What Is Horror Poetics?
Part III: It Has to Hurt

by J †Johnson

Read What Is Horror Poetics? Part I and What Is Horror Poetics? Part II

“In all the slashers Letha’s been memorizing, the least believable part isn’t Jason or Michael getting back up, or this all being Freddy’s dream, or nobody figuring out Ghostface is plural, or that a children’s doll can rack up this high a bodycount. It’s that—Cheerleader Camp, say, or Sleepaway Camp: dead kids are showing up, but the administrators never make a big deal about that.”

—Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper (224)

To write horror we need to read it, and to read it well we need to read across time and culture. Any literature listens before it speaks, and learns from its precedents. If horror literature and film are a way to tell stories about ourselves and our world, they are both a variation on other types of story and on other horror stories. This reworking of common material might be more conspicuous in monster tropes, haunted houses and stories about what Stephen King calls The Bad Place, and demonic realms; but all good stories circulate, get told and retold. 

And each teller leaves their mark. That’s true in any art that forms and emerges from the commons of story.

Some of the horror comes from the telling itself. This is true for performative characters like Vincent Price, Alfred Hitchcock, Elvira, The Crypt Keeper, The Boulet Brothers, and other spooky hosts. But it’s also true for storytellers who embrace wrongness and transgression as a horror trigger. I’m not sure Lovecraft was self-reflective or consciously performative about his xenophobia, but I know King gets a kick out of tormenting us with disturbing scenes of sexualized or racialized violence. 

This year I reread It for the first time since the novel came out in 1986, when I was closer to the age of the characters as kids than I am now to their adult selves in the novel. It’s only recently that I have returned to the King novels I read as a teenager. As I approached 40, I revisited epic literature and read Dante’s Inferno. Closer to my dotage, pushing 50, I returned to a different forest, and those monsters that scared me when I first got into horror. The storytelling in It repeatedly segues from nostalgic scenes of kids playing together to scenes where those same characters are abused, hunted, and attacked (as children and later as adults). The shape and logic of the narrative suggests that for the happy memories of childhood to be meaningful they have to be weighed against the horror of being vulnerable and often disbelieved. Much of the plot hinges on adult characters recovering traumatic memories of childhood in order to face that horror again; when they defeat that old monster, they lose their youthful credulity as well.

The horror we are left with is the possibility that we have to lose our childhood memories (the good ones and the horrible ones) to spare us what can’t be incorporated into our adult world view: fantasy and imagination give way to the rational, non-magical world we learn to live in so we can get by.

Maybe this is another function of horror, and what draws us to it. Not only does it help us process our dark impulses, or give us an outlet for misanthropic tendencies—it gives us a break from the rational world that kills our imaginations and tells us the monsters we see around us (those who feed on fear and vulnerability) don’t exist, or they actually know what’s best for us, or should be celebrated for their relentlessness, power, and wealth. Or we’re told that only monsters reject rational (read: conventional) concepts like good, bad, man, woman, beauty, progress, security. Another function of horror, then, is to allow identification with the monster, and celebration of non-rational monstrosity. It makes room for us to be our own monsters, rather than filling the role of someone else’s boogeyman.

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The self-described Redneck Film Critic Joe Bob Briggs has a succinct horror poetics: It’s gotta hurt. As much as his brash, say-anything persona has evolved over the years, and as much as he has learned from the sex-positive, progressive feminism of his Last Drive-In co-host Diana Prince (AKA Darcy the Mail Girl), Briggs continues to work the line that snakes through populist sentimentalism, orneriness, and antagonism. He doesn’t hesitate to point out when a film does something cheap, mean, pointless, or reactionary, but he’s equally suspicious of virtue signaling, and is not immune to his own periodic cranky-to-reactionary rant. He knows film history and how to put it in context, and he’s a riveting (if endearingly long-winded) storyteller even when he’s shaking his fist right off the rails. And he’s certainly not playing scared in talking about a subject as complex and troubled as the history of horror movies. 

But I’m trying desperately to bring this back around to that concise horror poetics: It’s gotta hurt. On the one hand this could mean a scary movie should or at least could terrify us. (Stay tuned for Paul Dellevigne’s forthcoming essay on Terrifier’s Art the Clown, who is not here for laughs.) But it also asserts that horror is fucked up, and if we try to unfuck it, we’ll have something other than horror but we’ll still be stuck in the same horrific world. Only we won’t have horror films to help us cope with and maybe even better understand the world. 

The question here is whether horror is coming for you. The problem is it comes for all of us differently, and seems not to come for some of us at all. If you’re used to watching it come for someone else while you stand by unmolested, horror doesn’t hurt you as much even if you enjoy it more.

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In the logic of It, we repress the trauma of the worst horror we have experienced as vulnerable, disregarded children at the cost of losing not only our childhood memories but our childhood and all that was possible when we were children. Would you return to that magic if you had to reawaken the horror as well? What if you weren’t the one to suffer the consequences?

Horror has to hurt if we have feelings for each other. That includes the monster of the week. And our capacity to recognize that one person’s monster is another person’s loved one reminds us that if and when the pitchforks are pointed at us, we have backup.

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Now, as an introduction to cycle 3, here’s a peek through the window of that weird house in the belly of the cul-de-sac. The following is adapted from the note we wrote to previous contributors as we started gathering work for this cycle. We share this with our readers at large to invite you all to consider sending us your horror poetics, in whatever form they take.

It’s not a horror franchise until we get a third installment. Maybe it’s 3D, but it’s definitely jumping the shark or changing its mask. It’s also becoming self-aware. Here at Cul-de-sac of Blood we know that what’s special about this little horror show is our contributors’ willingness to go there with us: to the scary places inside and outside. And to the strange, unsettling, hilarious places we return to because, as weird as they are, they feel like home.

So we’re reaching out to past (and future!) contributors to ask you to come on back to the old cul-de-sac with us: say hello, and let us know if you have anything stirring that you’d like to share. As ever, we invite you to let us know what horrors you’ve been watching or reading, whether or not it feels related to what you’re sending for consideration.

Also, a reminder: we’re not here to tell anyone what is and isn’t horror (or science fiction, fantasy, or other outer genres), even though we’re always trying to figure out what scares and thrills us. You get to decide what might be at home in Cul-de-sac of Blood. Know that we’re trying to go there with you too.

Thanks for revisiting “What Is Horror Poetics?” with us. We hope the latest entry in this series further sparks your imaginations and encourages you to contribute. (See our recent reading period announcements: a call for chapbooks and a Friday the 13th feature; we’re also always looking for Friday Features.) This series is not about defining horror, but about delving deeper into our fascination with it. How do we get so much pleasure and inspiration from genres that are fundamentally disturbing? Sure the world is already strange and horrible, but maybe scary movies can challenge our complacency. Through horror and related genres, we can cause trouble and we’re here for it. Are you with us?