The apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feelings are not in the least concerned and no passion seems to be excited but the depressing one of fear, is a paradox of the heart… difficult of solution.
John and Anna Laetitia Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” (1773)
Feeding The Monster: Why Horror Has A Hold On Us is the second non-fiction collection from film programmer, podcaster and critic Anna Bogutskaya. The book is both an exploration of the last decade in mainstream horror cinema, organized thematically rather than chronologically and at the same time, a response to a mainstream discourse that still sees horror as in some way suspect. Bogutskaya’s introduction puts this really well:
Every October, I’ll do a panel or a slew of interviews where I’m asked variously, ‘Why do we like horror?,’ ‘Is the genre misogynistic?’, ‘Why are people still watching horror?’ The unspoken implication of course, is that there is something wrong with the people making and watching horror films. (p. 6)
Or, to put the problem in the language of the 1800s, take the Reverends F. Prevost and F. Blagdon who wrote in their introduction to the 1801–2 Flowers of Literature anthology, ‘Happy would it be, for the welfare of the present generation, if those ridiculous fabrications, of weak minds and often depraved hearts, which constitute the enchantment of circulating libraries, could be entirely annihilated.’ The conservative writer Hannah More in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (written all the way back in 1799) argued that Gothic novels were a threat to the virtue of the female reader, as the novels were the ‘modern apostles of infidelity and immorality’ that dispersed ‘pernicious doctrines.’ I bring this up just to underscore that this problem – this accusation of being morally suspect – that Bogutskaya writes about has been floating around for as long as two hundred years. As such, even if her new book doesn’t get everyone to move on from asking these tired old questions, (which I think is too much to ask for any book!) every resource that helps give a new answer is both sorely needed and to be much welcomed.
In this respect, the book can be seen as a contribution to a much underappreciated body of work that includes things like Peter Laws The Frighteners (2018), Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), The Philosophy of Horror (1990) by the philosopher Noel Carroll, Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure Principle and a whole host of other writers stretching back to John and Anna Laetitia Aikin and even earlier. Bogutskaya’s answer to the question is given in the context of a historical shift that the book loosely pins to around 2014. “Horror, for lack of a more evolved way to put it, had become cool.” (p. 8) A large part of this coolness or cultural cachet is thanks to a wave of women filmmakers, and a broader collectivity of podcasters, curators, academics, writers and fans. In this context then, the implicit question of what’s wrong with you for liking this is stripped of its polite gloss and revealed to be what it has always been – an aesthetic and moral judgment that rests upon shame.
This accusatory question – what’s wrong with you – implies that there’s something broken, damaged or polluted in us. It never actually wants an answer; in itself the question pathologizes the appeal of the grotesque, the frightening and the horrific. You are the problem. Who we are, the identity and history of who is looking at a horror film or reading the horror book, changes the story. Cue justifications. Cue secrecy. Cue shame. Cue well-meaning panels and books and essays regurgitating that it is, in fact, okay for us to like horror, and yes, it’s okay to make horror films. (p. 11)
Here in the introduction, horror films are presented as a means of articulating a distinct set of fears, desires and hunger into sensory, phenomenological experience. The argument follows some broader trends in academic research around affect theory and what Xavier Aldana Reyes calls the “corporeal model” of viewership. To watch a film is not just to be a passive observer, but to experience a new kind of feeling. We are, in some ways, entangled with the horror which is what gives these films there power to reach through the screen and rake along our goose-pimpled skin. Accordingly, the intro finishes by pointing out the rest of the book is less about the film, “but our fixation with them, and the way they make us feel, particularly during times of real life anxiety and fear.” (p. 17)
Structurally the book moves through five long essays which can generally be read in any order – Fear, Hunger, Anxiety, Pain and Power. This is a rather brilliant way of structuring the book, allowing the essays to keep focus on the films in question but also to loosely interconnect, allowing the reader to draw inferences and connections. It’s this structure which is at least partly responsible for making this an invaluable introduction to contemporary mainstream horror cinema for people new to horror but who might have some broader cultural awareness that something like Midsommar was a thing.
The other thing that makes this such a good introduction is Bogutskaya herself – she’s enormously informative, but never in a way that feels exclusionary. Reading through the book is a joy as every few pages there’s a new film that you get to be excited about. So much writing from within a cultural niche can be so exclusionary that if you don’t already speak the language it’s impossible to find a way in – not so here.
That friendly welcoming tone makes both the vast sweep of film history and individual films far more approachable. The chapter “Fear” is a great example, contextualizing the present moment within the larger trend of horror film history, which is, at the end of the day, just film history. Horror, cheap to make and generally reliable in terms of economic profitability is internationally marketable and over the past decade or so has done very well in terms of market share. But horror has still struggled with its reputation and the last decade has also seen the popularization of the genuinely awful term of “elevated horror.” I absolutely agree with Bogutskaya that this term “generates an unusual amount of bile in me” (p. 41) Elevated horror is a term that simultaneously tries to say that contemporary horror is in some way new (not like that old fashioned non elevated horror) and that it is better that the old stuff. It is a phrase that is designed to denigrate, to reinscribe shame and to enforce cultural classism — people who make splattery horror movies with their friends make horror (looking at you Sam Raimi) but people like Ari Aster make elevated horror. While the term isn’t really in vogue anymore, I’m absolutely here for banging the final nails into its coffin, and then setting that coffin on fire.
The rest of the chapter offers a whistle-stop tour through the various decadeBogutskya’s s of horror, linking various films to the social and societal crises of a particular moment. “There is a pattern to our fear. Institutions and politics; economic booms and collapses; distrust and disenfranchisement…all rear up in different periods” (p. 36). In the discussion of contemporary horror films, it often feels like take on the politics of the current moment is profoundly defeatist, though not without reason. “There’s never been a time more ripe for horror than now. My generation – that of millennials – is one of fractures…what if good is no longer possible?” (p. 43-4) I don’t disagree — (obviously) — but I think this sense of contemporary horror being a site of closure is conceding too much to the broader cultural logic of late capitalism.
This sense of closure is not inevitable or in-built to horror film, but symptomatic of a cultural imagination increasingly atrophied, an atrophy determined by the wider forces of history. Yes, the contemporary horror film and the superhero film both tend toward epistemic and political closure and the restoration of the status quo, (i.e a kind of normative American hegemony) but this is reflective of nothing necessary to these two modes of cinema in and of themself. In short, there’s a tension in the argument here: horror is a site of empathy, sincerity and recognition but these things don’t seem to have much political valence. We can see ourselves in horror, we can feel – but we can’t potentially do much else besides that.
Much of the rest of the chapter concerns haunted homes with some bravura readings of things like The Haunting of Hill House, Tell Me I’m Worthless, Skinamarink and a host of other contemporary haunted houses and liminal spaces. “What is cinema if not a shared dream, and horror a shared nightmare” (p. 68) asks Bogutskaya, but a more important question is what do dreams and nightmares do? Can they push us to act differently, or to put this in more Blochian terms, do we dream in the day about a future in which horror can end, or do we dream at night in the nightmares that keep us trapped in the present?
“Hunger” is maybe the standout chapter of the whole book covering the contemporary cultural obsession with cannibalism, from Yellowjackets, to Hannibal to the Netflix series on Ted Bundy. In an era of atomisation, in which the social world has collapsed, we’re all hungry for some kind of connection and the sublimated eroticism of cannibalism is again a symptom of a deep seated alienation. Particularly good is the attention the chapter pays to the ways in which food, consumption and gender intersect, and the shame, (self) disgust and punishment that is doled out to young women as a disciplinary apparatus of patriarchal misogyny. Cannibal horror presents a record of what is done to women through the regulation of appetite, and the degree to which it literalises need, desire and the fundamental eroticism of human sociality. (Listen to Tender Subject! One of the very best podcasts precisely because of their own deep understanding of the ways in which desire, consumption and alienation are all messily chewing on each other). There’s something deeply personal and beautiful in this chapter, blending personal memoir, culture criticism and film studies to a conclusion that I think many of us would agree with.
Cannibals that want to disappear into one another, joining another person despite any taboos that might surround the relationship; to be absorbed into another, and in the process be relieved of the soul shattering loneliness. I find it hard to be afraid of them (p.107-8)
I won’t spend more time recounting the other chapters – the conclusion reinscribes some of the themes already covered, calling for a renewed appreciation of the ‘emotionality of horror, how terribly frightening and beautiful and sad it can be’ (p. 219) rather than an endless recitation of generic taxonomies or formal pedantry about what horror can and can’t be. Bogutskaya has little time for this kind of arguing (and as someone who hosts a horror movie podcast on which we claim that every film is a horror movie, I couldn’t agree more) One of the final lines from the conclusion puts it like this: “how difficult it can be to just admit being really fucking scared sometimes, of the world, of yourself, of scary stories” (p. 220) The question for me is whether or not this admission can do anything more than make us feel better – and in that I agree that all too often we don’t take these feelings seriously enough. In the dark of the screening room wherein we see our worst fears play out we do so alone, but at the same time, together – the very beginnings of a collective subjectivity.
Finishing with both a watch list and a reading list of horror fiction this is a stylish and at times very funny introduction to contemporary horror. It will become the starting point for so many people, just finding within themselves monstrous desires, dreams and anxieties. Why horror has a hold on us isn’t easy to answer definitively. However, the book’s argument that horror is the form which best allows us to confront our own worst nightmares, and that in its radical sincere empathy we might find acknowledgement of the monstrosity around us – and within us – is utterly compelling.
***
Feeding the Monster; Why Horror Has a Hold on Us by Anna Bogutskaya is out now from Faber and Faber
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