By Keri O’Shea
As horror has become (somewhat) more seriously considered and appreciated within wider culture in the past fifteen years or so, more and more people have taken it upon themselves to look in closer detail at the make-up of horror. Just who populates the stories that make up the genre? How are the main players characterised? And, in a small but growing community within academia, and elsewhere – just how representative is horror?
From various quarters, horror’s quotas have been found woefully lacking – or, even when there is a proportionate number of, say, women in a narrative, what happens to them has found itself endlessly debated too. We’re probably all at least tangentially aware of the Women in Horror movement, which seeks to champion one gender’s achievements over another’s for a period of time to achieve those most nebulous and yet credible of modern aims, ‘awareness’ and ‘recognition’. And yet, the buck doesn’t stop here. From within the WIH movement, other voices have emerged. These follow a very logical current, given the stream of consciousness they’re in; if we accept that women are marginalised, then what about Women of Colo(u)r? And there are sub-divisions within this – what about Latinas? Indians? Maoris? Do they enjoy visibility, and if not, what the hell is wrong with this picture?
There are yet further layers of inadequate representation. In a post on the Day of the Woman blog this year, we learned that the following females might have reason to be displeased also. This group is trans-women, and pardon me if I cut and paste this, as with apologies I speak limited Tumblrese:
“…all non-cisgender gender identities including: transgender, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, genderfuck, genderless, agender, non-gendered, third gender, two-spirit, bigender, and trans man and trans woman.”
Phew. You’d have hard work to get that on a student union teeshirt. However, my issue isn’t particularly with all of that terminology. Nor do I have a problem if people feel or decide that they don’t want to espouse or belong to conventional genders – whatever, it’s not my business, but what I do take issue with is that, somehow, having self-identified as ‘non-binary’ or what-have-you, they (or their online champions, and make no mistake, these exist) then begin to find fault with a fantasy genre which they feel owes them proportionate and sympathetic representation (and there’s that word again). People seem to feel better when it turns out they figure they have it worse. A lot of the thinking behind this clamour baffles me.
I’ll reiterate. Horror is fantasy. At its most fantastical, it routinely shows us ghosts, aliens, monsters and demons; even when it is of the ‘inspired by real events’ persuasion, its killers and stalkers are routinely omnipotent and omniscient. In any incarnation, it is a fictionalised world filled with threat, nastiness – and baddies, of every stripe. It has no obligation to inspire us or to show us heroic versions of ourselves, however we might self-identify; in the broadest possible terms, horror gives us the superhuman, or the very worst of humanity blown up to cartoonish proportions. You might find yourself rooting for the Final Girl, and god knows we’ve heard enough about that in recent years, but that’s all part of the fantasy too I’m afraid. It seems bizarre, even pigheaded to criticise a genre where people routinely come back from the dead for its lack of positive role models. Might you not look elsewhere for them? There are other film genres, and other art forms, which are highly motivated by social realism. Perhaps they could already provide you with the invented characters you seek to aspire to, rather than horror being found lacking. Modern horror is by no means perfect. We say so all the time here. But it is not, and has no obligation to be a perfect, idealised reflection of modern Western culture (and I’m sorry, my inherent cisgender hetero-white privilege probably forbids me from commenting on other hemispheres). If anything, horror will always do the opposite. It will always blow up our anxieties to nightmarish proportions, and make us confront them – even laugh at them.
It’s not just current horror which gets chastised, though. The plague which haunts modern academia and by eventual extension, popular culture is the urge to judge the narratives of the past by our current mores. Every year without fail, for example, someone discovers that horror genius H P Lovecraft held some frightfully beyond-the-pale opinions about other races – and they disown him, because they cannot get their heads around the fact that he existed in another time and place, and as such held views which were far more acceptable there and then. Even Tom and Jerry cartoons now have to come with a warning, because otherwise we might assume that Amazon are tacitly racist due to the fact that they sell a cartoon made upwards of seventy years ago. A cartoon, which comes complete with all of the overblown stereotypes of its own time (as well as a talking dog and a cat with opposable thumbs…) Judging the past by our own values is as pointless as it is stupid. One day, you can rest assured that the generations of the future will judge our values and concerns, no doubt finding them confusing and concerning too. It also displays extreme arrogance, the arrogance which assumes human development is a straight line moving from the Dark Ages to an enlightened future, and just needs a hardcore of dedicated individuals online to tidy up a few aspects of social justice. Fat chance, and looking squarely at the past to do this is to undertake the noble task of shooting fish in a barrel.
In her article ‘Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Trans* Woman? On Horror and Transfemininity’, writer Mey comments on the fact that trans* people have a rough time of it in horror cinema. Whilst she says that she loves horror movies and finds them cathartic, she nonetheless takes issue with the way in which trans* people in particular are demonised in the genre (presumably having no truck with the demonisation of anyone else, or at least not so much). Some of the examples she gives are from psychic ghost story movie (!) Insidious Chapter 2, the characterisation of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, a film made nearly twenty-five years ago, and Sleepaway Camp, made over thirty years ago.
Whilst I think the relative age and sub-genres of the films are relevant to a degree, I’m surprised in this case – and everywhere I see it – that my fellow horror viewers are perfectly happy to watch any manner of horrific fantasy on their screens, just as long as it doesn’t infringe on their own particular terrain of self-identification in any way unpalatable to them, whatever that terrain happens to be. Of course, saying as much runs the risk of bringing down a tsunami of outrage and indignation, usually involving a game of Privilege Top Trumps, or in other words, the modern means of devaluing anything you might have to say due to something out of your personal control. The point still stands.
Look, Buffalo Bill is no more representative of transgendered people than he is of residents of Virginia or of dog owners (and let’s not forget the fact that Thomas Harris expressly says in the novel that Buffalo Bill is NOT transgender at all – a fact which ardent horror fan Mey overlooks, out of ignorance or convenience). He is an overblown and grotesque figure, a murderer and tormenter, belonging to a made-up world (although arguably based on the very real figure of Ed Gein, who did skin women). Where is the merit in looking back in time and bewailing the absence of positive role models? Placing obligations upon the past is a dead-end street. It also smacks of an inability to watch films for entertainment, of a very modern preoccupation with fairness in fantasy, of watching beady-eyed for any negative representation of anyone currently deemed appropriately marginal (then complaining about it).
Will this idealised perfect world where every group in modern society can champion a positive role model in horror lead to better films? Hardly. Much of horror’s power is in its cruelty – to everyone present in its story. Many of the best horror films ever made have been bold enough to circumvent a neat, happy Hollywood ending; you’re meant to feel challenged, meant to feel shocked. Furthermore, many of these classic, brilliant films came from a milieu which didn’t share our predilection for outraged anxiety and were probably made by straight white males, ugh. If we are going to go down this path of demanding positive and proportionate representation though, must all our villains eventually follow suit? Can we hate and fear anyone, or will this be in some way traceable to some invented misfortune in their invented past which should make us nod and understand their woes, or ask that we make other considerations? Look at the array of dysfunctional families, low socioeconomic backgrounds, abusive relationships and mental health concerns which have dogged our antagonists in horror. Should we not bewail this unfairness too? And how is the new wave of proportionality to be ensured, assessed and maintained? That last bit isn’t a rhetorical question, by the way. I’m genuinely mystified as to who will ensure everyone has the champion they seem to want. ‘Better’ is a term infrequently agreed on. ‘More’, likewise.
With such a mindset, one which is held by a hubbub of voices in modern culture, we could be in danger of losing the pleasure of immersion in the sorts of imaginative, daring and downright scary fiction which horror can bestow. The drip-drip-drip of dialogue about privilege has so far brought little to the genre, in my opinion. An endless footnote of unease, distracting the eye from the way in which horror has always been overblown and discomfiting, and should remain so. If you have an eye on quotas, though, perhaps we can agree that at the most basic level it’s the behaviour of the person which should matter, not their gender, race, weight, sexuality or anything else. In such case, it’s not Buffalo Bill’s transgendered state, but his actions in hacking up women which makes him scary; ditto for every monster, human or non-human, since horror cinema was born, when it comes down to it – and we can probably find a monster in every form down through the years. When it comes to social anxieties, horror will reflect some – sure, of course it will. But it needn’t be the source of new ones.
To come back to the distinction between real life and imagined, as well as my point about human development not in fact being an unalterable straight line towards progress; there are many very real, very terrifying infringements upon all of our lives out there right now, and as such, the determination to police the horror genre for a wealth of axes to grind which we are genuinely privileged to be able to do seems dangerously more than petty. Horror is fundamentally born of escapism, not realism, and if your chief concern is with the latter then by all means, deal with the real. You may find that’s more scary these days than anything horror can throw at you.