Essay List
Unseen Terrors: the Monsters in our Minds
First published Ginger Nuts of Horror, December 2025
“What we fear most is the sensation of being afraid, which endows the most familiar objects with frightful possibilities.”
Julia Briggs, Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond, Springer Press, 1998
The human brain is a powerful thing. It has the ability to create intricate and detailed images with just a few tiny prompts. In times of great stress, sometimes what we imagine is far worse than the reality, and the monsters we envision in our minds are often more terrifying than the monster itself. The reason for this has roots far more complex than one essay could explore, but primarily, and most importantly, the brain is programmed to recognise and respond to fear.
At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt used his First Inaugural Address to say:
“… let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
While Roosvelt’s aim was to restore confidence to those who were suffering from the economic collapse, his words highlight how fear prevents action and worsens the situation. Much like Frank Herbert echoed in DUNE (1965) by reminding us, “Fear is the mind-killer.”
Horror, as a genre, is often subject to discussion and disagreement. As a general rule, for fiction to satisfy the criteria it should provoke an intense reaction of some kind, usually shock or revulsion. The catalyst for that reaction might be something so irrational or extreme, it is impossible to comprehend, like, scary monsters, tons of gore, and intensely bloody deaths. But of course, there is never one, easy answer. Horror, like any other genre, is made up of a massive spectrum of hundreds of sub-genres and thematic crossovers that weave their way into a thousand different personal paranoias and anxieties.
While some may argue that horror should, at the very least, be confronting in some way, it is also often seen as a safe space to explore those complex emotions, offering a cathartic outlet to experience fear with few unwanted side-effects. Modern research has proved that engaging in recreational horror (e.g. books, movies or video games) allows us to experience feelings of fear in a safe and controlled environment. Consequently, frequent consumption allows us to develop personalised strategies that help us regulate our emotions. These strategies can lead to stronger and more improved coping skills when faced with real-world trauma. (If you’re interested in learning more about this, this is a great start: https://www.coltanscrivner.com/publications.)
As Jennifer Aniston once said, “Here comes the science bit…”
Fear, on the other hand, is an equally visceral, and personal, emotional reaction to a perceived threat or danger. A natural and primitive emotion managed by the body’s sympathetic nervous system. It triggers physiological changes and alters brain chemistry, kicking the body into a state of alarm known as the Acute Stress Response, which most people know as ‘fight or flight’. A third state, ‘freeze,’ renders the body so paralysed by fear, it cannot run away or protect itself. (Additionally, a fourth state known as ‘fawn’ is prevalent in those who have suffered abuse or PTSD. It sees the individual attempt to manage the fearful situation by becoming compliant and agreeable.)
As a survival mechanism, fear keeps us safe and helps us recognise danger. It is also very personal to the individual. The brain doesn’t necessarily want us to be happy; it wants us to be safe. This is a conundrum that has been widely studied, especially in people with depression and anxiety. Rumination is one of the biggest drivers of these disorders, and it’s something our brains are infuriatingly good at. However, since the biology of fear involves some of the same chemical responses activated when experiencing pleasant emotions such as excitement and happiness—specifically, the release of cortisol (known as the stress hormone) and adrenaline (epinephrine)—people can experience either pleasant or unpleasant emotions to fear. Therefore, while the biological state of being frightened can be scientifically studied and monitored, the actual emotion of fear is closer to a psychological construct.
Our lizard brains are hard-wired to listen for unusual noises, or unexpected movement out of the corner of our eyes. We know to fear the things that go bump in the night in an empty house because anything could be a threat. It’s the reason why even if you’re not afraid of small insects, seeing one unexpectedly still might make you jump and your brain tells you, “It’s gonna bite you! Squish it while you can!”
Since fear is visceral, and personal, what scares me might not scare you, and vice versa. Our lived experiences give us a deep well of personal horrors to draw from, or sometimes our phobias have no real cause. There’s a reason I prefer psychological horror to actual monsters on screen. The thrill of imaging what it might be is often far more fascinating than what it is, so much so, I am often let down when the monster is finally revealed. Sometimes the barest glimpse can create the most terror. Everyone who has seen SIGNS (2002) knows what I mean here. A slightly out-of-focus alien creature slinks past the camera pausing only for a second to make eye contact with the viewer before disappearing into the bushes. The screams of the children in the movie coincide with our own uneasy shivers. When we finally see the creature in all its glory later on, it barely lives up to the hype.
But how do you make great horror without featuring a monster or a villain? Answer: You tell a story so well you never need to reveal it, because the audience creates an idea of it themselves. The power of suggestion ensures that a vague description can be more terrifying than a precise one. By feeding the reader or viewer small crumbs, they in turn build up a bigger, and more frightening image in their mind. Some movie critics argue that the decision to omit an actual monster can make a film seem cheap or weaken the plot. It deprives the audience of facing the evil, or indeed, giving evil a face.
‘Horror without monsters’ is a wide and varied genre, with many different examples, certainly far more than I could list in one place. What follows is a very small sample. I believe it’s also important to acknowledge the limits of different mediums. While movies and video games rely on visual storytelling, books have a much wider scope and there are likely hundreds of examples I could provide. Notable titles include Shirley Jackson’s WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (1962), IN THE DREAM HOUSE by Carmen Maria Machado (2019), WHITE IS FOR WITCHING by Helen Oyeyemi (2009) and THE OTHER by Thomas Tryon (1971). Psychological horror fiction, especially without a supernatural subplot, relies on a strong story and characters to elicit fear or anxiety in the reader, and my personal opinion is this is why when trying to make these complex texts into movies that impact is often lost. That said, the following movies do manage to capture the fear element very well.
In 1999, with the internet not being quite the obtrusive beast we know today, the makers of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) marketed it so authentically, many movie-goers actually believed it was real. Arguably one of the most definitive found-footage movies, the online hype generated enough interest to ensure it grossed over $200 million worldwide. All the horror is suggested to us, through the protagonists’ reactions and decisions. The more they discover, the less they—and the viewer—actually sees. And the alleged Witch is never even shown on screen. Most interestingly, the movie can be watched in two very different ways: one which hinges on the characters slowly eroded mental stability and suspicion of each other, another which invites an unseen supernatural force into the mix influencing their experiences.
The element of confusion and erosion of safety is a common theme in psychological horror. For example, in Jordan Peterson’s NOPE (2022) the UFO ‘monster’ named Jean Jacket takes many confusing forms before finally being revealed. As a cloud, a flying saucer, and eventually, a one-eyed jellyfish-like blob, Jean Jacket has form but not face, and functions as a representation of fear, despite being a physical entity. The fear derives not from its horrendous appearance, but what it does to those around it.
Another play on the theme of you don’t need to see it to be afraid of it is found in EVENT HORIZON (1997) As Dr. William Weir tells Captain Miller, “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.” While the impact of whatever force is influencing the crew plays out in horrifying, gruesome detail, what it actually is is not revealed. It is a vague ‘something’ that wreaks carnage without ever revealing itself. Madness, or monster, it’s difficult to ascertain, but while gore is certainly a central part of the story, it’s the lack of control and the crippling claustrophobia of being trapped by the unknown that drives the fear aspect.
Similarly, the independent psychological horror, THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE (2015) by Perry Blackshear, explores mental illness as horror, as the protagonist becomes convinced humans are being taken over by demonic creatures. What the audience sees is a projection of Wyatt’s hallucinations, with truly unsettling moments weaved in with mundane, as the character’s mental health worsens. In THE TWILIGHT ZONE episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” (1960) the ‘monsters’ (or rather, aliens) are indeed revealed at the end, but despite their direct involvement in the situation, it is paranoia and distrust that turn people into the real monsters. See also, 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016) when aliens invade the world, it seems logical that humans would band together for safety. What transpires instead is a situation more terrifying than destructive, genocidal aliens, as a supposedly safe refuge becomes a prison, and the real danger is far closer to home.
Finally, JACOB’S LADDER (1990) that for me will always be the pinnacle of psychological horror, is primarily an [spoilers ahead!] exploration of what might happen to the human mind at the point of death. In JACOB’S LADDER, the horror does not come from the character’s eventual demise so much as what was done to him prior without his consent. It also includes a deeply thought-provoking quote:
“If you’re afraid of dying, and you’re holdin’ on, you’ll see devils tearin’ your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein’ you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it.” Louis, JACOB’S LADDER
In all of these examples, fear as a psychological construct is linked strongly to the loss of autonomy and control. Confusion, manipulation, paranoia, misinterpretation, over-imagination and isolation: all of these emotions invoke a fear response that converts into horror as the experience is so shocking or illogical, it cannot be reasonably explained. Events outside the norm throw characters into emotional disarray or provoke them into acting in ways far beyond their baseline. When recreational horror finds a way to tap into that fear response, the monster frequently takes second place. I suggest the reasoning for this is when evil has a face, we can punch it. We can beat it. An abstract psychological construct is a much more difficult to reckon with, like a foul smell that assaults not only our nasal passages but worms its way into our brains.
A cursory search on the internet for “the scariest horror movies of all time” seems to lend weight to the idea that a really scary movie doesn’t need a knife-wielding bogeyman or a monstrous beast to frighten audiences. Instead, movies like INSIDIOUS (2010), SINISTER (2012), HOST (2020) and SKINAMARINK (2022) top the lists. Found-footage movies also score highly, suggesting that when the horror is grounded in some semblance of reality, it’s even more frightening.
Based on feedback from my own studies and research, most people who say watching recreational horror eases their real-life anxieties also say that for it to be really effective, they need to feel genuinely scared, not horrified. Some horror-enthusiasts with PTSD also report “self-triggering” to provoke a controlled trauma response using books and movies, which allows them to process the traumatic event. (This is a medically recognised method known as ‘exposure therapy’, or ‘flooding,’ although it usually takes a more careful and controlled approach.) The Acute Stress Response can be complex and multi-layered, as modern research also shows too much or too frequent cortisol can be a bad thing for our bodies, leading to hypervigilance and chronic stress. To reiterate, our brain doesn’t necessarily want us to be happy, it wants us to be safe. Although it seems a bit counterintuitive to keep flooding the engine with the aim of keeping it running. It is also interesting to note that individuals who enjoy recreational horror often have higher levels of general anxiety than their peers and yet turn to horror to calm that anxiety.
Fear and horror may indeed be close bedfellows, but they are not co-dependant on each other. When we consider the question, “What is horror?” we often focus on revulsion and disgust. Things that are visceral, shocking and quite often supernatural. But fear runs deeper than that. Fear is what fills us when we are abandoned, confused and made weak in some way. When we are cut off from our safe spaces, our communities and our peers. Being alone or isolated from support is incredibly scary. It’s the reason some of us get afraid of the dark or why being alone in an unfamiliar place makes us so uneasy. When the brain cannot see a monster, it will make one up for us. We crave that visualisation so we can respond and react. We need a psycho-killer to shoot, a bug to squish, or a ghoul to exorcise or immolate.
Most (not all) recreational horror has a resolution, most commonly that evil is vanquished, and the good guys get to relax knowing they’ve won. It sends a message that no matter how awful things might be, there’s always a chance that what’s wrong can be put right and all will be well in the world. Fear… lingers. That biochemical and emotional reaction to a perceived threat, whether actual or imagined, is not easy to control once it kicks in. It stays in our brains and wriggles into our subconscious. It reminds us that no matter how strong we might be, how fast we can run, how clever, calm or confident we are, there will always be strange things that go bump in the night, and not all of them can be beaten.
A Little Bit of Adrenaline is my Favourite Medicine: Horror, Healing and PTSD
June 2024
This essay has been a long time coming. I started drafting it eight months ago, to be precise. It’s funny, I always used to tell people I wrote creatively to help process my trauma and to make sense of an often unkind world. I’ve used “writing for wellness” for almost 35 years, assuming I begin the count from when I first began keeping a personal diary. Add in the years of stereotypical “teen-angst” poetry, some clumsy and poorly-planned attempts at copying my favourite horror authors in my twenties, fast-forward through motherhood when raising children took greater precedent over writing, and we reach what I thought of as the Comeback Period where I finally seemed to hit my stride. And then… disaster struck, and I found I couldn’t write for wellness anymore.
Strap yourselves in, folks. This could take a while.
Everyone knows what PTSD looks like. We’ve seen it played out plenty of times in the movies. The hyperventilating, hallucinating, flashback-driven character garnished with a-side-helping-of-auditory-fuckery commonly introduced in Horrors and Thrillers. The ‘Nam veteran (or Gulf, or whichever war seems applicable). The (usually female) sexual assault victim. The grieving parent who lost their child too soon, often because of their own actions. The problem is, PTSD is not really like that at all. These characters show fictional PTSD with little thought given to the reality. But how else can a filmmaker show someone in mental health crisis if not through a selection of over-exaggerated tropes?
It’s all bollocks, of course. And I should know, having spent the last eighteen months dealing with the reality. Oh, and using Horror to get me through it.
I’m T.L Wood and you may know me from previously published essays such as: ‘What You Need Right Now is a Nice Soothing Horror Story,’ ‘Staring Down the Darkness: Horror and Mental Health’ and ‘The Tao of the Black Dog.’ In case it isn’t obvious, I really like writing about Horror and mental health. In fact, maybe a little too much …
I shared a bit about what happened during the time, but to keep it simple, the TL/DR version (as the geek kids might say) is that in 2022 I experienced medical and dental trauma that caused a significant amount of drug-resistant nerve pain and ultimately resulted in the removal of all my adult teeth. I will also say upfront that while I hated having to make the choices I did, I do not regret making them, only that I wish I could have done so under better circumstances. Speaking from a place on the “other side” of trauma, I am happy with my decision and it has actually improved my life for the better. In fact, in some ways, I wish I’d had the knowledge and support to do this many years ago. But I would be lying if I said this was easy or had eliminated any residual mental distress. Unlike in the movies, there is rarely a handy fix for PTSD.
A few years ago, a friend shared a blog post with me. It expressed the idea that grief is like a ball in a box. As it bounces around and hits the sides, it causes a great deal of mental anguish. When the grief is fresh, the ball is massive, and it hits the box almost all the time, but as time passes, the ball gets smaller and the hits much weaker. We learn to cope with how that ball feels, and we learn not to upset the box. Sometimes we get the urge to give the box a shake, to remind ourselves of those feelings. Yes, humans can be quite complex creatures, and often do things that seem counterintuitive, but actually help us grow stronger and process our emotions. Just like when we immerse ourselves in Horror fiction when we’re feeling vulnerable or upset. To quote from one of my earlier essays: Horror, by its very nature, is confronting while showing us where the boundaries are. Horror lets us shake that box in a safe and controlled environment. It gives us space to feel uncomfortable but know we’re still in the driving seat.
I have to admit, I really liked the ‘ball in the box’ metaphor. I even liked a later re-telling of it that says the ball does not get smaller, but that the box grows bigger, implying that we grow around our grief rather than do things to make it shrink. They’re both fantastic, visual ways of understanding some deeply complex and painful feelings, and had helped me many times previously. I thought PTSD would also be like that. That eventually the pain would get smaller, or I would get bigger, and shaking the box would be a controlled way to process my experience. But I made a mistake.
Real talk once again: I genuinely think medication is a useful and valid tool to support people with finding and maintaining good mental health. I also respect and understand why some people don’t like it, don’t want it, or find it inappropriate for them. That said, my personal experience is that when it worked for me, it probably saved my life, but when it stopped working, it was a real bummer. So once again, in the interests of moving forwards: I tried it, at first it worked, things changed, and then nothing seemed to work at all.
I needed new tools.
I am almost at the top of the climbing wall when I feel the strength fade in my fingers and the muscles in my forearms start to spasm. My grip slips and I whimper, scrambling to gain purchase on the ledge. I hold on, balanced precariously, trying to support my weight, but I know I can’t stay that way forever. Gravity will always win.
I look down at the ground. It’s a hell of a long way. I will myself to carry on, to hold on for as long as I can. But the palms of my hands are slippery with sweat and terror has finally set in.
Oh, shit…
Oh, SHIIIIIIT!
I have no choice but to succumb. I let go and embrace the fall.
The floor comes up to meet me fast, but the impact never comes. The rope and harness do their jobs and keep me safe from harm. Above me, I hear the rumble of the auto-belay as it lowers me to the bottom. The descent takes mere seconds, but still I whisper a silent prayer — to who or what, I don’t know.
“Please don’t break. Please don’t break. Let me get down safely.”
And then my feet touch solid ground and I feel like a character in a superhero movie; all I’m missing is a scarlet cape.
My whole body thrums with adrenaline, and my heart threatens to pound out of my chest.
I turn and climb again.
Adrenaline is fucking amazing!
Adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, is both a hormone and a medication that works to regulate visceral functions. It plays an essential role in our fight-or-freeze response by basically dialling specific bodily functions up to eleven, such as: increasing blood flow to the heart and muscles, influencing our pupil dilation, and even affecting blood sugar levels. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)
When you experience a significant amount of stress, your body releases adrenaline to help you manage it. It helps you focus so you can deal with the situation. It provides a cover or distraction for any pain you might be feeling so you can cope with it. Your body knows when you are feeling a heightened sense of emotion and does whatever it can to shield you from harm.
I’m not a doctor, or a psychologist, or even a scientist. I’m a Horror writer, mostly. I cannot speak in detail about the full effects of adrenaline, or even explain exactly how it works, but I know what it does to my mind and body. And I love it.
I was forty-one the first time I went up an indoor climbing wall. My first thoughts were, “Oh, this isn’t as hard as I thought it would be,” followed by, “This is exciting!” and “Wow, I’m really high up…” and immediately after that came The Wobbles. My entire body started vibrating like I was being shocked with a low-level electric pulse. My legs trembled. My arms shook. My fingers simply stopped working. Before I could fight it or get my feelings under control, I experienced what I can only describe as an emotional power cut. I understand now that this was a freeze response — an automatic and involuntary response to a threat. In a split second, my brain had decided that freezing, rather than trying to fight or run away, was the best way to survive what was happening. Unfortunately, when you’re balanced on a ledge a long way from the ground, this is a rather unhelpful response.
When I was a kid, I had a toy called a wall climber. Made of rubber, it had sticky hands and feet. The idea was to throw it at a wall or window and it would “climb” down in a sort of rolling backflip. Eventually, as it picked up more cat-hair and carpet fluff, it lost its stickiness. It would hang for a moment, as each pad peeled away, before dropping ungracefully like a dead fly to the floor.
And that was how my first indoor rock climb ended.
Good job I was wearing a harness.
The Wobbles didn’t stop when I got to the ground, but weirdly, I didn’t feel scared. No, I was more exhilarated, excited, and rather damn impressed with myself for doing something I didn’t know I could. I’ve always loved things that terrified me physically, like rollercoasters, gravitrons and drop slides, but this felt different and new. I was thrumming with energy as if I’d gained a really awesome Power-Up just like Sonic the Hedgehog collects gold rings.
Like I said, I’m a Horror writer, so I know a thing or two about fear, or at least I thought I did. I realise now that it comes in many forms and doesn’t always manifest as dramatically as the movies might have you believe. I’ve experienced genuine fear quite a few times in my life, with a couple of those times feeling like it was the end for me. Oddly, those events didn’t cause my heart to pound or my whole life to flash before my eyes. No, it was in those moments that everything simply… stopped.
Despite building my career on manipulating words, I could never find the right ones to describe those emotions. How rubbish does it sound to say that in the moments before your apparent impending demise, there is no great fanfare or affirmation of your successes; your mind grows small, and you simply cease to be you. How boring. How illogical. No one would read that. We need fear in our fiction to be visceral, perhaps even violent, or frantic. We need to feel confronted by the tension, to feel our hysteria rise with the threat.
Sometimes, that is exactly how it happens; the body and brain work together to emit a resounding Luke Skywalker, “Nooooooo!” and to fight back the terror that overcomes them. But a fear response, unlike laughter, is not a universal language.
I think one of the best depictions of PTSD in the movies comes from one of my long-time personal favourites, ALIENS (1986). Ripley’s trauma shows up in sweat-coated nightmares and sudden, vivid flashbacks, punctuated with the banality of carrying on with her life as best she can. She smokes a lot and drinks too much coffee, and spends most of her time talking to her cat rather than people, and (aside from the smoking–I quit almost 20 years ago) that was pretty much me too. What works for some didn’t work for me, and the first therapist I saw was so desperately wrong a fit for me they set my healing journey back by months. During everything, it seemed easier to not talk about it. Not think about it. To compartmentalise it as much as possible, take the meds and just Carry On.
It was quite easy to stuff those memories into a box and shut the lid. To stay busy and focused on work. Although my experiences had stripped a hell of a lot of creativity out of me, I could still do well in my job and do a damn good impression of a functioning human being. Until I couldn’t.
Fight. Flight… Freeze.
I don’t really remember when it first happened, that sensation that everything had ground to a sudden halt, and I was merely outwardly observing myself, moving in excruciatingly slow motion. That “power cut” I felt when I first climbed, my body shutting down. Suddenly, it was happening when I was doing my shopping. In the shower. While driving my car. It was not only terrifying, it was also downright dangerous. My GP explained it was a survival response. My poor, battered brain, that I thought had been doing quite well until now, believed it needed to protect me from any further harm, and so it was perceiving everything, everywhere, all at once, as a danger. Except, rather than flooding me with adrenaline to get me the hell away from the threat, it was making me play possum at the most inconvenient moments.
People describe the symptoms of panic attacks in various ways. Most commonly, they have an elevated heart-rate and/or a tight chest, sweaty palms or feeling lightheaded, a dry mouth or shortness of breath. Yes, all of these things are down to our old friend adrenaline again, flooding our bodies with a fear response and getting us ready to fight or flee. A panic attack happens when this response is triggered, but there is no danger about to happen. Thus, a person can experience these symptoms in apparently stress-free situations, such as watching daytime television or while doing their grocery shop.
I’ve had panic attacks before, and I knew what they felt like. This was not that. Was it?
The common denominator across all panic attacks is: a strong feeling of impending dread, danger or foreboding.
“How did you feel when it happened?” my GP asked.
“Like I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it,” I replied.
“And what did you do? How did you make it stop?”
“Well…”
At this point you’re probably thinking, “Hey, T… I thought you said this was going to be about Horror?”
Yes. It is.
“So where’s the Horror?”
Funny thing about PTSD is that along with putting you in a state of what the psychologists call “hyperarousal” (which, contrary to how it might sound, is not about feeling really horny, but is a way to describe your body being constantly on high alert) it also dulls the parts of yourself that experience joy and excitement. Everything becomes very grey, dull, and boring; a bit like a damp February afternoon in Middlesbrough with fuck-all to look forward to and it’s always cold. (Apologies to my lovely Northern England friends. I spent 8 years living there after university, and my memories of the place ain’t so sweet. The Levellers sang it best with ‘Hope Street’.) When everything is boring, everything is boring. Literally nothing can bring even a spark of interest and concentrating on anything for any amount of time (even things you usually love doing) is incredibly difficult.
When you’re a writer by trade, that’s not a good thing. Goodbye words, hello writer’s block! (To any fellow writers reading this, I hope you never know that great disturbance in the Force, the pain it can inflict on a creative mind.)
The meds weren’t working. Talking wasn’t working. Time was marching on, but I wasn’t feeling any better. In fact, I was feeling much worse. I couldn’t make my brain work how I wanted and needed. I had no choice but to quit my job, and my creative thinking was completely blocked. I was resentful and angry and a very difficult person to be around, so I stopped being around people as much as possible. I felt so stupid and useless all the time; sometimes wondering if it would be better to give up and other times furious at myself for even considering such a thing.
That day when my GP asked me how I pulled myself out of the “impending doom” feeling, I wasn’t sure how to tell her that, frankly, I got so fucking angry at the thought that this was it for me, that I had no more time left to do all the millions of things I still wanted to do, that rage seemed to reboot my brain and somehow I could keep going. I felt that spark of being alive again. Just like when I conquered a climbing wall.
If you’re a fan of Star Wars (I’m not, but my kid is, so we’ve been rewatching them recently, hence all the references) you’ll probably remember Yoda’s wise words to Luke:
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” All well and good, but what Yoda didn’t tell us, and John Lydon did, “Anger is an energy.”
Anger, like fear, is also an adrenaline booster. It gives us that hit-the-NOS-boost we need to get the fuck on with things, get the fuck away from things, or get really fucking scary, so things leave us alone. Anger can be really, really powerful, and can make you feel like you’re beating the awful shit that’s being sent your way, but it’s also extremely destructive. Like NOS, it’s only good for short, controlled bursts. Use it too much and you’ll burn out your engine. As I mentioned earlier: Horror … gives us space to feel uncomfortable but know we’re still in the driving seat. It lets us let go while still staying in control.
In a time of great uncertainty and emotional upheaval, I needed to find a way to maintain control over my fluctuating moods while unpacking everything that had happened to me. Finding space to process the past while forging a new future. Rage would not be the power I needed, especially not if I wanted to keep my friends and family rather than alienating everyone.
To paraphrase a popular 90s movie quote: “I chose not to choose rage. Who needs rage when you have Horror?”
Despite everything being, to put it mildly, A Bit Shit, I could still find the energy for three (very influential as it turns out) things: going for walks in nature, having hot bubble baths, and watching movies / TV shows–although these often had to be watched in short bursts, over time, and most often in the bath. (Rather than seeing this as a bad thing, it was probably the most ideal combination my poor, battered brain could offer me.)
Most people, when faced with something uncomfortable, will reach for the things that are familiar and comforting. It’s logical and comes from our brains knowing exactly what it is it wants and needs: a tried and tested method that will make us feel good. Sometimes that’s things like using drugs or alcohol. If that works for you, it’s not for me to judge. It might also be listening to a certain kind of music, or reading a favourite book. Whatever it is, it will be something we know is 100 percent guaranteed to bring us out of the funk we’re in. For me, that’s creepy, clever, middling-on-the gore, psychological or emotional Horror-slash-Thrillers with a nice dose of Big Bad Monsters and/or a sci-fi twist—bonus points for humour too. My preference lies in things that can’t easily be pigeonholed, or that straddle genres in interesting ways.
You want a list? Okay, I’ve included one at the end of this essay. Take a peek if you want. I’ll wait…
I am fully aware that some of my very favourite Horror movies are not traditionally considered part of the Horror genre at all. Also, I can write a separate essay on each of them explaining why they are Horror. Horror has a special relationship with those who consume it, primarily using emotion to illicit reaction. It can be confronting while showing us where the boundaries are. It awakens hidden fears and desires and is often the most unsettling when it imagines danger in “safe” places. For me, all of my favourites do exactly that, and that’s what makes them Horror. (And if we’re talking about movies that elevate your pulse rate, my Apple Watch tells me that PHONE BOOTH is the one that throws it right off the charts!)
It was THE MIDNIGHT CLUB on Netflix that got things rolling first. When I read that the Guinness Book of World Records recognised the premiere episode as having the most jump scares in a single TV episode (twenty-one to be exact) I knew I had to watch it. PTSD makes you jumpy, usually when you don’t expect it. It’s a pisser as you can go from being perfectly fine to a gibbering mess in moments just because someone slammed a cupboard door. I wanted to know what would happen if I did expect it.
What happened? A great deal of hysterical laughter happened.
It turns out that the controlled adrenaline burst was absolutely what I needed, and suddenly my brain wanted more. Over a period of roughly six months, before and after my surgery, I watched as much Horror as I could, starting with my comfort faves, and moving on to some of the really gnarly stuff which I usually avoid because I find it boring. In my Bad Brain times though, gnarly slashers and extreme body horror were the tonic that helped (although I still can’t deal with finger-breaking scenes. What even is that all about?!) The more blood, the more gore, the better! I couldn’t face looking in the mirror at the aftermath of my dental surgery, but I could happily chow down popcorn to gory cosmetic body modification (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE), someone shoving a metal rod in their thigh (TETSUO: THE IRON MAN) or even an eyeball being sliced in two (UN CHIEN ANDALOU). I set aside some time every day to watch something my loving grandma would describe as “unpleasant” and slowly… slowly… my brain came back online. And I started writing again.
I wrote a blog post in January entitled “Bite-size chunks of positivity”. It was about searching for the positive in amongst the shit, even though I was really struggling to find it.
It can be hard to get back into the swing of things that used to be so easy but have now become difficult. Hard to reclaim who we are after we have lost a part of ourselves. I spent a lot of time feeling sad and angry about what I’d lost, and the worst part of that was feeling like I couldn’t write anymore. I felt like something that really made me who I am had been taken away, and it terrified me. Especially as I was no longer sure about who I was. Giving myself that tiniest nudge to just scribble down a few thoughts and ideas, or make goals that mean I have to think beyond the immediate and believe in a future, has helped my brain feel so relieved. I know now a lot of the loss and despair was the trauma talking, and while that’s okay, being able to see what lay beyond that was important too.
When you’ve been through a terrible situation where you felt like you had no control, Horror can give that back to you. Real trauma is so much more complicated than fictional trauma, but in a controlled setting, we can process our fear, trauma, and anger in ways that can be therapeutic. My counsellor suggested I was using Horror as a form of exposure therapy; the more gore I watched, the less sensitised I became to real-life scary stimulus. Sure, I still jumped when someone slammed a cupboard door, but my reaction and the after-effects had far less negative impact.
Remember that flood of adrenaline hormone your body releases when you experience a threat? What I forgot to mention is when the threat is over, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, sending a range of calming hormones to the brain to help you feel safe and relaxed. (It’s also one reason some people need to sleep a lot after a traumatic event.) This helps regulate your emotions and ensure you don’t remain in an elevated fight/flight state. For some people, it’s the come-down that is the addictive bit. The warm, fuzzy feelings of being safe, of the monster being banished once more.
If you were expecting some grand conclusion where I explain exactly why Horror helped me, I’m sorry, but I’m going to disappoint you. I don’t really know other than to assume that giving myself permission to become immersed in the darkest of fictions helped me to see the light in my real life. Even when that light was about as bright as a 99-cent pen-torch from the bargain bin, it was still there. I just had to find the best way to revive it.
Ripley, my idol, overcame her trauma by returning to LV-426 to confront her greatest fear. She strapped herself into a P-5000 Powerloader, said that iconic I’m-done-with-this-bullshit line, “Get away from her, you bitch!” and threw the Alien Queen out of the airlock. She fucking won.
I don’t have a Powerloader, and I suspect I’d get into trouble if I started throwing people out of airlocks, no matter how awful they might be, but in my head, in the creative part of me that was important, that’s exactly what I did. Despite how much to the contrary it might seem, Horror heals.
To finish, I think John Wick said it best. Hopefully, now I’m writing again, it’s true for me too:
“People keep asking if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah! I’m thinking I’m back!”
T.L.Wood’s Top Comfort “Horror” watchlist includes:
Alien / Aliens (of course!)
Jacob’s Ladder
Flatliners
Pitch Black
Last Night in Soho
The New Mutants
Near Dark
The Lost Boys
Blood Red Sky
Stir of Echoes
Get Out
An American Werewolf in London
Dog Soldiers
Saw
Signs
10 Cloverfield Lane
12 Monkeys
Donnie Darko
What Lies Beneath
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Night of the Hunter
Children of Men
Phone Booth
Moon
The Mike Flannigan Netflix collection (I have deliberately excluded The Fall of the House of Usher as I found it very weak):
Midnight Mass
The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Bly Manner
The Midnight Club
NO HORROR WITHOUT THE BODY:
How Body Horror Helped Me Embrace My Nonbinary Identity
Tee Wood, June 2022
The doctor calls my name in the waiting room and I take just a little too long to respond. The name she calls out is not the one I use anymore in my daily life, but is still my official title, the one my parents chose for me. I realise, rise, smile, and apologise, but offer no explanation for my delayed reaction. For that name serves as an uncomfortable reminder that who I am now is not who I was.
My real name, the one I chose for myself, is Tee, and who I am, amongst an assortment of many things, is a horror writer. I am also queer/pansexual and nonbinary/gender nonconforming. If those words are unfamiliar to you now, don’t worry. I will explain them in a little while.
Right now, I am surrounded by countless other reminders; this is a “Woman’s Clinic” (the words are emblazoned on the wall) and I am here to discuss a “woman’s issue”. That I no longer consider myself to be that gender is irrelevant to my appointment. In fact, to bring it up now might adversely affect the care I receive. Safety is paramount to those who live outside of gender norms, and such safety can be difficult to assess. So I stay quiet, despite my discomfort. I watch how her mouth moves as she says my old name, notice how strange it feels hearing it used to address me. It is not anger, disgust or even sadness I feel, merely an unusual sense of disconnect. An awareness of the assumptions this stranger has made about me, and how very wrong they are.
* * *
I do not know, and never have known, what being female means to me, only that I have never felt like it applied to me very much, not even as a young child. Equally, I have felt no actual disgust at my physical form other than an occasional musing that, had I been born a cis male, certain things would surely have been a lot easier for me. (This is not any indication of transness, by the way, more, a pervasive effect of a patriarchal society. A lot of cis women I know feel the same.) My physical body serves to assist me in moving my consciousness from A to B. As a creative and expressive individual, I also know I can dress up however I want and present any image I desire. I can effectively manipulate how others see me, and “read” me based on their own gender expectations. My skin is a canvass ripe for decoration, and I can paint it any way I choose.
The outdated, narrow definition of being transgender implied a movement across the gender binary: from female to male or vice versa. Modern definitions now also include individuals, such as myself, who have stepped completely outside the gender binary or move fluidly from one to another. (Note: I am cautious about identifying as transgender, preferring instead to use nonbinary or gender nonconforming. While the word applies to me, and I can claim it, I feel that those who have fought much harder to use it than I have more right to it than I do.)
Binary means to have two parts—when we consider the “gender binary”, we mean male and female. Nonbinary or genderqueer is an umbrella term for gender identities that are outside the binary. It took me a while to realise that while I had shrugged off the mantle of “woman” and I definitely wasn’t “man,” I also didn’t feel like I simply fell somewhere in the middle.
Some people are nonbinary in a no gender or androgynous way. Others, like myself, are nonbinary in a way that embraces many varieties of gender. Some are both or something else entirely. I like to refer to myself as “Fifteen Genders in a Trench Coat,” a.k.a. a Pokémon-type nonbinary in that I, “gotta catch ‘em all.” I believe the most accurate descriptor might be pangender or even omnigender. In all honesty, the label is far less important to me than it seems to be to others. Those of you who have seen Schitt’s Creek may be familiar with David’s assertion, “I like the wine, not the label.” He uses this analogy to describe his sexual orientation (pansexual) but it works equally well for me to describe my gender identity. The label is insignificant. It’s what’s inside the bottle that matters most.
Perhaps that’s why body horror has always fascinated me, even when I didn’t fully realise it. As a kid, I found the 80s body-swap movies like FREAKY FRIDAY, VICE VERSA and BIG to be uniquely riveting, as I considered how it might feel to find yourself in another body. I didn’t find it frightening or disconcerting, but curious and exciting. I was drawn to lycanthrope (werewolf) mythology for very similar reasons. How empowering it must be to embrace a fierce second self, unbeknown to even your closest friends. At thirteen, when I first read Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, I wished there was a potion I could drink to experience another part of me, and to be someone else; someone new. I joke with my family that on some days I, “cosplay as a girl”. Like Jekyll and Hyde, I can change how I present myself as I see fit.
The first “proper” body horror I remember watching was TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. I was eighteen, and my then boyfriend showed me to it, I suspect intending to gross me out. Such intentions backfired; it utterly fascinated me. Of course, I had already seen movies such as AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, CANDYMAN and ALIENS, but I hadn’t really considered how they fit into the body horror genre. The visceral intensity of TETSUO sparked something in me and I sought as many flesh-rending and face-melting movies as I could. Like many other body horror enthusiasts have done before me, I turned to the “Baron of Blood” himself, David Cronenberg.
I exhausted Cronenberg’s back catalogue at the time (to wit: SHIVERS, RABID, SCANNERS, VIDEODROME, THE FLY, DEAD RINGERS and EXISTENZ) before I realised I mostly preferred more a more subtle style, over movies that went all out on the gore. I was drawn to an understated, creeping kind of body horror, one that relied on a loss or transition of identity rather than extreme violence and bodily trauma. Films like JACOB’S LADDER and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, NIGHTBREED and ROSEMARY’S BABY.
For many of us, horror as a genre is as comforting as it is confronting. It awakens our hidden fears and desires and shows us where the boundaries are between feeling safe and being scared. Horror scholar Linda Williams suggests in her essay, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess that horror, like pornography, is a genre of excess that looks at the limits and the transformative capabilities of the human body. Fictional horror allows us space to recall our own personal, traumatic experiences, enabling us with the tools to explore—or find peace with—our uncomfortable feelings safely. In this way, horror can often be beneficial to our mental health, particularly when we are looking inwards for answers to questions we don’t yet know how to ask.
Joe Koch (author of THE WINGSPAN OF SEVERED HANDS and CONVULSIVE) begins his essay, A Transmasculine Horror Writer Looks at Lovecraft with, “If we speculate that all horror is body horror—and we may because the emotional energy experienced interacting with horror arises physiologically in the body,” I want to continue what Koch begins by asking, what does body horror do that other horror can’t? As horror echoes in our bodies, body horror is obsessed with the flesh.
Body horror is: invasion, contagion, mutation and transformation. It’s mutilation, distortion, violence and disease. It is viruses, infections, parasites and deformities. It is growths and tumours, and trauma of the flesh. It normalises horrific things and allows us to make peace with the discomforts we might feel. By doing all this, body horror reinforces humanity and what it means to have a physical body, a vessel that can be disfigured, malformed, destroyed and infected. It highlights how disturbing and disorientating it can feel for your body to be alien to you and yet still retain what makes it human.
While most horror focuses on the body being destroyed, body horror looks instead at how it can be transformed. It relies on changes or transformations to elicit revulsion and traverses broad spectrums of extremes. It delights in embracing gore and powerful visuals, and can be extreme in concept and presentation. Yet, it can also be subtle, a slow creeping dread, wrapped in layers of subtext and metaphor. It redefines boundaries and expectations by transmuting the familiar into something terrifying.
Equally, although body horror often focuses on things being done to the subject—usually against their will—some stories explore the wilful acceptance of transformation as empowering and something to be embraced. With this physical change comes an emotional confidence, a “leveling up” of a sort. The adjustments to the physical form may be excruciating to experience, but the power gained can be worth the pain. Likewise, what changes occur on the outside are not necessarily reflected within. What others perceive as monstrous can be euphoric, even beautiful, to the subject.
Just as all horror holds up a mirror to people, so they can look more closely at themselves, body horror gives us an opportunity to shine that mirror back on ourselves. It allows us space to see beyond the confines of the flesh and understand that what we see in the mirror does not always reflect how we feel inside. In subjects involving gender dysphoria, body horror allows a safe space to explore any uncomfortable feelings and embrace them. It toys with distortions of the human body, and plays with gender in ways that challenge how we think about it by blurring the lines of what is acceptable. In this way, body horror acknowledges the complicated relationships many of us have with our bodies.
I grew up in a small town where pretty much everyone knows who you are, and everyone knows everybody else. If you feel like you fit in, that sense of safety, community, and local identity wraps around you like a comfortable blanket. But if you don’t fit in, grow tired of the smallness, or want out, that same blanket grows smothering and heavy. There is a sense that others have already predetermined who you are and what you are capable of. Such attitudes may push you to move away, to find an escape from the past and Past You. Like every angst-filled, rebellious, and misunderstood BREAKFAST CLUB teen, you long to scream, “You don’t know me!” as you slam the door behind you.
I can practically hear my mother’s voice in my head as I type this. “You always were very dramatic…”
Being labelled as a “Woman in Horror” filled me with the same existential unease and confusion I always felt while spending time in my hometown. I wanted so badly to embrace it and endorse it, to be a part of that wonderful crowd, but it felt so dishonest. Seeing my name added to lists alongside other talented, creative women, I knew deep down I was an imposter amongst them. I became obsessed with writing stories about menstruation as biological horror, filled with (what I thought at the time to be) an irrational rage at the injustice of having to endure such a messy and painful imposition every month. I channelled my anger into almost everything I wrote. Hell, I even won an award for an essay exploring menstruation in horror fiction (published, ironically, for Women In Horror Month). And as the years marched on, I embraced every hot flush, change in my cycle and debilitating monthly pain as a delightful reminder that menopause was surely coming and with it, freedom from the horrors of blood. But rather than being cathartic, writing about it was an ugly reminder of how I constantly felt like my “female” body was taunting me. Every bloody month.
I rarely set out to write a body horror story. In fact, it took a good friend of mine to point out just how many of my published works fall into that category. When I was considering sending something to TWISTED ANATOMY, a body horror charity anthology, I bemoaned that there was no way I could write something suitable.
“I just don’t write body horror,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” my friend replied. “You’re always writing body horror!”
On inspection, well over fifty percent of what I write can be classified as body horror. Looking back on older stories with fresh eyes and a new lens, knowing now what to look for, I can see the desperation and longing in my words. The search for something that made sense, being very clear about what I was not without knowing exactly what I was. Through fiction, I scratched an itch of discovery, exploring themes of identity and transformation in a safe space without ever realising I was writing about myself. Every author knows that peculiar feeling when re-reading old works. The resounding question of, “who was I when I wrote this?” coupled with, “I hardly recognise myself in these words.”
“Little Teeth” ended up in the anthology as a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of vanity and aging. Of pinning your entire identity on the way you look, and of hiding the inevitable truth.
How very cliché.
Myles Hughes says in The Body Horror Genre: Our Meat Machines are Terrifying, “The fear [from body horror] comes from the notion that while the specifics of a given plot may be allegorical, the core truths about the ways our bodies can be taken over and manipulated by internal or external forces feels all too real.”
“Butterfly” was the second story I ever sold. It is an exploration of body horror and disability, of a body remade after trauma and described as “Lovecraftian” as the editor. But it misses the mark. I was writing from a place of confusion and resentment. I was still cookie dough and not fully cooked. In the tale, the father believes he can remake the daughter, just as she is coming to terms with her disfigurement. I hadn’t considered the message I might be sending to others, or, worse, what I was saying about myself. I was unaware of my own unresolved personal struggles with disability and gender and how I thought others saw me. It is a religious allegory (as many of my stories are, but that’s a separate essay!) in which the father believes that death and rebirth can heal his daughter through metamorphosis.
“Butterfly” is the first true body horror I can attribute to my confusion with gender and I express the horror through the experience of living with disability and the judgement of our peers. It is a story about outside forces meddling with things they have no business with. The daughter did not need to be “cured” and the father is no saviour. As a mirror for how I was feeling then, it works extremely well, showing the confusion I was experiencing, thanks to messages from others—particularly my extended family—about who I “should” be. The trauma I had internalised about what was acceptable and “feminine,” what was appropriate behaviour as a woman.
It was all bullshit.
I tell my kids, “Don’t make yourself small to make other people comfortable” and, “Never let anyone else tell you who you are.” Somewhere along the line, I forgot to take my own advice. But I didn’t have a grand awakening. I didn’t burst out of the closet in a moment of euphoric realisation, more vaguely saunter in a different direction without fully knowing where I was headed. The name I used when I introduced myself went from seven letters, to five, to one. I experimented with different pronouns to see how they felt until eventually I decided I didn’t much care (she/her/they/them/T are all fine, just FYI.). And then Lana Wachowski went and gut punched me.
More proficient writers than myself have talked about the concept of transness in THE MATRIX (and of course, the more recent addition to the franchise …RESURRECTIONS) but while THE MATRIX is marketed as science-fiction, it often fails to acknowledge the massive amount of body horror it also exhibits, specifically the eradication of identity and the Self. It shows a hairless body kept alive in a pod or an egg (and many transgender individuals know the symbolism of “cracking the egg”) attached with tubes to a nutrition system, fed with the liquified recycled remains of others that you too will also become. As the System regurgitates who they are into who you are, your entire existence becomes dependent on the biological feedback of others, your body nothing more than an energy source, while you are destined to do the very same to each following generation of pod people.
Heavy thoughts, huh? Put like that, who wouldn’t want to crack that egg? Shatter it into a thousand pieces and grind the shell into dust with your heel.
And the gut punch? It was while watching THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS I felt the sudden realisation that I’d been holding in all these thoughts, all these feelings, all these questions and insecurities for easily thirty years (maybe more!). I’d been writing about gender, reading about gender, figuring out how it all fit together in my head like a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the lid, but never actually going all the way to embrace the reality. There was no egg encasing me anymore, just like for Neo, there was no spoon.
* * *
Back home, after my appointment, I take off every layer of clothing, remove my jewellery and scrub the makeup from my face. I remove my “girl cosplay” and return to my true self. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and examine every bump and crevice, every pimple, scar and bruise. I regard the skin as if it were yet another piece of clothing, which some days I wish I could unzip and shake myself out of. Not because I dislike it. No, most of the time I am simply ambivalent about it. It is skin and bone, blood and sinew. It is a vessel for my consciousness and a canvas I can paint, not much more. But if I could change it? If I could peel off certain parts of me and replace them with others, as easily as trying on a new coat? I would. Of course I would.
As Koch so beautifully explains:
“The common term for what drives us to change is gender euphoria. When we are addressed using correct names and pronouns, and when we see ourselves represented in the body and external world as we know ourselves in our minds, we experience gender euphoria. Our motivation is not hatred, but joy. We simply want to feel at home in our bodies, which I think is a very reasonable human wish.”
Why am I drawn to, and write, body horror? To push the boundaries of extreme fiction to elicit reaction? To explore my (complex) feelings about gender? To tap into my insecurities, my impermanence and mortality? Even aging is utilised as a form of body horror, particularly that of the feminine body. Hagsploitation exists to portray the aging female form as repulsive and shocking; an Othering based on failing fertility, of desire tied to sexual youth. My journey into menopause serves as a reminder of that.
Body horror author and aficionado Lor Gislason says in their essay, An Ode To Flesh: My Love of Body Horror “[one of the] strengths of horror: [is] using it to open discussions of deeper issues in a safe and interesting way. … For body horror, it’s often confronting the inevitability of death or the limitations of our physical selves. The human body is both one of the most incredible and complicated systems and extremely fragile.”
Body horror lets me see past my own skin. I no longer feel like I have to drape it around my shoulders, wearing it like someone else’s castoff—a hand-me-down from my parents, ex-boyfriends, or past friends. Writing about the body through horrific narratives lets me explore my identity in fluid and nuanced ways. Through body horror, I can remake the familiar into something terrifying, something empowering, or both. I can transcend the limitations of the flesh to stimulate euphoria through dread. It was through finally understanding the power of transformation, of putting that into words, that helped me make peace with who I am.
When I write body horror, that peace is what I appreciate the most.
NO HORROR WITHOUT THE BODY.
Articles referenced:
Gislson, Lor An Ode To Flesh: My Love of Body Horror (February 2022) https://www.hearusscream.com/editorials/an-ode-to-flesh-my-love-of-body-horror
Hughes, Myles The Body Horror Genre: Our Meat Machines are Terrifying (December 2019)
Koch, Joe, A Transmasculine Horror Writer Looks At Lovecraft (February 2022)
Williams, Linda Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess (Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, 1991)
http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/rrushing/470j/ewExternalFiles/Williams—Film%20Bodies.pdf
Alone in the Dark: Exploring Isolation Horror
First published in MIDNIGHT ECHO 16 (November, 2021)
The eternal question asked amongst those who consume or study the genre seems to be, “What is horror?” There is never one straightforward answer. Horror, like any other genre, comprises a massive spectrum of hundreds of sub-genres and thematic cross-overs that weave their way into a thousand different personal paranoias and anxieties. While some may argue that horror should, at the very least, be confronting it is also often seen as a safe space to explore those complex emotions, offering a cathartic outlet to experience fear with few unwanted side-effects.
But what if those safe places only remind us how alone and isolated we are?
I live in Aotearoa, New Zealand, too often described as “an island at the bottom of the world.” Two thousand miles from Australia, four thousand miles to Antarctica, and just under double that again to America, it is safe to say that New Zealand is pretty separated from its nearest neighbours. This distance has served us reasonably well during the COVID-19 outbreak, offering us the ability to effectively raise the drawbridge and keep ourselves safe from viral dragons. But as a people, we know very well how it feels to be kept apart from others. Personally, I am keenly aware of how many miles are between myself and my extended family, twelve thousand, in fact, the other side of the world. Perhaps that’s why isolation themed horror interests me so much.
Horror often takes things to the extreme: it explores extreme emotions and reactions; extreme events, such as the psychological and supernatural. It takes us to the very edge of our comfort zones and then throws us overboard. But isolation horror also keeps us trapped in an unrelenting grip. Sometimes it plays on elements of claustrophobia, squeezing us into tight spaces. Other times it simply cuts us off from friends and family or our community, or sets us adrift in the middle of space or the sea. Wherever we are geographically, our extreme loneliness and disconnection is the key. We cannot escape, as there is literally nowhere to go.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’ll know there is a brand-new vampire horror series on the block that almost everyone is talking about. Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix offering, MIDNIGHT MASS, is a tremendous, emotional deep dive into organised religion, blood sucker mythology and the horrors of guilt and grief. Yet, what few people seem to acknowledge is its deeply oppressive geographical location. Set almost entirely on the fictional fishing town of Crockett Island, thirty miles away from an unnamed “Mainland,” the island serves to separate the community actually and spiritually from any outside influences. With the only way to leave via a scheduled ferry, and electricity blackouts possible at any time, the islanders are forced into a life of frugality, self-sufficiency, and resilience.
While the exploration of organised religion as a monstrous influence where vampires are mistaken for angels is at the forefront of the story, the events that transpire could only occur in a physical space well away from the bustle of a city or wider community. Even the few scenes where the characters are off island, they are trapped in small physical spaces: a prison cell and a doctor’s office. We, as the watcher, are trapped there with them, forced to confront the impossibility of escape, isolated physically and emotionally. It makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing, often verging on claustrophobic.
Taking a character and putting them in a situation where they are separated from others or cannot get help is a common trope in horror, especially in most modern slashers. For example, we all know what the likely outcome will be for the naïve teenager who wanders off alone or the confident blonde athlete who says, “I’ll be right back…”
“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” — Mark Watney, THE MARTIAN
The most common places to isolate your unsuspecting characters (based on how often they appear in popular horror movies) include:
- A cabin in the woods
- A dilapidated mansion miles from anywhere
- A remote outpost in the Antarctic
- In the depths of uncharted space
- Down a hole.
Both the aptly-named THE HOLE (2001) and THE DESCENT (2005) put underground isolation to great use. In THE HOLE, four teenagers find themselves locked in an abandoned underground nuclear shelter after a weekend of debauchery. On discovering their predicament, they, unsurprisingly, turn on each other, although the real danger is something far more sinister. THE DESCENT follows six women as they explore a cave system and predictably become trapped inside. Not only must they try to escape to the surface, they must also avoid the blind humanoid monsters who are keen to munch on their bones.
Space-based horror often strays into science-fiction. In fact, some people argue that the location of space itself takes it out of the horror genre. I disagree. As someone who often argues that movies that are not marketed as horror, are horror—for example: THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004), GROUNDHOG DAY (1993) and WATERSHIP DOWN (1978) spring to mind—I am very happy to include GRAVITY (2013) and THE MARTIAN (2015) on a geographical isolation horror list. What could be worse than tumbling, alone and untethered through the emptiness of deep space, or being left for dead on an uninhabited planet where you will spend eighteen months on your own?
Back on earth, while CAST AWAY (2000) is probably too light in tone to be truly horrorific—although Tom Hank’s character is stranded on a desert island for four, very lonely years—the culminating event in 127 HOURS (2010) definitely lends itself to the horror genre. Not only is the main character entirely alone in Bluejohn Canyon, a boulder on his arm pins him in place. His survival hinges on a gruesome, life-changing choice as he realises no help is forthcoming.
“I could’ve carried him. I should’ve carried him. Who are we if we can’t protect them? Who are we? You have to protect them! Promise me, you will protect them.” — Evelyn Abbott, A QUIET PLACE
While any kind of horror invokes fear, discomfort, mistrust or even revulsion, isolation horror plays specifically on our human need for companionship and community, on our terror of being rejected or left alone. It kickstarts our survival instincts and our distrust of the Other, especially if isolation is partnered with some element of invasion. While invasion horror is also a subgenre in its own right, with movies such as MOTHER! (2017) CAPE FEAR (1962 and 1991) and THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE (1992) being notable titles, isolation-invasion is frequently:
- Set in a remote location, either devoid of modern technology or “off the grid”.
- The main character is very often incapacitated, disabled or mentally fragile.
Take, for example, another Flanagan creation, HUSH (2016) where a deaf writer living in solitude is tormented by a masked intruder and must fight to survive. Or A QUIET PLACE (2018) where a family, including their profoundly deaf daughter, must live every moment in complete silence or else be hunted by deadly noise-sensitive monsters. A QUIET PLACE is admittedly less claustrophobic than most invasion-isolation, but both aspects limit the characters’ movements and introduce a threat that dictates how they live.
Similarly, BIRD BOX (2018) uses lack of sight to isolate the characters from each other as they live with a catastrophic malevolent force that causes all who see it to become suicidal. DON’T BREATHE (2016), however, spins the invasion element on its head with the blind protagonist holding the upper hand as he dispatches all those who dare enter his house.
In GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2015) we face double displacement and disconnection not only thanks to its isolated lakeside location, but exacerbated by the titular Mommy’s strange facial bandages and the way she apparently ignores one of her twins. The invasion theme here is clear; is Mommy even really who she says she is? Finally, the creepy one-shot SILENT HOUSE (2011) cuts off the main character’s means of connection with the outside world and locks her in a secluded farmhouse. Enter, an unknown intruder who drags up some disturbing repressed memories, and the isolation-invasion horror trope is complete.
That two of those movies mentioned include deaf characters is no coincidence, given that I am also deaf, and have been since childhood. I know well how it feels to be excluded or ignored, to feel left out of a group or unable to connect. And although these incidents have occurred most often through misunderstanding, not malice, they are no less painful to experience. Communication with our peers is integral to human nature and to positive mental wellbeing. When our ability to connect with others easily is removed, the individual will suffer. Isolation itself can be disabling.
“If you’re afraid of dying, and you’re holdin’ on, you’ll see devils tearin’ your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein’ you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it.” — Louis, JACOB’S LADDER
While a bleak physical location can go a long way to creating those uneasy feeling of isolation, psychological isolation is also extremely powerful. Take, for example, the well-known tagline of ALIEN (1979) “In space, no one can hear you scream.” The horror here is not merely the threat of the terrifying acid-blood Xenomorph, nor even that the characters are trapped with the creature lost in the emptiness of space, but simply that their anguish will not be heard. Their cries for help will go unanswered and their survival is squarely in their own hands. Knowing that you are alone with your fear can be crushing. In some cases, it might even drive you mad.
EVENT HORIZON (1997), another horror-in-space, uses geographical isolation to invoke insanity. In astronomy, the ‘event horizon’ defines the region of space around a black hole from which nothing can escape, not even light. It signifies the point of no return, of a desolation that knows no recovery. On board the (rather insensibly named) starship Event Horizon, the crew experiences distressing hallucinations, including apparitions of people from their past. Such visions drive many of the characters to self-harm and others to acts of violence. There is no hope and no chance for redemption as they succumb to the madness of space.
Madness is also pivotal to the plot of THE SHINING (1980) where a writer and his family move into an isolated, and unfortunately haunted, hotel hoping he can finish his latest manuscript. What Jack Torrance gains in peace and quiet, he loses in sanity and compassion as the evil forces that reside in the hotel compel him to murder his family. Once again, redemption is not forthcoming and Jack is left very much alone.
Perhaps my very favourite example of psychological isolation horror is the original JACOB’S LADDER (1990). It follows the main character, Jacob Singer’s, experiences of war in Vietnam where many of his platoon were killed or wounded. Back home in New York, strange visions and weird hallucinations plague him that lead him to believe the military has experimented on him. As the visions increase in severity and violence, Jacob becomes more desperate to discover the truth. To say here what the truth is would spoil the entire film, but Singer’s anguish, confusion, and distrust of authority are all consequences of his intense mental isolation.
“No one is strong alone. You know, you and your mom, you help each other through, don’t you?” — Nancy, ROOM
Of course, you don’t have to be completely alone to be isolated, especially if that isolation has been thrust upon you by some kind of captor. In MISERY (1990) novelist Paul Sheldon is injured in a car accident and later held captive by obsessive fan and nurse Annie Wilkes. While Annie initially helps Paul recover, she is most upset that Paul plans to kill off her favourite character and demands he write a new book. Paul isn’t keen, so to prevent him from escaping, well, let’s just say in both book and film versions, poor Paul draws a short straw. The isolation horror, however, comes from the knowledge that he is alone and incapacitated with the psychopathic Annie, with none of his loved one’s knowing where he is and his survival will require some hard choices.
A similar feeling of helplessness is invoked in 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016) and ROOM (2015). 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE sees recently single Michelle held captive in an underground bunker by an obviously unstable stranger named Howard. He claims he is protecting her from extra-terrestrial invaders, with the atmosphere outside now toxic and uninhabitable. Whether or not this is true is of less concern to Michelle, who fears for her safety in the bunker. With a fellow captive, Emmett, she makes plans to escape, but such plans never go smoothly. Once again, no one knows where Michelle is and ultimately she is forced to fight for her survival completely on her own.
ROOM is perhaps less of a typical horror and a more psychological thriller, with the main characters held in a tiny shed that they refer to as the Room. For seven years, “Old Nick” has held Joy and her son Jack prisoner in the Room, with Jack only ever knowing a life inside. Isolation envelops them both inside the Room and when they finally get out, as they struggle to re-join society. ROOM is one of those few films that continues to follow the characters after the “inciting incident” and their ongoing bewilderment and declining mental health shows how isolation does not come merely from being alone, but feeling alone as well.
Different from the others, and a precursor to “puzzle horror” movies like SAW (2004), DEVIL (2010) and ESCAPE ROOM (2017), CUBE (1997) puts six strangers in a cube-shaped room and challenges them to escape. Their captor is never revealed and the reason for their incarceration is unclear, but as they escape room after room and encounter trap after trap, their situation grows more dire and their distrust for each other grows. The group discovers that there are 17,576 cube rooms, with each one moving periodically. With no straightforward way to escape the maze, the characters’ desperation grows. Finally, SIGHTLESS (2020) combines both captive isolation with elements of invasion as a newly blind protagonist must come to terms with her disability while seemingly trapped in her own apartment. Or is she?
“Someone in this camp ain’t what he appears to be.” — MacReady, THE THING
In some of the previously given examples, it would be easy to argue that the real threat does not come from isolation, but from a monstrous or human foe. Horror and monsters are the jelly and ice-cream of the genre; they go together perfectly. But in isolation horror, sometimes the monsters cause the loneliness, and other times the loneliness is just as scary as the monsters. THE THING (1982) for example, could only possibly take place in the location it does—a research station in Antarctica—and that seclusion is as integral to the plot as the monstrous Thing. Such remoteness exacerbates the distrust between the characters, even at a time when they need to be united, and this ultimately affects their good sense.
In DOG SOLDIERS (2002) a six-man squad on a training mission is dropped into the Scottish Highlands, miles away from the nearest village. When werewolves attack, the soldiers retreat to the only place they can–an abandoned farmhouse. But with very few weapons, no mobile service, and no way of alerting anyone else to their predicament, the squad must take on the lycanthropes themselves.
Zombies aren’t a common monster to feature in isolation horror, not least because they most commonly travel in large hordes, but 28 DAYS LATER (2003) focused on a depopulated world where the main character wakes up to an uninhabited London. As he walks, somewhat stunned, through a city that is normally bustling with people and traffic, his loneliness and fear are palpable. No surprise, then, that the TV show THE WALKING DEAD (2010-ongoing) paid homage to the scene in its beginning episodes as Sherriff Rick Grimes rides a horse along a deserted highway.
It seems appropriate to end this piece as I began, talking about vampires and isolation horror. For vampires in small spaces, you can’t beat BLOOD RED SKY (2021). Set almost entirely on an aeroplane hijacked by terrorists, the mood is both extremely claustrophobic while emphasising how alone and devoid of help the passengers are. The monsters here are three-fold; Nadja, the vampire who is searching for a cure, the terrorist hijackers who ultimately just want money, and the psychopathic member of their crew, Eightball, who is easily the worst threat of them all. The isolation here is not just that every person on the plane is stranded from home, but also how quickly as a group they shun Nadja for being different, despite her not being the real threat to them.
I AM LEGEND (2007) (of which the film differs somewhat from the book) sees United States Army virologist Robert Neville and his dog, Sam, living in the isolated ruins of Manhattan after a deadly viral plague. Those who don’t die turn into vampiric mutants and Neville spends his days trying to find a cure while searching for food, supplies and fellow survivors. It’s a bleak existence, and one which clearly takes a toll on Neville’s mental health, which becomes even more obvious when he finds himself completely alone. It is Neville’s experiences of isolation, however, that ultimately make him stronger and aids in his final decisions. Sometimes, when you’ve been alone for so long, it’s just too hard to go back into a crowd.
When we answer the question, “What is horror?” we often focus on the fear, the terror and the disgust. We consider the visceral, the shocking and the supernatural. But I think the answer might be much more simple than that. Real-life horror fills us when we are abandoned and made weak. When we are cut off from our communities and our peers. Being alone is incredibly scary. It’s the reason we get frightened of the dark or why staying in a strange place by ourselves makes us so uneasy. Isolation horror forces the protagonist to confront the villain—no matter who, or what, that might be—with limited resources and no place to escape to. Their isolation doesn’t have to be physical to be effective, it can be emotional and psychological too, because at the root of horror is helplessness, and when you feel helpless, you lose hope.
I read and watch horror as a way of escaping, to feel fear in a safe space I can control. It’s as cathartic as it is exciting. As trends in the genre highlight the anxieties of our times, I think we can learn from horror too. While the events of the past couple of years have shown that isolation—in particular, quarantine—can go a long way towards saving lives, horror movies have also taught us that: the monster is rarely despatched by the first hit; never wander off alone from your friends; and a community is far stronger when it works together—unlike the doomed inhabitants of Crockett Island, MacReady’s Antarctic research team, or the Event Horizon crew— and overcomes its mistrust of the Other. Horror has shown us how we can overcome our collective feelings of isolation and helplessness and beat the real monsters in the world.
Sex, Death and Starshine – Exploring Clive Barker’s Short Story of Show-Business and Sex
First published on Kendall Reviews December 2021
Ghosts! Zombies! Body horror! Plus, some unintentional necrophilia. “Sex, Death and Starshine” reminds us the show must go on, even if the audience is undead.
The fifth story in Clive Barker’s BOOKS OF BLOOD, VOLUME 1, “Sex, Death and Starshine” is often much maligned as a weak link in his impressive horror repertoire. Certainly, its tone differs greatly from the blood-spattered “Midnight Meat Train” or the strange, mental health-themed black comedy “The Yattering and Jack.” It moves at an arguably slower pace and includes less gore than others in the collection, but none of that weakens its impact.
While its supernatural elements allow it space in the horror genre, its focus is more on emotions, specifically: passion and desire. It asks us to consider what aspects of life are truly important to us? So important that their discovery and ultimate realisation might even transcend the falling curtain of mortality. “Sex, Death and Starshine” is an exploration of love, art, and the roles that we adopt and play throughout our lives. With a sprinkling of Shakespeare, messy sex and reanimated corpses.
While I am assuming at this point that you have read the story, here’s the plot synopsis as a reminder, or if you have not.
Terry Calloway is directing Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, Twelfth Night, in a dilapidated theatre called the Elysium. Calloway is embroiled in a torrid affair with his leading lady, Diane Duvall, an ex-soap opera actress who he hopes will bring more fame (and punters) to the production. However, while he appreciates her sexual prowess, her skills on stage are sadly lacking.
Enter, the mysterious, theatrical and oddly masked Mr. Lichfield. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, Lichfield informs Calloway that, “the theatre is about to die,” and this is to be its last production before it closes for good. Calloway assumes this means the theatre’s owner, Hammersmith, has sold off the land. Lichfield is also vocal in his dissatisfaction at Diane’s casting as Viola, believing his wife, Constantia, could do far better. It is an interesting assertion, as we later learn from the geriatric trustee, Tallulah, that Constantia is, in fact, long dead.
On the day of the show, Lichfield walks in on Calloway and Diane in the middle of having sex—in her dressing room, no less! How clichéd. He seems far from being embarrassed, however. Instead, he is adamant that he needs to speak with Diane. Calloway leaves (awkwardly) and Lichfield informs Diane that Constantia will play the role of Viola on the opening night. Angry, Diane retaliates by literally unmasking Lichfield. She peels away his latex prosthetics, revealing him to be the walking dead. His face is almost gone and only a skull remains.
Diane is deeply shocked, but Lichfield leaves her little time to process. He tells her that certain choices must be made before he non-consensually kisses her and puts her into a coma. While Diane is taken to intensive care, Constantia is introduced as the replacement Viola, with some minor stage-light adjustments requested. Next, it is the arthritic Tallulah’s turn to receive the kiss of death, although this time Lichfield does at least ask Tallulah if she wants to die, to which she replies she does.
That evening, Diane returns to the Elysium, stating that she has some “unfinished business”. Calloway assumes she has recovered and takes her words to mean she wants more sex. However, in the middle of her fellating him, Calloway realises, his belly… full of terrors, that Diane is not breathing. She is not breathing because she is dead. Her reaction to his terrified realisation is to despatch him by plunging her nail-file in his ear.
The play is performed to an enthusiastic packed house. Unfortunately, when the performance is over, the actors see the audience is a collection of ghosts and corpses in various stages of decay. The deceased-but-now-reanimated Tallulah burns down the theatre and kills everyone in the production who is not already dead, and a zombified, pants-less Calloway confronts Hammersmith and snaps his neck.
The end sees Calloway and a selection of the Elysium actors joining Lichfield and Constantia on the road, devoting their death, as they had their life, to the art of theatre. We are told, The dead. They needed entertainment no less than the living; and they were a sorely neglected market. When asked by a member of his troupe what they should do, Lichfield delivers the closing lines:
[he] turned towards the company, his voice booming in the night: “What do you do?” he said, “Play life, of course! And smile!”
Far from being a weak link in Barker’s writing, I see “Sex, Death and Starshine” as being one of his most personal and ingenious. Born on 5 October 1952, Barker is an incontestable master in multiple creative areas. Whether as a playwright, author, movie director, visual artist or comic book creator, Barker is highly skilled in all formats. While he began writing horror early in his career, his interest and involvement in the theatre began well before then.
Wikipedia states that he “co-founded the avant-garde theatrical troupe The Dog Company in 1978 with former school friends and up-and-coming actors” and he has said himself that, “An incredible amount of what makes me feel I can do whatever the fuck I want has to do with the Dog Company…” No surprise then, that he would honour his theatrical roots and showcase his literary intelligence through a story that explores chaos and emotion, tragedy and elation, and asks “What would you sacrifice for your art?”
In my youth I was a theatre kid (although always lurking in the wings, never performing on stage) and in my twenties I taught English and Drama to high school students in the industrial North East. Being a fan of Shakespeare was both inevitable and a necessary part of my career. I recall my 6th form English Literature teacher declaring old Willy’s stories to be nothing more than 17th century soap operas, albeit perhaps better written than some modern offerings. Despite the over-the-top palaver and farce that he frequently turned to, I always felt many of Shakespeare’s works were much darker than often acknowledged. His plays involve: murder, adultery, magic and the occult, suicide, disfigurement and dismemberment, demonic possession, witchcraft and the supernatural. Hardly fitting subjects for a pious, Christian audience. In fact, one might even go so far to say that Shakespeare was one of the first writers of horror theatre. A notion I suspect Barker was well aware of.
Shakespeare isn’t the only literary influence in “Sex, Death and Starshine”. The story is littered with themes and sub-texts with some friendly nods to Greek mythology, beginning with the theatre’s name. In Classic mythology, Elysium was a place for the blessed dead, separated from Hades or the Underworld, which only heroes and mortals related to the Gods could enter. Later, it became more synonymous with the Christian notion of Heaven, a paradise for the worthy. This concept of paradise itself is referred to in Twelfth Night when Viola, believing her brother to be drowned, declares, “My brother he is in Elysium.”
Continuing the theme of Greek mythology are the multiple references to Apollo and Dionysus, both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the sun; of rational thinking and order. He signifies logic, prudence and purity. Dionysus is the god of wine, theatre and dance; of irrationality and chaos. He oversees emotions and instincts. Interestingly, the two gods are not necessarily opposites or rivals, in fact, they are frequently entwined, but they offer two differing viewpoints.
At the start of the story, Lichfield tells Calloway, “We should never have given up Dionysus for Apollo… We should have had the courage of our depictions, I think. Served poetry and lived under the stars,” by which he asserts his belief that matters of passion and the heart are more powerful motivators of the arts than money.
During the play, Lichfield feels comforted by the idea that Dionysus is with them that night, and afterwards, From the Gods rapturous applause erupted…. The gods usually refers to the highest areas of a theatre such as the upper balconies, but in this context, and the use of a capital G, could easily refer to Dionysus and Apollo themselves.
Lichfield himself hides in plain sight, his true nature evident in his name. A concept more popular in fantasy fiction, the word lich is taken from the Old English līċ, which means corpse. A lich itself is a type of undead creature. Unlike the traditional stereotype of the mindless zombie, liches are supposedly intelligent creatures, often depicted as having the power to control other, less powerful, undead servants. Appropriate for a character who acts as a kind of ringmaster or director for the rest of the undead.
Lichfield was not embalmed like Constantia, and thus his physical form is greatly damaged. His latex mask serves to shield his decomposing face and allows him to walk relatively unremarked upon amongst the living. Such a disguise has echoes of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, where the deformed Erik wears a mask to hide his hideous features as he falls in love with soprano Christine. Like Erik, Lichfield’s mask also hides the grief he carries. It allows him to control the face he presents to the world as he embraces the role he plays.
The theatre manager, Hammersmith, is surely a nod to the iconic Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London. Established in 1888, it was due to be demolished in 1966, but was saved, dismantled and rebuilt brick by brick on another site. Calloway, Tallulah and Duvall are all well-known names of persons prominent in the arts. Coincidence or a deliberate choice? We may never know. Constantia is another Classical Greek name, meaning perseverance and harmony. Interestingly, it is also the name of a Greek town that was destroyed by an earthquake soon after its completion but was rebuilt and strengthened anew.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a play of love, loss and desire, of exploring duality (twins and opposites) and temporary subversion of status. On the actual Twelfth Night (as in the twelve days of Christmas) the last celebration of the festive season was celebrated with parties and performances. The Lord of Misrule—generally a peasant appointed to be in charge of the Christmas revelries—could act as if they were a king for the night and tell everyone what to do. Thus follows a night of potential chaos, but it is fun chaos, rather like what Dionysus signifies.
Although the play is a romantic comedy centred around love and passion, many of the characters spend a lot of time miserable, acting irrationally or frequently confused; like the characters in Barker’s tale. While love ultimately triumphs at the end, it drives some characters almost mad.
The first lines of the play uttered by Duke Orsino—possibly some of Shakespeare’s most famous and most often quoted—and referenced in the story are:
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die…”
Orsino, suffering from unrequited love, asks to be stuffed so full of it that he loses his appetite for it. Yet in “Sex, Death and Starshine,” it seems perhaps the opposite may be true, that an outpouring of love for theatre and music might somehow satiate those players who are already dead and have given their lives to the arts. Constantia, dead before she was twenty, becomes “alive” on the stage as if the part were made for her only. A spell is cast and the actors’ mortal status (or otherwise) is no longer relevant. All that matters is the play. As Lichfield looks on it becomes apparent, They were equals, the living and the dead, and nobody could find just cause to part them.
What of all the sex in the story? Is it added merely to shock or titillate? I would argue, yes, that’s definitely a part of it, but also Calloway and Diane’s actions say a great deal about their true character. Their affair is based on lust and carnal desires rather than love and tenderness. Older than her, and married (like she is) Calloway suspects that even during intercourse Diane is simply acting a part. Their connection is purely physical, their illicit relationship made far more interesting by being forbidden. But both of them know the other is replaceable, and they are merely using each other as a stepladder to greater, brighter things. It is in stark contrast to Lichfield’s relationship with Constantia. While copulation is apparently impossible given their bodily decay, they are connected through the strength of romance and true devotion. Genuine soulmates, even after their death.
“Sex, Death and Starshine,” despite its apparent focus on Calloway and Duvall, is, of course, Lichfield’s story. It is a story of redemption and resurrection as much as it is of love.
Lichfield … had been capable of giving his brilliant beauty everything she desired; fame, money, companionship. Everything but the gift she most required: life itself.
Such pain drives Lichfield to massacre a group of people for the benefit of his wife. His deeds are inarguably heinous and yet also we fully understand his motivation. While murdering Diane is reprehensible, no matter how bad an actress she may be, his killing of Tallulah is almost merciful, as her advanced age and arthritis bring her so much pain. He could not save his wife from cancer in the breast, but he can bring meaning to the unfairness of her death. Embalmed to preserve her physical beauty, it is equally her inner beauty and raw talent that transfixes others and cannot be taken from her, even by death. Lichfield’s role is to ensure her performance can be experienced, so she can bring joy to the stagnating dead, those usually starved of entertainment.
As love triumphs in Twelfth Night, so too does it triumph for Lichfield and his troupe, as they give up their earthly lives for the love of performing, bound together in eternity by their passion. As the Latin poet Virgil says, omnia vincit amor, or love conquers all. More importantly, the show must go on.
Shakespeare was well-known for comparing life to the art of acting. In As You Like It, the character Jacques in his Seven Ages of Man speech declares:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…
Lichfield knows that even in death, he must continue to act as if he is alive. As he tells the trustee: “To play life… ah, Tallulah, to play life… what a curious thing it is. Sometimes I wonder, you know, how long I can keep up the illusion.” His life, perhaps our lives too, are merely roles which we play until the show ends and we take our final bows. Art imitates life imitates art. The stage is where we live and beyond that, who knows what awaits us. While our audience is watching, we must perform.
“Sex, Death and Starshine” examines the roles we play throughout our lives, even in the face of abject horrors; the masks we put on to face the world and hide our true faces, or our pain; and the validation we can find in our passions when we embrace what we truly love. More than that, it is Barker’s love letter to the power of the theatre and an understanding that through the art you leave behind, you can experience a little piece of immortality.
“There are lives lived for love,” said Lichfield to his new company, “and lives lived for art. We happy band have chosen the latter persuasion.”
An Exploration of Menstruation in Horror and Dark Fiction
First published February 2020 at The Horror Tree for Women in Horror Month.
This essay won an Australian Shadows Award, 2021, for Nonfiction and was shortlisted for a Sir Julius Vogel Award, 2021, for Best Fan Writing.
As a person who now identifies outside the gender binary I want to acknowledge that this piece uses the word “woman” as synonymous for “a person who menstruates.” This is not meant to be exclusive in any way, and reflects how I saw my personal identity at the time of writing. It is important for me to draw attention to this wording now, as menstruation is not something that happens only to women, and not all women menstruate.
“Shark Week.”
“Aunt Flo’s here.”
“Riding the Crimson Wave.”
There are over 5,000 different slang terms and euphemisms for menstruation, according to an international survey conducted by the people behind period-tracking app, Clue. With over 90,000 people across 190 countries adding to the list, the type of phrases range from the obvious to the ridiculous. And yet, it begs the question: what is it about menstruation that makes some people feel like even the word itself is dirty? That many women feel unable or ashamed to say, “I’m on my period.”
It stands to reason that there will be a woman — or someone of another gender, because it is not only women who menstruate— reading this piece right now who “has the painters in.” The onset of puberty heralds “Mother Nature’s” arrival, and barring illness, pregnancy, some medication or use of certain contraceptives, this monthly visitor brings her scarlet luggage with her up until the time of menopause. The loss of blood is considered emblematic of a young girl’s entry into womanhood. No longer a child, immune from the Male Gaze, but a fertile vessel, sexual, and capable of bringing forth new life. It is a normal and expected part of most cis women’s lives. Except it is rarely talked about unless in hushed tones, and hardly ever in places where men might overhear. It is only very recently, for example, that televised adverts for menstrual products have replaced the colour of the liquid symbolising blood loss from unnatural blue to a more accurate red.
Does horror fiction perpetuate this shame and discomfort, or can writers seek to remove any stigma by normalising menstruation in text and film? You might think that in a genre which delights in exploring themes of the bloody and disturbing, there may be more than a handful of examples that also include menstrual blood. But it appears that the “monthly curse” is often too terrifying a concept, even for horror writers to exploit.
Probably the most famous example of menstruation in a dark fiction novel is in “Carrie” (1974) the debut novel of horror heavyweight Stephen King. A motion picture based on the book was released in 1976, directed by Brian De Palma, and was the first time menstrual blood was depicted on screen.
The eponymous Carrie is a teenaged girl with a background of sustained abuse, both from her peers and her zealot mother. She gets her first period in her high-school shower room, and with it comes a dangerous ability.
“Plug it up!” her classmates yell, as they pelt her merciless with sanitary products. Cowering in fear on the bathroom floor, Carrie’s humiliation and confusion (her mother has never explained menstruation to her) help form the catalyst allowing her to unleash her devastating telekinetic powers. King links the onset of menstruation with Carrie’s outpouring of pent-up rage. Drenched in pig’s blood on her prom night when her classmates attempt to embarrass and belittle her, Carrie’s traumatic passage into womanhood allows her the opportunity to find and unleash her true potential — to destroy all those who would seek to destroy her. No longer a child, nor an impotent victim, she uses her new-found fertile femininity as a deadly weapon of revenge.
Similar stakes are at play in the 2000’s Canadian werewolf horror movie “Ginger Snaps” directed by John Fawcett. Ginger Fitzgerald, a self-styled gothic outsider fascinated with suicide and death, is attacked by a lycanthrope monster, the “Beast of Bailey Downs,” almost at the exact same moment that she experiences menarche. Thus, menstruation and her “monthly change” are unavoidably linked. Ginger grows hair in awkward places, and even starts manifesting a tail. Her behaviour grows inevitably more monstrous and violent, which her sister, Brigitte, points out with alarm. Ginger denies such changes, attributing any differences in her behaviour to normal hormonal reactions.
I’ve got hormones,” she says to Brigitte when confronted. “And they may make me butt-ugly, but they don’t make me a monster.”
Previously uninterested in any of the males at her school, post-bite Ginger is suddenly sexually insatiable, going so far as to engage in risky, unprotected sexual intercourse and infecting her clueless partner. It is implied that although he instigates their initial sexual contact, ultimately she rapes him as she asserts her sexual dominance.
“I get this ache,” Ginger tells her sister later. “I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces!”
While we might assume that these urges are the result of being bitten, they are also tied to her new-found awareness of her physical body and her burgeoning womanhood. Femininity as a weapon once again.
Typically, as is often the fate of female characters in horror, both Carrie and Ginger meet untimely ends. Their powers are so immense that they become unstable, driven by revenge or desire. It’s a narrative we are told repeatedly in fiction and real life: “That time of the month makes women go crazy.” They are irrational, dangerous, and unhinged. Just like a beast or monster, you cannot reason with them.
King would later revisit the idea of menstruation heralding Very Bad Things in his subsequent novels, “IT” (1986) and “The Tommyknockers” (1987).
In “IT” Beverley’s fear is that of transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and the arrival of her period punctuates this. The book and film versions differ greatly in how menstruation is portrayed. In the movie, Bev’s mother is deceased, and she has no female figure of authority in her life. She is clueless about her changing body and her physically abusive father sees her maturing form as an invitation to sexually molest her. In the book, she says that she and her father create a “smell” between them, which may or may not allude to the aroma of menses. When blood begins to pour out of the drain, it could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for Bev’s monthly flow.
In “Tommyknockers,” Bobbi Gardener begins menstruating so heavily, her repulsed lover wonders if she will need a transfusion to replace the loss. This overly heavy flow is in response to her digging out an alien spaceship, buried for aeons in rural Maine. Her hair and teeth start falling out, and she turns translucent, finally undergoing a metamorphosis where she resembles the blob-like aliens themselves. Is this perhaps some clumsy metaphor showing how menstruation equals youthfulness and fertility, and when it halts, menopause will (allegedly) steal a woman’s youth and beauty? Sadly, King’s writing at this time was much too sloppy for us to be sure.
In many societies, menstruating women are shunned or vilified for being unclean or even sinful. Bleeding women may be banned from places of worship, or excused from performing prayers. Certain religions may prohibit the woman from preparing food for others, or engaging in intercourse.
Conversely, in some historic cultures, menstruating women were seen as powerful and sacred beings; formidable warriors much stronger than men. In pre-colonial Māori communities, for example, menstruation was seen as an honour that represented a oneness with life-flow. A young girl’s menarche was celebrated with rituals and seen as a rite of passage.
Anne Rice uses the notion that menstrual blood might bring strength when she offers it up as an unusual meal for the vampire Lestat, in the fifth book of her Vampire Chronicles series, “Memnoch the Devil” (2000). In an act which some readers thought controversial, and others considered utterly abhorrent, Lestat drinks the menstrual blood of the devoutly Christian Dora so that he may gain necessary sustenance from her blood without hurting the woman. The scene is sometimes referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as “a vampire period drama.” Whatever Rice’s reasons for including this act it does, albeit briefly, suggest the idea that rather than being a dirty, waste product, menstrual discharge could be both nutritious and revitalising. That women could both derive and share power from their bleed.
Not a horror text, but a fantasy series, Alison Croggon’s “Pellinor” books also equate menstruation with power. In “The Gift” (2003) every significant event occurs when the central character Maerad experiences her period. She realises the connection between blood and strength and discovers how powerful she is. This heralds Maerad’s awakening, and understanding of what it means to be a woman. Menstruation signifies a sense of becoming, of maturing and finding strength in herself.
Menstrual blood might indeed be powerful, and life-giving, but in horror, there is very often a dark twist. “The Murders of Molly Southbourne” (2017) is horror novella by Tade Thompson which focuses on the life of the titular character. Molly suffers from an unusual condition; every time she bleeds, a doppelgänger grows from her blood. After three days, the doppelgänger “goes bad” and attempts to kill her. In order to survive, she is forced to kill “herself.” Her situation is somewhat complicated by the onset of puberty and subsequent menstruation, with doppelgängers arriving with every cycle. Thompson’s story is an intriguing, and often violent, allegorical look at what it means to grow up female, and offers an interesting connection between puberty and mental illness — a time when many sufferers may first see their symptoms manifest. Molly’s blood brings life, of a fashion, but it is not good life.
That blood is life is both a philosophical and biological notion: to lose blood from a wound or other orifice usually indicates trauma and possible death. Blood loss from an area which is seen as inherently sexual, and is not in response to trauma or harm, suggests a transcendence from usual biological rules. These bodies are so powerful they can slew the lining of their wombs each month, and be ready to nurture new life inside them a mere two weeks later. A cycle of death and life with each new moon.
Menstruation in horror fiction is frequently used to signify that terrible “Otherness” which the genre seeks to invoke. Either by amplifying the belief that it is sinful or unclean, or as a harbinger of immeasurable and uncontrollable feminine power. As a great deal of horror fiction is often skewed towards men, both as creators and consumers of, what could be more Other than this unrepentant cycle, one over which they have no control? Representation differs between the genders, with female writers offering an (unsurprisingly) more realistic and pragmatic view of “lady time,” while men frequently equate being “on the rag” as an indicator of unexpected violent outbursts or uncontrollable sexual energy — sometimes even both.
In addition to books and film, some examples of menstruation can also be found in horror video game narratives. However, with such games being marketed primarily at male players, menstruation, yet again, most often signifies the monstrous Other. In “Bioshock Infinite”, it is Elizabeth’s menarche at age 13 which incites a spike in power readings on the massive machine, The Siphon. To reach her full potential, however, requires blood, and it is blood which Elizabeth says highlights the difference between a girl and a woman.
In Telltale Games’ “The Walking Dead” even a zombie outbreak can’t stop the onset of puberty, with the motherless Clementine experiencing her first bleed and feeling bewilderment and fear at having no idea what it means. It is up to group leader Javier to do his best to explain it to her; a duty which many men, mostly due to societal conditioning, might indeed find “horrific”.
Menstruation might well be the Last Taboo, and its inclusion in horror fiction is often problematic or dangerously destructive, but unlike in horror, science fiction and fantasy writers do not seem as squeamish about adding menstruation into the mix. Corrine Willis’ short story “Even The Queen” (1992) explores how women who no longer need to endure a monthly bleed due to scientific and medical breakthroughs, opt to experience it by choice, even going so far as to call themselves “Cyclists”. It has been described as a sly and subversive jab at feminism, but also imagines a future where women might have more autonomy over their bodily functions. It notes very clearly the negative aspects of an unwanted bleed, and how much freedom can be regained when it’s no longer necessary. While the young daughter praises the supposed miracle of womanhood, her mother knows much better — that menstruation also brings with it pain, mood changes and a literal bloody mess.
End-of-the-world novels very rarely feature a female protagonist. Stories by Octavia Butler, P.D. James, and Margaret Atwood are some of the few who buck the trend. Add to this list Meg Elison’s “The Book of the Unnamed Midwife” (2014), a post-apocalyptic exploration of how men and women’s experiences of a broken world can differ greatly, especially in times of societal crisis. The book is written primarily in journal format, and follows a female medical worker struggling to help and provide medical care to the women she meets on her journey to find civilisation. Women are scarce in this future, with large numbers killed off by an unknown plague which also makes childbirth deadly. Added to that, most women are raped and enslaved by the remaining men — the protagonist even poses as male to evade capture. Menstruation, pregnancy and sexual assault are all examined in honest detail. This is a violent and harrowing tale which never shies away from the more visceral, bloody parts of being a fertile woman, but also examines their strength and resilience.
Fiction has no shortage of female characters adopting a masculine appearance as a form of defensive camouflage, but David Twohy’s horror sci-fi movie “Pitch Black” (2000) adds menstruation and gender-stereotyping to the mix. While the crew members assume Jack is a boy due to her choice of clothing and hairstyle, she is outed — without her consent — as female by the prisoner Riddick.
“I thought it’d be better if people took me for a guy,” she says. “I thought they might leave me alone instead of always messing with me.”
It’s a powerful statement which offers a scathing commentary of a patriarchal world where girls who have entered puberty may suddenly be seen as sexual objects of desire. An understanding that menarche opens a door not only to womanhood, but also to danger.
Ultimately, despite the suggestion that her monthly bleed may put a kink in the crew’s plan to avoid the deadly creatures that are hunting them, and escape the alien planet, Jack proves to be a strong and capable survivor. Dealing with menstruation while running for your life may be an inconvenience, but it certainly does not indicate weakness.
To conclude, I want to mention the more upbeat (but still deliciously dark) short story “Logistics” (2018) by A.J. Fitzwater. Another post-apocalyptic speculative-fiction tale, this is a first-person account of Enfys and their search for sanitary products at the end of the world. It is as much an exploration of gender as it is the issues and physical trials of menstruation, but acts as a thoughtful reminder that biology does not equate to gender, and the two are sometimes in conflict. Likewise, simply being in possession of a working uterus — whether you want one or not — brings its own unique challenges. “The monthlies” don’t just stop because civilisation is in pieces.
Examples of menstruation in darker genres clearly emphasise the shame, myths and frequent inconveniences that surround it, but they also illuminate, in ways that are often uncommon in fiction, the conflicting emotions felt by menstruating women about their bodies, and of those around them. As well as exploring the societal fear that the menstruating woman is a threat, these stories also show her powerful side, her resilience and sexual strength. The menstruating woman celebrated as a warrior and survivor, not as a monster to be feared.
It would be incredibly difficult to include every instance or example of menstruation in horror & dark fiction. By way of an apology to those I have left out, I offer a list of further reading and watching.
Fiction:
“Some of Your Blood” Theodore Sturgeon (1961)
“Wolf-Alice” short story from The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter (1979)
“The Handmaid’s Tale” Margaret Atwood (1985)
“Weaveworld” Clive Barker (1987)
“The Crossing” Mandy Hagar (2009)
“Shiftless” Aimee Easterling (2014)
“Man-Eaters” (graphic novel) Chelsey Cain (2018)
The Witch, dir. Robert Eggars (2015)
Jennifer’s Body, dir. Karyn Kusama (2009)
It Stains the Sands Red, dir. Colin Minihan (2016)
A Tale of Two Sisters, dir. Jee-woon Kim (2003)
Excision, dir. Richard Bates, Jr (2012)
Teeth, dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein (2007)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dir. Fran Rubel Kuzui (1992)
Non-fiction:
“Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror” Erin Harrington (2018)
“The Vagina as a Bleeding Wound: Monstrous Puberty in Carrie, The Exorcist and Ginger Snaps” Kate Maher
“Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice” Linda Badley (1996)
“Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage” Williams, Christy, Marvels & Tales (2006)
Read online:
“Even The Queen” Corrine Willis
Who Is Ellen Ripley?
First published February 2020 for Women In Horror Month at Ginger Nuts of Horror
Revised and reprinted June 2020 in The Digital Dead magazine
I was fifteen when I first watched Aliens, and twenty-two by the time I saw Alien. Yes, I watched them out of chronological order. Despite being part of the same franchise, I consider both movies to be exceptionally different, albeit underpinned by one amazing, badass character — Ellen Ripley.
According to online fan-site Xenopedia, Ellen Louise Ripley was born on 7th January 2092 and began her career as a warrant officer with Weyland-Yutani commercial freight operations. During her assignment on USCSS Nostromo, she first encountered hostile Xenomorphs on planet LV-426, commonly known as the Archeron.
Later, promoted to Lieutenant First Class and attached to the Colonial Marines as a civilian advisor, she encountered yet more Xenomorphs, while revisiting LV-426 on the USS Sulaco, cumulating with Ripley blowing the Alien Queen out of the Sulaco’s airlock.
Ripley is not a soldier and she is not trained in combat, but she is determined, tough and amazingly resilient. Alien is a slow-burn sci-fi horror story which doesn’t fully kick into action until forty-five minutes has passed. (Director, Ridley Scott himself joked that nothing actually happens in this time.) It has been described as a haunted-house movie, except the old house is a creepy spaceship. You would even be forgiven for assuming Ripley is a mere supporting character after Tom Skerritt’s Captain Dallas. Yet it is Ripley who faces up to the Xenomorph, devises an explosive survival plan, rescues herself, her cat Jonesy, and escapes. She floats away in cryosleep, hoping to be rescued from deep space.
After spending fifty-seven years asleep, Ripley awakens as a main character once more, in the action-packed horror/sci-fi blockbuster Aliens. It’s clear she is suffering from some serious PTSD and anxiety disorder and has no wish to revisit the alien threat. It is her recurring nightmares and concern for the people of Hadley’s Hope (a colony now living on LV-426) that sparks something powerful inside her. A burning need to do the right thing and also to confront her fears.
The first time I watched Aliens was with two friends in their den. Our respective parents had no idea. I remember being totally blown away, and not just because of the impressive action sequences. I’m out and proud as queer these days, but at fifteen I wasn’t fully sure. I just knew Ripley was one of my very first girl crushes, and I longed to have someone like her in my life.
On a superficial level, I was immediately struck by her physical appearance. Sigourney Weaver is a striking woman, but not stereotypically “pretty.” Her beauty comes from her energy and her attitude, and the way she carries herself. In Aliens she is make-up free, wearing typically masculine attire and sporting a rather unfortunate haircut. Yet rough, tough, macho marine Corporal Hicks falls for her pretty much instantly. Forget about any other romantic movie you have ever seen and think about that moment where Hicks shows Ripley how to use a pulse rifle.
Ripley: What’s this?
Hicks: That’s the grenade launcher. I don’t think you want to mess with that.
Ripley: You started this. Show me everything. I can handle myself.
Hicks: [chuckles] Yeah, I noticed.
Screw When Harry Met Sally, I wanted a love like Ripley and Hicks.
As an impressionable teen who also wasn’t traditionally pretty, that affected me in a million positive ways. It’s not about how you look, it’s about who you are, that will attract people to you. Ripley really emphasised that. Stuck in space with a bunch of hard-ass marines, she doesn’t try to lean into any particular angle other than her own. She doesn’t butch herself up to fit in, but she equally doesn’t try to emphasise her femininity so that those big, strong boys will do everything for her. She exudes complete and utter confidence in herself and her abilities. And she is fucking fabulous.
Ripley sparked a love for kick-ass females, and who I will probably always look to as a timeless and indisputable feminist icon. I remember watching her in both movies and thinking how bloody brilliant it was that she gave no apologies to anyone for any part of her. She would not back down and she would never give up, she simply rolled up her sleeves and got on with the damn job.
It would be hard to talk about Ripley without mentioning the theme of The Mother. In Alien, MU-TH-UR 6000 known as MOTHER is the AI mainframe in the Nostromo, and as well as auto-piloting the ship, was responsible for monitoring the crew. A poor guardian, however, MOTHER also ensured the survival of the deadly Xenomorph specimen taken from LV-426. Ultimately, MOTHER is destroyed by Ripley, along with the Nostromo.
In Aliens it is Ripley herself who takes the maternal role. Tormented by the loss of her real daughter while in hyper-sleep, she is quick to adopt and protect orphan Newt. While the Alien Queen attempts to colonise the planet with her own, deplorable offspring, the movie culminates in the ultimate face-off between two strong and determined females, fighting both for themselves and for their children
But Ripley is a mother to everyone, not merely to Newt, as she guides and advises the marines. She sees and anticipates what needs to be done, and her concern for the Hadley’s Hope colony overrides all her fears. She is the epitome of a strong matriarch, leading and protecting her community. She respects those who deserve her respect but has no time for those who give her any shit. She accepts everyone based on their merits and their behaviours, but she also understands that people can change when given the right guidance and support.
Except Burke. Fuck that guy. Right?
Or maybe not. In one of the most famous deleted scenes from Aliens, apparently cut because of a continuity error, we see Burke’s original demise. While searching for Newt inside the Hive, Ripley finds Burke, cocooned to the wall with a Chestburster inside him. He begs Ripley for help. She gives him a hand grenade and moves on. Behind her, Burke apologises for everything he has done. Ripley is a total badass, but she is also kind and fair. She is still a human being filled with surprising amounts of empathy. Even towards a jerk who would have happily killed her, and Newt, for money.
Ripley has no comparable military training to that of the marines. She does not have any obvious special skills or abilities, and she accepts leadership begrudgingly. But she survives due to her determination, her willingness to meet the problem head on, and to take control of her own narrative. She will not allow anyone to control her — not a Xenomorph, not a manipulative male, and most certainly not a corporate company. She’s learned that if she wants to survive, she needs to help herself, but that doesn’t make her selfish or immune to others’ needs, in fact it makes her more empathetic. She walks her own damn path, but she doesn’t need to walk all over others to do so. She knows “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and she works hard to do what’s right.
All of that doesn’t mean she’s not scared. Of course, she’s scared, but real bravery doesn’t mean you’re not frightened, real bravery means you can be scared but manage to overcome it. That you carry on in spite of your fear. All of these aspects of her personality make her an archetypical strong and powerful woman, in many different ways. Above all else, Ellen Ripley is undoubtedly a true badass.
Why I Believe ALIENS is the Best Movie Ever Made
First published January 2021 at Sci-Fi & Scary.
Director, James Cameron is well-known for using themes in his work. The most prevalent of these are:
- the preservation of the nuclear family unit,
- corrupt, capitalist corporations,
- corporations owning and utilizing the military for their own gains,
- advanced future tech managed by blue-collar workers,
- strong, female characters and mother/child relationships.
Unsurprisingly, ALIENS ticks off all of these, and more.
So, let’s begin… Why is ALIENS the Best Movie Ever Made?
Because it begins with a chilling bait-and-switch.
Barely eight minutes into the movie and we see the main character, Ellen Ripley, struggling with what appears to be an internal parasite and begging to be killed. It’s shocking and intense and makes you sit up and take notice. When the Xenomorph finally bursts out of her chest we are reintroduced to the titular monster with terrifying gusto.
Because the clever use of time markers adds to the intensity and pacing.
The script gives us all the necessary pieces of information without ever straying into needless exposition. Fifty-seven years have passed since the events of ALIEN; Ripley spends three, frustrating hours in the boardroom; the team has seventeen days before they can expect a rescue with four hours until LV-426 blows up, and Ripley has only twenty-six minutes to rescue Newt. Thus, we are on the clock from the very first scene.
Because the level of worldbuilding is exceptional with a tight plot straight out of the gate.
James Cameron doesn’t mess around – you are thrown into space while the title credits are still fading, with Ripley positioned like a modern Sleeping Beauty being rescued from her years of slumber. There are very few wide pans or establishing shots, Cameron instead drives the story through his characters making location almost secondary to the plot.
We are given a very claustrophobic view of what Earth looks like in this imagined future; we are restricted to seeing only interior shots, while the outside is a Virtual Reality projection. Through this we can surmise that Earth itself is a ruined shell of itself and the colonization of other planets has become a necessity rather than mere desire.
Because you care about all the characters.
The jokes, the camaraderie and the chemistry between the actors means you can feel a real sense of everyone working together. The Colonial Marines are enlarged by their actions and none of them feels one-dimensional. It enhances their unity, both as a team and against the enemy. Whatever their screen-time or character motivation, you care about them all. No one dies without leaving a mark, even the slimy traitor Carter Burke.
Because Ripley is so incredibly badass but also relatable and human.
Ripley is traumatised and psychologically broken, but still she finds the strength to do what she needs to do. Being all alone in the universe, she is motivated by her desire to reclaim her own life as well as to save the colony. She is unapologetic about who she is as a survivor and how her experiences have shaped her, and yet her empathetic nature means she still manages to put others first.
Because Ripley is a feminist action star and cultural icon.
Ripley is one of the best female characters in a science fiction movie, ever. Superficially, while this movie might appeal to stereotypical, white, cis, testosterone-filled males, in reality it is about compassion, motherhood and survival. Ripley (along with Hicks as a stand-in father) has a fearless, protective, motherly instinct. This movie helps to smash the patriarchy simply by existing.
ALIENS was not marketed as a women’s story, but it is a woman’s story. Ripley is not tough like a man; she is tough like a woman – the indescribable toughness of a mother who has lost her only child, who finds a child who has lost their mother. In a moment of furious determination, Ripley literally uses duct tape to make her ultimate badass weapon – a M240 incinerator unit (flame thrower) attached to a M41A pulse rifle with under-barrel grenade launcher – before setting out to rescue Newt. It shows Ripley’s ingenuity and drive, while being incredibly relatable and human.
Plus, “Get away from her, you bitch!” is the greatest movie line ever.
Because the scene where Hicks shows Ripley how to use a pulse rifle is intensely erotic.
Hicks is attracted to Ripley from the moment she steps into that Power Loader and shows him and Apone what she can do. Unlike the leading ladies in many other movies, Ripley is not here for our viewing pleasure. Her appearance is one of quiet confidence, she shows that she is resilient and in control, yet the intensity and energy she exudes proves that women do not need long, blonde hair and big tits to be sexy. She subverts the usual clichéd tropes and rough, tough Corporal Hicks is completely smitten.
Personally, I feel like it’s a travesty that Hicks never gets to tell Ripley how he feels. Instead, he says it all through his actions; how he places himself physically between her and any danger, his constant checking if she is okay and when he tells her, “Don’t be gone long, Ellen.” It’s a kick in the gut to know that (spoiler) Hicks and Newt are killed off right at the start of ALIEN 3, and Jonathon Clemens is a poor substitute lover.
Because it passes the Bechdel Test.
To pass the test, a movie has to have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something besides a man. While we might not be able to count Ripley’s heated interaction with the Alien Queen, we can certainly include her conversations with Newt.
Because Burke is such a believable bad guy that you love to hate.
Burke is literally the catalyst for all this carnage. It is on his direct orders that Newt’s parents go to check out the Alien egg-infested derelict spaceship and end up taking a facehugger back to the colony. When confronted he shrugs and says it was a “bad call, that’s all.” Little wonder then that Ripley tells him he will be nailed to the wall for all he’s done. Which in turn, emboldens him to carry out his real plan – to allow an unsuspecting Ripley and Newt to take an Alien embryo back to Earth.
Burke embodies every real bad guy we know in modern society. He highlights how capitalist corporations fuck with us and, perhaps worse, how we let them. Burke is suave, intelligent, reasonably good-looking and acts like he’s on our side, but he’s actually a more terrifying monster than any Xenomorph. Unlike the Alien Queen, whose only real agenda is to ensure the survival of the species, Burke’s motivations are based in financial greed and corporate power, and he will sacrifice anyone to achieve that selfish goal.
Because the Alien monster is a giant, walking sex organ.
Like its predecessor ALIEN, this movie shines a spotlight on sex and body horror by allowing an alien female to gain power by using their sex as a weapon. In a show of patriarchal subversion, the Alien forcibly impregnates the host body – also a glaring analogy of rape and pregnancy – and uses their own body against them. The host is used and later discarded but ultimately kept alive. It flips expected gender roles and exacerbates the vulnerability and fragility of the human body, where everyone can be a victim.
Because Newt has the best scream in any movie, ever.
Seriously, the kid has a stunning pair of lungs on her that even Drew Barrymore and Jamie Lee Curtis cannot match.
Because the special effects are phenomenal.
Not enough is said about the cinematography and visual effects used in this movie, especially the colour palette used. The lighting and tone demand we lean in close, while the ragged, fractured visuals of the soldiers’ shoulder-cams entice us to peer into the shadows and dark spaces with them.
Because ALIENS has a cat in it.
This needs no further explanation.
Because the hardware in this movie is exceptional.
As Private Hudson tells us, “Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you.
Check-it-out… Independently targeting particle-beam phalanx. VWAP! Fry half a city with this puppy. We got tactical smart-missiles, phased-plasma pulse-rifles, R.P.G’s. We got sonic, electronic ballbreakers. We got nukes. We got knives. Sharp sticks…”
Add to this the M577 Armoured Personnel Carrier, the M56 Smart Guns, and the hulking form of the starship Sulaco, and we can see that ALIENS is rocking some serious tech, as Hudson himself might put it.
Because even though it appears to support gun fetishization and militarism it is actually a critique of both.
Other writers greater than me have suggested that ALIENS draws a parallel to the horrors of the Vietnam War, where those in power sent troops on a mission where they had explicit corporate interest in the outcome, but were quite aware that they were sending them to their deaths. It mirrors the time-honoured human tradition of knowingly sacrificing a group of people if it appears to serve the greater good.
ALIENS shows us that while war might seem unavoidable, it comes with a incalculable price. The number of weapons you have and troops you command mean nothing; the real tally of conflict is human lives.
Because it has an important, underlying warning about the human cost of colonialism and imperialism.
One of the reasons why ALIENS is so great is how it paints a terribly depressing yet fully believable future in terms of how human beings behave and how we might colonise space. The Alien Queen has no great master plan. She has no grand illusions or expectations. Her sole aim is to ensure the proliferation of her species with no other agenda but survival.
ALIENS reminds us of how humans frequently try to take what is not rightfully theirs by force while actively repressing the Other. Only in this story, the Alien Other fights back and wins. It gives us a glimpse into a future where our selfish actions have dire consequences. Humans are no longer at the top of the food chain and cannot simply do what they want.
Because James Horner’s original soundtrack is phenomenal.
This macho, science-fiction action movie has a soundtrack written and performed with the prestigious London Symphony Orchestra, and if you don’t think that is incredibly cool, I don’t know what else to say to you.
Because the scene in the director’s cut when Ripley gives a cocooned Burke a grenade will give you chills.
After running away like the coward he is and shutting off a potential escape route for the others, Carter Burke is apparently killed by an Alien. Except, as Ripley tells us earlier in the film, they don’t kill you. Whilst searching for the abducted Newt she comes across Burke, cocooned in the wall. He begs for help; says he can feel it inside him. Silently, she hands him a grenade, wraps his fingers around it and pulls the primer. She moves on. From behind her, we see and hear the blast. Ripley doesn’t even react.
Because it is eminently quotable.
Everyone has a favourite, but here’s some of mine:
“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”
“No. Have you?”
“This little girl survived longer than that with no weapons and no training. Right?”
“Why don’t you put her in charge?!”
And finally, to conclude,
“Game over, man. Game over!”
Queer Vampires in Modern Cinema
First published June 2020 for Pride in Horror Month at Divination Hollow Reviews.
This essay was shortlisted for an Australian Shadows Award, 2021, for Nonfiction.
Human society craves the Other – an enemy, a stranger or a scapegoat, against which every individual can define themselves. Any appearance, behaviour or desire which deviates from the culturally accepted norm is considered monstrous, and as a consequence, is avoided or shunned. As a genre, vampiric horror frequently emerges during times of cultural crisis. It serves as a social pacifier, a tool to help negotiate communal anxieties by working through them in a displaced form.
Author Fred Botting (Gothic, 1996) suggests that since the Middle Ages, the fear of vampires originated as fears of the Plague, thought to have emerged from the East. A vampire’s principal companions and alternative forms – rats, wolves and bats etc. – were all associated with this affliction. The vampire was seen principally as a disease-bearing foreigner, thus combining overt racism and the fear of illness and death in one. The 18th century aesthetic of morality and monstrosity added to this further with the spectre of homosexuality. Decadence, corruption and forbidden love; all sins to be avoided.
Ever since their creation, vampires have been associated with sex and deviancy. They are the Monstrous Other and their existence is terrifying and corrupt. By their very undead nature, vampires go against the supposed laws of God and goodness. They embody both physical monster and unclean desires. As any deviation from the expected norm is considered scary, homosexuality has also long been equated with the Monstrous Other. Those who oppose it often cite it as exhibiting “unnatural urges and behaviour” and that it “goes against God.”
Vampires embody homosexual behaviour primarily in the way that they engage in sexual practices without the consequence of reproduction. Their bodily form can shift and become fluid, and all expected physical boundaries can be transgressed, with this fluidity applying to traditional gender norms as well. Lesbian vampires were considered an even greater danger to society. Female-to-female desire was seen as destructive to both natural laws and as a threat to the patriarchal order. L. Andrew Cooper, writing in Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture(2010) suggests that by penetrating the flesh with her fangs, the lesbian vampire emulates the insertion of the phallus, and thus claims masculine power for herself. This subversion of and deviation from patriarchal norms saw such vampires become monstrous “Femme Fatales.”
Legends around vampires have existed for millennia, with many different cultures having their own stories of blood-drinking entities and spirits. While the gothic novel found its heyday in the late 18th century, the cinematic medium has depicted vampires for just shy of a century, beginning with the 1922 release of Nosferatu. Max Schreck donned prosthetics and heavy makeup to play Count Orlok, emphasising the vampire’s monstrous appearance. Yet it didn’t take long before vampires became desirable. Bela Lugosi’s early portrayal of Count Dracula (1931) was unfailingly charming and often sexy, although his victims were always beautiful women. Any queer vampirism was kept to a subtext.
Between 1934 and 1968, all Hollywood projects were required to adhere to the Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hays Code, a set of rules intended to prohibit the making of any movies that might corrupt the general audience. While not explicitly banned, the Hays Code made sure that any instances of homosexuality or queerness were effectively erased. When they did exist, their sexual preference was usually only vaguely alluded to or they were depicted as villains.
Horror films were one of the few genres unafraid to explore and expose a queer presence in cinema. While many creators used queerness as a trope – the monstrous and predatory queer being unfortunately very common – there was some sense of victory that the queer was at least becoming visible. Movies such as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Rebecca (1940) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) certainly included queer characters, even if this was not made explicit or celebrated.
Vampire movies went even further by equating queerness with sexual liberation. In Dracula’s Daughter (1936) the central character, although desperate to cure her vampiric tendencies, seduces both men and women to drink their blood. Blood and Roses (1960) – an updated adaptation of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella, Carmilla – was a precursor to the many out-and-proud lesbian vampire movies that would arrive a decade later. Unrequited love sends the unhappy Carmilla to her vampiric ancestor’s tomb where she also becomes a vampire, to then kill and feed on other women.
By the 1970s, feminism was on the rise, and the empowered, lesbian vampire was a powerful symbol for marginalised groups – women and homosexuals alike. The 1960s had ushered in a sexual revolution, and the Stonewall Riots gave LGBTQ characters the room to have a more explicit presence. The end of the Production Code also allowed Hollywood filmmakers greater freedom to tell the stories they really wanted to. Lesbian vampirism became a 20th-century Exploitation trope beginning with Hammer Films release of The Vampire Lovers (1970) which applauded queer, vampiric horror. The Belgian movie Daughters of Darkness (1971), Spanish Vampyros Lesbos (1971) and Blood Spattered Bride (1972), and the British Daughters of Darkness (1974) ensured that queer vampires went international on the big screen. French director Jean Rollin built his career on this trope, releasing a succession of queer-friendly vampire pictures including The Naked Vampire (1970), The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), and Lips of Blood (1975)
In the 1980s, cult erotic-horror classic, The Hunger (1983) gave visibility to an openly bisexual vampire. Catherine Deneuve stars as Miriam Blaylock with David Bowie as her companion, John. When John begins to age, Miriam seeks to replace him with the – at least initially – unwilling Sarah (Susan Sarandon), while John’s undead, mummified body grumbles pitifully in her attic. Fright Night (1985) introduced Chris Sarandon as the posh, gay (possibly bisexual) vampire Jerry Dandridge and his obsessed young neighbour, Charley Brewster; while The Lost Boys (1987) played with physical androgyny and queer sexuality as lead vampire David asks the conflicted Michael, “How far are you willing to go?”
Many filmmakers also realised that vampiric horror was an ideal way of delivering subliminal messages concerning the dangers of sexual liberation, particularly during the 1980s amid the threat of AIDS and HIV. While the characters are not explicitly queer, Near Dark (1987) plays with the themes of ‘infected’ and ‘clean’ blood, as well as clear racial and homosexual metaphors.
Many of the queer vampires of the ’90s and early 2000s moved away from sex and passion to focus on relationships and family. Interview with the Vampire (1994) based on Anne Rice’s novel from 1976, saw Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Lestat and Louis, playing father-figures to the plague-ridden Claudia (Kirsten Dunst). The movie explores their complicated – and frequently volatile – relationship over several centuries. The Dracula and Van Helsing families become inexorably intertwined in the vampiric arthouse-style movie, Nadja (1994) which updates the Dracula myth into modern New York. And Let the Right One In (2008) tells the story of Oskar, a bullied young boy, and his relationship with child vampire, Eli. While Eli’s gender is deliberately ambiguous, their relationship transcends this, with the two main characters shown to be both firm friends and romantically connected.
In more recent years, queer vampires seem to have become less popular in the movies. The Sisterhood (2004) is a teen horror B-movie about a vampire who corrupts a college sorority, while German horror film, We Are the Night (2010) focuses on an all-female vampire trio who are being investigated by the police. Unrequited same-sex love features as a motivational plot-point, while exploring the idea of a matriarchal society. However, where the big screen might be lacking, there is still plenty of queer representation in television (True Blood, The Originals, What We Do In The Shadows, BBC’s Dracula) on YouTube (queer, feminist Canadian vampire web series Carmilla) and in low-budget, independent “Gaysploitation” erotic-horror films (Vampire Boys and Bite Marks, both 2011).
Being queer might still be considered by some as the Monstrous Other, but it seems that gay vampires are no longer the shocking entity that they once were. The popularity of Ellen and Ru Paul’s Drag Race has integrated gay culture into the mainstream, and same-sex marriage is legal in twenty-eight countries around the world. Where horror aims to shock and subvert, homosexuality is no longer considered controversial enough.
Yet vampires remain popular regardless of their sexual preferences. Modern vampire stories in cinema and television often focus on their raw strength and immortality, rather than their sexual deviancy. They do not age nor die of natural causes. They can create others like them without a prolonged gestation period. They have increased speed, strength and healing ability, and are apparently immune to disease. Current events have shown us that a large percentage of the human species is woefully unprepared for catastrophic events – vampires show us an Other which we might secretly aspire to be. An impossible, evolutionary advantage, that might also be just a little bit queer.
The Mother is the Monster — an Exploration of Monstrous Matriarchs in Modern Horror Fiction
First published as a Guest Post, May 2019 at Ladies of Horror Fiction.
Women in horror frequently get a very bad deal. They are punished, constantly and consistently, for no other reason than their gender identity. Portrayed either as weak and fragile victims, or gratuitously over-sexualised, often their only purpose is to be assaulted, lusted over or both. Enter: the Monstrous Mother. She may be possessive, narcissistic, overbearing, jealous, abusive, homicidal or sexually oppressed. The very worst kind of monstrous mother is all of these things at once. Horror has a special relationship with its audiences — it relies on emotions and must illicit a reaction. It awakens hidden fears and desires and is frequently the most unsettling when it imagines danger in “safe” places such as the home. Because of this, monstrous mothers make ideal protagonists.
The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud described motherhood in a highly controversial way. He believed that women’s lives were dominated by their reproductive functions, and a woman’s existence is only given real meaning when she becomes a mother. She serves as a container for her infants’ endogenous drives, and her influence is so powerful that should she fail to successfully realise these drives and desires — especially during their formative years — she may cause irreversible and catastrophic damage to her child’s psyche. Thus, mothers are supposed to be saviours and protectors. Their primary role is to nurture and care. When that is compromised, we are forced to confront a kind of horror which makes us feel vulnerable and confused. The Monstrous Mother trope taps keenly into our primal fears. It fosters distrust in the mother’s role as a worthy protector. The idea that all mothers should be sweet and caring homemakers is undermined by casting them as villains. It is a Freudian nightmare made real.
No other monstrous mother better highlights this Freudian fear than Vera Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody) in Peter Jackson’s Braindead. After being bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey, becoming a zombie, and subsequently turning the entire town into the undead, she then mutates into a gigantic and repulsive beast, complete with oversize breasts. That sequence of events could be quite terrifying enough for her nebbish son, Lionel, to cope with, but her warped maternal instincts urge her to go yet further and suck her unwilling offspring back into her womb, along with the line, “No-one will ever love you like your mother!” Lionel escapes by performing his own twisted caesarean and dispatches his creator, running into the waiting arms of his young, female lover. An Oedipal tale this is not, and yet it certainly toys with some of Freud’s controversial ideas on psychosexual development — where the mother is the first true love object of the child, all boys are drawn to and subconsciously desire their mothers until a suitable substitute is found. Lionel has to effectively be re-born and destroy his overbearing mother before he can begin a new sexual chapter in his life.
Women who turn their back on creating offspring are often seen as monstrous, simply for denying what Freud would argue is a woman’s sole purpose for existing. Yet some monstrous mothers most certainly should never have accepted such a role. In Stephen King’s Carrie, Carrie White’s mother Margaret (played by Piper Laurie in the 1976 thematic release) is a fanatical, abusive zealot who brands her telekinetic daughter a witch, throws hot tea in her face and then tries to kill her. The fact that she has traumatised her daughter throughout her entire life, and has been the catalyst for awakening her powers, has apparently not occurred to her. Clearly Mrs. White is not mentally sound and is possibly suffering from a certain amount of unresolved guilt and past trauma, however her unhealthy obsession with Jesus and a fervent revulsion of sex, ensures that Carrie’s life, especially during her formative years, is a constant misery. Carrie has no knowledge of menstruation or what it means to her as a woman; her mother informs her that the onset of her period is due to her entertaining “sinful thoughts” and forces her into a cupboard to pray away the evil. Ultimately, after sustaining years of bullying and abuse from her mother and her peers, and then doused in pig blood as a prom night prank, Carrie herself takes up the mantle of monster and destroys her classmates, her mother, and herself with her telekinetic abilities. Her actions are seen primarily as an act of revenge, but also an act of liberation, as Carrie emancipates herself from a lifetime of matriarchal mistreatment.
Mother’s Day, a Troma Entertainment “exploitation film” from 1980 (and loosely remade in 2010) also takes the idea of an unsuitable mother and runs wild with it. The titular Mother has raised her two sons to be murderers, rapists and thieves and actively encourages their horrible exploits — indeed, they engage in such acts to impress her. Of course, the victims are invariably young and attractive women, and in another warped example of the Oedipal and Jocastacomplexes, Mother ensures she eliminates any competition for her sons’ adoration and maintains total control over their lives. Mother’s background is never revealed, and we are left to assume that her proclivity towards derangement is simply due to some warped enjoyment. The character is eventually dispatched by her sons’ would-be victims wielding a sex-toy, serving to further highlight Mother’s fear that eventually all mothers are replaced by younger, more sexual women in their sons’ lives.
Horror mothers are often angry, and that rage fuels their homicidal urges. In David Cronenburg’s The Brood, Nola Carveth (Samatha Eggar) is abused by her alcoholic mother during childhood. Her unprocessed rage — coupled with a new type of experimental psychotherapy — is so powerful that she is able to parthenogenetically give birth to a brood of homicidal dwarves who physically enact her subconscious desires by murdering everyone who angers her. An obvious physical manifestation of her unresolved psychological pain, Nola’s ability to spawn these children of vengeance is somewhat ironic, given that her sole aim for undergoing therapy is to prove that she is emotionally stable. Thanks to the actions of her supernatural children, her desire to gain custody of her real, human child is a goal which is sadly never reached. Yet, just as alcoholic Monster Mother begat traumatised and unstable Monster Mother, we are shown in the conclusion that Nola’s daughter might also have inherited her mother’s vengeful talents.
One such child who definitely inherited his mother’s temperament was motel owner-manager Norman Bates, he of Psycho fame. The domineering and narcissistic Mrs Norma Bates is equal parts jealous, manipulative, needy and homicidal. She is a mean-tempered and puritanical old woman who raised the seemingly mild-mannered Norman with abject cruelty. She teaches him that all women — except her — are whores, and that any sexual contact is a sin. She controls his entire life and forbids him to leave her or the motel. It is hardly any wonder then that when his mother takes a lover, a confused and jealous Norman dispatches them both. Later, unable to bear the pain of being separated from her, he exhumes and mummifies his mother’s corpse, and keeps her in his fruit cellar. Eventually we discover that Norma’s influence on her son has had terrible consequences, to the point where he not only commits homicide in her name but does so while wearing her clothes. We are led to believe that Norman is not merely pretending to be his mother but has essentially become her: his personality has been split and overcome by the murderous “mother” persona. Norma may not have ever taken up a knife herself, but her terrible parenting certainly made her indirectly responsible for a multitude of deaths, by actively contributing to Norman’s psychological distress.
Horror films are all too happy to pervert the results of a personal tragedy into some form of biblical vengeance and perhaps the most well-known monstrous mother is she who only becomes a monster to avenge the demise of her child. Driven mad by bereavement, Pamela Vorhees (Betsy Palmer) in Friday the 13th, wreaks murderous vengeance on the teenage counsellors of Camp Crystal Lake, who she blames for the accidental drowning of her son, Jason. It is an extreme decision, but it shines a light on a mother’s primal instinct to protect their child, or to make sense of their death. Pamela’s actions are indeed monstrous, but we can also appreciate how the tragic circumstances have influenced her mental state and driven her to pursue lethal reparations.
Other monstrous mothers seeking either homicidal justice include: Mrs Loomis in Scream 2 who wants revenge for the death of Billy, her murderous son; the ghostly Jennet Humfrye from The Woman in Black who seeks to avenge the accidental death of her child by taking the lives of any who dare approach Eel Marsh House; and even the Alien Queen from Aliens who as a six-legged, double-jawed beast with acid for blood becomes even more terrifying when she discovers that Ripley has incinerated her precious eggs. Going back as far back as the Anglo-Saxon era, when Beowulf kills Grendel, it is Grendel’s mother who arrives seeking murderous revenge. Such behaviour is clearly an extreme over-reaction, but these monstrous mothers see their deeds as completely reasonable. And as any real-life mother knows, when the “Momma Lion” has been unleashed in her, woe betide anyone who hurts her child.
Horror mothers don’t always start out as monsters, often they are simply struggling with the responsibilities and pressures of motherhood. Sleep deprivation, physical and mental exhaustion, behavioural difficulties in their offspring or financial worries all have a considerable impact on any new mother. In The Babadook Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) is an exhausted widow, struggling to raise her troubled and violent son without help. Mentally fragile and clearly gripped by a terrible depression, Amelia voices the unthinkable: she wishes her child were dead. She is subsequently possessed by the Babadook, which urges her to act on her desires, yet through a feat of great emotional strength, she is able to overcome the monster and drive it into the basement of her house. Amelia does not vanquish the beast, but instead she learns to tame and control it. The Babadook serves as a powerful metaphor for the destruction mental illness, and specifically maternal depression, can wreak on a family unit. Director, Jennifer Kent, stated in October 2014 that: “it is a very taboo subject, to say that motherhood is anything but a perfect experience for women.” And yet it is one which many mothers, new and old, readily identify with. Caught in the grip of post-natal depression, for example, real life can feel like real Hell for many women.
Lionel Shriver captures this struggle uniquely in the character of Eva Khatchadourian in her novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Some might argue Eva is included unfairly, as after all it is her son who is the real monster, but her indifference and coldness towards her own child and the distance she maintains between them, pushes him down a dark path. It is unclear if Eva herself is suffering from some form of PND, but her ambivalence to motherhood, borne from her struggle to adjust to life with a challenging infant, and perhaps compounded by the fact that having a family meant she had to give up her successful career, drives an already disturbed young child to commit atrocious acts. Why, we wonder, did Eva not seek professional help for her child, and also for herself? Perhaps, to some, a monstrous mother is not only one who commits evil, but one who also quietly distances herself from it and allows it a space to thrive in her own home.
In The Monster the mother herself is not necessarily the titular monster, but she is still a terrible mother, and as such, her behaviour is deemed to be monstrous. A raging alcoholic who is both incompetent and abusive, the relationship between failed mother and neglected daughter is hideously strained, and it is largely Mummy’s fault that they both find themselves in a perilous situation. Only after the introduction of the “real” monster — a stereotypical scary beast with sharp teeth and claws — is the monstrous mother thus able to redeem herself. She acknowledges and apologises for her previous bad mother behaviour and offers herself up as a sacrifice to ensure her daughter can survive. Her selfless sacrifice cannot necessarily negate her prior monstrousness, but it does reassert her role as a protector and saviour and suggests that even the worst mothers can change and rediscover their caring, maternal role.
Horror as a genre is frequently dominated by male writers and directors — out of all the books and films mentioned previously, only three: The Babadook, The Woman in Black, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, were penned by women. Playing heavily on the stereotype of the “hysterical” woman, most other male-written monstrous mothers become shrieking harpies, incapable of expressing themselves rationally or calmly. Perhaps locked in a permanent state of post-menstrual tension or driven mad by unstable hormones, they are seen to be devoid of logic or compassion. Male writers are only able to comment on their perception of motherhood — and one also has to seriously question the relationships they have with their own mothers when looking at their sources of inspiration! Their fictional mothers are frequently zealous, domineering, or seek to emasculate their offspring. They are usually post-menopausal, and if not outright unattractive, they are certainly not depicted as sexual, or sexually active — suggesting that a woman loses all her urges and sensuality once she has given birth. She does not need to be an actual beast, when her behaviour is beastly enough, (excluding Vera Cosgrove of course.) However, all faults aside, Monster Mothers are also frequently strong and formidable characters. It shows an interesting awareness that even when the female horror character has lost her physical allure or her sexual “purpose”, her role as a Mother can offer her a different kind of power as a woman.
In traditional horror literature, when the females are stronger than the males, they are frequently depicted as sexually depraved monsters who indulge in exhibitionism and sadism. Not true in monstrous motherhood. These women have no need for sex or procreation — their work is already done. When the female is able to transcend these predefined gender roles, she has the potential to be both feminine and masculine, and to be as nurturing and protective as she is dominant and aggressive. These females then become a threat by simply proving they can be stronger or more powerful than any male — a concept which Freudian theory claims a man is incapable of enduring — and the mother becomes a monster more frightening than any supernatural beast.
“The mother is the monster” is not a typically common horror trope, at least not when compared to the use of women as victims or sexual objects, but a number of modern horror writers and directors are becoming increasingly aware that it is a chillingly effective one. The bond between a mother and child forms one of the strongest emotional ties in human nature and exploring those feelings through horrific narratives awakens a primal terror within us. An anxiety that suggests that if we cannot even trust our own mothers to nurture and protect us, nothing in our lives is truly safe.