[Pride 2020] Love, Trauma And Horror

I used to hate horror films. I’d never watched them, but I hated the idea of them. I knew enough about the genre’s most regressive tropes that I long wrote it off as misogynistic, racist, homophobic, excessively violent, and generally peurile. Using fear as entertainment was baffling to me. I figured I’d already lived through enough trauma; I didn’t need to see more.

But my best friend loves horror. In our ten years of friendship, Sean (not his real name) has reliably vanished into a two-month frenzy of planning, designing and prop-building for his annual Halloween party every autumn. These absences sparked countless arguments, as the elaborate preparations led me to love the holiday but dread the months leading to it. Two year ago, I decided to try something new. Despite my aversion to horror films, I offered to let him show me a few of his favourites. I knew he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to introduce me to his favourite genre, and sitting through a few scary movies seemed preferable to six more weeks of silence.

I met Sean in the fifth year of my four-year Bachelor of Arts degree, when I started volunteering at the student paper. We didn’t speak for the first three months, until one night we got drunk together at a party and ended up talking about comic books until two in the morning. He became the first friend I’d made in university, and the first person I told about my rape three years earlier. He saw my weirdness, my queerness, my mental illnesses, and loved me for it, whether he understood it or not. It was unconditional acceptance I never expected from this straight, small-town boy from Alberta, and it made him family, with all the messiness that sometimes entails.

Over the last decade, we’ve grown into a kind of sibling relationship. He plays the protective, sometimes patronizing older brother and I’m the idolizing younger one, always asking to tag along. As a result, he’s introduced me to the majority of my current social circle, as well as to books, music and local restaurants. And of course, to horror.

Over the span of two months, we watched more than a dozen films, guided by a document Sean created and ironically titled “Not a Horror Syllabus.” Among the first films we watched were Halloween and Friday the 13th, films which had helped cement the horror tropes I found most disturbing, like the teenage girl who is inevitable killed after having sex, the unnecessary nudity or the killer-cam that seems to celebrate the violence being meted out.

But the “syllabus” came with lessons, delivered in his typical meandering monologue. I’ve always found the habit inexplicably charming, in part because it’s tempered by a willingness to listen to me lecture on my own pet subjects. Horror has never been just about ghosts, monsters or axe murderers, he explained. And despite what some people claim, it’s not apolitical. Instead, it’s a reflection of society’s darkest fears, what we find monstrous or inhuman.

That realization - that horror could mean something, that it was about more than body counts and exposed breasts - changed everything. In university, I loved historiography; the idea that history itself has a history delighted me. I could read a monograph and find more than just a recital of events; it was a window with the curtains loosely drawn, and if I leaned in close I could glimpse the writer and the moment they lived in, what they valued and what they feared, what they felt compelled to justify. Horror, I learned, wasn’t just a window. It was a mirror held up to the world.

That was how I fell in love.

Suddenly, each film was an opportunity to discover something new. Sean and I spent hours on the couch, talking film theory and analysis, teasing meaning from every frame. The Ring isn’t just a ghost story about a malevolent child; it’s a meditation on motherhood and the media. 28 Days Later dissects institutional misogyny and how governments fail to protect the most vulnerable in moments of crisis. The Thing can be read as either a prescient allegory for the HIV/AIDS crisis that was in its infancy during the movie’s release, an exploration of masculinity and homosexuality, or a dire warning about the consequences of the Cold War.

There were other lessons. For years, Sean has joked that I’m a black hole of pop culture knowledge. I couldn’t differentiate between directors, and I’d watched so few movies overall that most references or call-backs to other films were generally lost on me. I had no understanding of the role of cinematography except vague recollections of the camera’s “male gaze.” Gradually, I started to notice that films had their own colour palettes, that how the camera moved and where it focused had meaning. I began to understand the role of direction. I was enchanted by seeing new tropes born in one film begin to appear in others.

Eventually, I started watching horror by myself. On a Monday night, I got home from work and wrapped myself in a thread-bare IKEA quilt against the mid-October chill. Netflix had already sensed a shift in my tastes, and rather than its usual recommendations of “Strong Female Leads” or “Because you watched Broadchurch,” the app thought I might like to watch Hush. The 2016 home invasion flick features a deaf writer being menaced by a masked intruder with a crossbow over the course of 81 tense minutes.

But Hush was a different kind of mirror. This time the reflection wasn’t of some societal anxiety, an abstract monster made real with special effects and a script. In real life, home invasions are more sudden and brutal. There’s no set up, no plot. There’s the tinkling sound of glass shattering in a nearby parking lot, muffled voices, and then the crash as your front door cracks inward.

I was 14 when two men burst into my family’s living room on a humid spring night. The noises carried through the thin walls into my bedroom: my stepfather shouting, my mother screaming; the muffled smack of fists on flesh, of feet scrabbling on carpet, of unfamiliar voices barking orders. The whole thing lasted fifteen minutes, and then they were gone.

My audio-only experience made the random violence seem abstract and surreal. Half a life later, that night and everything that happened afterwards - our sudden move to the suburbs the next day, the trips to police stations, a trial that happened on the periphery of my awareness - still feel intangible.

Like anyone who’s lived through trauma, I have plenty of my own monsters, among them depression and post-traumatic stress. I’ve lurched between hypervigilance and dissociation, sometimes anxiously aware of my surroundings but disconnected from my own skin. For years, I’d seen horror as needless replicating those traumas, and I worried that seeing any version of something I’d lived through would splinter the wall I’d erected between the painful parts of my history and the peace I was trying to build for myself.

If horror is a mirror, then Hush was like looking at my own reflection in foggy glass. I recognized the general shapes of my own experience. But the monsters on film weren’t what I expected. They didn’t frighten me the way I thought they would. In fact, the more familiar they were, the more they comforted and consoled me.

A home invasion or a rape, on its own, doesn’t mean anything.

A real horror story, one you’ve lived through, isn’t a story at all. There’s no no three-act structure with exposition, rising tension and a moment of crisis, no character development. One second you’re sitting on your bedroom floor, and then a bottle breaks, and so does your life. The monsters are ordinary, even boring, just people with their own fucked up histories. Violence is just a thing that happens, a horrible kind of nonsense.

But on film, murder and mayhem are ordered into narrative and commentary. The bloodshed in horror serves a purpose, to tell a story or expose some truth about the world. The monsters are all allegory, and they arrange trauma into something sensible. It was soothing to see my worst experiences rewritten into something I could understand.

It’s not that horror stopped being frightening. It didn’t. In the nearly two years since Sean first took me up on my offer, I’ve watched more than 100 horror films, tackling every subgenre from body horror to rape-revenge to zombies. Many, even most of them, have made my chest, spine and shoulders tighten as the dread mounts on screen. But I understand now why fear can be its own kind of comfort, when you can package it into two hours and control it by pressing pause or play.

I hoped watching a few scary movies would let me spend more time with my best friend. Horror brought Sean and I closer, and it’s become a language we share, the default setting for any evening we get together. But it’s more than that.

It’s also become a type of therapy, a way of unwinding the parts of the world that defy reason. Horror has made the monsters in my head smaller and quieter, easier to tame. It’s not that horror isn’t everything I thought it was, because it can be. There are movies that revel in every trope I hated. But even those films tell a story.

They’ve given me a way to start to tell mine.

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