What Is Horror Poetics?
Part II: Further Out, Further In

by J †Johnson

Read “What Is Horror Poetics?” Part I

Our monsters represent our fears. We call them from the deep, from the woods, from our psyches. All those dark places where fear hides out. 

If the old horror stories are tormented by succubi, they might reveal gynophobia and misogyny: anxiety about women’s power. Witch stories reiterate the threat of self-sufficient, childless, unmarried or widowed women to the social order: they eat babies, cause crop failure and disease, and ride their ointment-lubed broomsticks into the night, cackling at the patriarchy.

There is a long and ignoble tradition of xenophobic Frankensteins in the mold of H.P. Lovecraft, whose vision of cosmic horror remains foundational even as his racism is both small-minded and profound, and much closer to the surface of his stories than one might imagine. When Lovecraft’s xenophobia is acknowledged, it’s often assumed that fear of foreignness and otherhood are transmuted into cosmic fear of a vast, unknowable outside. But it manifests in horribly banal ways as well, as in the casual racism of the black cat’s name in “The Rats in the Walls,” a tale which remains celebrated and influential.

The trope of the disabled monster runs deep in the literature, just as queerness and trans identities are commonly coded as monstrous in horror. Of course, there is little nuance to the conflation of disability and queer or trans bodies: monsters all, in traditional tellings. And yet, there are critical opportunities to reclaim queer and trans monstrosity, as well as disability-coded monstrosity, though such maneuvers might require radical, extratextual restagings and critical reimaginings.

But there is another possibility wherein we can work with the power that already resides within traditional horror while freeing ourselves from its bigotry. It’s a matter of casting the pitchfork up rather than down. If our monsters represent our fears, we need to assert that those fears belong not only to embattled patriarchal cis-heteronormativity. Furthermore, anyone outside that hegemony might fear the hegemon and cast those dominant actors as monsters. This might seem to be the case in films like The Hills Have Eyes (1977) or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), except that the monstrous white families in these films are societal outcasts marked lower class (which is presented as coextensive with and constitutive of their monstrosity). 

On another hand, perhaps Mary Harron’s filmic adaptation of American Psycho (2000) takes advantage of this reversal, casting a wealthy, privileged, cis white man as the monster. Whereas Bret Easton Ellis relishes Patrick Bateman’s elaborate slaughter of women, pushing satire into torture porn,† Harron emphasizes a critique of patriarchal privilege while satirizing the priorities of the slasher film. Ellis horrifies us by making the male gaze explicitly murderous, and giving us that perspective on each sexualized kill; Harron uses a reverse angle to show us the killer’s unchecked glee in his lack of consequences.

Here’s an example of what we might do to reposition horror as a means of exploring and perhaps exorcizing our monstrosity, rather than feeding it. As Bryan Fuller and others discuss on Fuller’s Queer for Fear (2022) series on Shudder, James Whale packed his filmic interpretation of Frankenstein (1931) with queer subtext reflecting his own experiences as a gay artist. Whether he did so in an entirely conscious way is up for debate, but queer identification is available to anyone who sees themselves in the “unnatural” offspring of disapproving daddy Dr. Frankenstein, who turns out his creation before hunting the monster down with the rest of the torch-bearing townsfolk.†† That the film largely withholds the voice Mary Shelley gives to her delinquent outcast and eloquent autodidact is perhaps a version of the qualified silence Whale had to endure in public.

Nor do we have to choose between recasting our fears to disrupt a conventional power dynamic, and imbuing the queer or trans monster with agency. We can develop new tropes and narrative strategies that do not need to rely on the old prejudices and cruelties. And we can adapt the motifs we already love so that we can enjoy them without doing harm to ourselves. This is not to say we have to weed out the horror canon or filter new works of horror. That old tension and contradiction (and the impulse to transgress social and cultural taboos) is part of horror’s power. 

But think how much more powerful horror can be when we don’t have to bracket or make excuses for those moments when horror is complicit in rather than critical of sexual violence, abuse, and intolerance. Consider for example Basket Case (1982), a fantastic, hilarious, delirious film that includes a scene of such disgusting, over-the-line, gendered sexual violence that the crew purportedly walked off set when it came time to film it. If you recommend that film, do you endorse such a gross, objectifying, triggering moment, or does it require a disclaimer? Where is that line in horror, anyway? 

What we need is other ways to use horror, and other things to do with it. We want more and better horror, more complex monsters, so we have more choices as writers and as readers. We can do that, and we can have it, without sacrificing any of the power of horror. It will only give us, and horror, more power, and more agency. Better nuanced, more inclusive horror will help us see ourselves, and change.

Here’s to our first sequel here at Cul-de-sac of Blood: another series of horror poetics from contributors who help us see ourselves in the dark light of what scares us and makes us feel both human and monstrous. Here’s to being unafraid of being critical about what we love, even when we don’t have names for it, and have to make them up. We won’t scare away our favorite monsters by talking about them. And we can make even better, more horrible monsters if we’re able to look deeper into our darkness.

†And it’s quite possible we’re seeing a popular return of this dynamic in the Terrifier franchise (reaching new extremes in 2022’s Terrifier 2): look out for who you look up to, and notice whose drawn out, explicit suffering you are celebrating, horror fans!

††We note a similar relationship in M3GAN (2023), where a cyborg is given life and then demonized by an aloof, clinical parent who can’t see the humanity in (or their sense of responsibility for) their creation. The only option is to shut it down. As with Frankenstein, we can read this radical parental rejection as a reactionary response to queer offspring.