"Respite in the Macabre: On the Horror Genre" by Mina Hamedi
On a 6pm video call, Victor LaValle described horror as:
A genre of storytelling that tells you one day the house is calm, and the next day a demon has taken over the grounds.
He said it corroborated most with his childhood experiences compared to other genres.
Horror is life veering. Horror is a mood, an aura, a fairy tale beset by shadows. Horror is the realization; it is searching for the source of the sounds and facing the mirror, whereas terror is the beginning of suspense or fear, and the questions: Where is my sister? Where is the light coming from? What is that mark? Horror is the answer, the promises fulfilled.
The first time I stepped into this genre, I was around twelve years old. It was a summer afternoon in Istanbul, the magnolia trees in our garden a bright green, leaves beating against our silvery blinds. I grabbed the VHS of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) from the attic shelf and brought it to the kitchen. It was quiet around the house—I don’t remember where my parents or sister were. I put the tape in and pressed play. Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand became my siren song as the credits rolled a few hours later, the sun had set, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, my knees pressed to my chest. Scream opened up worlds that went beyond my worn copy of Edgar Allan Poe stories and the condemned role of Pugsley Addams to my sister’s Wednesday Addams (I was the younger sibling).
Horror as art and entertainment is not new. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Mesopotamian epic about a king in search of a mystical figure and eternal life. His fear of death drives the tale. The chronicles of a Syrian patriarch from the 9th century CE cite an encounter between the physical and supernatural realms. According to his account, villagers on the Euphrates in northern Syria unearthed a stone slab bearing Median inscriptions as well as a bronze cauldron and statue with a chain around its neck. The village sorcerers whispered spells over the statue until it said, “Sixty thousand demons are imprisoned in this figurine.” The gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries like The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde confronted the reality of evil and of multiple selves. The silver screen creations of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), which I would watch, years later on an October night at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, played with shadows and twisting landscapes, echoing the isolation that was characteristic of German Expressionism.
It wasn’t until grad school that I truly questioned why I was so drawn to horror. I met my raven-haired, best friend, Naomi, who had written an incredible essay that managed to tie the Saw franchise with Washington Irving’s famed short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
A kindred spirit, I immediately thought.
Our joint love of horror has not only blossomed into the magazine NAUSIKȂE, devoted to all possible mediums of the genre, but also into constant discussions and interrogations of why we love this particular kind of creation and what it means to crave it. We turn to horror, be it in the form of literature, film, or even interior design, when we feel unmoored.
Aldous Huxley phrased it as: Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Horror is where we are able to find untethered human emotion, or the extreme, without having to subject ourselves to the decisions that led there. Horror forces you to consider: what would I do to survive as an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation? Horror is also a practice in empathy. We fall in love with the characters and we stay with them as they endure the threats of death.
I always wonder how far a writer, director, or actor can stretch the possibilities of death. I say this knowing that this is not everyone’s genre of preference. I say it knowing there are misogynistic aspects to many films and sexist or racist tropes that people have spent decades fighting against. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is about the travails of people locked in a house, trying to survive. They are a microcosm of society. The lead is a Black male, who everyone refuses to listen to and in the end, he is shot by the police. Prom Night (1980) and other slasher films depicted mostly female victims, screaming in terror or being subjected to torture. I don’t want to blindly praise horror; I just want to tell you why I like it.
Since March 2020, I’ve devoured more horror films than ever before. I watched Sleepwalkers (1992) with my sister, Leyla, who lives in the same building as me, and set herself the task of reading (and watching) everything Stephen King has ever written. I also watched The Wicker Man (1973) and An American Werewolf in London (1981) in a quiet home in Cold Spring with close friends—our last getaway from the city. I forced my boyfriend to watch Valentine (2001) on Valentine’s Day, hoping the soundtrack would make up for David Boreanaz’s bizarre performance. We watched Videodrome (1983) in bed, and I felt acutely aware of my pulse, pressing my fingers against my neck, my legs restless under the blanket. I even formed a horror film club with a few friends, designating a night each week to watch a film and discuss it after. We began with Cure (1997) directed by Kurosawa followed by Santa Sangre (1989) directed by Jodorowsky.
Santa Sangre stayed with me for days, like the dreams I would have about giant snakes living in my vent, or my family members covering their faces with volcanic mud in shallow waters. I missed the nights I would wrestle myself from those dreams, grab my phone, and type up every detail I could remember before my eyelids closed again.
I read a small paperback of Rosemary’s Baby I had bought at a flea market and finally framed an old 1960s poster of House of Usher. During an internet deep dive, I came across Weird Tales, a fantasy and horror pulp magazine founded in 1922. It had published the early works of Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and H.P. Lovecraft. I scrolled through hundreds of mesmerizing pin-art covers, drawn by Margaret Brundage, “The Queen of Pulp.” The backdrops were bright yellow, crimson, teal and aqua, with semi-nude women either cowering from monstrous creatures or villainous brutes. Altars rose from the foreground, spider webs cloaked nymphs, and demons cast spells in front of grimoires. I saw the cover of the spring 1934 edition, featuring the story, “A Witch Shall Be Born,” about a witch who replaces her twin sister as queen of a city state. After hours of searching, I found an old copy for sale, and immediately ordered it while listening to Wolfsheim and Sisters of Mercy, longing for the dark, late nights at Pyramid Club, dancing with my sister.
I think about what LaValle said regarding tropes:
The beauty of tropes is that people have them in their heads and they know how the story will go. People will give you the energy and emotion they expect from those tropes, so you can make it breathe just a little bit, or tip it just a little bit, until you find the pleasure.
That pleasure has come to mean so many things and is directly linked to the events or fears of any given era. Our fears, and our monsters, all change with the times. The monsters in the movies of the Great Depression were all ultimately defeated because viewers needed that reassuring ending. The special effects of 1950s films like Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1956) warned the audience against foreign threats during the Cold War. The 60s marked the rise of zombie movies—the monster of the 21st century. Zombies were the perfect metaphor: forsaking the rules, dismantling society, and starting over. Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead, which depicted the first “zombie apocalypse,” showed that the raw impulses that come out of people during times of crisis are way more terrifying than the walking dead.
Slasher films, which began with Psycho, then Halloween, and so on, made the villains the star, and initiated the “final girl” trope—a young woman who is both the victim and the last survivor, the one who fights back. Naysayers claimed these were misogynistic films, but what other genre would so powerfully depict real-life manifestations of the kind of threats and fears we face as women every single day? What other genre forces us to face things we normally refuse to?
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes:
If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that novels, movies, TV and radio programs—even the comic books—dealing with horror always do their work on two levels. On top is the ‘gross-out’ level, when Regan vomits in the priest’s face in The Exorcist. On another more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search. And what it’s looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level.
On the surface, Candyman is about a ghost who murders anyone who summons him by saying his name five times in front of a mirror. Why was he killed? Because he was a Black man who fell in love with the daughter of a white landowner in the 19th century.
Horror is not ambiguous and it's clear purpose is to scare. I find that clarity, freeing. It is as if by submerging yourself in a horror story, you will be unmade, but you can also re-emerge, different than before, if you choose. The overused adage is true: we imagine horrors in order to cope with real ones.
In my case, they force me to question: How would I act in these scenarios? What would I do to survive? Would I die in the first twenty minutes, or fight until the end?
There is that intoxicating simplicity: we take horror and use it to destroy itself. At the end of the day, it is a projection, not a reality. Horror is the promise that at the end of each night, as I curl up with my cat beside me, I am safe. Safe, but just a little bit changed.
Mina Hamedi grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and is of Turkish/Iranian descent. She works at the literary agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where she is building her own list focusing on literary fiction and experimental non-fiction. She is writing a collection about her grandfather, the family company he founded 75 years ago, and the nature of legacies.
