to overlook the similarities that exist between characters within the now wider Marvel meta-verse, especially when including a horror dimension into the discussion. The lack of ageing in both Bucky and Wolverine marks a demarcation line around their bodies that tacitly constructs them as grotesque, even though they do not physically project grotesque qualities in the traditional way. Their grotesqueness comes precisely from their in-betweenness as ageless entities, forcefully recalling unshakable notions of what bodies, even superhuman bodies, should do and look like. Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund suggest that “the normal can never truly escape the lingering shadow of the abnormal,” and it is “always haunted by its other” (2013, 7). Equally, abnormality can only be defined as such in relation to pervasive notions of the normal, as slippery and as unreliable as those notions may be. “Normal” is, of course, a complex label in the superhero world of the MCU, but even within those shifted parameters for acceptability, the idea of difference persists through the embodiment and recollection of tacit horror shadows. Ideas of normality linger around both Bucky and Wolverine, among others, as they inevitably emerge as abnormal, even within the internal logic of the narrative structures that they inhabit.

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The idea of being “haunted by the other” is a recurrent part of Bucky’s representation in the MCU. This includes the fact that there are often two “versions” of Bucky that are commonly addressed in the narrative, as an almost matter-of-fact part of his identification. On the one hand, his “human” identity, so to speak, reaches back to the 1940s, and the time spent fighting in the Second World War with Captain America. A big part of that identity lies precisely in his friendship with Steve, and the childhood memories that the two so fondly shared. On the other hand, however, Bucky’s “Other,” the Winter Soldier, is also an unavoidable part of the narrative. It is made clear, at least as far as the events of The Winter Solider and, later, Civil War (2016), are concerned, that Bucky succumbs to being the eternally compliant assassin every time the correct words are recited. Mind control is at the center of his identity as the Winter Soldier, and while Bucky has faint memories of his missions as the alter ego, he does not have any agency in those guises. As “the Other,” the Winter Soldier literally overcomes Bucky, possessing his body and removing the latter’s identity. There is something unavoidably reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde about Bucky’s predicament, and the surfacing of the Other as the ultimate horror presence is difficult to ignore. Like Dr Jekyll, Bucky is unable to control the actions of the Winter Soldier. And like Hyde, the Winter Soldier is a murderous and dangerous creature, which is feared and alienating. Further recalling Hyde, the Winter Soldier is the result of scientific experimentation, and while the motivations behind his creation obviously differ from those set out in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous tale (1886), the vestiges of the “man vs. Other” dichotomy remain strong. The Winter Soldier’s haunting of both Bucky’s consciousness and his narrative are reinforced by Steve’s question in Civil War, as he openly asks his old friend, upon beginning a conversation: “Which Bucky am I talking to?” The open admission of the existence of “two Buckies”—or, at least, two sides of Bucky’s consciousness—is indicative of his function as the site of a frightening horror doubling, as he becomes a form of fission monster (see Carroll). The two sides of Bucky coexist, and often mingle and merge, and the unreliability of his sense of self and will is what transforms his experience into a matter of horror. This evocation of the long-standing notion of the “Gothic double” reinforces the idea of the technologically controlled, super-body as inevitably othered and othering, and as a dark entity that is “itself bound up in the maddening dynamics of return ad repetition” (Townsend 2013, 193). The severance of the connection between Bucky and the Winter Soldier does not manifest itself until the events shown in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where, after a lengthy form of mind therapy in Wakanda, the brainwashing hold over Bucky’s mind is erased, and he no longer “becomes” the Winter Soldier upon hearing the predetermined word sequence. In spite of this, however, the Winter Soldier still haunts Bucky’s consciousness, as the

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memories of his murders slowly resurface and fill his mind with uncertainty. It is made clear that, in spite of the apparent resolution, the trauma of Bucky’s past cannot easily be removed, as it is often the case with horror narratives. The acts of the Winter Soldier remain in Bucky’s consciousness as Gothicized secrets: buried and hidden, but threatening the stability of mind, narrative, and culture, if discovered. Indeed, the metal arm that Bucky continues to wear is a constant reminder of both his suffering and his guilt over being the Winter Soldier. The Gothicized representation of Bucky’s mind and body here unveil a narrative investment in excess that is proper to horror, as the superhuman body, “like monstrosity” becomes instrumental in “negotiating larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries” (Aldana Reyes 2014, 7). Bucky’s mutilation and acquisition of the metal arm expose him as an inevitably transgressive figure. The metal arm is a constant threat to his cognitive independence, an iconic representation of the horror that he both endured and bestowed, and a point of negotiation for his humanity in a super-human world. MONSTROUS BIO-TECHS While there is a suggestion, of course, that all superheroes in the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe are, to some extent, “abnormal” and “monstrous,” an undeniable layer of fear surrounds Bucky Barnes, as a somewhat devious entity that exceeds even the bounds of superhumanity via notions of both transhuman and posthuman transformation. Everything about Bucky’s body is transformed via transhuman medical enhancements—especially the life-altering super-serum—which mark his journey of transformation and emerge as the cause of indelible amounts of trauma. As Bucky’s memories of the past, and of his own identity, are removed by Hydra, his trans-human qualities not only alter him physically, but also challenge his sense as an individual. As the super-enhanced Winter Soldier, Bucky is a figure of excess: he exceeds the bounds of humanity and enters the spectrum of horror as a frightening and liminal figure, somewhere between human and machine. In its grotesque guises, Bucky’s Gothic body renders, as Aldana Reyes would put it, “our fears of difference and marginalization,” while also “laying bare the impositional structures of bio-politics” (2014, 7). It is precisely those politicized conceptions that drive our understanding of the enhanced body in a techno-horror context, and inevitably define superhumanity as a difference-driven label. The processes of experimentation and physical enhancement that fill Bucky’s narrative place a focus on surgery as an agent of horror. These range from the initial procedures to which he was subjected in the 1940s, in order

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to become the Winter Soldier, to the regular torture he needs to undergo in order for his mind to remain compliant. It is very common, of course, to see the very concept of surgery actualized as part of the horror narrative; surgery becomes a conduit for transgression and the embodiment of fear in the flesh. Examples here abound across centuries of horror literature and film and range from H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to (infamously) The Human Centipede (2009). Indeed, as Aldana Reyes suggests, the horror narrative employs “a through exploitation of surgical nightmares” (2014, 10). The horror dimension of surgical procedures is not generally part of the superhero narrative, as its science fiction-inspired developments regularly tend to frame surgical and experimental procedures on the body as the source of awe and amazement. One should only think here of Captain America himself. In the case of Bucky, however, the forceful inclusion of elements of torture transforms procedures of trans-human enhancement, through surgery and other bio-technological means, into a frightening and monstrous narrative. While the term “monster” is not openly used to refer to Bucky in the MCU, the conceptual narrative that surrounds him suggestively defines him in these terms. While he is perceived, by both most of the Avengers and the Soviet Hydra division that controls him, as little more than a lethal weapon, an unavoidable level of fear accompanies his identity as the Winter Solider. Indeed, the idea that he must constantly be kept “under control” is difficult to avoid and becomes an essential part of his construction and conceptualization as a monster, and a central element in an implicit, but unavoidable, horror structure. Michel Foucault famously contends that “what makes a human monster a monster is not just its exceptionality relative to the species form”; indeed, the identification of a human “as monster” relies on the “disturbances” it brings to the “regularities” of the law (1997, 51). The law here is to be interpreted as both a judicial concept, and an idea connected to the broader, and often nebulous notion of naturality. The natural laws that construct humanity, as such, inevitably delineate the limits of the monster, which in turn, and somewhat inevitably, also shows defiance for moral and ethical conduct. The monster’s “field of appearance,” Foucault goes on to say, is “a juridical-biological domain” (1997, 51). On the one hand, the Winter Soldier defies the biological and suggestively “natural” laws that define the human: his serum-enhanced body does not conform to the expectations of human biology, in the broadest sense; additionally, his cybernetic metal arm distinctly sets him apart from naturally defined structures of human anatomy. On the other hand, his identity as an assassin situates him outside of the forceful bounds of legal conduct, as he operates outside of the judicial system, both in concept and action. It is made clear on several occasions that the Winter Solider must be “controlled” via the regular brainwashing procedures he is subjected to. The

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fear of the Winter Soldier becoming uncontrollable is intrinsic to the figure. The technological advances that have made him “superior” also identify him as monstrous in similar terms. The idea that the Winter Solider could come into his own consciousness and overthrow human governments is openly addressed in Civil War, when the threat of an army of Winter Soldiers—created as part of the same Soviet experimental program that gave Bucky his abilities—makes an appearance. Winter Soldiers, with their enhanced bodies and training, are feared as unstoppable and the ultimate weapon. And while the threat of multiple Winter Soldiers does not actually manifest, Bucky remains a reminder of their unstoppability. The enhanced body, whether or not further complicated by the presence of cybernetic elements, is deemed as abnormal, out of control and frightening, taking on the mantel of the monster that must be destroyed. This is a common conceptualization of the monstrous body, of course, which is found in the great majority of horror narratives, and to which the MCU tacitly subscribes. As Justin Edwards puts it, “the abnormal body of the monster-human is caught up in a matrix that elevates the productive, transformative and manipulative body through a system of significance that clearly marks out the parameters of normality” (2015, 9). The enhanced body, operating as an “abnormal” body, becomes synonymous with the subversive. The technological advances that have made Bucky “superior” in the MCU also identify him as archetypically duplicitous and culturally uncanny in similar terms. The monstrosity of Bucky’s body, and its associated behavior, come precisely from the impact of transformative technologies. Both the use of the super-serum and the surgical implementation of his metal arm challenge the boundaries of the normal human body. The unavoidable body modifications that he is subjected to mark him as different, Other, and inevitably monstrous. It is important to mention here that the idea of the super body as different, uncontrollable, and therefore monstrous runs deep in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier is perhaps the most obvious example of that monstrification at play, notions of fear surround the conceptualization of the abnormal and “out of control” human body in a number of narratives, with the example of the Hulk and Wanda Maximoff perhaps being the most evocative here. The idea of keeping these “abnormal” super figures “under control” is recurrent and becomes explicit in Civil War. It is worth noting here, en passant, that the majority of the superheroes that comprise the Avengers have come to possess super abilities as the result of technology and experimentation, whether this is in the form of a nanotech suit or the outcome of molecular and biological changes. The constant inclusion of enhancing technologies marks the superhero as part of a recurrent transhuman horror structure, where the super-body is othered by its own suggested superiority. While technology may suggestively bring hope for the

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transcendence of our “finite flesh” (Edwards 2015, 8), this also causes anxiety in the otherwise “normal” population. The super-body is impressive and awe-inspiring, for sure, but it is also a source of apprehension in virtue of its difference and potential uncontrollability. As Edwards suggests, the “notion that we can transform the human condition and move beyond its limits also means that we must remain in control of the technologies” that make this possible (2015, 9). That control, however, is often an illusion. The super-body, in this context, is unarguably a horror agent, and its status as different opens the way for the exploration of fear and cultural abjection.3 HAUNTED BY THE FLESH In its conceptualization as an agent of Gothic horror, the technologically enhanced super-body can be interpreted as both transhuman and posthuman. In its transhumanity the super-body signals the commitment to improving the condition of the human being and its efficiency through bio-mechanical manipulation. This is evident in Bucky’s possession of his cybernetic metal arm, which is clearly perceived to be stronger and overall superior—as far as abilities go—to the organic arm made of flesh. Further bio-technical transformation into a transhuman state is of course embodied in the very use of the super-soldier serum; being genetic-altering, however, the super serum also transforms Bucky’s body into a posthuman entity. In using the term “posthuman” here I am not referring particularly to the idea of the overcoming of human condition. For sure, this is one of the most well-known interpretations of the posthuman, and one that continues to ring true, especially in the politics of experimentation that define the super-soldier program within the MCU. As Patricia MacCormack suggests, the “posthuman challenges” the “qualities that make up the human—as an organism and a cultural, reflective, knowing subject (including knowledge of the self)” (2020, 524). Indeed, the example of Bucky allows us to see his posthuman status as not only going beyond the constraints of the flesh, as far as the human body is concerned but also specifically as a wish to erase the limitations of humanity by transforming it into something “other,” both physically and mentally. The overcoming of the “human self” as such is indeed what exposes Bucky as a posthuman entity who belongs to the realm of Gothic horror. In its posthuman status, the super-body does not simply depose the human, or simply come after it, but specifically “allows access to” the “excesses, conundrums, jubilant failures and disruptive events” that often define the human condition (MacCormack 2020, 525). The super-body is a suggestion of what “could be” and the price that we would be prepared to pay to achieve it. It is precisely in its suggestive possibilities that the posthuman super-body is reinforced as a matter of horror,

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as it fully acknowledges the intrinsic Otherness of the human condition as forever-able to be mutated into something different and fear-provoking. If, as McCormack suggests, the posthuman is “past, present, and future contracted into immanent entity,” then the super-body becomes an agent of transtemporality and disrupted human history, from the physiological to the psychological, and beyond. The super-body embodies the liminality of the posthuman by exposing its tantalizing attractiveness and simultaneous frightening nature. As such, the posthuman super-body is scary precisely because it “eviscerates absolute knowledge as an impossible goal” (MacCormack 2020, 525). As Donna Haraway famously argues (2006), the primary example of posthumanism is techno-posthumanism; and the most significant embodiment of techno-posthumanism is, of course, the cyborg. Although only parts of Bucky’s body are bestowed cybernetic qualities, his iconic metal arm still qualifies him as belonging to this particular category. Indeed, the obvious coexistence of flesh and cybernetic parts in his body are even more evocative in highlighting the problematic nature of the cyborg as a liminal entity, and bring to the surface preoccupations of over both humanity and superhumanity that compromise the certainty of categories and identities. As Haraway argues, the identification of the cyborg relies on “binary oppositions” (1991, 4). By exhibiting both organic and cybernetic materials, the cyborg speaks to a “posthuman future” that is set on achieving “liberation from the flesh” (MacCormack 2020, 526). The flesh in question is, of course, human flesh. Liberation from the flesh, however, also inevitably translates into its subjugation. Techno-posthumanism paradoxically carries the idea that, in order to “improve” the human body we must necessarily destroy it. In its in-betweenness, the cyborg also speaks to the inferiority of the flesh, and the need to “substitute” it not only with technologically advanced materials and matters, but also with advanced forms of consciousness. Substitution, however, only translates into erasure: the erasure of the human body and the human self, which superhumanity—at least as far as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is concerned—often demands. In this sense, it is not surprising to see that the techno-posthuman transformation of the super-body also requires, in one way of the other, the erasure of memory in the human subject. In spite of the impact and forcefulness of the super-body, however, it seems that the final frontier of posthuman subjugation remains sited in the self, and in the individuality of the human as a living entity. The erasure of memories in Bucky as the techno-liminal Winter Soldier is central to the furthering of the posthuman agenda, so that the consciousness of the human being can be exchanged for the horror-infused layers of “cyborg consciousness” (MacCormack 2020, 526). While posthumanism seemingly aims at overcoming the constraints of the flesh, it would appear that the central aspect of the techno-posthuman

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condition, as far as Bucky Barnes is concerned, is his difficult negotiation with his own materiality. This is especially visible in the pain he experiences as part of the torture that reinforces his compliant consciousness as the Winter Soldier. MacCormack suggests that “pain, actual suffering, experiments [. . .] on flesh, or the result of technologies of combat, show us not an ‘idea of matter,’ but matter’s ubiquitous all” (2020, 527). That is to say, the flesh is constantly there in both consciousness and unconsciousness, even when it is removed, or the aim is to supersede its importance. The more we try to forget the flesh and represses its significance, the more it returns, in the most Gothicized of ways. Bucky’s physical suffering is a distinctive characteristic of his identity and his mastery of the super-body. The relevance of pain is undoubtedly made a central part of his experience, not only in terms of physical pain, but also as an emotional state. Indeed, once he is “freed” from Hydra, Bucky struggles to grapple with his loss of identity and inability to reconcile his past and present. Even though he is no longer the subject of torture, Bucky’s metal arm is a constant reminder of his Otherness. The lack of his own arm is cause of emotional pain, as the metal limb forever separates Bucky from his perceived identity as a human being. In his posthuman state, Bucky suffers the emotional consequences of his physical transformation. The lack of organic arm reinforces his liminality, as he yearns for an identity that will be forever denied. His cyborg body, as well as his sense of self, is paradoxically defined by lack, rather than presence. The hybridity of his body speaks to the impact of flesh. And as such, the missing flesh haunts the narrative, and Bucky’s experience overall in the MCU. FINAL REMARKS The representation of Bucky’s body and troubled mind in the Marvel Cinematic Universe unveil a complex web of horror intersectionalities, as the superhuman body becomes instrumental in addressing deep-rooted concerns about humanity and its inevitably shifting limits. In its defiance of boundaries, the super-body confirms Dorian L. Alexander’s contention that the Gothic horror body especially, in its techno-liminal contexts, is always one that lacks “stable integrity” and “inspires” fear (2018, 188). The frightening liminality of Bucky’s body, and its associated behavior, come precisely from the impact of bio-transformative technologies. The unavoidable body modifications that he is subjected to, from the super-serum to his metal arm, challenge the boundaries of what it means to be human. While ostensibly projected as inherently superior in a number of ways, Bucky’s super-body is also a tortured body, carrying with it a Gothicized history of suffering, which inevitably marks him as Other. As an individual whose body has been technologically enhanced

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and who, as a result, has crossed the threshold of physical limitations, Bucky speaks loudly to the conceptualization of the super-body as a subversive entity, and overtly uncovers how superheroes confront our notions of what it means to be human. Here, an unavoidable connection is constructed between technologically tortured bodies, suffering, and the Gothicized loss of memory and identity in a posthuman context. Ultimately, the enhanced “super-body” emerges as a porous, liminal, and intersectional entity, which tacitly takes on horror overtones in its challenge to bio-technological human boundaries. NOTES 1. I will not be discussing comics as part of this analysis of Bucky’s techno-liminality. There are some similarities, but also some fundamental differences in the ways in which Bucky’s experience is portrayed comparatively in the MCU films and the Marvel comics, so I will be leaving a discussion of the comics for another occasion. 2. While there are recurring similarities in the ways in which the narrative engages with the horror dimension, I will leave the discussion of the superheroes within the DC universe—Marvel’s alleged primary rival in the business—for another occasion. 3. Of course, this also brings forward complex and important debates over the idea of disability in the superhero world, which is inevitably problematic in a number of ways. I will not be covering this particular aspect here, but a wealth of research has been done productively in the field (Stoddard Holmes 2013; Alaniz 2014; Smith and Alaniz 2019; Murray 2020).

WORKS CITED Alaniz, José. 2014. Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Alexander, Dorian L. 2018. “Faces of Abjecivity: The Uncanny Mystique and Transsexuality.” In Gender and the Superhero Narrative, edited by Michael Goodrum, Philip Smith and Tara Prescott, 180–202. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Edwards, Justin. 2015. “Introduction: Technogothics.” Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics, edited by Justin Edwards, 1–16. London: Routledge. Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund. 2013. Grotesque. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Allen Lane. Haraway, Donna. 2006. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In The International Handbook

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of Virtual Learning Environments, edited by Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Peter Trifonas, 117–58. New York: Springer ———. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge. Haslem, Wendy, MacFarlane, Elizabeth, and Sarah Richardson. 2018. Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation. London: Routledge. Jeffery, Scott. 2016. The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. MacArthur, Sian. 2015. Gothic Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave. MacCormack, Patricia. 2020. “Posthuman Teratology.” In The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 523–36. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murray, Scott. 2020. Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology and Cultural Futures. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Nickel, Philip. J. 2012. “Horror and the Idea of Everyday Life.” In The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy, 14–32. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Rosenberg, Robin S., and Peter Coogan. 2013. “Introduction.” In What Is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan, xvii–xxi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Scott T. and José Alanis, eds. 2019. Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoddard Holmes, Martha. 2013. “Disability.” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by David Punter, David, William Hughes and Andrew Smith, 189–95. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Townsend, Dale “Doubles.” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by David Punter, William Hughes and Andrew Smith, 189–95. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.

Index

Pages references for figures are italicized. abject, 50, 225, 266, 277, 297, 312 ableist, 215–17, 224, 227 aesthetics, 13, 16–18, 27, 29–30, 35–38, 40, 123 affect, 3, 19, 24, 28, 31, 33–34, 40, 46, 123, 131, 137, 148, 150, 215, 270 Africa, 104–7, 109, 164, 166, 171, 223, 226 African Americans, 23, 68, 106, 166, 171–72, 175, 176 Afrofuturism, 105, 106, 164 alien, 187, 215, 220, 222, 263, 265–66, 281–83, 304 alienation, 38, 67, 193, 298, 303, 308 America, 4, 23, 40, 50, 52, 59, 63, 64, 66–69, 81, 87, 98, 107, 109, 116, 166, 171–72, 179–80, 181n6, 181n8, 186, 191, 209, 211, 261, 264, 304, 306 American Horror Story, 29, 34, 153, 201, 209, 212 Anthropocene, 21, 23, 260, 265, 267, 270, 278–80, 283–87 anxiety, 1, 16–17, 21, 23, 27, 77, 78, 82, 132, 137, 138, 148, 179, 181n6, 194, 199, 208–9, 212, 265, 269–71, 279–80, 287, 304

art, 5, 16, 30–32, 34, 36, 38–40, 44, 51, 72, 94, 102, 106, 120, 124, 143, 153, 173, 187, 237–38, 251, 254, 265, 236, 280 audience, 1, 2, 5, 14–15, 18–20, 24, 32, 44–47, 52–53, 59, 60, 102, 104, 113–14, 116–26, 132, 136, 144, 147– 48, 150–52, 165, 179–80, 185, 188, 192–95, 200, 203–4, 208, 220, 221, 224, 230, 235, 239, 262, 300 Australia, 49, 118, 164, 166, 186, 188, 192, 264 author, 14, 15, 17, 24, 51, 71–74, 76, 80, 82, 157–67, 191, 202, 230, 260 binary, 18, 24, 81, 205, 313; non-, 162, 163 Black: bodies, 4, 223, 234; community, 4, 23, 102, 106, 108–9, 164, 237; horror, 23, 171–80; identity, 103–4, 107, 159, 166, 173, 223, 224, 226, 235; Lives Matter, 4, 23, 171–80; music, 4, 106–7 The Blair Witch Project, 143–44, 153 Blaxploitation, 61, 172, 173, 177, 181n6

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Index

blood, 41n4, 50, 62, 82, 119, 135, 172, 175, 179, 181n9, 208, 210, 238, 254, 262, 294, 297, 304 Blood Quantum, 185–86, 187, 190, 193, 195 Blumhouse, 4, 60 box office, 145, 229 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 61, 63, 158, 201–4, 206, 208 Canada, 59, 186, 195 cannibal, 29, 41n41, 48, 75, 117, 144, 206, 207, 268, 276 capitalism, 66, 68, 81, 267, 269 Carroll, Noel, 31–32, 132, 136, 308 child, 20, 41n2, 49, 105, 124, 211, 223, 232–33, 254–55, 266 childhood, 65, 306, 308 children, 49, 52, 60, 64–65, 115, 138n3, 164, 175, 177, 181n7, 188, 190, 203, 222, 225–29, 234, 236, 270, 294–95, cinema, 4, 15, 30, 31, 34–35, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 59, 63, 98, 115–16, 122, 125, 130, 145, 148, 173, 185, 188, 195, 215, 221, 227, 230–31, 245, 249, 256, 265, 303–6, 313–14, 234 classic: cult, 63, 65, 215, 229; horror, 20, 57, 145; monsters, 3, 58, 60, 69, 188 colonialism, 23, 92, 166, 222, 223, 227, 264 comedy, 49, 52, 60, 63, 114, 133, 147, 150, 164–65, 189, 191–92, 263 comics, 4, 5, 61, 71, 75, 96, 263, 303, 305, 307 consumerism, 143, 267 contagion, 120, 212, 291–301 cosmic, 269–71, 275, 282, 284, 287 creator, 2, 5, 17, 23, 24, 73, 119, 121, 143, 145, 146, 147, 152–53, 159, 185, 199, 224, 324 crowdsourcing, 5, 152 culture, 16, 20, 23, 28, 40, 50, 58, 61, 63, 67, 72, 78, 81, 88, 96–98, 104, 113, 115, 123, 150, 153, 157, 159,

161, 171, 174, 179, 185, 204, 210, 256, 261, 285–86, 305, 309; Black, 104, 106–7, 109–10; Geek, 24; Indigenous, 186, 192, 247; popular, 4, 15, 60, 145, 205; sub, 16, 18, 146 death, 4, 17, 24, 30, 46, 51, 75, 82, 91, 115, 124, 172, 174–76, 180, 19, 202– 3, 206, 208, 210–11, 215, 218, 221, 226, 232, 233, 234, 236–37, 247–48, 261–62, 264, 266–67, 275–76, 280, 282–83, 287, 300 demon, 14, 22, 48, 63, 103, 119, 192, 202, 206, 211–12, 218, 246, 248, 305 desire, 3, 21, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 40, 44, 54, 68, 75, 117, 124, 147, 150, 151, 167, 191, 202, 204, 207, 215, 233, 248, 268, 269, 298 deviant, 216, 217, 218, 296 disaster, 22, 34, 82, 153, 260–61, 277, 291, 292 disgust, 29, 31–33, 113, 136, 148, 151, 179–80, 187, 189, 215, 225, 263, 300, 303 distribution, 1, 3, 5, 18, 44–47, 49, 52–53, 144, 159, 187, 190, 193 diversity, 17, 23, 33, 98, 158, 162, 163, 186, 193, 217 domestic, 3, 48, 75–76, 80–81, 95, 96, 135, 138, 189, 236, 263 doppelgänger, 101, 175, 179 Dracula, 3, 5, 14, 43, 57, 58, 60–64, 89, 95–96, 115–16, 145, 162 dread, 28, 34, 118, 119, 125, 152, 164, 179, 260, 279, 284, 287, 292 Earth, 5, 106, 251, 265, 267, 270, 275–81, 283–87 ecohorror, 260–61, 263–71 ecological, 21, 260, 262, 264, 269–71, 277, 278, 280, 287 elevated, 2, 5, 18, 35, 38, 149, 249, 254 embody, 123, 131–32, 189, 205, 216, 219, 222, 236, 238, 239, 253, 255, 270, 296–97, 299, 308, 310, 312–13

Index

emotion, 1, 5, 19, 29–32, 34, 36, 59, 102, 119, 148, 218, 225, 306, 314 enjoyment, 28–29, 31, 33, 35, 38, 41, 119, 132, 136, 150 erotic, 3, 20, 44, 48, 204, 207–8, 210 ethics, 29–30, 36, 38, 40, 45, 192, 310 Europe, 50, 92, 105, 106, 116, 187, 246, 254, 256 excess, 1, 19, 34, 44–46, 66, 175–76, 294, 309, 312, 314 exploitation, 2, 4, 50, 51, 180, 181n7, 303, 310

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186, 187, 189–90, 192, 203, 211, 226, 229–25, 239, 261–62, 305 Gothic, 13–20, 22–24, 27, 43, 61, 64, 68, 72–74, 76–79, 81–82, 88–89, 91, 113–14, 164, 173, 178, 198, 204, 230, 259–60, 263–64, 270–71, 291–92, 300–301, 306, 308–9, 312, 314–15

fantasy, 64, 76, 82, 157–60, 162–65, 187, 195, 208, 216, 285 fear, 13, 17–18, 19, 22, 30–33, 50, 54, 68, 87, 88, 90, 91, 113, 118–21, 125–26, 132, 134–36, 144, 145, 148, 150–53, 166–67, 187, 189, 194, 200, 206, 209, 215, 219, 260, 262–64, 268, 270–71, 279–80, 291–95, 297– 304, 306–12, 313, 314 femininity, 76, 80–81, 162, 265 folk horror, 234, 245–54, 256 folklore, 43, 135, 144–48, 164, 225 found footage, 34, 144, 147, 151 Frankenstein, 1, 3, 23, 43, 57–59, 61–62, 63–69, 69nn3–4, 69n6, 74, 82, 114–16, 174, 176 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 14, 16, 20, 32, 113 fungus, 222–23, 268–71, 293–95 future, 1, 13, 21, 22, 59, 69, 72, 74, 81, 147, 163, 167, 173, 180, 185, 187– 90, 194, 195, 201–3, 216, 218, 222, 224, 227, 239, 245–46, 256, 266, 270, 276–91, 283, 285–87, 288n5, 295, 299, 300, 313

Hannibal, 27, 29–30, 34–36, 38–41, 39, 41n1, 204, 206–8 haunted, 72, 76, 78–79, 82, 96, 115, 117, 119–21, 180, 225, 264, 295, 299, 304, 307, 308 Haunted House, 14, 22, 73, 78–79, 81, 115, 122, 123, 124–26, 129–31, 133, 138, 138n3, 144, 209, 231 The Haunting of Hill House, 35, 73–79, 160, 230 Heidegger, Martin, 2–3 Hereditary, 215, 217–18 heteronormative, 77, 199, 202, 203, 208, 212 heterosexual, 199, 201, 205, 207, 209–12 history, 2, 16–18, 20, 23, 34, 43–46, 50, 54, 60, 64, 66, 72, 77, 82, 89, 97, 102–3, 105, 107, 110, 120, 122–23, 164, 171, 176, 179, 185–91, 193–95, 199–203, 210, 220, 223, 230, 232–34, 236–39, 264–65, 270, 275, 279–85, 292, 294, 313 homoerotic, 204, 207–8 homophobia, 78, 157, 209 homosexual, 200 hybrid, 65–66, 135, 138, 187, 222, 224, 255, 259, 266, 269, 276–77, 294, 314

games, 14, 16, 31, 96, 120, 129–38, 145, 146, 149–50, 153, 190, 271, 275, 277, 282–83, 286, 288n6 Get Out, 4, 23, 173–79, 224 ghost, 21, 76–77, 113–15, 117–18, 120– 26, 129, 131, 134, 138n3, 151, 162,

identity, 4, 19, 23, 47, 58–59, 66, 78–79, 90, 97–98, 166, 188, 193, 201–2, 204–6, 208, 216, 223, 237, 259, 266, 292, 294–98, 301, 304, 306, 308–10, 313–15 Indigenous, 2, 92, 96, 185–95, 236, 267

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Index

infected, 222–23, 237–38, 268– 70, 291–301 intellectual, 15, 31, 45, 60, 177, 179, 182n9, 248 intelligent, 2, 65, 262, 265 internet, 5, 18, 19, 46, 146, 150, 157, 282 Jackson, Shirley, 71–77, 79–82, 159–60, 163–66, 168n19, 230 Japan, 77, 121, 122, 190 Kickstarter, 152 killer, 3, 15, 22, 34, 48, 80, 118, 120, 146, 202, 208, 211, 215, 219, 296 language, 21–22, 49, 68, 79, 93, 95–96, 145, 163, 188, 190, 192, 222, 248– 53, 255–56, 280, 284–85, 296, 300 liminal, 149, 152, 248, 264, 304–7, 309, 313–15 linguistic, 246, 248, 250–51, 285 Lovecraft, H. P., 21–22, 76, 103, 106, 110, 164–65, 185, 269–70, 276, 287n1 market, 40, 45–46, 49, 51–53, 80, 153, 159, 162, 194 marketing, 53, 63, 143–44 masculinity, 212 medical, 81, 115, 223, 224, 226, 291, 292, 295–96, 299–300, 301n4, 309; bio, 66, 296 mental health, 21, 215–18, 226, 234, 295, 312 Midsommer, 216–18 minorities, 1, 2, 3, 28, 246 mirror, 21, 34, 75–76, 88, 125, 147, 151, 153, 209, 231–34, 236, 238, 261, 269 misogyny, 4, 78, 232, 233, 236 monster, 1, 3–4, 19, 21, 23, 31, 34, 36, 52, 57–65, 68–69, 74, 81, 87–90, 93, 95–97, 113–15, 121–23, 126, 134, 144, 148, 167, 176, 191, 199–200, 204–8, 215–16, 220, 227, 235–26,

261–62, 264–65, 270, 281, 293–96, 308, 310–11 monster queer, 199–200, 204–6, 208 monstrous, 4, 14, 15, 22, 23, 30, 44, 49, 76, 78, 81–82, 88–90, 92, 96, 98, 145, 162, 172, 176, 180, 181n8, 187, 188, 200, 204, 206, 209, 216–18, 222, 227, 235–26, 249, 251, 254–55, 260, 263–66, 269–70, 281, 293–94, 304, 309–11 morality, 28, 30, 38–40, 45–46, 49, 75, 89, 179–80, 216, 222, 292, 310; immoral, 28, 29, 39 music, 16, 38, 60, 78, 101–10, 116–19, 177 nation, 4, 78–79, 95–96, 103, 106–8, 164, 176, 179–80, 185–86, 193–94, 236, 245, 250, 256, 259 Native, 24, 92, 98n1, 185–95 Netflix, 35, 62, 64, 73, 81, 203, 230 New Nightmare, 2, 15 nightmare, 67, 225, 231, 270, 277, 310 occult, 138, 277 ontology, 3, 22, 92, 121, 136, 255– 56, 261, 270 oppression, 4, 50, 89, 93, 97, 106, 171, 174–75, 177–78, 180, 189, 200, 206, 208, 235–36, 264 paranoia, 132, 299 paranormal, 45, 53, 117, 123–25, 134, 146, 148, 151, 187, 189, 191, 211 patriarchy, 76, 78, 167, 248 pedagogy, 88–89, 92–93, 97–98, 223 Peele, Jordan, 4, 101, 194, 224, 229 Penny Dreadful, 29, 34, 36, 37, 61, 64 perform, 2, 14, 113, 116–18, 118–22, 125, 148, 175, 191, 220, 186 performance, 27, 35–36, 59, 64, 81, 88, 91–93, 114–15, 118–25, 147–48, 247 philosophy, 22, 30–31, 38, 47, 51, 67, 91, 113, 216–17, 231, 264–65

Index

pleasure, 29–32, 40, 44, 46, 81, 132, 176, 179–80, 204, 210, 202 Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 23, 115, 162, 220 politics, 1, 4–5, 17, 19, 20, 23–24, 27, 40, 50–51, 57, 66, 69, 78–79, 81, 82, 88–90, 93–95, 157–59, 164, 172–74, 178, 185–86, 189, 195, 202, 206, 215, 221–23, 224, 248, 278, 280, 291, 293, 294, 304, 309, 312 porn, 15, 34, 43, 47, 50, 51, 65, 180, 181n8 possessed, 76, 79, 109, 120, 189, 193, 206, 215, 218, 225, 248, 312 psychoanalysis, 13–16, 20, 22, 32 psychological, 1, 5, 14, 17, 34, 45–46, 50–51, 82, 115, 157, 160, 166, 216– 19, 280, 300, 313 The Purge, 172–78, 180–80, 229 queer, 14, 200–213; Gothic, 16; Horror, 77, 202–4; queering, 24; queerness, 199–200, 202, 205–6, 209, 212–13 A Quiet Place, 52, 212, 220–24, 229 racism, 4, 68, 78, 87, 103, 110, 172, 174–75, 177–78, 189, 216, 224, 229, 235–37, 239 religion, 43, 45, 63, 96, 166, 206, 249, 270, 285 ritual, 20, 76, 82, 109–10, 120, 122, 135, 146, 186, 190, 193, 218–19, 249 Satan, 20, 252, 256 scopophilic, 29, 35, 249 sentimental, 65, 287n1 serial killer, 3, 15, 44, 80, 211, 215 shadow, 46, 122, 124, 165, 167, 176, 204, 212, 282, 307–8 shock, 33, 36, 50, 102, 136, 157, 178, 179, 200–201, 218, 223, 253, 303 Shudder, 153 slasher, 2, 15, 57, 215, 229 smart, 2, 15 snuff, 45, 46

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social media, 18, 24, 77, 134, 144, 149, 153 society, 13, 19, 24, 50, 66, 68, 76, 88–89, 110, 136, 161, 164, 178, 199–200, 205–6, 208–9, 212, 217, 233, 261, 276, 286, 296 sound, 46, 110, 120, 131–32, 135, 226, 300; film, 35, 43, 47, 52, 61, 102, 104–7, 148, 150–52, 221 spectral, 71, 114, 134–35, 138, 207, 210, 305 stalker, 122, 202 streaming, 5, 61–62, 69, 145, 149–50, 153, 187, 282 subconscious, 288n6 supernatural, 34, 47, 91, 103, 113–14, 124, 134, 138, 148, 151, 158, 164, 166, 176, 186–87, 189–92, 201–2, 217–19, 229–31, 234, 256, 275, 292, 295, 305 symbolism, 4, 14, 22, 36, 114, 129, 200, 205, 238, 285 technology, 18, 21, 24, 67, 69, 82, 89, 105–6, 130–31, 133–34, 136–38, 145, 151, 153, 179, 221, 267, 276, 304–5, 308, 310–15 television, 13, 16, 21, 27, 29–30, 32, 34–38, 40–41, 52, 62–63, 66, 73, 76, 96–97, 117, 123–24, 129, 137, 148, 151, 153, 194, 200, 202–3, 209, 212, 263 TikTok, 143–44, 150–53 theater, 32, 47, 95, 113–17, 119–26 transgender, 167, 167n2, 167n8 trauma, 4, 20–21, 44, 66, 74–75, 77–78, 91–92, 126, 166, 173, 180, 188–89, 194, 215–19, 224–26, 220, 277, 281, 283, 286, 292, 296, 299, 309 True Blood, 29, 34, 205–6, 208 undead, 227, 305 unheimlich/uncanny, 2–3, 13, 23, 80–81, 113, 123–24, 138, 143, 147,

322

179, 226, 230, 256, 259, 264, 266, 295, 304, 307, 311 vampire, 60–63, 82, 95, 114, 121, 158, 166, 188, 191, 201, 204–6, 208, 215, 305 violence, 3–4, 29–30, 32, 34, 39–40, 44, 48–51, 62, 67–68, 79, 81, 90, 113–14, 122, 149, 167n2, 172–79, 181–82nn8–9, 189–90, 193, 200– 201, 209–11, 215–16, 218, 224–25, 227, 230, 295, 299 virtual, 88, 90, 97, 130–31, 133 The Walking Dead, 21, 137

Index

weird, 21–22, 71, 75, 158, 264, 269–71, 276–77, 280 werewolf, 59–60, 188, 191, 204 witch, 34, 62, 85–86, 114–16, 143–44, 153, 160, 190, 206, 218, 225–26, 256–59, 263–64 women, 2, 4, 67, 71–72, 75–77, 80–81, 108, 157–58, 200–203, 207, 212, 217, 219, 224, 226, 233–35, 246–49, 259 zombie, 21, 48, 116, 187, 189–90, 193– 95, 215, 222, 224–25, 268, 292–97, 299, 301n2, 305

About the Editor and Contributors

ABOUT THE EDITOR Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and edited twenty-plus books on various subjects including Gothic: A Reader (2018), Horror: A Companion (2019), Transmedia Vampires (2021), and Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2022), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (forthcoming). He has also published a series of books on vampires in popular culture: Becoming Vampire (2016), Dracula as Absolute Other (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Vampires from Another World (2021), and is working on the next Unhallowed Ground: Imminent Terror and the Specter of the Vampire on Screen. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Carina Bissett is a writer, poet, and educator working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in multiple journals and anthologies including What Remains, Upon a Twice Time, Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales, Arterial Bloom, Gorgon: Stories of Emergence, Weird Dream Society, Hath No Fury, and the HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. V, VI, VIII, and IX. In 2021, she was acknowledged for her volunteer efforts at HWA with the prestigious Silver Hammer Award, and her fiction and poetry have been nominated for several awards including the Pushcart Prize and the Sundress Publications Best of the Net. She can be found online at http:​//​carinabissett​.com. M. Keith Booker is professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

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About the Editor and Contributors

He is the author of dozens of essays on literature and popular culture and is the author or editor of more than sixty books on literature and popular culture. Horror film is among his central interests. John Edgar Browning (PhD, SUNY–Buffalo), professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has appeared as an expert guest on or consulting for such documentary programs as National Geographic’s Taboo USA (2013), Discovery Channel’s William Shatner’s Weird or What? (2010), AMC’s Eli Roth’s History of Horror (2018), History Channel’s The UnXplained (2020), Disney+’s The World According to Jeff Goldblum (2021), and Netflix, as well as numerous radio programs. He has contracted or published twenty academic and popular trade books and at least 100 articles, chapters, and reviews on subjects that cluster around Dracula, vampires, zombies, horror, and the Gothic, including: The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker (Palgrave, 2012) and the forthcoming Dracula—An Anthology: Critical Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1920 (Edinburgh University Press), as well as critical editions of Montague Summers’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin and The Vampire in Europe (Apocryphile Press, 2011, 2014); with Caroline Joan S. Picart, he coedited as well Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology (Palgrave, 2012) and cowrote Dracula in Visual Media (McFarland, 2010); with David R. Castillo, David Schmid, and David A. Reilly, he cowrote Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics (Palgrave Pivot, 2016); and, with Darren Elliott-Smith, coedited New Queer Horror Film and Television (Horror Studies) (University of Wales Press, 2020). He is also coeditor of the second Norton Critical Edition of Dracula (2021) with David J. Skal. Kevin Corstorphine is lecturer in American literature at the University of Hull, and program director in American studies. His research interests lie in horror and Gothic fiction, particularly representations of space and place, the environment, and haunted locations. He has published widely on authors including Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Clive Barker. He is coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, published in 2018. He is currently working on several research projects including US imperialism, haunted graveyards, and ecology in nineteenth-century US literature. Ian Fetters (he/they) is a researcher of the Weird and the Hauntological. They are the 2017 recipient of the S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship for the project “Lovecraft’s Dark Continent: At the Mountains of Madness and Antarctic Fiction.” They are also the first recipient of the Donald Sidney-Fryer Research Fellowship in 2018. Their research on Lovecraft

About the Editor and Contributors

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and Clark Ashton Smith has been published in the journals Lovecraftian Proceedings and Penumbra. Their work has also appeared in the critical anthologies Not Dead but Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the Twenty-First Century and The Evolution of Horror in the 21st Century and Beyond (2023). Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Five of her short stories were adapted for the television series The Hunger. Teresa Fitzpatrick is a research associate and an associate lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her doctoral thesis, Killer Plants and Gothic Gardeners, developed a material ecofeminist Gothic framework to explore the intersection of gender and cultivated nature in plant monster narratives from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. She has written reviews on ecoGothic/ecohorror for several journals, presented her research at numerous conferences, and contributed chapters on nature and gender, ecoGothic, and eco-posthumans to various edited collections. Jacob Floyd is an assistant professor in visual studies at the University of Missouri and is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Brandon R. Grafius is associate professor of biblical studies and academic dean at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. His most recent publication is Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions That Haunt Us (Broadleaf Books, 2022). He is currently coediting (with John W. Morehead) The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (forthcoming in 2023). Neil Jackson is a senior lecturer in film and program leader in film and television studies at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is the coeditor and a chief contributor to Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (2015). He recently contributed chapters to The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbuster (2020), New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror (2020), Shockers: The 70s Cinema of Trash Terror and Exploitation (2021), and Re-Focus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023) He is currently preparing a monograph entitled Combat Shocks: Exploitation Cinema and the Vietnam War (forthcoming). Mikel J. Koven is the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (2006), Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (2008), and Blaxploitation Films (2010). He holds a PhD in folklore studies and

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About the Editor and Contributors

has published extensively on the relationship between folklore and popular cinema. Laura R. Kremmel is a lecturer at Brandeis University. Her published work focuses on Gothic studies, the medical humanities, history of medicine, and British Romanticism. She is the author of Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (University of Wales Press, 2022), and is coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018). Carlos Littles is a researcher whose interests include popular culture, Native American history, and existential philosophy. He earned his BA in philosophy and history from Old Dominion University and an MLA from Johns Hopkins University. Natasha C. Marchini is a PhD researcher/candidate at Ulster University, Magee. She has been focusing on the presence of queer representation in the horror genre for the past three years and has decided to now focus primarily on the representation of queer women in horror television. Natasha would like to dedicate her chapter in this book to both her supervisor Dr. Victoria McCollum, and her wife, Jessica C. Marchini, for always being there and supporting her goals. Joan Passey is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she specializes in nineteenth-century coasts and seascapes and the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present. She is the Wilkie Collins Fellow at Edge Hill University and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She has previously published on Shirley Jackson, Ann Radcliffe, and Gothic Cornwall. Gwyneth Peaty is a research fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University, Western Australia. Her research interests encompass popular culture, technology, video games, disability, horror, and the Gothic. Publications include “Beast of America: Revolution and Monstrosity in BioShock Infinite” in War Gothic in Literature and Culture (eds. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke), “Monstrous Machines and Devilish Devices” in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (eds. Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel), and “Power in Silence: Captions, Deafness, and the Final Girl” in M/C Journal 20(3). Lorna Piatti-Farnell is a professor of film, media, and culture studies at Auckland University of Technology, where she is also the director of the Popular Culture Research Centre. Her research interests lie at the intersection of popular media, literature, and cultural history, with a focus on Gothic and

About the Editor and Contributors

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horror, film, television, and popular iconography. She has published widely in these areas, and is author of several monographs, including The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (Routledge, 2013) and Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (Palgrave, 2017). Angela Marie Smith is associate professor of English and gender studies and director of Disability Studies at the University of Utah. Her research examines the dynamics of disability affects in cinema, television, and online media. She is the author of Hideous Progeny:  Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (2011) and has published in the journals Literature and Medicine, Post Script, and Antipodes and edited collections The Matter of Disability (2019),  Monsters: A Companion (2020), and Embodying Contagion (2021). Erik Steinskog is an associate professor in musicology at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. He earned a PhD in musicology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2002 with the dissertation “Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: Music, Language, and Representation.” He is the author of Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (2018). Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has published twenty-nine books and more than 100 essays and book chapters addressing American literature and culture, with a focus on horror and the Gothic. Among his newer publications are Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (Fordham UP, 2023), Monstrous Things: Essays on Ghosts, Vampires, and Things That Go Bump in the Night (McFarland, 2023), and Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (Fordham UP, 2021). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com. Maisha Wester is a British Academy Global Professor at the University of Sheffield and an associate professor at Indiana University. Her work focuses on racial representation in Gothic literature and horror film, and on sociopolitical appropriations of Gothic and horror tropes in discussions of race. She is author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places, co-editor of Twenty-First-Century Gothic, and numerous essays and articles including “The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-Century Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils” (Gothic Studies), “Correcting the Text: Lovecraft Country’s Literary and Historical Interventions” (Post45), and “Et Tu Victor?: Interrogating the Master’s Responsibility to—and Betrayal of—the Slave in Frankenstein” (The Huntington Library Quarterly).

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About the Editor and Contributors

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is the four-time Bram Stoker Award nominee for such books as Eaters of the Dead and The Conjuring. He is a professor of theatre at Loyola Marymount University, the coeditor of Theatre and the Macabre (2022), and the creator, writer, and director of The Haunting of Hannon, a live, immersive haunted attraction in a university library, now in its tenth year. He has written a dozen books, edited a dozen more, and has also written over a hundred book chapters and journal articles.