No Longer Afraid of the Dark: On Finding Horror Once the Nightmares Stopped

Indie Spirit and Inspiration in a Genre and Feeling I’ve Avoided

Ten years ago, I was at a literary conference in Massachusetts, sitting on a terrasse with a table of writers who were drinking hard and telling grand stories of their achievements and brushes with the famous and infamous. I sat mutely next to a writer I did not know, sipping at my beer and wishing I hadn’t recently quit smoking. We didn’t utter a word to one another, but there was an unspoken bond born of our quiet disdain for the scene that built around us. In those days, a lit conference was my nightmare, and I felt like it was hers too, and after about an hour of enduring the ego of our party, she leaned into me with an unearned yet welcome intimacy and whispered, “Tell me about your night terrors.”

I hadn’t thought about that evening until recently, when, after a lifelong abstinence from horror (the genre, not the emotion), I finally convinced myself to give it a try. Other than reading the first chapter of Adam Taylor’s copy of Stephen King’s It in seventh grade and avoiding sewer grates for decades, I hadn’t watched or read much, if any, horror in my 48 years of rabid media consumption. From a very young age, I had enough gore in my nightmares to dissuade me from indulging in Freddy Krueger, Poltergeist, The Exorcist, Jason Voorhees, Chucky, Leatherface, Cenobites, or even The Shining, deeply fearful of even the genre’s most iconic and celebrated entries. What could horror do for me that my mind wasn’t torturing me with already?

The night terrors did stop a few years ago, right about the time I put away downers and the drink and reinvested those dollars in therapy. At times, I dipped my toe into the bloody pool of horror, watching Get Out, Us, Fire Walk With Me, and It 2 through half-closed eyes. But I never picked up a horror novel, part of a literati infection of genre disqualification. Horror, YA, sci-fi, mystery, and pulp are simply not literature in a world where literature means having pretended to read Thomas Pynchon. Over the last few months, with the guidance of Bill Mullen at the Bluegrass Writers Studio, I’ve undertaken a foundational journey into the genre through Lovecraft, Alighieri, Poe, Gilman, and a selection of critical texts that have forced me to reconsider horror and gothic literature beyond my ignorance.

But I was still afraid. And, to be honest, worried the night terrors would come back.

Turns out that horror doesn’t have as much to do with fear as I thought.

Most of my writing uses humor and absurdity as devices to confront issues I’m interested in and arguments I want to make, or rather, what AI can’t do with writing until it gains sentience and empathy, at which point everything will be horror. It’s an extension of what, at some point, was a tendency of repression, deflection, and self-deprecation commodified. My first three books borrow their titles from alcohol, and confront issues of addiction, love, loss, and unspoken trauma born of the cocktail of those entities. It had never occurred to me until my recent engagement with the genre that where I go funny, horror goes fear. Their builds and releases are the same—only their modes differ.

This new engagement allowed me to finally consume a wealth of art that had occupied a blind spot in my purported renaissance and has, in fact, reconnected me with a decidedly “independent” style of genre-based auteur filmmaking.. I can now talk to friends about Ari Aster’s Midsommar, where the filmmaker uses humour, absurdity, and horror to (among other things) indict the notion of Western exceptionalism. Who are we—as the film’s American protagonists were when they witnessed an ättestupa ceremony—to be appalled by the tradition of septuagenarian Scandinavians plummeting to their suicides? And, sure, the Hårga commune sews a drugged-up guest into the hollowed-out body of a bear and burns him alive, but even the head of the CDC eats raw roadkill from time to time. Outrage and morality, the film argues, are a matter of perspective. I also appreciated the White Nights setting, where the continuous daylight serves as a commentary on darkness itself, where evil lurks not in the shadows, but in subliminal imagery edited into the background, hiding in the light of day. Horror is typically associated with and set in absence—of light, of truth, of morality—but Midsommar contends that monsters don’t hide, because they don’t believe themselves to be monsters.

Chaste no more, I can now add Samanta Schweblin’s novella, Fever Dream, to my Goodreads. (I’m not on Goodreads.) Set during a mother/daughter vacation haunted by an environmental toxin, Schweblin explores the unsettling idea that consciousness can persist beyond death and inhabit illogical, liminal spaces. Her sparse, urgent prose within a horror framework is a device I never would’ve considered. And “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood is a haunting, captivating short story, which H.P. Lovecraft considered to be a seminal supernatural text. (It also begs for a feature adaptation.) I never would’ve imagined enjoying horror, but unburdened by my ignorance, I’ve found a true affection for it. It’s not about being scared; it’s about confronting fear, trauma, and impotent institutions.

The works of Shirley Jackson have been a revelation, though I have found contemporary adaptations either too indistinguishable from the estimable original text (Mike Flanagan’s still entertaining Haunting of Hill House) or too jump-scare forward (Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle which I could not finish because I’m still a scaredy cat). Black Mirror, if that’s even considered horror, is brilliant, and “The USS Callister” is one of the best episodes of television in the past quarter century. It Follows, the low-fi cult hit made for 1.3 million and set in Detroit suburbs, defies genre tropes and leads the synth layered midwestern kids confront the supernatural aesthetically into Stranger Things, itself a beautiful, nostalgic indictment of Reagan’s America, and perhaps a survey course of the '80s horror flicks I abstained from. The Last of Us, until Sunday night’s “Through the Valley” broke my fucking heart (no spoliers here), was what I thought was an optimistic interrogation of our authoritarian present, though subreddits and internet conjecture suggest an investigation of vengeance comes next. Either way, I dig it. Bestiary, written by Christopher Ford and Dakota Rose—an off-off Broadway play about bestiality and the apocalypse—was a stunning Mr. Dressup meets Clive Barker mashup of the grotesque.

The common thread in the works that I’ve connected with (and what horror fans have told me forever) is that I find something deeper in the work than gore, which is what, in my genre illiteracy, I figured horror singularly to be. In the past, when I searched for something to read/watch, I’d deselect the horror box, removing it from the possibility. But I’m relying on someone else’s classification, and what I consider “horror” (or whatever genre), they may not. I apparently didn’t know what horror was, and I’ve denied myself singular and innovative contemporary artistic works.

What I truly come to admire about the horror genre is its independent spirit. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an indie kid. My favorite bands are/were found on labels like Drag City, Secretly Canadian, and Matador. The films I watched were those of indie auteurs like Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, John Sayles, and the Coen brothers. In literature, I was always happier at small to mid-sized press events and celebrating indie authors than the big publishing house pageants or the sycophancy of book launches that look like Connecticut country club gender reveal parties. Horror seems to be the one genre of filmmaking that, in the last five years, thrives outside of the studio system. A24 (Midsommar, Hereditary, Heretic, Ex Machina), Blumhouse (Oscar winning Get Out, The Purge and Insidious franchise), and others have excelled at artist-forward, small-budget productions that eschew the notion that projects need A-list actors and inflated spending., instead these narratives focus on good storytelling and respect for their audience/fanbase.

This is not a new model for horror, as some of the genre’s most seminal offerings have come from modest beginnings. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher Texas Chainsaw Massacre was made for just $140,000 but brought in over $30 million at the box office and spawned a cottage industry of sequels, video games, and knockoffs. John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) made over $70 million against a $300,000 budget and a franchise that’s produced thirteen films. Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) made over $57 million with a budget of less than two million. It’s well known that the POV sequences in Jaws came from when the animatronic shark broke and the crew had to innovate their approach. The point is something that the art industry can’t seem to understand: Money does not equal relevance or profit. What matters is artistic freedom and the autonomy to say something. I’ve championed the sentiment in my own communities, and I’m almost embarrassed to be so late to the indie spirit that manifests in this current era of horror.

Even on Blusesky (and I imagine elsewhere), there’s an active and supportive horror community, where a #HorrorWritersChat is hosted, and writers share their works in progress. It’s the kind of small creative writing program or workshop community that can be difficult to find in IRL, especially for those of us without malleable schedules. I haven’t participated in the chats—I’ve got no WIPs—but I experience it as a jealous voyeur, and I’m amazed by what has been built in their digital space.

During my dalliance with horror, I’ve only had two nightmares, and one of those coincided with a friend’s passing, and the other was the combination of grey-market edibles and overnapping. I’ve been eager to dig deeper into the horror canon, but there are still entries that my wife says I’m not ready for: Longlegs, The Substance, Young Sheldon, to name a few. Late Night with the Devil intrigues me, as does the Canadian classic Ginger Snaps and the not-Canadian Nosferatu. But the true excitement lies not as much in more consumption, but rather in how I can apply the lessons of horror—complete with its indie sensibilities and confrontations—to my own work. That said, I still can’t watch any of these films without someone holding my hand and warning me that the scary part is coming.