The Necessity of Horror

On the healing balm of terror

ChatGPT’s visual interpretation of this article. The article itself is human-made.

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Miley asked,

What's your favorite horror genre? Do you think there's a superior medium for that genre, or is it just a case by case basis for each story? And then if you were going to make a horror film or write a novel, which medium would you pick? Do you think there are themes that get overlooked in horror (either not enough stories or under appreciation)?

I read widely across the horror genre, but my first love is Cosmic Horror, especially the work of H.P. Lovecraft and, more recently, Thomas Ligotti. For those unfamiliar, Cosmic Horror is a genre that probes our place in the universe and our condition as tiny creatures in a vast, incomprehensible expanse. There’s something that feels real and almost religious about cosmic horror that I can’t shake.

Whatever God I worship is closer to Lovecraft’s Elder Gods (as a metaphor, not literally) than the Christian God. The coldness, wildness, vastness, and mind-consuming mystery of the cosmos and whatever lies beyond it can be described as God, but it is a far cry from the personal supernatural deity of modern Christianity. Lovecraft, Ligotti, and other horror masters have given me an avenue to explore my relationship with the cosmos and my feelings about it. They have helped me understand that the Holy and the Terrible are often the same thing.

At the same time, reading Cosmic Horror has helped me reconnect with the awe found in Abrahamic scriptures. The God of the Old Testament is a being as horrific as He is beautiful, as terrible as He is loving. “He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies,” writes the Psalmist in Psalm 18:11. The Old Testament God is incomprehensible, shrouded in both light and dark, and to look on His face is to be destroyed.

This all feels true about our place in the universe and our relationship to it. Cosmic Horror gives me a lens through which I can examine its mysteries.

As for the best medium for expressing cosmic horror, I’m biased toward the written word. I’ve been working through the short stories of Thomas Ligotti which have reinforced for me that there is no substitute for literature. Through his masterful prose, Ligotti makes me feel strange and immaterial things that I’ve never felt before. As much as I love film, I have always had a wider range of experiences in literature.

What themes get overlooked in horror? I don’t know. But what I do want to see is more great horror that speaks to the human condition.

Horror is a medium where we can, and must, explore the taboo, the horrific, and the unspeakable. The very best horror stories speak directly to the human condition and allow us a safe, sanctioned space to express our deepest fears. The Exorcist speaks to our terror of a godless world, existential doubt, female sexuality, and the wildness of female adolescence. The Books of Blood by Clive Barker are about the excesses of carnality and how the extremes of pleasure open a door into hell. The Shining by Stephen King (and Kubrick’s adaptation) is about alcoholism and domestic abuse. Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons is about confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and a global system that preys on the vulnerable. The best horror literature rises above mere schlock and gore and heals us by allowing us to witness and accept our deepest fears and shame.

Stephen King expressed this best in his introduction to the 2001 edition of The Shining:

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives... the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance, it seems to me, and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families. To look directly at such brilliance is to be blinded, and so we create any number of filters. The ghost story, the horror story, the uncanny tale – all of these are such filters.

We humans carry an incomprehensible burden of darkness, and polite society rightly doesn’t give us a place to vent it. But there is one place in the library — a dark, forbidden section which, paradoxically, is also socially sanctioned — where you can explore any darkness to your heart’s content. You might need to look at the shadow of drug abuse or the darkest consequences of your sexual fantasies; you might need to come face to face with the nightmare of child sex abuse or confront your deepest existential fears about your place in the universe. Horror literature is where you can plumb those depths, and thank God. When I was recovering from a shooting in which I witnessed my friends get murdered, it was horror that put the monster safely behind the movie screen and the pages of a book where I could finally look at him and come to understand him.

I am convinced that we need horror. We need it because we are fucked up broken perverts and reading is, as John Milton argued in Areopagitica, the safest way to experience vice and human darkness. We are violent and grieving creatures. That violence and grief never fully go away; they just get sublimated into safer mediums that can’t hurt us or others. The best horror doesn’t merely indulge that violence and grief, but transmutes it, integrates the shadow, and helps us become whole. So, when you ask me what themes in horror are overlooked, I think we need more horror that looks unflinchingly at the human condition.

I don’t think people need to enjoy horror, to be clear. But it is one available avenue by which we face our darkness, violence, and deepest fears about the world. Frankly, I’m more afraid of, and for, people who never do the work of integrating such darkness than the people who face horror head-on.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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