Author: Tenacity Plys

One Goddamn F*cked Up Horror Picture: Carmen Maria Machado, Pearl, and the Psychoanalytics of Horror

by Tenacity Plys

 

Generally, horror doesn’t scare me. It’s not that I don’t feel fear; I feel fear literally all the time. Don’t you?! But typically when a book or movie is supposed to be scary, something in me is numb to the experience. Like, there’s a guy killing all these people while they’re on vacation; who cares? Or some doll is creepy, and it’s gonna kill everyone; whatever. Even Midsommar didn’t really do it for me, because I was basically nodding along like, “okay, these Swedish people are a death cult and they’re going to kill all these teens in ~symbolic~ ways until only Florence Pugh is left. Got it.” Once you know the shtick of a horror story, that’s kind of it for your emotional response, even if the story is as smart as Midsommar. 

 

I used to be way too scared of horror movies. As a kid, I basically couldn’t watch them; they upset me way more than anyone else my age. Over time, I believe I developed defense mechanisms to keep me from being so overwhelmed, resulting in my anhedonia—in fact, sometimes I feel moved to nervous laughter at horror movies, my distress taking a detour through hilarity to make me look like a sociopath rather than a crybaby. Progress?

 

Fear is a primary emotion, meaning it’s a reflexive reaction to our environment; primary emotions are sometimes called precognitive emotions, because they happen before you can think about the fact that they’re happening—and while you can mitigate them by thinking once they’ve happened, you can’t prevent them by thinking. To instill fear, horror has to sneak up on us, before our conscious minds can catch on and intellectualize our fear before we feel it. The power of language is such that when we think “I am scared” to ourselves, this gives us a handle on our fear—naming what’s scary is half the battle, especially when you can just say to yourself “it’s only a movie.”

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