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The Evolution of Horror in
the Twenty-First Century
 LEXINGTON BOOKS HORROR STUDIES

Series Editors:
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology

Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University

Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary

monographs or edited volumes that expand our understanding of horror as
an important cultural phenomenon. We are particularly interested in critical
approaches to horror that explore why horror is such a common part of
culture, why it resonates with audiences so much, and what its popularity
reveals about human cultures generally. To that end, the series will cover
a wide range of periods, movements, and cultures that are pertinent to
horror studies. We will gladly consider work on individual key figures (e.g.
directors, authors, show runners, etc.), but the larger aim is to publish work
that engages with the place of horror within cultures. Given this broad scope,
we are interested in work that addresses a wide range of media, including
film, literature, television, comics, pulp magazines, video games, or music.
We are also interested in work that engages with the history of horror,
including the history of horror-related scholarship.

Titles in the Series

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, edited by
Simon Bacon
Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss, edited by Erica
Joan Dymond
Supranational Horrors: Italian and Spanish Horror Cinema since 1968, by
Rui Oliveira
The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary
Popular Imagination, edited by Simon Bacon
Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic
Storytelling, edited by Natalie Neill
Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives, and
Aesthetics, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Subashish
Bhattacharjee, and Ananya Saha
Violence in the Films of Stephen King, edited by Michael J. Blouin and
Tony Magistrale
 The Evolution
of Horror in the
Twenty-First Century
Edited by Simon Bacon

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www​.rowman​.com

86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages
in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bacon, Simon, 1965- editor.
Title: The evolution of horror in the twenty-first century / edited by Simon Bacon.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Lexington Books horror studies
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022054416 (print) | LCCN 2022054417 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793643391 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793643407 (epub) | ISBN 9781793643414
(paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror in mass media—History—21st century. | Horror films—History
and criticism. | Horror television programs—History and criticism. | Horror tales—
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC P96.H65 E96 2023 (print) | LCC P96.H65 (ebook) | DDC
700/.41640905—dc23/eng/20230213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054416
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054417

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
 Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1
Simon Bacon

PART I: FRAMEWORKS AND CLASSICS OF

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HORROR 11
Chapter One: Horror Theory Now: Thinking about Horror 13
Kevin Corstorphine‌‌‌
Chapter Two: Decadent Feasts: Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television 27
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Chapter Three: From One Extreme to Another: Horror Cinema and
Censorship in the Twenty-First Century 43
Neil Jackson
Chapter Four: The Recurrence and Evolution of Universal’s Classic
Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror 57
M. Keith Booker
Chapter Five: The Remixing (and Ransacking) of Hill House:
Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley Jackson in
Contemporary Gothic Fiction 71
Joan Passey

v
vi Contents

PART II: MEDIA AND CONSUMPTION 85

Chapter Six: Further Notes Toward a Monster Pedagogy 87
John Edgar Browning
Chapter Seven: Sounding Horror: Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the
Power of Music in Black Horror 101
Erik Steinskog
Chapter Eight: The Evolution of Horror on Stage 113
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Chapter Nine: Hauntify the World: New Directions in Video Game
Horror 129
Gwyneth Peaty
Chapter Ten: The Evolution of Horror and New Media 143
Carlos Littles

PART III: RECOGNITION AND EVOLUTION 155

Chapter Eleven: The Future of Horror: Evolution or Revolution? 157
Carina Bissett
Chapter Twelve: Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror 171
Maisha Wester
Chapter Thirteen: Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century 185
Jacob Floyd
Chapter Fourteen: “Stepping out of the Closet”: The Evolution
of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century
Horror TV 199
Natasha C. Marchini
Chapter Fifteen: Involution, Adaptation, Mutation: Horror’s
Disability Dynamics 215
Angela Marie Smith‌‌‌
Chapter Sixteen: Sympathy for the Candyman: The Politics of the
Past in Supernatural Horror 229
Brandon R. Grafius

PART IV: EVOLVING THEMES 243

Chapter Seventeen: The Futures for Folk Horror 245
Mikel J. Koven
 Contents vii

Chapter Eighteen: The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism 259

Teresa Fitzpatrick
Chapter Nineteen: Undying Earth: Extinction Romances in the Age
of Anthropocene 275
Ian Fetters
Chapter Twenty: Fear of Infection: Negotiating between
Community and Isolation in Gothic Contagion Narratives 291
Laura R. Kremmel
Chapter Twenty-One: The Metal and the Flesh: Techno-liminalities,
Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced Super-Body as a Horror
Space 303
Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Index 317
About the Editor and Contributors 323
 List of Figures

Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror xii

Figure 2.1. Josh Hartnett as Ethan Chandler and Eva Green as
Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful 37
Figure 2.2. Tom Hardy as James Keziah Delaney in Taboo 38
Figure 2.3. A murder victim transformed into a ghoulish work of art
in Hannibal 39
Figure 0.2. Visual Intervention II: Mother 156
Figure 0.3. Visual Intervention III: Sinew 244

ix
 Acknowledgments

First of all, I’d like to thank all the authors who have been involved in this
book at whatever stage for helping to make it happen—without you all, we
never would have made it from idea, to proposal, to final manuscript. A spe-
cial thanks to all those that made it to the final volume as the “new normals”
we have been constantly experiencing over the past few years have made sus-
tained focusing on anything other than coping an amazing feat in itself: well
done and thank you to all of you. I would like to thank Lorna Piatti-Farnell
and Carl Sederholm for wanting the book for their terrific series at Lexington
and Judith Lakamper for her help and patience in getting the book from
manuscript to finished thing. A big thank-you to Gemma Files who is not only
an amazing horror writer but a terrific artist as well and who kindly let me use
one of her drawings for the cover of the book (someone needs to approach
her about publishing a book of her drawings). As always, the biggest thank-
you to my wife, Kasia, my always and forever, without whom none of this
would ever get done or be worth doing. Also, to our own two little “horrors,”
Seba and Maja, who always help to keep things in perspective no matter how
stressful things get. And last, but not least, Mam i Tata Bronk for their con-
stant support and never-ending supplies of sernik Magdi.

xi
Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror.
Source: Drawing by Gemma Files. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.
 Introduction

Simon Bacon

The beginning of the twenty-first century feels like a special moment in the
evolution of the horror genre, in part due to the intersection of many areas
of global and cultural anxiety over a world that humanity no longer has any
control over, but also in the convergence of a growing importance given to
minority directors, new emerging genre themes, production methods, and
means of distribution. As many commentators have noted, horror is at is
most important and it’s most valuable at times of extreme emotional and
psychological excess, as a way to externalize what we, as a cultural and as
individuals, are feeling and also visualize ways beyond it. While this can be
seen to be a rather Freudian observation on cultural production, recent studies
have claimed that horror does indeed prepare us to cope better with horrific
and anxiety-producing situations (see Johnson 2020, Clasen 2017)—even if
it might also mean we will leave more lights on at night and not investigate
strange noises outside the house. However, it does reinforce, and build upon,
the more established observation that each generation creates its own mon-
sters (Cohen 1996, Auerbach 1997) which would strongly suggest that the
same is true of horror—we need only think of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s
Monster to see how a particular cultural moment produces not only a unique
monster but the nature of the horror it produces or partakes in, is equally
individual (even if the cultural and individual anxieties at play can seem to
be similar across time).
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century then begins the
important work of conceptualizing exactly what that means and how the
interplay of evolving means of creation, production, and audience consump-
tion and participation affects what we consider to be horror in the 2020s.
More so, through speculating how the evolution of the genre might develop
in the future, it also suggests ways in which we might not only cope with a
world during a pandemic, populist politics, #MeToo, BLM, and constantly

1
2 Simon Bacon

changing versions of the “new normal,” but preparing us for how we might
conceive of what follows.
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century then sees the horror
genre as intimately connected to our experience of being in the world at a
very particular historical and cultural moment. This implies a certain respon-
sibility on the genre itself, and indeed those that write about it, to engage
with that moment in ways that both help to understand it and to interrogate
it, interrogation here being a frank questioning, a laying bare of what is ordi-
narily hidden, an inherent part of horror, so that we might be more able to
recognize and evolve with it. In many respects, horror can be seen to perform
a similar function to Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the unheimlich as
a “dark double” to this world that allows us to investigate the nature of the
world (Withy 2015). From this, it is equally important and timely to redress
imbalances within the genre itself, especially in terms of gender and ethnic-
ity, as seen in the necessary promotion of female, indigenous, LGBTQ+, and
minority themes, directors, creators, and producers.
There has been much talk around horror at the start of the twenty-first
century as being smart, intelligent, or “elevated” as a defining characteristic.
In part, this is a product of each age wanting to distinguish itself from what
came before—a process that has increased ever more rapidly in an age of
“Buzzfeed” headlines and online content creators vying for audience atten-
tion—though it is equally related to the increase of quality horror production
and its increasing standing within the film industry, which remains highly
influential within the discourse of entertainment media. Due to its inher-
ently exploitational nature horror has always produced a lot of B-movie and
low-budget content—not least as there has always been a significant-sized
audience who appreciate such fare—particularly in the relation to gore, jump
scares, and sex (predominantly scantily clad women). However, the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century has seen horror and horror adjacent narratives
becoming more mainstream with A-list directors, actors, studios, and budgets
producing significant numbers of films and related content—oddly this has
been assisted by the pandemic that saw a large boost in the demand for stream-
ing and online services offering original films and series with several major
players in this offering dedicated horror channels. Later in this collection
Jeffrey A. Weinstock describes much of this new content as “prestige” horror
in the sense that it has high-quality production values and has obviously had
large amounts of money spent on it. Almost inevitably, this has seen a rise in
more inventive and plot lead narratives which have subsequently labeled as
“elevated.” It is worth noting that this can be a highly problematic category as
many films categorized as such often still depend on well-worn horror tropes
within their plots as much as slasher and gore lead horror can involve deeply
intricate and “elevated” plot lines (see Wes Craven’s New Nightmare [1994]).
 Introduction 3

Indeed, even the current studio obsession with sequels and remakes that the
terminology was meant to react against, can equally be shown as much more
knowing and inventive than such oppositional categorization would like to
suggest. In contrast to this, then, the current volume would like to propose
something else as a defining characteristic, not necessarily just for the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century, but it is possibly one we need now more than
earlier generations, and that is horror as a call to action.
This call to action is part recognition of the horror portrayed on screen
and part affective in that it compels a response, be it ontological and/
or physical—a change in how one views the world and/or how one acts
within it. Consequently, it can almost be seen to be aspirational in that it
calls for us to be better than we are now—more inclusive, more accepting
of others though less accepting of the bad behavior of others. Aspirational
would seem a contradictory word to use in relation to horror, unless one was
encouraging a generation of serial killers, but here it is meant as narratives
and/or “vehicles”—vehicle in the sense of all the other aspects of a horror
property, such as production values, actor choices, minority representation,
access and distribution, fan interaction, and so on—that express a desire for
change. “Change” can be a difficult term to use here, though it relates back
to Heidegger’s thoughts on the unheimlich, which for him was a means to
investigate the ontological and what “normal” might be (Withy 2015, 3–4).
Horror, then, if interpreted as a means to defamiliarize the world around us,
by revealing the darkness and violence within it, becomes a way to look at
and investigate what we think of as “normal”—normal often meaning a safe,
unprejudiced, and equal world—and, by revealing it is anything but that,
can force us to recognize and change that. Subsequently, fictional horror, in
revealing the real horror of the world, allows us to “see” it and potentially
redress the imbalances and prejudices underpinning it.
Obviously, it’s worth citing some examples to see how this might work
in practice. An obvious one would be a recent remake by Blum House, The
Invisible Man (Whannell 2020), which more clearly than any of its predeces-
sors, of which there have been a few (see Bacon 2020), explicitly relates the
narrative to domestic abuse and gaslighting. The Invisible Man—from a story
by H. G. Wells from 1897—as played by Claude Rains in 1933 is one of the
Classic Universal monsters alongside Frankenstein’s Monster and Count
Dracula. In the original film saw brilliant inventor Dr. Jack Griffin becom-
ing unhinged as the effects of his invisibility potion start to take a toll on his
sense of self. One of the victims of his increasingly erratic and often violent
behavior is his fiancé, Flora (Gloria Stuart) who tries to help him. This aspect
remains with the figure and becomes increasingly eroticized through later
additions to the canon such as The Invisible Women (1940) and Memoirs of
an Invisible Man (1992) reaching something of a climax in The Hollow Man
4 Simon Bacon

(2000) where sexual violence becomes a key feature of the narrative. The
majority of these earlier texts promote the titillating aspects of the narrative
around male control over the female body, though often tries to mitigate this
through blaming the invisibility potion itself as the real source of the sci-
entist’s unhinged behavior. However, the Blumhouse film explicitly shows
invisibility as a tool for the already possessive and violent inventor (Oliver
Jackson-Cohen) to control and abuse his partner (Elizabeth Moss) even more.
In contrast to its predecessors then, Whannell’s film cites the true source of
horror in the film, the unseen monster in the room as it were, as violence
against women and more so that inflicted by partners. The effects are shown
as graphically real, not just on the victim but the world around them. By
showing this behavior as monstrous, it equally identifies all those that inflict
such violence, or help facilitate it, are also monstrous. This, the film is a call
to both to stop such behavior and also for those that assist in its continue to
be held accountable.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) can be seen to work in a similar way in cit-
ing cinematic precedents of Black slavery in the United States and the dan-
gers of entering the symbolic White (plantation) House (Lauro 2018, 69–75)
and how Black bodies are used to ensure the immortality of White power and
privilege. Peele knowingly shows an image of traditional wealthy Whiteness,
that presents as a “friend” to Black America, yet exploits and, literally, takes
on its talents as their own, to prolong their own longevity and prowess—the
kind of systemic oppression and exploitation shown in Get Out is shown to
be of national scale in Us (2019). The monsters are many in Peele’s film, but
potentially the most horrific one is the implication that Black identity is being
replaced by the White world that seeks to “inhabit” and subjugate it—once
out of the city the majority of Black bodies seen are actually inhabited by
White minds. Get Out then more clearly delineates the horror of modern-
day America and its treatment of Black bodies and identity, becoming a call
for change.
It is no surprise maybe that these two examples can be connected to two
social and political movements that came to prominence just before the
COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, and that’s #MeToo and Black
Lives Matter. Both are the result of years of discrimination, abuse, trauma,
and unnecessary deaths, and both actually feature in individual essays within
this collection. Given the worldwide support garnered for each of the move-
ments, it is unsurprising that they might find form in popular culture and in
films, novels, comics and games amongst others. In many respects then, they
have become focal points for earlier works (texts, films, etc.) that had already
begun the work of expressing the inherent horror that has always been present
in racism, misogyny, sexual and physical abuse, and exploitation.
 Introduction 5

One can make similar and related cases for films that highlight the continu-
ing plight and social vilification of immigrants, as seen in His House (2020),
and No One Gets Out Alive (2021); the unseen pandemic of dementia and
Alzheimer’s in old age, as shown in Relic (2020); and through to environmen-
tal concerns as highlighted in movies like In the Earth (2021), Gaia (2021)
or even Endzeit (2018). In this sense, Aspirational Horror, or Call to Action
Horror, becomes a way or reminding ourselves of how entangled we are in
our environment and with each other and that we have a duty to recognize
this and respond accordingly if we are ever to address the very real horrors
of the world that we currently live in. As such, this idea informs much of
what this collection is about, accepting the human, emotional, and political
nature of horror, and not just as a genre to titillate but as one of worth, in the
psychological, emotional “work” it facilitates in its audience/readers/players,
and a facilitator of change.
As suggested above, entanglement and relationships are of increasing
importance with contemporary horror, not just within the various areas within
the genre itself—funding, production, creation, and distribution—but in rela-
tion to its audience as well. While all genres have always been ultimately reli-
ant on their respective audiences for their continued popularity and financial
rewards—Dracula has remained part of the horror canon since its publication
due to its mainstream popularity rather than critical plaudits—in the age of
the internet and New Media, the relationship between content producers and
their audience/consumers has altered dramatically. Many projects now rely
on crowdsourcing for their funding, often giving their multitude of investors
more input on the final product; promotional films, shorts, and even complete
works are now released online via YouTube, subscription sites, or online
streaming services; fanzines, slash fiction, tribute works, and all manner of
fan art are released online, often garnering their own respective dedicated
audience and occasionally launching mainstream careers; fan communities
now “power” all manner of comic cons and events where content creators
and producers can be met and engaged with, often broadening the scope and
appeal of a particular narrative/franchise and its characters/actors—some
content producers even introduce this into their content (see Camilla 2014–
2016). Taken together, in many areas of its creation and production, horror
has become a far more collective endeavor allowing for greater engagement
and influence over the finished material. In contrast, of course, the kinds of
celebrated horror of the early 2000s, the elevated and prestige variety, are
far more in the area of auteur- and studio-funded works. More importantly
however, it does speak to the relationship between horrors creators and their
audience and how the two are often the same thing. This further intimates
why horror is becoming more diverse and also why it aspires to do even more.
6 Simon Bacon

Consequently, The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century will

not only speak to the changes wrought by technological development in
creations, production, and distribution but also promote the ways in which
those who are traditionally underrepresented positively in horror—women,
LGBTQ, indigenous, and BAME communities—are being seen and find-
ing space to speak. As such this is a hopeful collection, one that identifies
how horror has, and is, evolving in the twenty-first century and the kinds
of positive futures it can allow us, as a shared humanity and part of a larger
ecosystem, to have. As such it claims that horror is not just about identifying
the cultural anxieties of today but about revealing and recognizing the ways
that we might ourselves, evolve into the future.

THE SHAPE OF THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

The collection will then be divided in to four sections that focus on different
areas of the horror genre. Beginning with what might be termed theories, or
frameworks through which aspects of horror can be viewed. Consequently,
the first section, “Part I: Frameworks of Horror” will largely concentrate on
where we are now, covering some of the groundwork for what will follow.
The first essay, “Horror Theory Now: Thinking about Horror,” by Kevin
Corstorphine then looks at a more purely theoretical approaches consider-
ing recent classifications of horror with canonical approaches such as Freud,
Kristeva, and affect theory, while stressing the importance of evolving and
inclusive theory. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in “Decadent Feasts: Aesthetics,
Ethics, and Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television,” continues the
theoretical turn with an affective twist, contemplating the aesthetics of gore
and violence in recent narratives and the beguiling nature of certain recent
horror narratives. This is followed by “Horror Cinema and Censorship in the
Twenty-First Century,” by Neil Jackson who discusses the changes in cinema
censorship for recent horror where old prejudices still persist even though
new means of distribution and consumption increasingly take new mate-
rial beyond the reach of such official bodies. Next is “The Recurrence and
Evolution of Universal’s Classic Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror,”
by M. Keith Booker who considers how the classic Universal monster such
as Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man have
continued to fascinate and engage horror audiences up until the present day,
and indeed into the future. The first part ends with “The Remixing (and
Ransacking) of Hill House: Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley
Jackson in Contemporary Gothic Fiction,” by Joan Passey which continues
the wider recognition of one of the most influential horror writers of the twen-
tieth century whose work is finally receiving the due it deserves. This essay
 Introduction 7

also acts as a prequel of sorts to Carina Bissett’s article in part III which reit-
erates the importance of women writers to the ongoing evolution of the genre.
“Part II: Media and Consumption” then considers the different media
involved in the production of horror as well as the evolution of the ways
in which it is received and consumed, many of which have been dramati-
cally affected by world events in 2020. In his essay “Further Notes toward a
Monster Pedagogy, John Edgar Browning begins the section with an unusual
place for the dissenting of horror: the classroom. Here horror becomes a use-
ful educational tool in the consideration of difference and otherness in light
of evolving real-world events. Erik Steinskog in his essay “Sounding Horror:
Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the Power of Music in Black Horror,” examines
what constitutes Black music and how that relates to Black horror. Next, in
“The Evolution of Horror on Stage,” Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. moves from aural
to physical space and the evolution of theatrical horror into lived experiences.
Challenging the barriers between real and fictional it provides a direct cri-
tique of the world beyond the narrative space. In “Hauntify the World: New
Directions in Video Game Horror,” Gwyneth Peaty looks at gaming and the
horror genre and how the uses of virtual spaces and development of multiple
players online create increasingly realistic and “horror-full” places of inter-
action and experience. Carlos Littles, in “The Evolution of Horror and New
Media,” considers how New Media effects horror and horror production, and
in particular how, through the online democratization of creation, production,
funding, and distribution, the lines between the authors and audience of hor-
ror are becoming increasingly blurred.
This is followed by “Part III: Recognition and Evolution” which looks
more at groups that have more traditionally been excluded from the produc-
tion of horror as creators, actors, directors, producers and also from positive
identification or leading roles within horror narratives. The first essay here is
by Carina Bissett who, in “The Future of Horror: Evolution or Revolution?,”
considers the ongoing struggles of women writers in the horror genre and
how it has taken decades for them to be valued as much as their male coun-
terparts. Maisha Wester in “Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror,” argues for
the recognition of a new subgenre of horror, Black Lives Matter Horror, that
groups films and texts together that specifically deal with Black experience in
contemporary America. In “Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century,”
Jacob Floyd considers First Nation indigenous horror in both its complexity
and its gradual increase and acceptance by wider audiences. This is fol-
lowed by Natasha C. Marchini, whose essay, “‘Stepping out of the Closet:
The Evolution of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century
Horror TV,” will then look at how concepts of the queer run deep in the heart
of the horror genre and never more so than in recent films and series. Next is
“Involution, Adaptation, Mutation: Horror’s Disability Dynamics,” by Angela
8 Simon Bacon

M. Smith who describes the how many horror films try for greater inclusion
and sensitivity with their respective narratives yet often slip into old, disen-
franchising modes of thought in regard to mental and physical disability. On
a positive note, though she does suggest that some recent narratives envision
disablement as a site for radical human transformation. The last essay in this
part is “for the Candyman: The Politics of the Past in Supernatural Horror.”
Brandon Grafius uses the figure of the traumatized and traumatizing ghost to
cut through the complications and false equivalences that often arise in the
horror genre.
The collection closes with “Part IV: Evolving Themes” which brings to the
fore themes that have particular relevance to the 2020s and, indeed, either as
concerns for many recent horror narratives or as real-world anxieties over
just what our future might be. Mikel J. Koven begins this section with “The
Future Promise for Folk Horror,” that looks at the increasingly popular sub-
genre of Folk Horror, though not as one where the past inevitably consumes
the future but for its ability to provide a voice for marginalized groups. This
is followed by “The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism,” by Teresa
Fitzpatrick, which lays out the main areas of what we think of as Ecohorror,
giving special attention to those which begin to describe the subgenre as
evolutionary rather than avenging. Next Ian Fetters in “Undying Earth:
Extinction Romances in the Age of Anthropocene,” examines the rise in
apocalyptic or “extinction” narratives in science fiction and how the “hor-
ror” within them might not describe “the end” but a reckoning with what’s to
come. In “Fear of Infection: Negotiating between Community and Isolation
in Gothic Contagion Narratives,” Laura R. Kremmel continues the idea of
extinction through the lens of contagion and our experiences of the recent
pandemic. Here, the future is one that cannot take firm through isolation, a
point picked up in the final essay in the collection “The Metal and the Flesh:
Techno-liminalities, Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced Super-Body as a
Horror Space,” by Lorna Piatti-Farnell. The “horror” of the future here is in
“super bodies” that deny human isolation in favor of a collective, though one
not of human sociability, but by combining the human and the nonhuman:
horror then becomes the inability to accept the inevitability of a future that
makes us unheimlich in relation to our present selves.
As noted above, horror is a way for us to investigate the “horrific” nature
of the anthropocentric world we have created around us. The intersection of
the genre with science fiction and environmental studies reveal more clearly
how horror can describe a world that is more than we can ever understand.
And yet, horror is also hopeful, and as such is the only chance we have to
make sense of where we are and where we might be going.
 Introduction 9

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.
Bacon, Simon. “Domestic Abuse: The Invisible Man (Whannell, 2020)—Domestic
Monsters.” In Monsters: A Companion, edited by Simon Bacon, 23–30. Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2020.
Carmilla. Created by Jordan Hall, Steph Ouacknine, and Jay Bennett. Toronto:
Smokebomb Entertainment, 2014–2016.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Clasen, Mathias. 2017. “Lessons from a Terrified Horror Researcher.” TEDxAarhus,
November 28. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=6St5R2bYMOY. Accessed 21
August 2022.
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions, 2017.
Johnson, Nicole. 2020. “How Horror Movies Can Help People Overcome Real-World
Trauma.” National Geographic, October 30. https:​//​www​.nationalgeographic​.com​
/science​/article​/how​-horror​-movies​-can​-help​-overcome​-trauma​-and​-relieve​-stress.
Accessed August 21, 2022.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. 2018. “Ron Honthaner’s The House on Skull Mountain (1974)—
Zombie Gothic.” In The Gothic: A Reader, edited by Simon Bacon, 69–75. Oxford:
Peter Lang Ltd.
The Invisible Man. Directed by Leigh Whannell. Universal City: Universal Pictures,
2020.
Us. Directed by Jordan Peele. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 2019.
Withy, Katherine. 2015. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
 PART I

Frameworks and Classics of

Twenty-First-Century Horror

11
 Chapter One

Horror Theory Now

Thinking about Horror

Kevin Corstorphine‌‌‌

THEORY

Horror’s capacity to delve intimately into the human psyche at the same time
as reflecting the preoccupations of society more widely makes it a mode
that is particularly open to theoretical approaches. It is also a topic, whether
in fiction, film, or other media, that attracts a great deal of concern over its
potentially negative effects. At the same time, enthusiasts extol its virtues
in terms of allowing a safe exploration of fear, fostering communities of
like-minded individuals, and even being fun. Indeed, horror has been playful
since its earliest inceptions, and continues to be so in the twenty-first century,
especially after its close entanglement with postmodernism at the turn of the
millennium. In film, genre theory, aesthetic approaches, and psychoanalysis
have loomed large, and in literary studies the conversation has been hugely
affected by the dominant idea of the “Gothic,” stemming from the influential
wave of sensational novels that appeared in the late eighteenth century and in
their Victorian evolutions came to influence the later media of film and televi-
sion. This chapter will chart the trajectory of horror studies in the twenty-first
century and aim to point to the areas likely to prove most fruitful in the future.
Horror has a tendency to be cyclical, and so many of the age-old debates con-
tinue, even as new and challenging expressions of horror appear and, in their
turn, inspire fresh critical perspectives.

13
14 Kevin Corstorphine

HORROR THEORY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

The start of the twenty-first century was a particularly interesting moment for
horror theory. A century prior, the late Victorian fin-de-siècle had thrown up
some of the most enduring horror texts to this day, including Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In parallel, the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund
Freud and his contemporaries were proving capable of interpreting these
strange tales but at the same time writing Gothic narratives of their own. In
Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919), as Nicholas Royle points out, “Freud
is storytelling in ways that make his essay irreducibly literary, touched and
energized by the fictional” (Royle 2003, 3). This intertwining of Gothic text
and criticism explains why Freud has remained prominent in horror theory,
long after having fallen out of fashion in the field of psychology itself. Horror
is a genre that is especially capable of absorbing its own criticism and reusing
it as a template. Twentieth-century horror had been characterized by this ines-
capable loop in which the mind itself functioned as a kind of haunted house
and the distinction between the symbolic and physical nature of the demons
scarcely seemed to matter as psychoanalytic theory flowed back into the work
of horror authors and filmmakers. On one level this moved toward making
some forms of horror theory redundant or at least tautological.
Ken Gelder’s brief but significant sketch of the “field of horror” in the
introduction to The Horror Reader (2000) perfectly encapsulates this situa-
tion. After conducting a prescient survey of forward-looking postcolonial and
queer readings, he notes the limitations of horror studies as things stood then:

The approaches here remain semiotic: almost no ethnographic work of any

consequence on actual horror audiences has been done, although the occasional
pious reminder that horror audiences are as “diverse” as the field of horror itself
may be of as little help to analysis as the weary dismissal of horror as a genre
that performs the same task over and over again. (Gelder 2000, 6)

Gelder here recognizes the limits of interpretation within a framework that

is so wrapped in self-referentiality, and his criticism has been justified by an
expansion in the twenty-first century not just of perspectives, but approaches
to horror, many of which will be explored here, such as ecocriticism, critical
race theory, and reception studies. Nonetheless, what Gelder refers to here as
a semiotic approach remains broadly common even within these expanded
approaches. The question of what is represented or, to use popular current
terminology, “coded” into horror, remains relevant, especially where it come
to monstrosity and what is actually portrayed as horrific.
 Horror Theory Now 15

The position of horror theory in the 1980s and 1990s paralleled wider
developments in literary and film criticism. Theory, specifically postmodern-
ism, threw the doors open to the academic study of what has consistently been
thought of as a “low” cultural form, from Gothic novels to horror cinema. As
Myra Mendible writes in 1999, “As theorists of popular culture, we shame-
lessly cast our gaze on cultural productions that once were ‘beneath us,’ rec-
ognizing pornography, working-class literature, B-movies, pulp fiction, and
soap operas as relevant objects of scrutiny” (Mendible 1999, 71). Horror was
very much part of this and, importantly, horror productions themselves were
regarded as becoming “smart,” or at least indulging in the kind of intellectual
self-referentiality characteristic of postmodernism. In film, the Scream fran-
chise (1996–present) exemplifies this trend. Scream relies on audience expec-
tations of established slasher movie tropes at the same time as recycling them
for a new audience. Director Wes Craven’s earlier New Nightmare (1994)
arguably took this further, by having the director himself, and the key actors
from his Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (1984–present), menaced by the
monstrous Freddy Krueger, who has escaped from his fictional universe. This
metafictional approach would be echoed in fiction such as Bret Easton Ellis’s
Lunar Park (2005), where the author is troubled by the rumored presence
of his own serial killer creation Patrick Bateman in the neighborhood, hav-
ing seemingly left the pages of his novel American Psycho (1991). Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) takes the postmodern turn in horror to
its logical conclusions by containing a deeply layered narrative framework,
copious footnotes that spill across multiple pages, and fictional interviews
with everyone from horror authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice to liter-
ary critic and custodian of the cultural canon, Harold Bloom. Danielewski’s
text serves to anticipate and even forestall the act of literary criticism. As Bill
Clough points out, “the novel functions as a parody of the traditional schol-
arly edition of a text”’(Clough 2019, 294). In the light of developments in
the early twenty-first century this phase of horror seems somewhat indulgent,
even smug, but served to complicate a previously complacent critical rela-
tionship to the text. It is difficult, for example, to imagine now a successful
reading of a horror text that simply falls back on the claims of psychoanalysis.
If horror in the 1990s had hit a peak of postmodernity in a creative sense,
then critical theory and the expansion of the canon opened up new possibili-
ties for approaching the text. The emergence of Gothic Studies as a discipline
is intertwined with these developments. Gothic Studies grew out of a number
of critical forerunners, but coalesced in the work of a group of academics
including David Punter, Glennis Byron, and Fred Botting, who used the
springboard of the Gothic novel as a way of expanding the scope of the
Gothic and its interpretive possibilities.1 As Catherine Spooner points, out,
one of the key elements of this was “to loosen Gothic from the straitjacketing
16 Kevin Corstorphine

notion of genre [. . .] reconfiguring Gothic as a mode” (Spooner 2021, 7–8).

This opening up of the Gothic led to a proliferation of new perspectives that
is crucial to horror theory today. Spooner acknowledge the possibilities and
limitations of this approach:

The advantage and the problem with the shifting critical understanding of
Gothic as a mode, discursive site or aesthetic is that it meant that almost any-
thing could be defined as Gothic [. . .]. At best, this produced exciting new
combinations of Gothic and theory—Queer Gothic, Ecogothic—but this could
also dwindle into the endless taxonomisation of subgenres and, at worst, deliver
an ever-multiplying and thus, ever-vanishing critical object. (Spooner 2021, 8)

Gothic Studies takes in everything including but not limited to literature,

film, television, videogames, art, fashion, music, and tourism, and is not even
limited to horror. Spooner’s own Post-Millennial Gothic (2017) focuses on
the rise of “happy Gothic,” uncoupled from both the association of Gothic
with horror, but also the “anxiety” model of reading Gothic texts (the crucial
importance of which will be returned to in this chapter). Spooner contends
that “Gothic” takes on new meanings in the early years of the twenty-first
century, moving from something ardently associated with subculture to some-
thing approximating a mainstream presence. Accordingly, there is a need to
stop thinking about Gothic as something solely at the margins, merely indica-
tive of things that are pushed out of mainstream culture. Spooner notes that,
“nuances are often overlooked to feed a popular conflation of Gothic/horror
and social anxiety” (Spooner 2017, 14). In this model, horror fiction and film
exist primarily as an expression of the repressed: appropriately, the Freudian
psychoanalytic model refuses to lay down and die.
The interdisciplinary approach of Gothic Studies is inclusive of many dif-
ferent forms of media but emerges from literature departments and remains
anchored in this history. In an essay alluded to by Spooner, Chris Baldick
and Robert Mighall attack the “anxiety” model of Gothic theory by critiqu-
ing its supposed claims to radical transformation. Rather than revealing
much about the subtext of such narratives, they claim, Gothic criticism
tends to pat itself on the back by pointing out the foibles of, for example,
the repressed Victorians: a move that reinforces the spurious notion that we
(specifically academics in the humanities) are progressive and liberated. They
claim that “it stands as a central, if more colourfully flagrant, instance of the
mainstream modernist, postmodernist, and left-formalist campaign against
nineteenth-century literary realism and its alleged ideological backward-
ness” (Baldick and Mighall 2000, 210). Baldick and Mighall’s criticism here
is loaded with specific references to a certain tendency in literary studies
and specifically the self-congratulatory nature of postmodern critique. Like
 Horror Theory Now 17

Gelder’s piece earlier, this essay emerges in 2000, and further signals a turn
in Gothic and horror criticism away from complacency and toward a wider
world. As they do well to point out, though, Gothic studies does not occur in
a vacuum, and follows the same trends seen in literary criticism more widely.
It is instructive, too, to look outside this specific field and to examine the
convergent evolution of film studies in particular.
Film studies has long considered the Gothic to be primarily an aesthetic
mode, and instead has focused on the term “horror” as a marker of genre.
Nonetheless, the concerns of horror film scholars align closely with the
Gothic studies approaches outlined here. As Xavier Aldana Reyes points
out, “the once-neglected history of Horror has, in the twenty-first century,
been consistently explored and recast” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 3). Like the
Gothic, the vaguely disreputable nature of horror film has affected how it is
viewed through an academic lens. Rather than starting from a neutral posi-
tion, horror is almost always approached in terms of its social function and
a certain amount of restating its importance is generally necessary. Bryan
Turnock, for example, in Studying Horror Cinema (2019), borrows from the
now-established field of Gothic criticism to associate the themes and nar-
ratives of horror cinema with “early-to-mid eighteenth-century Britain and
the works of the so-called ‘graveyard poets’” (Turnock 2019, 10) and the
associated Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century. The motifs of death,
ghosts, and ruins, established in the Gothic, are later joined by a focus on
psychology, particularly as seen in American authors like Edgar Allan Poe,
and all feed into a genre that would come to be fully established in film
toward the middle of the twentieth century. Like the Gothic, horror film has
very much been interpreted as indicative of social mores at the time of each
individual production. As Turnock notes, the dominant approach to studying
horror “illuminates broader social, political and cultural histories” (Turnock
2019, 13). This is all well and good, but when horror is viewed, as it often has
been, as subcultural, then the reading is skewed by other factors. As Baldick
and Mighall point out, “since Gothic horror fiction has a generic obligation
to evoke or produce fear, it is in principle the least reliable index of suppos-
edly ‘widespread’ anxieties” (Baldick and Mighall 2000, 222). This critique
has not necessarily changed the way that horror criticism operates: the loose
framework of the “anxiety” model is still commonplace well into the twenty-
first century. Where there is hope of progress in this regard is probably in an
increased attention to the specifics of history and the operations of power. The
increasing diversity of horror authors and creators has also helped to avoid
the kind of critical complacency that Baldick and Mighall warn of.
18 Kevin Corstorphine

HORROR THEORY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Although horror film maintains the “generic obligation” of causing fear

pointed out here, it is worth noting the shift in position of horror in the
twenty-first century. As Turnock points out, horror has become increasingly
mainstream. This has been demonstrated by the huge box-office success of
films like It (2017): a big-budget adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror
novel that Turnock uses as a case study. Although the apparent crossing-over
of horror into the mainstream inspired a slew of newspaper headlines, Turnock
argues that “in reality the genre’s popularity had been growing steadily for
a decade or more, fuelled by commercial and technological changes across
the entire industry” (2019, 266). Larger changes that affect the consumption
of horror include online distribution and unexpected sources such as social
media: Turnock points to the case of the 2014 film The Babadook when
postrelease, “the title character became the subject of an Internet meme that
bizarrely elevated it to the status of gay icon” (2019, 290). Turnock sees this
as symptomatic of wider forces, demonstrating, “the genre’s ability to cross
cultural boundaries and capture the imagination of non-traditional audiences,
while at the same time delivering a well-made scary movie” (2019, 291).
Audience is crucial here, and the ways that horror is received and transformed
through this actively engaged relationship with the genre necessarily changes
the way we should examine it. This has much in common with Spooner’s
observations on the Gothic, which also demonstrate that academic study itself
has moved the Gothic toward something approaching respectability, as can
be seen by the popularity of Gothic studies in English literature departments.
Spooner documents the tensions between a rebellious subculture and the
establishment, questioning “what happens when Goth images or aesthetics
enter the mainstream or are appropriated by cultural producers and audi-
ences who are not current participants in the subculture” (Spooner 2017, 21).
Spooner answers this question by claiming that “just because something,
an image, is appropriated by what, for want of a better term, I shall call the
mainstream does not mean that it stops signifying” (2017, 21). If anything,
in the twenty-first century, the signifying potential of Gothic and horror has
increased exponentially. In addition to the collapse of the high/low cultural
binary characteristic of postmodernism, there has been an additional collapse
of a firm distinction between the subcultural and mainstream.2
At this point it is important to distinguish between Gothic and horror in
the scope of this discussion. The entangled history of the two modes mean
that Gothic criticism is useful in approaching horror. Clearly, though, Gothic
aesthetics, mood, and narrative templates are not necessary to horror as such,
particularly when thinking outside of the literary. Spooner’s arguments make
 Horror Theory Now 19

clear the possibility of such as separation with the rise of “happy Gothic.” It
is more difficult to imagine such a thing as happy horror, with the aforemen-
tioned need to create fear being a generic prerequisite. Accordingly, horror
theory has moved to an increased consideration of how audiences actually
consume horror, and to the mental and biological effect of horror itself.
As Aldana Reyes pointedly claims, “horror films do things3 to viewers and
their bodies” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 5). This experience is desirable and even
pleasurable for viewers: a seemingly obvious point that has been hugely over-
looked by critics. Aldana Reyes notes that “while socio-political readings of
Horror are necessary, they hardly even cover the experiential side of Horror”
(2016, 134). This aspect, for many viewers, “may be more consciously pres-
ent in the decision of watching a film in the first place” (Ibid.). Horror, for
Aldana Reyes, is “underlined by the emotional state of being under threat at a
fictional remove” (2016, 100). This is crucial and goes some way to explain-
ing the appeal of horror, even while it exists alongside a reluctance. Mathias
Clasen’s work on the biological and evolutionary components of horror has
seen the establishment of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University,
Denmark, in 2020, and the publication of wide-reaching research that bridges
the academic and general readership.4 The importance of such work is that it
takes assumptions and truisms such as the idea that horror fans are thrill seek-
ers in general and conducts empirical research to establish firm findings. This
movement away from purely “theoretical and interpretative work” (Clasen
2021, x) toward a quantitative and also socially engaged method, is one major
thread of the evolution of horror research in recent years, and a response to
the challenge posed by Gelder in 2000.
The claims put forward by Clasen echo the work on affect highlighted by
Aldana Reyes. An understanding of evolved human nature, of our physical
identity as “an anxious hairless ape” (Clasen 2021, ix), provide insight into
the functions and even tropes of horror. For example, claims that “many hor-
ror monsters are exaggerations of ancestral predators” (Clasen 2018, 358)
or that they exhibit antisocial behaviors that have consistently been pro-
scribed in human societies (359), really do provide insight into how horror
interacts with what Clasen calls our “evolved cognitive tendencies” (Ibid).
Importantly, this work emerges from a perspective beginning with passionate
engagement and a real appreciation for horror, avoiding reductive or dismis-
sive readings. A wider, and partly internet-driven, expansion of fandom and
interactions between fans (including researchers) has meant that a consid-
eration of who is actually watching, reading, or playing horror is not easily
dismissed by academics. As Aldana Reyes claims of his “affective-corporeal
approach” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 133), this allows an expansion, rather than a
contraction: away from “an excessive focus on representation” (2016, 132)
and toward “a more intuitive way of finding value in Horror that proposing
20 Kevin Corstorphine

apposite readings about its transgressive qualities that, at times, depend on

points of reference viewers might not share” (2016, 133–34). What brings
these approaches together is an acknowledgment of the futility of producing
a single, totalizing reading. Instead, multiple interpretive possibilities come
together under the aegis of highly specific case studies. Linnie Blake, using
the lens of trauma, gives an example of how this might work. In a nod to
classic horror theory such as Julia Kristeva’s interpretation of psychoanaly-
sis, Blake argues that “the narrative of the decomposing corpse as object of
erotic attachment can be seen to take on a particular significance once located
within the broader context of a wounded post-war Germany [. . .] fulfilling a
specific socio-cultural function” (Blake 2008, 188). Such approaches allow
for an integration of the New Historicist impulse to deny eternal, fixed mean-
ings in favor of the specific, but also to integrate post-Freudian ideas such as
trauma theory.
Trauma, at both a personal and collective level, has emerged as a trope that
captures the mood of the early twenty-first century and lends itself overtly to
reading the themes of horror. In the wake of the 2020 global SARS-CoV-2
pandemic this shows few signs of changing. As discussed earlier, Freudian
psychoanalytic ideas became so entangled with horror and the Gothic in the
twentieth century that it was impossible to separate the text itself from its
interpretative meanings. Roger Luckhurst points to something of a crisis in
the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s over the legacy of Freud, when a kind
of collective hysteria deriving from Recovered Memory Therapy saw accusa-
tions of ritual Satanic child murder on a mass scale in the United States. A
sober reflection on what actually happened suggests, as Luckhurst notes, that,
“traumatic memory might be iatrogenic, the product of the very therapy used
to treat it” (Luckhurst 2013, 12). Luckhurst’s work does not seek to dimin-
ish the very real experiences of those suffering from responses to trauma,
but to argue that “it is valuable to be made aware that psychiatric discourse
assumes a plurality of possible responses to traumatic impacts” (2013, 211).
An example he uses is that of the July 7 bombings in London in 2005, where
“thousands of people on the tube system that day met the criteria of experi-
encing an extreme stressor event, yet diagnoses of PTSD fell vastly below
usual statistical extrapolations” (Ibid). This observable plurality of responses
is in contrast to claims made in the humanities, particularly literary and film
studies as discussed here, that often assume a set response to trauma, itself a
Gothic narrative of haunting more than a claim to truth. If such a plurality is
possible, then how can we read a text from another culture with any certainty
of accurate interpretation? A possible answer is through the highly specific
attention to historical, social, and political detail proposed by Blake, and one
that is also charted empirically by Clasen’s work on audiences. Clasen points
out that “horror movies are always enmeshed in, and a product of, the cultural
 Horror Theory Now 21

context” (Clasen 2021, 130). While this does mean that they “are good at mir-
roring widespread anxieties and concerns” (Ibid.), they are also bound up in
other factors such as technological changes and business models of distribu-
tors, all of which are not extraneous to how we can and should interpret an
individual horror text. Clasen uses the word “enmeshed”: a term that will is
also relevant in ecological readings, as discussed later, but this concept is also
related to the work of Bruno Latour, whose ideas will also be discussed in
more detail later. Luckhurst invokes Latour’s ideas by contending that “rival
theories proliferate around the notion of trauma because it is one of these
‘tangled objects’ whose enigmatic causation and strange effects that bridge
the mental and the physical, the individual and collective, and use in many
diverse disciplinary languages consequently provoke perplexed, contentious
debate” (2013, 15). All this means that the position of horror theory in the
early twenty-first century is one where a much wider nexus of connected
ideas is acknowledged in all of their contradictions and paradoxes.
An area of urgent critical concern, and certainly horror, is the question of
the environment. This is also an area where theory has “proliferated” in an
attempt to grapple with a very real problem that is simultaneously immediate
and on a scale that is difficult for our minds to grasp. Human evolution has
simply not prepared us to tackle global warming, the extinction of species,
and our part in this at the level of humanity taken as a whole. Ecological
theorist Timothy Morton sums up a certain critical reticence by pointing
out that, “thinking outside the Neolithic box would involve seeing and
talking at a magnitude we humans find embarrassing or ridiculous or politi-
cally suspect” (Morton 2016, 27). Morton calls problems at this magnitude
“hyperobjects” because although things like global warming exist, they are
the result of large-scale interactions between billions of human beings and
their activities, and feel instinctually removed from our individual actions and
desires. Nonetheless, in what many such thinkers call the Anthropocene, an
era defined by human impact on the planet, we are the monster of the story.
A novel like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and its film adaptation
(2009), portrays future environmental collapse by zooming in on a father and
son’s experience of such a world, and borrowing heavily from the lexicon of
horror. A television show such as The Walking Dead (2010–2022), ostensi-
bly a zombie horror narrative, emphasizes attempts to rebuild human social
structures with a heavy focus on agriculture. The “walkers” of the show and
the cause of their resurrection might be said to be a hyperobject in Morton’s
terms, and through this, it becomes clear why critics like Morton (who began
his research career writing on Romantic ecologies) have turned to horror,
and particularly the Weird, to illustrate their points and to show what horror
texts themselves are capable of illuminating about the human condition. The
horrific sublimity of beings such as H. P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of deities
22 Kevin Corstorphine

like Cthulhu equate to Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. Beyond even

this, with specific reference to climate change and species extinction, is the
realization that we are part of this monstrosity even if we experience our
individual lives on a different scale. Weird fiction can function as a means
by which this disjunction is revealed. As Morton writes, “even when I am
fully aware of what I am doing, myself as a member of the human species is
doing something I am not intending at all and couldn’t accomplish solo even
if I wished it” (2016, 20). This sense of the larger scale, wrapped up in nar-
ratives of forbidden knowledge and magical realms beyond, for example in
Lovecraft or in the world of The Evil Dead (1982–present), reflects back on
the human subject.
In the connected field of Object-Orientated Ontology (OOO), a theorist like
Graham Harman sees horror fiction, again focusing on the Weird, as a crucial
intervention in philosophy. He writes of Lovecraft that “no other writer is so
perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe
them, or between objects and the qualities they possess” (Harman 2011, 3).
This “philosophical turn” in horror theory, as we might characterize it, serves
to refocus horror criticism away from tired psychoanalytic models as well
as the excesses of postmodernism. Using Paul Tremblay’s novel, A Head
Full of Ghosts (2015), as an example, Lyle Enright points to the future of
“horror after theory,” claiming that in the novel, “the power of the unknown
regains its ability to frighten from a space outside explanation or symbolism”
(Enright 2018, 507). It is through an appeal to thinkers slightly tangential to
horror criticism like Harman, Morton, and others such as Latour, that horror
theory is finding an escape from the haunted house of psychoanalysis and
the self-referential loop of postmodernism. Latour’s writing, and the wider
concept of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in particular, have become useful in
horror criticism to explore and articulate the enmeshed nature of humans and
non-human actors. ANT, as Jonathan Murdoch writes, “stresses how social
and natural entities come into being as a result of the complex relations (or
networks) that link them together” (Murdoch 2001, 114). What these ideas do
in practical terms is to allow a re-examination of the ways in which what we
call “nature” has been depicted in horror fiction. Clasen’s earlier point about
how evolutionary factors have shaped what we fear can also be applied to the
natural world, which has appeared as a force of horror in the form of terrify-
ing animals, natural disasters, and even killer vegetation. This demonizing of
the natural world, what Simon C. Estok terms “ecophobia,” in The Ecophobia
Hypothesis (2018), is not solely responsible for environmental destruction,
but can be seen as part of a wider network of connections through the work
of the theorists discussed here. Horror criticism then comes to the fore as part
of a network of resistance and takes on new practical significance. As edi-
tors Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland write in the first issue of Gothic
 Horror Theory Now 23

Nature, “nature in the Gothic is so effectively uncanny because it is known

and unknown all at once—strangely made visible in these stories in a way
that often challenges our foolish sense of human self-enclosure” (Parker and
Poland 2019, 12). The rise of ecogothic criticism has huge implications for
the focus of horror theory and what is actually does. Like ecocriticism more
widely, it allows for an engaged and practical purpose, exposing instances
of ecophobia but pointing to the possibilities of a more enmeshed and con-
nected view of humans and the nonhuman. Donna Haraway has proposed
the need for a “Cthuluscene” (Haraway 2016, 101) in response to the chal-
lenges of the Anthropocene. Here, we would embrace what has previously
been approached, at times, with horror: our interconnected “tentacular” rela-
tions with the natural world. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, in their
landmark collection on the ecogothic, claims that, “the Gothic seems to be
the form which is well placed to capture these anxieties [climate change and
environmental damage] and provides a culturally significant point of contact
between literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process” (Smith
and Hughes 2013, 5).
An examination of what is “natural” is an inherent quality in horror’s
depiction of monstrosity, and as Smith and Hughes note, this, “representation
of ‘Evil’ can be used for radical or reactionary ends” (2013, 2). This question
of representation comes to the fore in early-twenty-first-century horror criti-
cism when thinking also about the representation of race and of LGBTQ+
identities, where nonwhite, gay, and trans characters have often been side-
lined or coded as the monsters. This is partly a consequence, too, of the
historic lack of creative diversity in horror. In her work on African American
representation in horror, Robin R. Means Coleman notes “how the genre
‘speaks’ difference. That is, marking Black people and culture as Other—
apart from dominant (White) populations and cultures in the US” (Coleman
2011, 2). Similarly, Tabish Khair sees this as a global process, claiming that,
“the Other—Gothic, gendered, imperial, colonial or racial—remains a key
concern of not only Gothic fiction but also postcolonialism” (Khair 2009,
10.). A renowned critical focus on race and representation has been spurred
on by movement such as Black Lives Matter and an impetus to decolonize the
academy, but also specifically in horror by a wave of nonwhite creators using
horror in new and provocative ways. Sherie-Marie Harrison identifies a “new
black gothic” (Harrison 2018) in the work of filmmakers like Jordan Peele,
whose film Get Out (2017) both works within and subverts American horror
film tropes. Horror and Gothic frameworks have allowed Remi Weekes to
examine the experience of asylum seekers in the UK in His House (2020),
Ahmed Saadawi to explore the legacy of the invasion of Iraq in Frankenstein
in Baghdad (2014), and Steven Graham Jones to center previously Othered
24 Kevin Corstorphine

Native American characters in The Only Good Indians (2020). This all feeds
back into horror criticism, which is increasingly questioning its own assump-
tions. Indeed, a special edition of Gothic Studies in autumn 2022 is dedicated
to “decolonising the Gothic.” As with ecocriticism, this is very much overdue.
In a broad sense, horror theory is moving in line with other forms of cri-
tique in the humanities in expanding the range of perspectives and possible
avenues of exploration in approaching a text. This involves both an awareness
of wider factors such as audience reception and the material conditions of the
production of the text, which might involve things such as race, gender, and
sexual orientation of the creator. If Barthes signaled the death of the author
in 1967, then they have now, appropriately, risen from the grave. Technology
and the increasing ability of horror fans to communicate and form networks
has meant that fandom is now a crucial part of the text itself. Horror, like
other genres, now responds to and preempts fan expectations on a scale far
beyond previous generations. The 1980s and 1990s idea of queering the text,
as in exploring the gay subtext of a novel like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), is somewhat old hat compared to the layers of meaning
surrounding The Babadook, mentioned earlier. Such readings can take into
account fandom, social media studies, and meme culture alongside queer
theory and textual analysis. Postmodernism has evolved into something taken
for granted, as seen in the proliferation of mashups and intertextual references
that characterize many horror texts.5 Horror theory at the cutting edge is fully
embracing the critique of power structures inherent to social justice move-
ments, while steering a path away from the binary political readings of the
past. Affect theory, cognitivist and evolutionary approaches, and an aware-
ness of the enmeshed, or networked, nature of the text in terms of society and
the environment are currently driving horror theory forward. All of this is
taking place in the context of the neoliberal devaluation of the humanities that
horror theory critiques but is also, by necessity, finding ways to appease by
bringing out the practical benefits of understanding what scares us and why.

NOTES

1. For a full account of this history, see Spooner, 2021.

2. We might look to the massive success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in
particular the multi-billion-dollar monetization of what might have recently been seen
as marginal “geek culture,” including the pushing of previously obscure characters
into the mainstream.
3. My emphasis.
4. See Clasen, 2021.
5. See Bruin-Molé, 2019.
 Horror Theory Now 25

WORKS CITED

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of
Viewership. New York: Routledge.
Baldick, Chris, and Mighall, Robert. 2000. “Gothic Criticism.” A Companion to the
Gothic, edited by David Punter, 209–28. Oxford, Blackwell.
Blake, Linnie. 2008. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and
National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bruin-Molé, Megan. 2019. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions
in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury.
Clasen, Mathias. 2018. “Evolutionary Study of Horror Literature.” The Palgrave
Companion to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura
Kremmel, 355–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2021. A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Clough, Bill. 2019. “Scholarly Parody: Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” MPCA/ACA
7, no. 2 (2019): 294–306.
Coleman, Robin R. Means. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films
from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge.
Enright, Lyle. 2018. “Horror ‘After Theory.’” The Palgrave Companion to Horror
Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel, 499–510. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge.
Gelder, Ken (ed). 2000. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Harman, Graham. 2011. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. London: Zero
Books.
Harrison, Sherie-Marie. 2018. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
https:​//​lareviewofbooks​.org​/article​/new​-black​-gothic​/.
Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere.
London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2013. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge.
Mendible, Myra. 1999. “High Theory/Low Culture: Postmodernism and the Politics
of Carnival.” American Culture 22, no. 2 (Summer): 71–76.
Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Murdoch, Jonathan. 2001. “Ecologising Sociology: Actor-Network Theory,
Co-construction and the Problem of Human Exemptionalism.” Sociology 35, no. 1
(February 2001): 111–33.
Parker, Elizabeth, and Poland, Michelle. 2019. “Gothic Nature: An Introduction.”
Gothic Nature, no. 1 (2019), 1–20.
Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
26 Kevin Corstorphine

Smith, Andrew, and Hughes, William. 2013. Ecogothic. Manchester: Manchester

University Press.
Spooner, Catherine. 2017. Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise
of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 2021. “Introduction: A History of Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First
Centuries.” The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume III: Gothic in the
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Catherine Spooner and Dale
Townshend, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turnock, Bryan. 2019. Studying Horror Cinema. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.
 Chapter Two

Decadent Feasts
Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Twenty-First-Century Prestige
Horror Television

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

AESTHETICS

“Why are you watching this?” This question has been on my mind ever since
a discussion with my wife some seven years ago about the horror/thriller/
police procedural-cum-cooking show Hannibal. I had been binging the series
and it had impressed me deeply with its aesthetics, its writing, its character
development, and its sheer audacity.1 In response to my amazed recapitula-
tion of some of the more ghoulish moments of the series—such as a charac-
ter forced to consume a gourmet preparation of his own amputated leg and
another who slices off pieces of his face and eats his own nose—my wife
caught me off-guard with her blunt question: “Why are you watching this?”
I responded, no doubt a bit defensively, in ways that are certainly true: That
as someone who researches, writes about, and teaches horror and the Gothic,
the show is firmly in my wheelhouse and is something with which I need to
be conversant; that the series, like horror in general, offers us insight into con-
temporary sociopolitical concerns, anxieties, and desires; that the show does
fascinating things with familiar characters and is extremely interesting from
a transmedia adaptation studies perspective; that it has a fascinating narrative
arc, that the performances are nuanced, that it is gorgeous to look at, that the
writing is excellent, and that the crimes committed and the gustatory proclivi-
ties of the primary antagonist are incredibly audacious—especially given that
the program was created for network television; and so on. All of this is 100
27
28 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

percent true, and yet I still managed to dodge the real questions at the heart
of the question—not just why are you watching this, but do you actually like
this? Is this OK? Should anyone like this? Because of the note of dismay
lurking in my partner’s voice, I stopped short of saying that I was watching
the show—and, by extension, much of the horror media that constitutes my
primary media diet—because I enjoy it.2
It needs to be acknowledged at the outset that few things are calculated to
irritate horror fans more readily than the suggestion that there may be some-
thing wrong with or immoral about horror and its consumption because it
implies that one’s tastes are depraved and that, as a consequence, one is mor-
ally flawed. It’s a bit like a vegan asking a carnivore how they can possibly
stomach eating meat—it ends up feeling like a personal attack that can elicit a
knee-jerk defensive response. Of course, “acafans” of horror like myself have
developed excellent strategies not only to deflect the question but even to turn
it back on those who raise it. We may freely acknowledge, for example, that
many works of horror may be in “bad taste,” but then cleverly foreground (by
way of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) the classist connotations of taste and the
standard bearers of conservative culture who police it; we may highlight the
very conventional moral framework at play in most works of horror in which
the antagonists are punished for moral transgressions and the rule of law
re-established and reaffirmed at the end; we may, as I suggest above, point
out the many ways that horror narratives give us insight into our culture and
ourselves; and so on. And these things are entirely and indisputably true: The
idea of “good taste” has indeed always been the privileged faculty of those
with access to wealth and power; many horror narratives in the end are in
fact extremely conservative reaffirmations of the status quo and its system
of values; and to varying extents, horror narratives can certainly offer insight
into what we dread and secretly desire. We may even scoff at those who ques-
tion the morality of horror as close-minded puritanical teetotalers who lack
the sophistication or stomach to appreciate the value and virtues of horror.3
And yet these responses don’t tell the whole story because they mostly
side-step the question of enjoyment. One doesn’t have to enjoy horror to
watch or study it, of course; one can acknowledge it as a pervasive form of
contemporary entertainment and explore its forms, themes, and messages in a
neutral, dispassionate way. One can watch a horror movie just to see what all
the fuss is about or study horror to see what it has to say about race, gender,
class, and other issues without either embracing or rejecting the genre as a
whole. Lacking an affective investment in the genre, such individuals also
would have little reason to be irritated by having their motives for watching
questioned. Such individuals, however, I suspect are likely in the minority.
Viewers typically choose to watch horror because they want to watch hor-
ror—that is, they derive some enjoyment or satisfaction from the viewing.
 Decadent Feasts 29

And those who study horror often focus on the genre either because it is
something they already enjoy or, less commonly I think, because they have a
bone to pick with it.
To have a frank and honest discussion about horror in the twenty-first cen-
tury, therefore, we have to raise the issue of enjoyment, which then becomes
central to any discussion of the even more vexed issue of the ethics of horror.
What does it mean to enjoy films that include scenes of violence, abuse, mur-
der, cannibalism, and so on? Is there something immoral in taking pleasure
in scenes of other people being harmed? Just to ask these question can make
someone seem puritanical or provincial; nevertheless, especially given not
only the cultural prominence of horror as a genre, but the twenty-first-century
development of what I will refer to below as “prestige horror” that aestheti-
cizes violence in ravishing ways, it seems a question at least worth asking,
even if it “gets under the skin” of horror fans and scholars and even if there
are no easy answers.
Addressing enjoyment in relation to media in general, it should be pointed
out, is a vexed endeavor because the reasons we enjoy or do not enjoy a par-
ticular narrative can be multiple, overlapping, and even in conflict. We may
enjoy a clever plot construction that defies our expectations or keeps us on the
edge of our seats, and we may enjoy a satisfying conclusion that provides the
closure we desire and answers questions raised by the narrative in convinc-
ing or surprising ways; we may enjoy a narrative that we perceive as a timely
meditation on contemporary issues and/or one that reflects and reaffirms our
positions and opinions; we may enjoy a television episode or film because of
its lyrical writing, complex character development, compelling acting, daz-
zling effects, and any number of other technical aspects. Crucially, we often
enjoy narratives because of how they make us feel: pleased, aroused, amused,
exhilarated, and even ways that would seem contrary to enjoyment, such as
sad, angry, disgusted, anxious, and scared.
The question of enjoyment is one that has been particularly important to
considerations of horror because of the apparent logical conundrum of the
genre: Since we usually seek to avoid being afraid or disgusted, and these are
presumably the emotional responses horror seeks to provoke, how then can
we explain the appeal of horror? Put simply, why would anyone intention-
ally seek to experience painful or unpleasant emotions? Quite a few different
theories have been proposed to explain this seeming paradox, and I will offer
a quick survey of the existing theories of horror below. I will then propose
that these theories need to be updated to accommodate the prestige horror
of television’s twenty-first-century golden age. With Hannibal in mind in
particular, but also series such as Dexter, Penny Dreadful, Kingdom, Taboo,
American Horror Story, True Blood, Hemlock Grove, and so on, I will pro-
pose that enjoyment of horror today is at least in part scopophilic, a pleasure
30 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

we derive from seeing TV programs that are essentially cinematic in quality

and that seduce viewers with a gorgeous aesthetic that transforms violence
and death into art. This then prompts a consideration of an issue neglected
by most theoreticians of horror: ethics. Theories of horror have attempted to
explain why people enjoy it; most, however, have shied away from asking
the question of whether or not we should enjoy it. For my purposes here, I’m
particularly interested in the implications of the aestheticization of violence
and gore in twenty-first-century prestige horror television. What happens
when extreme violence is turned into a thing of beauty? What are the ethical
implications of dining with Hannibal?

A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THEORIES

OF HORROR ENJOYMENT

Theories of why people enjoy horror can be grouped into three broad catego-
ries: denial theories, conversion theories, and competition theories. Denial
theorists reject the idea that horror actually evokes painful emotions. To a
certain extent, this could be referred to as “schadenfreude theory.” That we
may experience pleasure or joy from witnessing the trouble or humiliation of
others seems undeniable, although in the case of horror narrative, this would
seem to apply more immediately to characters coded as negative or evil: We
can delight, for example—and with little or no guilt—in seeing the faces
drain away from the Nazis at the end of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 Raiders
of the Lost Ark (a useful example from a film that wouldn’t necessarily be
considered a horror film). It is generally considered OK to take pleasure in
the punishment, comeuppance, or even death of monstrous or morally com-
promised characters in fiction, film, and television (especially if they are
Nazis). It seems to me to be far less acceptable to celebrate or derive pleasure
from harm done to “innocent” or “good” characters. This suggests a kind
of underlying sadistic impulse that can find expression in either acceptable
or more questionable ways—we, therefore, can derive pleasure from seeing
representations of people being hurt, punished, or killed, although this is only
“sanctioned” if they are “bad” people.
Included under this denial of pain rubric are the related propositions from
philosophers Alex Neill and Kendall Walton who both argue that our emo-
tional responses to horror are not inherently unpleasant. Neill draws an inter-
esting distinction between situations and elements present in horror that may
be evaluated as painful or unpleasant, and our emotional response to them,
which may in fact be pleasurable (Neill 1992, 62–63). Berys Gaut offers a
similar approach in proposing that we can in fact enjoy fear and disgust,
which reflect our evaluations of objects and situations (see Gaut 1993). From
 Decadent Feasts 31

this perspective, there is nothing paradoxical in taking pleasure in the disgust-

ingness of gruesome cinematic effects, such as Regan (Linda Blair) vomiting
in The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973) or Pam (Terri McMinn) hung on a hook in
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Walton, for his part,
argues that it makes very little sense to say that we are afraid when watching
or reading horror because we know we’re safe. Our emotional arousal is real,
but it is what Walton refers to as a “quasi-emotion” elicited through a form
of make-believe. When we consume horror, we are thus playing an enjoy-
able kind of game in which we pretend to be afraid (see Walton 1978). For
denial of pain theorists, there is no paradox associated with horror enjoyment
because we aren’t really ever truly scared or grossed out.
As opposed to denial theories of horror enjoyment that reject the proposi-
tion that we are ever actually scared or truly disgusted, conversion theorists
propose that unpleasant or painful emotions can certainly be elicited by art but
that they are then transformed into something more pleasurable; discomfort is
the price paid, so to speak, for enjoyment or relief that comes afterward. This
idea goes all the way back to Aristotle and his theory of tragedy—tragedy, he
proposes, generates negative emotions that then result in a pleasurable purga-
tion of excess pity and fear: catharsis (see Aristotle 1997). Applied to horror,
this might suggest that we really do feel fear and disgust but emerge from the
experience feeling good. Conversion is also the basis of philosopher David
Hume’s approach in “Of Tragedy” in which he proposes that the eloquence of
expression in tragedy transforms what in real life would be painful into plea-
sure (see Smuts 2007, 64)—although in Hume’s case, artistry converts what
would otherwise be painful into something enjoyable (so a case can be made
here for grouping Hume under the denial of pain category; see Hume 1907).
Rather than one emotion being converted into another, competition theories
of horror enjoyment propose that more than one emotion is aroused by hor-
ror, but that enjoyment prevails. This is the basis of one of the better-known
theories of horror consumption: Noël Carroll’s proposition that the negative
emotions evoked by what he calls “art-horror” are offset by the enjoyments
of narrative and the interest elicited by categorically impure monsters.
According to Carroll, while we really do experience fear and disgust when
watching horror, we are also fascinated by the monsters and get wrapped up
in the plot and want to see how things turn out. If our curiosity prevails, we
keep reading or watching. If our disgust or fear wins the competition, we stop
(see Carroll 1990). Carroll’s approach can and should I think be expanded to
include aspects of narrative other than plot and its eliciting of curiosity or sus-
pense. Viewer engagement with or appreciation of any other element of a hor-
ror narrative may reasonably be considered to compete with negative affect:
We may, for example, be disgusted or disturbed by a film, but appreciate on
an intellectual level its theme or subtext or that it functions as an allegory, and
32 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

therefore keep watching for that reason. The main idea is that two (or more)
different responses are simultaneously elicited by horror literature or media,
and they fight it out to determine whether one keeps watching or reading, or
calls it quits.
Carroll’s approach does, however, leave an important question unan-
swered: If narrative by its nature creates curiosity and a desire to see how
things turn out, all things being equal, why wouldn’t we just choose stories
that don’t evoke fear or disgust? An answer to this question is provided by
John Morreall, whose “control theory” proposes that we can enjoy even
unpleasant things as long as we know we can “start, stop, and direct the expe-
rience” (Morreall 1985, 97). This explains, for example, why roller coasters
are appealing—they may be frightening, but we can also experience pleasure
because we assume we are safe. The same goes for television or film: We can
always turn off the TV or leave the theater. Morreall’s theory is similar to
Aaron Smuts’s “Rich Experience Theory.” According to Smuts, “painful art”
lets us “have experiences on the cheap” (Smuts 2007, 74). That is, “Art safely
provides us the opportunity to have rich emotional experiences that are either
impossible or far too risky to have in our daily lives. We can feel fear without
risking our lives, pity without seeing our loved ones suffer, thrills without
risking going to jail,” and so on (Smuts 2007, 74).
Mathias Clasen takes Smuts’s Rich Experience Theory the next step by
arguing from a biocultural perspective that human beings are in some ways
evolutionarily conditioned to “find pleasure in make-believe that allows
them to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe
context” (Clasen 2017, 4). Horror fictions, which, according to Clasen, toss
a “live wire into ancient structures in the audience’s central nervous system”
(Clasen 2017, 29), thus actually serving some important functions. Among
other things, horror, according to Clasen, helps us learn to manage negative
emotions, acquire coping skills, and thus learn to negotiate real-world dan-
gers (Clasen 2017, 59–60).
A variant on competition theory is what Smuts refers to as “power theories”
(see Smuts 2007, 69–70) in which individuals seek out “painful art” to test
their capacity for endurance. Extended to horror, this might explain why some
fans seek out extremely violent or gory horror films—to show they have the
intestinal fortitude to consume extreme representations; extreme horror fans
thus enjoy being the kind of people who can sit through extreme horror. Susan
Feagin offers an interesting slant on the question with a focus on tragedy,
proposing that we take pleasure in being the kinds of people moved by sad
things. That is, there is a form of satisfaction derived from being the sort of
person able to feel sympathy for others (see Feagin 1983).
Finally, a somewhat different form of competition theory is repression
theory. Derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, repression theory, especially
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