Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us, by Anna Bogutskaya, Faber & Faber, 244 pp
American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, by Jeremy Dauber, Algonquin Books, 468 pp
The ghost of Jamie Bulger haunted the margins of my childhood, and it returned to haunt my life as a parent, when my son was two and three-quarters: the age at which Jamie Bulger was abducted from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, Liverpool, by a pair of ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who led a crying Bulger around the city streets for two hours, before bringing him to a railway siding in Walton, where, among other tortures, they threw blue Humbrol model paint in his eye, before leaving his body to be bisected by a passing train. That afternoon, thirty-eight people had noticed two boys wandering alone with a crying toddler. Nobody intervened effectively. A week later Thompson and Venables were arrested and charged with Bulger’s murder. The trial judge permitted the media to name them. Their mugshots were widely reproduced, alongside stills from the New Strand CCTV camera that captured the moment of abduction: the small trusting figure, holding the hand of the larger – the much larger – boy.
I was eleven years old at the time. And, at the time, it was not Jamie Bulger but Thompson and Venables who loitered at the edges of my imagination, refusing to be assimilated, refusing to go away. I understood Thompson and Venables, then and for many years afterward, as potent figures of evil: frightening, unknowable. Delinquents, truants, vandals, shoplifters: the familiar classroom type, here hideously and incomprehensibly magnified. Bad boys, in the argot of early childhood, whose badness somehow reached out past the limits of the moral universe, to some unbearably sad, ugly, barren, and yet dispiritingly ordinary place (that railway siding; that Humbrol paint). Unknowable; and yet, they were like me. They were boys, like me. What to do with this?
Nobody could answer this question for me in 1993, because nobody else knew what to do with it either. At the time many people resorted to calling Thompson and Venables evil – a Merseyside police officer who took part in the arrests was widely quoted to this effect – and to this day Thompson and (particularly) Venables still occasionally appear in the press as monstrous figures, avatars of sheer malice. As recently as 2022, the Daily Express journalist Carole Malone wrote about her memories of Bulger trial, and said that she could not meet Jon Venables’s gaze during proceedings because ‘I knew I was staring into the eyes of evil.’
Evil in the eyes of a ten-year-old boy. This is a trope from horror fiction, rather than from the universe of liberal moral thought. But liberal morality foundered, and still founders, on Jamie Bulger’s lonely death. Andrew O’Hagan, looking back at the case for the London Review of Books in 2010, noted that ‘In 1993, there was no liberal orthodoxy to apply to the case, and there isn’t now’; the impulse, then and since, has been to suspend judgement, to reach for intensifiers, to anathematise the unacceptable event. John Major, who was UK prime minister in February 1993, said of the case that ‘We must condemn a little more, and understand a little less.’ We must, in other words, say: this is evil. A form of words as a form of banishment, a collective gesture of warding-off.
Raising my own two-and-three-quarters-year old, and doing what parents habitually do in the small hours – that is, imagining the worst – I found that my mind already contained an image of ‘the worst’: that is, it contained my unexamined childhood memories of the Jamie Bulger case. (My thoughts were surely prompted by the fact that my son shares Jamie Bulger’s given name.) And so I found myself at last examining those memories – reading about Bulger’s final hours, and looking, for the first time in thirty years, at that CCTV picture, at those mugshots. In the photographs of Thompson and Venables, aged ten – in the grainy pictures of those unformed, frightened, vulnerable faces – I could not see monsters, or devils. Even knowing what Venables’s future would hold (repeated arrests, as an adult, for the possession of indecent images of children), I could not see evil. In any case, ‘evil’, as a summative judgement of a human being, forecloses thought, forecloses feeling. And yet; and yet.
The tropes of horror fiction, famously, played a part in the case. It came to the attention of the UK media that a scene in the just-released-to-video horror film Child’s Play 3 featured Chucky, a boylike doll possessed by the soul of a serial killer, being splattered with blue paint, just as Jamie Bulger was splattered (and blinded) by blue paint in that railway siding in Walton. A moralising conclusion was drawn: watching Child’s Play 3 and other horror films at an inappropriate age had driven Venables to replicate screened cruelties in actual life. There followed a moral panic – sequel to the ‘video nasties’ panic of the late 1980s. In November 1993 a motion was tabled in the House of Commons calling on Her Majesty’s Government ‘to launch an immediate investigation into the role played by violent films in the psychological impulses that led to [Bulger’s] murder’. The result was the Amendment to the Video Recordings Act, which instructed the British Board of Film Classification to pay ‘specific regard’ to ‘any harm that may be caused’ by violent films ‘to potential viewers or, through their behaviour, to society’.
I did not watch Child’s Play 3 as a child. So I was spared this particular form of harm. As it happens, there is no evidence that Jon Venables or Robert Thompson watched Child’s Play 3 either (though the trial judge also made the blue-paint connection). We do know that Venables watched John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher film Halloween a few months before the murder, and that he then drew a picture of a female figure stabbing two smaller figures (he called it ‘My Dad’s House’; his parents were separated, and his father’s house was where he watched the film). Should a ten-year-old boy watch Halloween? Of course not. Might watching Halloween turn a ten-year-old boy into a killer? It is, in its way, a comforting thought.
Depictions of wicked deeds will inspire us to wickedness: this is an old argument, as old as Plato’s Republic. It has been frequently rehearsed, by court cases and newspapers, in the age of the screen – in the age, that is, of mass distribution and of utterly persuasive mimesis. Were teenage thugs, in the 1970s, warped by Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange, as various judges and prosecutors at the time maintained? The argument is comforting because it suggests a solution: simply restrict the offending artworks, or ban them outright, and we might prevent such awful things from ever happening again. But the argument is false because it gets things backward. Teenage thugs do not exist because of A Clockwork Orange. A Clockwork Orange exists (partly) because there are teenage thugs. And actual horrors do not occur because of horror films. Horror films occur because of actual horrors.
In linking Jamie Bulger’s murder to Child’s Play 3, and to other horror films, commentators and the trial judge were unconsciously suggesting something close to this truth – that is, they were unconsciously acknowledging what horror stories are for. If, as an eleven-year-old, I understood Thompson and Venables as potent figures of evil, it was partly because they were repeatedly associated with a figure that I already knew to be evil: Chucky. The Child’s Play films lurked, among other forbidding, alluring cassettes, up there, on the top shelf of our cobwebbed and plastic-odorous village video shop, under the handwritten sign saying HORROR. I had never seen any of those other horror films either (Ghoulies, Critters, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Prince of Darkness – the Eighties!), but I understood them – I even understood their lurid VHS cover illustrations – to be whispering something that I was not supposed to hear, or perhaps it was something that I both wanted and did not want to hear: the news that there are monsters, that they will hurt you, that the worst news about the world is the ultimate news about the world; that ‘HORROR’ is not a genre but the genre, the genre of reality itself.
In the aftermath of the Bulger trial, Chucky the evil doll became a totemic presence in my primary school yard. We had not seen the film but we knew the gist. A toy that wanted to hurt you, a bad boy who had caused other bad boys to kill a child – Chucky stood for all that was most frightening, but also all that had to be confronted, whether we liked it or not. I remember playing a game with my friends in which Chucky, at first a malevolent figure, was soon befriended, domesticated. Thus was the terrifying rendered harmless. In a way, the commentators who blamed Jamie Bulger’s death on Child’s Play 3 were doing the same thing. Horror gives us images of evil. We put such images to use in various ways. Often we use them to soothe the polity, or simply to soothe ourselves, in times of uncertainty and dread.
Playing Chucky. Those seeking to explain the murder of Jamie Bulger have resorted to the language of archaic moral judgement (‘the eyes of evil’) or of censorship; to the language of psychoanalysis (Terry Eagleton, in his 2010 book On Evil, points glibly to the ‘weaker superego’ of children); even to the language of hazard (Blake Morrison, in As If, his 1997 book about the case, suggests that ‘Between the ages of eight and fourteen, most of us do something terrible […] in a childish, first-time daze. With luck, it isn’t rape or murder.’) I will simply offer two quotations. The first is from the preface to the 2011 reissue of The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (first published in 1994) by David James Smith, a journalist who followed the case from its beginning:
It now seems probable that, like his co-accused Robert Thompson, Jon Venables may have been the victim of child sexual abuse before the murder of James Bulger.
But this is not something known or proven. Like so much else about the case, it exists in the realms of speculation[.]
The second quotation is from WH Auden:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Playing Chucky. ‘What is the relationship between culture and violence?’ Darryl Jones asks at the beginning of his excellent short study Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (2018). One answer to this question is supplied by Walter Benjamin: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Meaning, roughly, that culture is violence, or, at the very least, that culture consists of the effort to disavow, to paper over, the violent roots of a given political order. Child’s Play 3 – tag-line: ‘There comes a time to put away childhood things. But some things won’t stay put!’ – is perhaps not quite the sort of thing that Benjamin had in mind (in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ he speaks of ‘cultural treasures’). But, like all horror films – like all horror stories – it raises acutely the question posed by Darryl Jones.
Watching Child’s Play 3 for the first time, as a grown-up, I can see that, far from being some sort of exudation of the purest evil, it is simply a not very good B-movie: derivative (of, weirdly, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: the film is set at a military school), desultorily plotted and indifferently acted and shot. Chucky is a ‘Good Guy’ doll who happens to be possessed by the spirt of a serial killer with the All-American name of Charles Lee Ray; he kills people, sometimes with toys. As with many low-grade horror films, the point is not to tell a story or even to generate crude metaphors (as B-movies sometimes do) but rather to speed across a rickety scaffolding of narrative to get to the set-piece scenes of torture and death – after all, these scenes cannot take place in vacuo; they have to happen somewhere, and involve someone.
What distinguishes Child’s Play 3 – if ‘distinguishes’ is the word we want – is a tone or sheen of callousness, of amoral superficiality. Its scenes of high-gloss violence are wanly justified by an implicit appeal to ‘irony’ (in the decadent postmodern sense of the word), as in quite a lot of late-eighties or early-nineties Hollywood product. Think of the hard vacuum at the centre of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987), or of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), two films that present acts of extreme violence in an ‘ironic’ way, establishing, more or less accidentally, a circular cultural logic in which screen violence was staged in order to critique the culture of screen violence, thereby perpetuating a culture of screen violence, et cetera. This sort of closed loop was characteristic of the American age of postmodernity, an age which America now seems, violently, to be exiting.
Is Child’s Play 3 a ‘document of barbarism’? More interesting, perhaps, to ask: is it a document of civilisation? It begins with scenes of an abandoned and decrepit toy factory cranking its production lines back to life, and spewing out, by accident, a resurrected Chucky. The film’s real horror, a Benjaminite critic might suggest, is Fordist capitalism, returning to terrorise the increasingly offshored and financialised US economy of the nineties. But presumably most of the viewers who willingly paid to see Child’s Play 3 in the cinema, or to rent it on video, were responding not to its buried historical-materialist content but to its jump-scares, its in-jokes, its splatterings of gore.
Another way of asking ‘What is the relationship between culture and violence?’ is to ask: Why do civilised people watch horror movies? What is it that people like about them? What is entertaining, or gratifying, about seeing a young woman impaled on a meat-hook (as famously occurs in Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)? Or about reading a description of a wounded dog whose hind legs have been hacked off with a hedge trimmer (you can find such a description in James Herbert’s 1980 novel The Dark)? Darryl Jones wittily begins Sleeping With the Lights On with a list of horrific scenes like these – ‘A baby is ripped from its living mother’s womb. A mother tears her son to pieces, and parades around with his head on a stick’ – before pointing out that they occur in ‘canonical literary classics’: in these instances, Macbeth and Euripides’s The Bacchae. ‘The spectacle of violence,’ Jones suggests, ‘is encoded in art from its very beginnings.’
Just so. And yet, the difference between Macbeth and James Herbert’s The Dark, or between Euripides and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, isn’t just a matter of literary or dramatic style (Tobe Hooper was no tragedian, and James Herbert, bless him, was no Shakespeare: ‘The howling dog pushing its way along the corridor towards him, its back legs slithering frantically in the trail of blood it left behind’, et cetera). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Dark, unlike Macbeth and The Bacchae, are avowedly horror stories. Horror, whatever this might actually mean, is their point.
Here are some things that we can say about horror. Horror films rarely lose money at the box office (if you want to break into screenwriting, write a horror screenplay; producers love them). Horror novels are often the first ‘adult’ books that teenagers read when they venture beyond the children’s section of the public library (I recall the girls in my final year of primary school passing around, as if it were samizdat, a scary-looking paperback of Stephen King’s Misery). Horror is the only genre named after an emotion (thriller properly describes not a genre but a subgenre, in this case of crime fiction). And horror is the least reputable of mainstream genres (in the genre hierarchy, it sits uneasily just a rung or two above its close cousin, pornography, and can never quite deny the family resemblance).
Genres are marketing categories, of course. But they are also, in a sense, Kantian categories – they shape our seeing and our feeling – and this means that the market fluctuations of a given genre, alongside the genre’s own internal history, can tell us things about ourselves and about how we understand the world. Where did horror come from? The modern horror genre has its roots in Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth century – everyone knows this – but where did Gothic come from? Why has the mass popularity of horror, especially since about 1945 or so, waxed and waned but never died? Why have we established a whole commercial genre devoted to fear, cruelty, mutilation, agony, and death?
Two new books suggest some answers to these questions, though neither of them, alas, very satisfactorily. Anna Bogutskaya’s Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us and Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond appear at a suggestive moment, and address a suggestive topic. Although only Dauber is American (Bogutskaya was born in Russia and lives and works in the UK), both of these books look westward, to a United States now scarily in transition between a frayed neoliberal consensus and a burgeoning gangster autocracy. Both books find in horror the genre that most visibly articulates our fears and hopes, at such a time. For both Bogutskaya and Dauber, horror is a largely American business: it is about American fears, American hopes, which all of us, of course, in the postwar world, have shared, whether we wanted to or not.
But neither Dauber nor Bogutskaya really know what to do with these fears or hopes, or what to do with horror itself. Dauber is the more scholarly (he is a professor at Columbia University) and Bogutskaya the more polemical (she is a podcaster and critic). But they have certain things in common. They are breezy. They are cutesy. They love their subject and they are pretty much happy to settle for the usual, the received, analyses of it. They are, in other words, fans, in the twenty-first century sense of the world: half-critics, half-acolytes of a jolly cult of appreciation. ‘We have such sights to show you,’ says Pinhead, the Cenobite priest in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987). Bogutskaya and Dauber have sights to show us too. Is there anything we haven’t seen before?
This may be the time – lest I seem too condescending, and in case it isn’t already obvious – to out myself as a horror fan. ‘Out myself’ seems like the right way to put it. As Bogutskaya notes, at the beginning of Feeding the Monster, ‘horror fans are looked upon as oddballs’. The genre offers ‘frowned-upon thrills’; it ain’t never gonna be respectable. Horror is ‘considered, at best, trash and at worst, evil’; it is a ‘dirty genre’. (Bogutskaya does not make the obvious connection with pornography, a genre so disreputable that nobody ever calls themselves a fan of it, but ‘dirty’ is certainly le mot juste.)
Accordingly, Bogutskaya kept her love of horror, discovered in her teens, secret until she was in her late twenties: ‘It was not to be taken seriously and not to be discussed in polite company.’ ‘Loving horror films,’ Bogutskaya writes, ‘is akin to nursing the memory of a secret lover, someone’s touch that never leaves the most hidden grooves of your muscle memory, one that makes you feel things you cannot yet name, think thoughts so forbidden they send an exciting chill down your spine.’
As a way of saying ‘I like horror films’, this is, let’s say, overdone. Prose like this waves language vaguely in the direction of feeling, in the hope that you will think a thought has been thunk. But prose isn’t really Bogutskaya’s métier. Much of Feeding the Monster has the feel of a transcribed podcast – it is chattily ingratiating, digressive, shallow – and, like a podcast, it leaves you with the desire to go off and read something actually substantial when it’s over. It is one of those books (there are now quite a few) that spends a lot of time recounting things that happened on the internet over the last five years or so. On the other hand, it is, like a podcast, likeable. Its heart is in the right place. Horror, it tells us, is ‘the defining genre of our times’. Who could argue?
But people do argue; that’s what people do. The young Bogutskaya understood that if she came out of the closet as a horror fan, she would encounter disapproval. People would ask her, in various ways, What’s wrong with you? ‘No other artistic genre comes laden with this level of judgemental baggage and existential prodding.’ In part, she seems to want to argue for horror’s respectability. In the twenty-first century, she says, horror has ‘become cool’. The 2010s and 2020s have seen a ‘new wave’ of American horror films and TV shows, beginning with It Follows (2014) and Get Out (2017), and including work by a number of female writers and directors (horror has always been quite a man-centric genre, it’s fair to say).
Bogutskaya is concerned to defend horror as a legitimate taste, especially for women: ‘Women can’t always explain away our appetites or where they come from – and should we?’ There is, of course, a difference between explaining away and explaining, but Bogutskaya seems happy to conflate the two, thereby explaining away the whole issue. She also thinks that to ask a horror fan ‘What’s wrong with you?’ is to err because ‘the query pathologises the appeal of the grotesque, the frightening and the horrific’, which misses all sorts of points quite splendidly.
It is a particular kind of respectability that Bogutskaya seeks for horror. ‘The commercial popularity of the genre, underpinned by critical and mainstream attention, has allowed the parameters for female, queer and POC horror voices to grow, showcasing painfully contemporary filmmaking that can elucidate the political, the commercial and the artistic all in one.’ This isn’t, perhaps, fully intelligible, but the general thrust is reasonably clear; and in later pages, Bogutskaya wonders if horror, with its long history of depicting damage to the female body, is at last being reclaimed for the ‘female gaze’. In other words, she believes that horror – in particular, recent American horror films and TV shows – can or should be brought into the tent of progressive cultural politics.
Fair enough, I suppose. The culture wars spare no corner of culture, and progressive cultural politics are better than reactionary cultural politics. Then again, there are solid grounds for believing that ‘progressive horror’ is a contradiction in terms. The utopian impulses of contemporary progressivism (can’t all of our identities simply get along?) are properly the generic responsibility of science fiction. Horror is not in the business of imagining alternative worlds, nor of celebrating diverse voices in this one. Horror, even at its most floridly supernatural, is about our world, this world. Horror has no truck with utopia.
This might, actually, strike us as strange, since horror, like science fiction, is by definition a modern genre. Like science fiction, horror belongs to the world created by the Enlightenment – that is, to the world created by the insight that human beings could radically alter their social and physical environments, the quintessential modern idea. Before, oh, let’s say, 1789, it made no sense to categorise an artwork as ‘horror’. Beowulf fights a man-eating monster, but Beowulf is not a horror story. Neither is Dante’s Inferno, despite its catalogue of tortures. (What is the relationship between violence and religion?) Horror qua horror is the offspring of the French Revolution; and the boom in Gothic fiction in the early nineteenth century represents the childhood of the genre.
This, or something very much like it, is the argument of a brief book by John Clute, The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (2006). Clute is a superb, a visionary critic. In fact, he is one of the most important and original of twentieth and twenty-first century literary critics, and if you haven’t heard of him, this is because he writes almost exclusively about science fiction, fantasy and horror (which he calls the literature of Fantastika), because his reviews tend to appear in ghettoised genre publications, and because he understands Story as the central mode of human thought. This last is an idea that puts him far outside the mainstream of Western literary criticism, which understands Story as material for other modes of thought (politics, philosophy, et cetera). But this is an aside.
In The Darkening Garden, Clute proposes that
Horror is born at a point when it has begun to be possible to glimpse the planet itself as a drama: a very dangerous time in the history of the West, because it is at this point that (to put it very crudely) Enlightened Europeans were beginning to think that glimpsing the world was tantamount to owning it. Horror is (in part) a subversive response to the falseness of that Enlightenment ambition to totalise knowledge and the world into an imperial harmony […]
Horror, in other words, can only speak when there is an Enlightened world to speak against, an Enlightened lie to subvert with its bad, its gruesome news. Horror, in Clute’s rendering, is ‘that category of stories set in worlds that are false until the tale is told’; the truth that horror speaks is ‘the naked, impersonal malice of the world, the Vastation consequent upon true seeing’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Clute’s exemplary horror text is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which makes its refutation of Enlightenment hubris explicit (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’) and leaves us, in Kurtz’s final words, with what Clute calls ‘the final grammar of reality entire’ – which is to say, the horror, the horror.
Clute’s theory – that horror is, roughly speaking, modernity’s Id, the repressed that returns to mock the dreams of progress – explains the existence of horror, but it doesn’t really explain the appeal of horror. In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya’s subject is not, she insists, horror as such (and she does not cite Clute or, indeed, much else in the way of horror criticism) but rather horror movies, and ‘our fixation with them and the way they make us feel, particularly during times of extreme real-life anxiety and fear’.
In proposing that horror serves an essentially therapeutic purpose, Bogutskaya is orthodox – Aristotelian by way of diluted Freud. Horror catharts, horror heals trauma. True, up to a point, of course. But horror is also the genre most likely to subvert the trauma plot; to insist that trauma is not aberrant, a healable wound, but rather the common fate of all life. In an early Stephen King story, ‘The Boogeyman’, a man named Lester Billings visits a psychiatrist seeking treatment for his grief: his children have been murdered by a creature who may or may not be the Boogeyman. At the end of the session the psychiatrist, Dr Harper, tells Billings to make an appointment for next week. But the nurse’s station is empty. Billings returns to the psychiatrist’s office. Out of the closet steps the Boogeyman. ‘It still held its Dr. Harper mask in one rotted, spade-claw hand,’ goes the story’s final sentence. That’s what horror thinks of your trauma.
Bogutskaya feels that she has broad generational reasons for her attraction to horror: ‘My generation – that of Millennials – is one of fractures. We have not had a Great War, but we’ve endured an endless string of them, bearing witness to conflicts all around the world via twenty-four-hour rolling news and the Internet[.]’ It is very Millennial indeed, if I may say so, to compare watching the news from Gaza or Ukraine with fighting at Neuve Chappelle or the Somme. Bogutskaya says next: ‘We graduated into a recession, entered the workforce in a second one and got promoted in a third.’ All those recessions, and yet you still went to college and got a job and got promoted! Well done, you. It’s the basic middle class Millennial myth: the world is falling apart and that’s been very hard on me, as I built my successful life. But I don’t mean to mock. We live in an age of anxiety. Indeed, we’ve been living in such an age since 1789 – those of us, at any rate, who have been lucky enough not to find ourselves on tumbrils or in war zones or killing fields. We have horror to help us think about this anxiety – horror, the genre that tells us we are right to be scared.
Bogutskaya wants to add nuance to the popular understanding of horror. ‘For too long,’ she writes, ‘horror has been treated as a homogeneous entity, a single brushstroke applied to all of it.’ But a statement like this needs, as we say in the English department, some supporting argumentation. By whom, and in what regions of discourse, is this brushstroking being done? Similarly, to assert that ‘There isn’t just one kind of horror film, in the same way there isn’t just one kind of comedy’ is fatuous, and not only because everyone knows that there are different kinds of horror film. These are odd terms in which to defend horror. Horror’s value doesn’t lie in multifariousness (pornography is also multifarious), or in its power to represent the experiences of different ethnic groups (all the other genres can do this too, if you wish). Horror’s value lies in the way that, surface variation aside, it tells you one thing only. In this, too, it resembles pornography. Pornography’s singular message is, People have sex – a message that as social beings we generally prefer to hear in coded form. (Sometimes the code is very easily cracked.) Horror’s message is, we are nothing more than material bodies fated to suffer and die – a message that as social beings we generally prefer not to hear at all. It is the lingering shreds of old-fashioned bourgeois prudery that makes pornography disreputable. But it is the universal unacceptability of its message that keeps horror in the gutter. Horror appeals to the adolescent for the same reason that pornography does. They both bring news that the grown-up world doesn’t want you to hear.
To be fair, Bogutskaya knows this. ‘The power of horror lies in its confronting viewers with images and ideas that reach into our darkest, deepest fears and expose them.’ But she goes on to say, ‘We’re all afraid of many things at different times, and horror movies draw on those fears.’ This is respectably relativist. But I wonder if it’s true. Are we all afraid of many things at different times? Spiders, debt, cancer? Isn’t it the case that, really, we’re all afraid of more or less the same thing? What we’re afraid of is suffering. And suffering has many forms but always the same content, always the same message.
The classic horror story peels away the ‘rind’ of the ordinary (the word is John Clute’s) to show you something awful underneath that wants you to hurt and die. Almost every horror story in existence begins with ‘the ordinary’ (say, a family moves into a new house). A note of oddness is struck (say, weird neighbours, tales of an ancient Native American burial ground). A small violent thing occurs (who nailed our cat to the door?). Then further violence, further fear, a grim, thrilling descent. Finally, the truth of the story’s world stands clear: ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara,’ as the boyfriend puts it at the beginning of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).
As children, we glean our first intimations of this truth from close observation of the adults in our lives, of the ones who love us, the ones who frighten us, the ones who hide things from us, perhaps for our own good (and perhaps not). The ordinary. What might it conceal? When you’re a child, nobody says it outright: They’re coming to get you. But that’s the really bad news. They are coming to get you. The only real question is who they will turn out to be.
Bogutskaya is very present-minded. Her book is very twenty-first-century, very last-ten-years. So are the politics she envisions transforming our understanding of horror. She praises two recent horror films because they ‘privilege the points of view of characters traditionally reduced to the background’, for instance a Filipina maid. This is all to the good, I suppose, but to understand horror as actually or potentially progressive in its politics is, I think, to misunderstand the nature of the genre. If horror has a politics, then that politics is conservative to the point of nihilism. Horror says that there is an order to which all things will finally revert, and that that order is one of suffering and death. The political views of any given practitioner of horror are largely irrelevant. Stephen King votes Democrat. But his best horror novels (Pet Sematary, IT, Misery) whisper that politics as such mean nothing. (King generally pastes on a redemptive ending; but it always feels false to the tale’s true burden, which is why people always complain about his endings.) HP Lovecraft thought that coloured races were inferior to whites. But his stories tell you that no races, no people at all, mean anything, in the face of a cosmos that is basically and unalterably malign.
Bogutskaya says something interesting when she writes: ‘Horror is immune to irony poisoning and the ironic detachment that has permeated most media. It is, perhaps, the last truly sincere genre.’ If she understood irony as one of the possible modes of sincerity, she might be on to something. But you see what she means. They’re coming to get you. You can trust horror to tell you this, even if no other genre will.
Feeding the Monster is more casual memoir than scholarly history. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary, by contrast, is very much a scholarly history, although it has been written with a popular audience in mind. ‘Our guiding light is the not-so-simple question, simply put: What’s scared the crap out of us?’ We are not in monograph-land. This is reassuring. Dauber, like any good contemporary academic, is a historicist. He understands the given work of horror as symptomatic of material or political ills. ‘[Y]ou can write America’s history by tracking the stories it tells itself to unsettle its dreams, rouse its anxieties, galvanise its actions.’ He is escorting us through familiar territory. But he is an affable guide.
Dauber’s sense of the genre is capacious – perhaps too capacious. In his account, American horror bleeds at its edges into true crime and reports of historical atrocity. John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) merits several pages, as does Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). At no point does he meaningfully define horror as such, or distinguish it from these other modes. (It isn’t just that horror fiction is fiction. It’s that true crime and accounts of atrocity almost always have as their implicit aim the strengthening of a moral consensus, and horror – the vandal genre – seldom shares this aim.) This is itself an argument, of course. Dauber’s quarry, as he tells us at the outset, is not American horror but American history. What has frightened Americans? What continues to frighten them? Not zombies or poltergeists but immigrants and foreclosures; not witches but women; not spectres but slaves.
A certain definitional laxity leads Dauber to find the tropes (and the affect) of horror in all sorts of places, some of them peculiar. Late in the book, he reads the September 11th attacks as ‘a scene from a horror film’. But ‘two planes flying into two buildings’, as Dauber puts it, isn’t a scene from a horror film. The genre of the attacks (if we must vulgarly assign them a genre) was that of the technothriller, or of the Hollywood action movie – and we know, from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (2006), that in the late 1990s Bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda watched Hollywood action movies in order to generate ideas for spectacular attacks on America. (Which raises the question, why wasn’t Independence Day blamed for 9/11 in the way that Child’s Play 3 was blamed for the murder of Jamie Bulger?) ‘Spectacular’ is the point. Horror works by intimacy, not spectacle. The horror story is not the sum of all fears but the sum of your fears.
Dauber wouldn’t necessarily hold with this, however. He proposes that there are two kinds of horror story. The first kind depends on ‘the fear of something vast, something cosmic’ – Burke’s Sublime in a Lovecraftian key. (‘[S]ome day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’ – from Lovecraft’s ludicrous, racist, and also strangely powerful 1928 story ‘The Call of Chthulu’.)
The second kind of horror story depends on the fear of “the monster located right next door.” Under this rubric, Dauber includes American horror tales about the return of indigenous tribes (all those ancient Indian burial grounds), about witches, black people, immigrants, and serial killers: everything from Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Dauber is a conscientious historian of both America and of the horror genre – he starts with Early Modern revenge tragedy and Goethe’s Faust and, when he swings westward, touches on the brimstone-themed sermons of Increase Mather, on the weird pressures applied by the dark New England forests (that ‘wilderness’) to the imaginations of the early Puritan settlers, and on through Washington Irving, Poe, The Turn of the Screw, Weird Tales, Shirley Jackson, The Twilight Zone, Stephen King, Wes Craven … To anyone who knows the history of American horror, there is little here to startle. Dauber’s most valuable chapter is his conclusion, which introduced me to a smorgasbord of contemporary horror writers whom I have not read – literary criticism’s humblest, and most important, function.
Dauber’s two big categories are useful in a project-management sort of way. More interesting are some of his historicist speculations. He finds the roots of much later American horror in the suspended world of the Puritan divines – the world of Jonathan Edwards, in which we hover over Hell or are scooped up into Grace. Redemption in the balance certainly underwrites many of the novels of Stephen King. Dauber points out that Carrie’s mother, in King’s first novel, owns a picture called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Is Carrie redeemed? Are any of us? More conventionally, Dauber asserts that the most basic American horror story is the story of America itself. It is not the Overlook Hotel but the United States in toto that is built on an ancient Native American burial ground. And it is not an accident that the most admired literary novel of America’s postwar decades is a horror story: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a book that tells us which other ghosts haunt the old New World, and why.
Absent from both Feeding the Monster and American Scary – two books about American horror – is any sense of a larger haunting. I mean not the haunting of America but the haunting by America – America’s continued ghostly presence in the consciousness of all of us who are not American, but who inhabit an American world. ‘We all live in two countries,’ John Berger once remarked; ‘our own, and the United States of America.’ Is this a kind of horror story? Isn’t it too big, too spectacular, to count as horror? Or is it just the right size – the size of our own skulls?
Halloween, the horror film that Jon Venables watched in the months before he helped to kill Jamie Bulger, is an American film. It is set in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a place of big clapboard houses and white picket fences, a place utterly unlike Merseyside, where Venables grew up, and also utterly unlike the Dublin village where I grew up. (I Google Jon Venables, and I find that he is still, remorselessly, my near-exact contemporary.) Halloween was the breakout hit of John Carpenter, a director whose later films (They Live, The Thing, In the Mouth of Madness) I dearly love. ‘It was the Boogeyman,’ says Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode, in the final moments of Halloween. The psychiatrist character, played by Donald Pleasance, replies, ‘As a matter of fact … it was.’ This scene is in my head, as it was in the head of the ten-year-old Jon Venables in 1993. It reassures me, this scene, in a way. Yes, of course. It was the Boogeyman. My worst fears are true. Did it reassure Venables thusly, aged ten?
Towards the end of Wes Craven’s Scream, which came out three years after Jamie Bulger’s death, one of the murderers says, ‘Don’t you blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!’ In December 1992 in Manchester, three months before Jamie Bulger’s murder, a sixteen-year-old girl named Suzanne Capper was tortured to death by her former babysitter and her husband, Jean and Glyn Powell. As he tortured Suzanne, Glyn Powell would chant, ‘Chucky’s coming to play.’ Playing Chucky. I played Chucky as a child. I seemed to need to. I knew that Chucky wasn’t real. But I also knew that people like Glyn Powell were real, and that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were real. Why do I love American horror? What truths do I hear it speak? What truths do I want it to speak?
Haven’t I been listening? It was the Boogeyman. It was the Boogeyman all along.
1/2/2025
Kevin Power’s The Written World: Essays and Reviews (The Lilliput Press) includes several pieces that first appeared in the Dublin Review of Books.
