Horror and the Glib Comforts of Reason

I’ve been reading a ton of Colombian horror comics the last few months, which has led me to think about what horror can do for us as a genre and the blind spots that at least this particular iteration of it can underscore.

Horror isn’t altogether new terrain for me. When I was little, I wrote endless stories modeled on the slasher B-movies I’d tape off HBO. People thought I’d be a horror writer. I grew away from it, but I never rejected it as I did some of my other youthful tastes. I’ve remained a reasonably committed but casual horror fan.

But over the last year or two, it’s become central to what I read and watch. A key part of this has been the heap of local Colombian horror comics I’ve devoured. The Bogota Zombie Massacre, Saic, SRT, and Hvamincide are some titles that stand out. They’re a great way to refine my understanding of Colombian society as well as my Spanish linguistic facility.

I’m always a little skeptical of attempts to read socio-political import into pop culture products, which often seems like people looking for excuses to talk about their pet tastes. At its worst, it can feel a little frothy and like a distraction from more demanding but salient ventures. This obviously isn’t always true, but you don’t have to try too hard to find that dynamic at work.

However, that is clearly not the case with huge swaths of Colombian horror comics or heavy metal (there’s quite a bit of overlap between those communities in Bogota, as I suspect is the case more generally). Not only is the socio-political critique not subtle, but the authors often directly say that their work explores weighty topics like colonialism, political corruption, global inequality, and race relations.

By focusing on what frightens and makes us uncomfortable, horror has a general affinity with socio-political critique. It’s nicely primed to raise questions about troubling norms or social practices. It pushes buttons that can lead us to ask about the sociocultural undercurrents behind our anxieties and fears. Understanding what scares or disgusts us can tell us a lot about the type of society we live in. This is a classic form of the social as the personal — and few things are more personal (but often generalizable) than what we fear.

In hindsight, I was too quick to underestimate the utility of horror as a vehicle for challenging social inequities. This probably happened for a few reasons, including the peculiar form of provincialism characteristic of those critiques seeming almost too familiar.

In that sense, I remember once talking with a brilliant cognitive scientist who responded impatiently to an anthropologist’s work in which an interviewee took pains to emphasize that both she and her community cared about the well-being of her/their children.

The point seemed absurd to the cognitive scientist: of course they cared about their children. From an evolutionary standpoint, how could they do otherwise?

A reasonable question, but the absurdity is of course the point. It’s ridiculous to suggest that entire communities don’t care about their children. Unfortunately, we live in a ridiculous world. Some arguments are worth refuting not because they’re the best version of the argument but because they’re the version that’s on the table.

Thinking about this, not to push my Sartre a little harder than it might deserve, but part of me wonders if that tendency towards over-emphasizing reasoned insight might not be a way to impose a comforting illusion of order on an often absurd world. In a darker vein, it can easily mask or even foster hatred.

In that sense, part of what makes horror powerful is that it is a potent rallying point. The audiences are huge, and people derive real meaning and power from its messages. This sociological thrust is worth noting both on its own and because it shapes the work itself. There’s a certain gestalt to this and something of a synergistic effect. The material takes on another meaning when situated in another setting. This is true both sociologically and aesthetically.

On one level, this of course all sounds obvious, and I’ve read enough social science and social movement theory to know better. Still, at the risk of stating the obvious to diagnose a problem of stating the obvious, it’s awfully easy to have one’s lived perspective be out of step with one’s better judgment (before laughing, recall the last time you were genuinely but privately astounded by a platitude like “life is short” when it hit you that, well, life really is kind of short).

And, of course, that’s what my motivation to obsessively read about zombies devouring a person’s brain stems from: my struggle to wrap my head around the obvious. How could it not?