Halloween Countdown 2018, Day 27
Oct. 27th, 2018 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eldritchhobbit
Today I’d like to share an excerpt from “Reading Horror Can Arm Us Against A Horrifying World” by Ruthanna Emrys (2018).
The banal evils of the world — children shot, neighbors exiled, selves reframed in an instant as inhuman threats — these are horrible, but they aren’t horror. Horror promises that the plot arc will fall after it rises. Horror spins everyday evil to show its fantastical face, literalizing its corroded heart into something more dramatic, something easier to imagine facing down. Horror helps us name the original sins out of which horrible things are born.
Some of my favorite horror stories are those in which real-world terrors
grow gradually into something stranger. Mariana Enriquez, recently translated into English in Things We Lost in the Fire, writes a Buenos Aires in which poverty and pollution inevitably swell into risen corpses and sacrificial cults. Stephen King’s Carrie only destroys her town because abuse and bullying feed her frustrated teenage telekinesis. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” starts from the simple psychological claustrophobia of well-meaning relations and deep-rooted sexism….Horror as a genre is built around one truth: that the world is full of fearful things. But the best horror tells us more. It tells us how to live with being afraid. It tells us how to distinguish real evil from harmless shadows. It tells us how to fight back. It tells us that we can fight the worst evils, whether or not we all survive them — and how to be worthy of having our tales told afterward.
Read the complete essay here.
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Date: 2018-10-28 12:31 am (UTC)Thank you, dear friend. I am sad that the month is waning! This countdown, I'll say it again, is a high point for me every year. And I think this year has been the one I've enjoyed most so far. <3
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Date: 2018-10-31 12:19 pm (UTC)