What Is Horror Poetics? Part V: The Point of No Return
by J †Johnson
If the encounter with the strange here is not straightforwardly pleasurable (the pleasurable would always refer to previous forms of satisfaction), it is not simply unpleasant either: there is an enjoyment in seeing the familiar and the conventional becoming outmoded.
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
[T]o be queer is to be an Other who exists in opposition to the mainstream, causing social unease, which is reflected in horror films.
—Heather O. Petrocelli, Queer for Fear
When we talk about horror as post-rational, we talk about people leaving or being expelled from the normative world, and normativity itself. A person onscreen experiences something that does not fit into the world they have learned to accept as the only reality. That’s just the way it is comes to mean something different to them in a moment where they find themselves outside what has been defined as normal. A disorienting reversal occurs, where this person acquires an exterior credibility from direct experience that is internally denied both agency and authority. Exterior to the film is the audience, who shares the strange experience and tends to recognize it even as it is called into question.¹ Within the film, the person attempts to speak across the veil of normalcy, to reveal what they have seen—to say, what you have told me about the world is not true, or is not the only truth—and are met with incredulity. They are told that their experience is not real—they must be mistaken to perceive something strange and unusual, or to think that what they know matters.² They are not normal, and must be corrected, or face rejection and expulsion from family, community, and society—in some cases, they are expelled from humanity, or simply killed. The stakes for reintegration could not be higher.
That moment in horror where³ we can no longer deny that we have gone beyond the limits of the rational world puts the lie to normality. The viewer must decide whether to accept horror on its own terms, bracket it as only horror, or reject it completely and return to the so-called normal world. In any case, their orientation to that ostensible consensus reality has been queered. In sharing the queer experience of that person onscreen, the viewer has also been queered. Horror makes you queer. Deal with it.
That’s what horror is: a queerness that challenges what we perceive to be normal. People who fear queerness do so because they cannot come to terms with the queer world they help produce: there are no others but those who are othered. In an age where it is increasingly difficult to assert normalcy, where any claim to a prior sense of normalcy becomes absurd, horror tells us stories that make sense. Horror, after all, doesn’t credibly claim that everything was fine until the monster showed up. Of course, there is a mode of reactionary horror that says just that: if we defeat the monster, things will be normal again. But once we have seen the monster, we know they came from the same places we came from, and were there all along. We know we are changed by having seen them.⁴ We know the world of monsters is real. We know that we too are monsters, because the monster is outside normalcy, and so are we. Even reactionary horror, in its panic, puts the lie to claims of normalcy, and that is why horror and queerness threaten norms. That is also why horror is dismissed as childish, grotesque, silly, unserious, disgusting, abnormal. Horror transgresses correctness and rejects the notion of correction. That is why horror is queer.
What is normal in the world: homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, nationalism, economic and environmental exploitation, total war. When normality is disrupted, so is business as usual. Getting back to business is returning to these normal conditions. Nor can normality be corrected, except in the sense that normality is the assertion of correctness (where what is correct is what is normal).⁵ We must queer these norms in order to unsettle them if we are to reject the world as it is.
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The monster is the future, according to Derrida. Well, he says it the other way: the future is monstrous. But let’s reverse that formulation in order to literalize it and think about what the monster means to us. This is the condition of writing and reading: we are moving between a past, a present, and potential futures. The writer writes for and to those futures, and lives therefore with monsters: those speculative figures who are always in the process of showing themselves, or warning us of what is to come, and of domesticating themselves in becoming familiar to us. No wonder we are suspicious of writers, who have the capacity to bring us into being, just as they have the ability to dispel false conceptions. It is the power to shake foundations: a direct threat to anyone invested in the status quo. No wonder as well we are so often disappointed with writers who fail to challenge norms and help us see other futures, other presents, other pasts.
If these are the larger stakes of writing—and monster making—: changing the world—there are smaller, more local stakes as well. What Is Horror Poetics? as an ongoing series attempts to contextualize and delve into the stakes for engaging horror, and in doing so it creates the monster it pursues, the monster that pursues in return. The unique space of Cul-de-sac of Blood ⁶ allows for a different and deliberate sort of being in the future for this serial inquiry. We have fallen into the practice of writing one installment for each cycle of the publication, and we tend to draft the next installment before the previous cycle begins. That is to say “Part IV: Metaphor and the Monster” was written in draft form before cycle 3 began, and we are writing Part V at the end of cycle 3 (which concluded in December 2023). Only now are we coming to realize the ramifications of this habit. Much of what we contribute to CDSOB (like Friday Features) is posted within weeks of writing, so it is relatively contemporary with our lived poetics.⁷ And there is this other strain of thought that we develop in periodic installments that is in conversation with those occasional pieces, but is held onto for further consideration and later circulation. That serial strain is informed by what happens during the cycle (our own writing, reading, and viewing, along with conversations with others about their horror poetics), and it also informs what we write and share between serial installments.
In other words, What Is Horror Poetics? is monstrous to the extent that it is both continually revealing itself and stashing itself in the future. As long as I write it, it remains monstrous to me as well, because it exists in and as the future. That goes for installments we have yet to write, as well as the current installment we continue to develop and revise over the course of a given cycle—here we are, a week before cycle 5 begins (already the past as you are reading this), still revising and adding footnotes and asides to this essay. So as you read these pieces, keep in mind that they move forward in all directions, as do we all. And remember that here be monsters, as in that mirror over there.⁸
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When we say horror makes you queer, we don’t mean to trivialize queerness or falsely attribute a queer identity. It should be clear as well that we do not think of horror as trivial. The more we think about what it means to think about horror, and what horror means (which always of course begs the question of what it means to whom), the more we are convinced of what many queer commentators claim: that horror does not only offer itself up to queer interpretation, but horror is inherently queer. Typically this claim is based on horror’s intrinsic treatment of otherness and its fundamental interest in transgression. Our understanding of horror as queer includes this idea of the audience identifying with two figures in horror: the person who recognizes a world outside the normal, ordinary, rational world they had previously accepted to be all there is; and the monstrous other. ⁹
We also understand that monstrosity is a relational matter, and that proximity to monstrosity is as catchy for humans as proximity to humanity is for monsters. In short, the monster might be a queer other or a queering other. And once we know what horror reveals about reality—that reality is a horror, and this is not distinct from so-called normalcy—we are changed. That awareness, if we do not deny it, pushes us outside normality, as a queer subject. We have to deal with that. If we can’t or won’t deal with it, we can only choose to ignore horror or identify with those within horror who persist in denying there is anything beyond the rational, normal world. What a drag that would be.
So if horror makes you queer, you have a choice to make. Those who get caught up in the who’s next of horror miss the what’s next of horror.
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Welcome to cycle 5 of Cul-de-sac of Blood. It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for (checks site) two years now! We started this like you start anything you love: in daydreams. We talked about it on couches, walks, bars. We sketched out logos and reached out to friends. We watched tons of movies and read endless horror novels. And eventually we brought it into the world along with our writers and readers. What makes something real is to share it. Well, it’s real in our heads, but when we let it out, it becomes something else. It stretches out, sheds its skin, tracks the moon, and howls the first and last cry to end all that went silent before it. Whatever brought you here, we thank you for joining us, and for sharing your horrors and ours.
Now, let’s make this happen. If you’ve ever read something in CDSOB that made you realize you have something to share with us, please do.¹⁰ We don’t publish everything we receive, but we do read and appreciate everything people trust with us. Have a look at our revised mission statement to get a sense of what we’re looking for. We want to both celebrate horror as it is and push it into places it has only warned us about: places just as unsettling but more inclusive of the vast array of non-normative experience. Rather than reiterate or replicate harm, we want to find a way through it, even if it’s a fraught path. We call this horror poetics because there are stakes to revealing what scares us, and facing it together. And we have a responsibility to not just circulate horrible images, but to meet the monster and come to terms with them. That’s where things get complicated, because it means recognizing that the monster has their own terms to be met. To be clear: we aren’t just a queer-inclusive publication, we’re a queer publication. Horror is queer. If you can see that in your writing, CDSOB may be a home for you. It’s haunted, of course, but it’s a happy house as well. Swing by and have a scream with us.
¹ This is part of the reason why films that narratively suggest a person has not experienced what we saw them experience are particularly upsetting or exasperating.
² Though it is said like this: “You did not see what you thought you saw. It is not real.”
³ We insist on treating the moment as a place, a border, a line, a temporal location: a moment where rather than a moment when. This is how film as a visual medium treats time. Throughout this series of essays we have intentionally conflated film and literature, to speak about horror as genre. For the sake of the framing image of this installment—a person onscreen experiences something that does not fit into the world—we speak directly about film, but we could adapt these points to include other motifs of horror. Of course, they have their own formal conditions and capacities.
⁴ “The horror story that ultimately ends with a triumphant return to the status quo isn’t doing its job. ... Yes, by all means, reveal that horrific truth—but once revealed, how can anyone ever be the same again? They can’t. They’ve been changed. There’s no going back.” See Paul Tremblay’s “The H Word: The Politics of Horror,” which delineates and distinguishes reactionary and progressive horror.
⁵ If this sounds like circular logic, that is because normality is cyclical, reiterative, and self-consuming.
⁶ One of our foundational assertions is that we can do poetics in public as we talk and write about and through horror. More on this to come.
⁷ And here let us briefly revisit two concepts: the plural self and poetics as the lived experience of the implications for our writing practice. In any given moment we have both the impression of a unified self—an I who is the agent of our thoughts and actions—and a confluence of the selves we have been, and who cannot be logically or experientially contained in the first person. The I we might have used last week has not gone through the intervening time between then and now, and cannot represent the I we might use now. We could say the same for the first-person plural, in that last week’s we is not the same confluence of selves we speak from now. However, at least to use the first-person plural in this way acknowledges that confluence (and invites collaboration with our potential future selves): the way we think with ourselves from different vantage points over time, and the way we think with other people. And just as it doesn’t always feel right, or accurate, to use the first-person singular pronoun, that we doesn’t always work. We need both subject positions, and more. Divya Victor has said she is hungry for all pronouns in her poetry, a sentiment we deeply admire. Our writing is nourished by first person, second person, and a queer, capacious we & they. As for poetics, they are the stakes for our writing and thinking, set to the strange music of embodiment.
⁸ If you are a vampire, here is your mirror. See also Jalal Toufic’s (Vampires), which offers a textual image of the undead who cannot otherwise see themselves. Still, we might ask, what does a vampire see in the mirror? Do they see the nothing that is there—that weird presence of absence Mark Fisher (in The Weird and the Eerie) describes as that which does not belong? How uncanny to look in the mirror and see your own absence. How strange to see yourself on screen.
⁹ This monstrous other is pursuer and pursued. If you see monsters, you have to contend with others who do not, and who might insist that you do not see them either. You might also have to contend with monsters who see you.
¹⁰ And if you suffer as many of us do from Imposter Syndrome, and wonder if you are a horror writer, consider Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Part 5). Is Jason in it? For that matter, is Michael Myers in Halloween III: Season of the Witch? Um, yeah they are! You’re in it too.
Read What Is Horror Poetics? Part I , Part II, Part III, and Part IV.