Horror’s historical cousin: the Gothic

To understand why horror operates as subversive, we must first look at its distant cousin, the Gothic genre. The Gothic became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries as a response to Enlightenment rationalism. The Enlightenment considered the world as reasonable and easily understood, and the Gothic set out to dismantle that. With its ghosts, haunted castles and unstable psyches, Gothic novels questioned if the world really was as stable and rational as the Enlightenment considered it to be.

In other words, the Gothic questioned and poked holes in the status quo. Ghosts questioned the immutability of death, psychotic breaks insisted that the human mind was irrational and haunted houses broke down the commonly accepted hierarchy of the domestic space.

Sources:

https://elifnotes.com/main-elements-of-gothic-literature/

https://www.britannica.com/art/Gothic-novel

This is why women writers found a welcoming niche in the genre. The Gothic’s haunted house offered a way for women to explore their anxieties surrounding their position within the household. The most notable example is Shirley Jackson’s three haunted house novels. These novels explored how domestic expectations and oppressions put on women — especially social expectations — caused anxiety and harmed women’s psyches.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Shirley-Jackson

https://the-line-up.com/shirley-jackson

For these reasons, most academics — including myself — consider the Gothic to be a socially subversive act of resistance towards the social order. The Gothic offers a mirror to society. Look here, it says. The status quo scares us. Anxieties and fears could be explored in a safe space. The Gothic acted as catharsis, in a way.

Times changed, and the Gothic wasn’t enough

For all of its social subversiveness, the Gothic had shortcomings. One of them was the way it upheld colonial hegemony and the racial Other. The Black and Brown body was made into monsters; the colonized were depicted as wrongdoers who threatened the White social order. Strangely, it sort of fits with the subversive work of the Gothic. White Gothic writers were suspicious of the colonized, and they explored those anxieties within the space of Gothic fiction.

But as the postcolonial movement blossomed, and ex-colonies gained independence, the Gothic couldn’t offer the level of subversiveness needed to combat colonial ideology. Thus came modern horror.

Modern horror grew out of the postmodern movement of the late 20th century. Like the Gothic movement, postmodernism was highly skeptical of reason. It even considered, as the Gothic did, science and technology as highly destructive. However, postmodernism explored an area the Gothic considered but didn’t focus on: a suspicion of ideology and hegemony and the role those two things played in maintaining power.

This is why postmodernism and postcolonialism, the study of the consequences of colonialism and imperialism, are closely linked. Postmodernism questioned hegemony, and postcolonialism questioned Western power. Postcolonialism questioned social hierarchy, and postmodernism explored the reasoning behind it. Both intellectual movements grew hand-in-hand.

So, the question is, what do either of these intellectual movements have to do with modern horror? In the literary sphere, Gothicism wasn’t prepared to deal with postcolonialism. It was firmly rooted in Western hegemony, and postcolonialism sought to upend that. That is where we get modern horror: at the intersection of Gothic subversiveness and postcolonial/postmodern rethinking. Zombie horror and slasher films were born out of the excess of the postmodern movement. They were meant to blur genre boundaries, thus refusing the clearly delineated categories (Us v. Them, colonized v. colonizer, etc.) of hegemony.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postcolonialism

https://bookerhorror.com/the-postmodern-horror-film-an-introduction/

The birth of modern horror and its social subversiveness

As the world developed beyond postcolonialism and into decolonialism — the movement to eradicate colonial mindsets — horror developed along with it. Folk horror became a widely popular subgenre because it defamiliarized Western beliefs and myths through the use of marginalized, diasporic points of view.

Sinners, the Oscar-nominated film I mentioned before, is the perfect example of this. The film follows twins Smoke and Stack as they try to carve out a space where Black sharecroppers can let loose in Jim Crow Mississippi. Their night of music, dance and companionship is threatened by an Irish vampire who wants the twins’ musician cousin, Sammy, to join him and use his music to bring more people into his coven.

The film blends Gothic vampirism with Black diasporic beliefs. White hegemony (Jim Crow South) is made uncanny through the vampire trope, and Black myths (conjure, Vodou, haints) become central to the story instead of being Othered or cast to the margins. This is what modern horror is meant to do: decenter the status quo and center alternate modes of belief.

As for the other horror media examples I offered, they all attempt to break down hegemonic ideology by making the status quo uncanny through horror elements. The Substance turns female beauty standards into a body-horror nightmare. The Magnus Archives takes the issue of surveillance in London to a new level, likening it to an omniscient god. Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter and Lingua Ignota’s Sinner Get Ready albums critique religious fundamentalism through hair-raising, grating sounds.

Each example is “scary,” sure. They’re cathartic, too, just like the Gothic was. But they’re doing something for culture that other genres can’t do. In my opinion, the most efficient way to subvert something is to make it seem abnormal. Horror has taken the status quo and made it horrific. It’s recreating culture right in front of us.

The next time you’re watching a horror movie or reading a horror novel, stop and think. What is this piece of media trying to say? How is it trying to say it? In this age of viral, short-term media, analyzing creative content (be it horror or something else) is a refusal to accept the status quo. It’s revolutionary.