Website and all contents thereof property of Maren Wasser
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Yesterday, my state government enacted a law that threatens this very website... ok not really at least not yet. Here's the situation: in order to curtail access to "adult content" by minors, websites that provide such content are required to take sensitive identifying information such as a picture of the users drivers license, and use it to verify their identity and age before permitting access. Not only is the digital collection of such data a huge privacy and security risk, but also, should content on this website be determined to be "adult" or "harmful to children", I could face legal repercussions. I don't have the training let alone resources to handle sensitive data, even from the very small ammount of people who view this site. But, one might respond, you don't have any adult content on your site so you have nothing to worry about. According to whom? I talk about my medical transition on this site. Not in any great detail, but I discuss the medication I take and the process I took to aquire it. Given the way American culture treats trans people right now, I could see the state government electing to see that information as "harmful to children". I am protected however... nobody visits this site. That is an exaggeration, of course, but this website gets probably less than one real reader a month. That being the case, I could probably get away with posting explicit content for the foreseeable future; just so long as I don't get too popular. Not that I will; as tempting as it might be to find out if my chest has developed enough for a shirtless pic of me to be considered obscene.
Putting that authoritarian bullshit aside, today is the first day of the best month of the year: October. Y'all may have picked up on me being a horror junky. For me Halloween isn't a day, or even a week, it's a month. I feel motivated to be extra spooky this year. Horror is interesting as a genre. Appreciation of it seems unintuitive. The obvious question is why would someone seek out being scared, but I think there is a far more interesting and illuminating question: What other appeal is there to horror besides the thrill of being scared? There must be somthing else right? Not all horror media is really all that scary. Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, The Lost Boys, and many others are "horror media", but don't really try to scare the audience. Why do they borrow the aesthetics of horror without the intent to horrify? Macabre subject matter holds a fascination on its own. There is an undeniable draw to the obscured and taboo. Humanity seems hardwired for exploration and novelty; anytime we try to deny ourselves access to a thing we don't have experiance with, our curiosity, or even desire, fights us every step of the way. This is reflected in the marketing of a lot of horror media. The back of the box of Silent Hill 3 reads: "Everything you never wanted to see" a phrase that perversely appeals to that desire for what polite society tells us to deny ourselves. In a sense the macabre is marginalized.
This explains a different mechanism of attraction to the macabre that is very strong for marginalized communities. Like the vampires in The Lost Boys, ghosts in Beetlejuice, Jack in Nightmare Before Christmas, and so into infinity, people have been forced to hide or disguise themselves or face hatred, rejection, or exploitation. Queer people especially, given societies' long standing preference to pretend they don't exist, have a lot of experience being ignored except in hushed tones, esoteric euphemisms, and dark implications. Queerness becomes, in that environment, an occult community. For the marginalized, horror becomes not an object of curiosity or desire, but an expression of identity. Movies like Clive Barker's Nightbreed (to a lesser extent Hellraiser), Let The Right One In, Nightmare On Elm Street Part II, and basically Guillermo Del Toro's entire filmography make this explicit with queer and other marginalized identities being inextricably linked to horror and its aesthetics. Within this link there is power. The Nightbreed, vampires, Del Toro's gallery of tragic monsters... they're powerful. In a world that pretends you don't exist, horror can show you yourself. When who you really are is obscured, curiosity becomes fascination becomes desire becomes identity. This is how I found myself in horror.
When I started "The Lycan's Confidant", the short story that would later develop into my novel manuscript, I thought I was a cis man. Werewolves came to facinate me, but not initially. Most stories I was exposed to treated lycanthropy as a burden to be struggled against, but, in small pockets of social media, many people wrote little vignettes of healthily coping with lycanthropy, and speculative and empathetic understandings of it. Maybe Werewolves are violent because transforming takes a lot of energy and they are starved. Or maybe violent tendencies could be curtailed by providing suitable enrichment. I fantasized about the possible tangible realities of being a werewolf, of living life in a way that was unique to me, and I wrote a story of my own. I didn't intend to find an understanding of myself in the Werewolf, but I put myself in that place and in seeing myself laid out conceptually I saw more clearly than I ever had before. One of my favorite quotes I have ever written for a character of mine (in an unpublished short story) is: "I'm not a person who is sometimes a wolf or a wolf who is sometimes a person. I'm a werewolf. One thing." Not one or the other, not both, a unique other thing.
Horror isn't just a quick thrill or safe exploration of discomforting concepts, though it serves those purposes well. Its aesthetic marginalization can speak to those who feel unheard and ignored or even despised. We find ourselves in the art that speaks to us, and horror speaks in a way and from a perspective that many of the marginalized need to hear: you may be ignored and despised, and challenge the social status quo, but you are powerful, and your story is worth telling.