Illustration by Marcelina Jagielka
CW: Mention of racism, mental illness
Plot spoilers for: Ex Machina (2014), Get Out (2017), Midsommar (2019)
Do you feel it? Can you smell it in the air? Drifting in the breeze . . . A pumpkin. A hint of frost. The faint jingle of The Monster Mash. Gather round, girls and ghouls, for the spookiest time of the year approaches!
It’s a bit much, I know, but I love Halloween. I LOVE Halloween. There’s nothing that brings me more festive cheer than seeing the world decked out, not in boughs of holly, but tacky black-and-orange plastic. The sweets are half-off, the costumes are half-done, and every streaming service is packed with slashers, thrillers, and bone-chillers. We are living in the golden age of horror, where you can go straight from a midnight viewing of Nope, to the classic Night of the Living Dead, before settling in for a few hours of your favourite indie horror game. Then, beginning the day with blurry eyes and a notification from Daily Dracula that our favourite un-dead aristocrat is back and causing trouble.
I’m hardly unique; we’ve been telling scary stories around the campfire since flint first struck stone. We’ve squeezed terror out of everything: sea monsters lie in wait beneath the ocean waves, homes become haunted and turn against their owners, people transform into wendigos and zombies and ghosts and vampires. But why? Why do we make horror? And more pertinently to this time of year, why do we love consuming it?
My guess is that the appeal of the horror genre can’t just be simplified into ‘fear’, and it isn’t just ‘fear’ because it is never just ‘monsters’. It is really about people: our people, our loved ones, and our neighbours. Who Goes There? (1938 novel) and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (1956 film) isn’t simply invading aliens – it’s communist brainwashing taking over your neighbourhood. The slasher villains of the 1980s – Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees and Freddy Kruger – targeted promiscuous youths, drunken youths, during a time of anti-drug ‘Just Say No’ campaigns and huge moral panic over the corruption of children. Our children. Our loved ones, turning into monsters or victims. Modern horror is our subservient AI going rogue in Ex Machina; our community revealing itself as a murderous cult in Midsommar; our family trauma and mental illness in Hereditary; our loneliness in the existential emptiness of The Backrooms; class warfare between them and us in Us and Fear Street; everyone’s racism in Get Out. Our houses have been haunted by our grief, our guilt, our real and metaphorical ghosts as far back as Arthurian legend and as recently as Netflix’s 2018 miniseries The Haunting of Hill House.
Some fiction is only fun because it is so distant, so unbelievable that it constitutes escapism. Horror is enduring beyond everything else because it strikes us at our core. Beneath the aliens, the paranormal, and the psychopaths is the most normal fear of all: losing our people or our place among them. Time and time again, we watch our horror protagonists lose what they love. And then we watch them keep going anyway.
There’s the kicker. The acknowledgement of our fears wouldn’t amount to much without the depiction of us overcoming them. When the main characters expel the aliens, exorcise the spirits, and put the axe-wielding murderer down for good, the media creator (be they a writer, director, game designer, or graphic artist) takes our hand and says, “It isn’t just you. This fear is real and we all experience it. And it can be defeated.” The ‘final girl’ lives. Not always, but often. You do get the theme of insignificance in the face of the unimaginable vastness of the universe from Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and your Jigsaw with his endless gory traps (Saw, 2004 film), and the knowledge that you can never wipe out all of the zombie horde, but how often do the protagonists really give up?
If the fear is losing our loved ones, the point of the fight is to preserve them. To protect each other and the love we have for our fellow human beings. The fight continues because it has to. If there’s a moral to horror, it’s this: always keep going, whether you’re battling the forces of darkness or the gradual encroachment of Christmas decorations into your local Sainsbury’s in the first days of September (a true story, folks).
Happy Halloween, everyone.