First off, hello! I hadn't forgotten this blog existed, but I'm going to have to rethink how I want to use it. I'm still likely to talk about tea and poetry most of the time, but for the moment don't expect anything regular or quite so structured. I'm at a point in life where I should start thinking about longer term plans and patterns. That doesn't mean that I'm actually going to, but in as much as I can use this blog for rough drafts and direction, I'll do so.
To that end, I'd like to pin some words down on the subject of horror and monsters, a subject near and dear to me that I always struggle to explain my full connection to. Fair warning, this is likely to wander about a great deal.
As early as I can remember, I've had a paired fascination with ghost stories and nightmares. My own dreams were and have ever been filled with monsters and the end of the world, but always in fantastical scenarios. Floods and zombies and serial killers, undead personally coming to the door of five year old me to murder me. And for all that these sound horrifying, they didn't scare me in the same way that more mundane dream scenarios have. They were still frightening, and I'd wake up with that heightened paranoia that makes me watch shadows at 3 a.m. to this day, but it's a different plane of fear, and thus, in a way, comforting.
As for ghost stories, they were my introduction both to formulaic story-telling and fear as entertainment. My close friends got into the habit of asking me to tell them ghost stories on long rides or sleep-overs, and I'd string together the necessary beats and imagery as I went, fascinated that the words I was making up off the top of my head could possibly be frightening. Obviously the blood and the mirrors and the ghosts weren't real,* so how could this be affecting them? And given how much they were enjoying it, how could I make it affect me? Could I convince myself to feel afraid, or did I need darker material to start with?**
It's probably also worth mentioning that I'm not entirely neurotypical. I've never had a formal diagnosis, but I went through most of my life a half-beat off from everyone else. I am very likely on the autistic spectrum. I don't process emotions the same way as most people, I certainly don't react to them in the same way, and as I grew up, most of my efforts were spent on understanding why I seemed to living in a parallel dimension from the people around me. Mostly I figured out how to fake the expected reactions and social scripts, but they never came naturally and never made sense. This will come up again later.
And so life went on and I grew up. The usual tragedies of childhood followed, as well as tragedies that shouldn't be normal. I graduated from books of ghost stories scavenged from the library to my older sister's Fear Street books, hungry for blood and phantasms, and grew a collection that eclipsed hers. I was never deeply into movies, but bored and alone over the summer I'd catch any bizarre horror movie that crossed my path. In middle school, I fell in love with the Count of Monte Cristo for an execution scene as much for the beautifully executed revenge plot. In high school I took a summer class on vampires in myth and literature and fully codified my love for Gothic fiction.
Throughout this all, I was a clearly labeled Weird Kid. "Gifted" teacher's pet, shy, but also widely referred to (affectionately) as evil by my family and friends. Teenagers always feel like outsiders, but the struggle of understanding basic social interactions combined with the knowledge that the stories and images that most pleased me were horrifying to the general public led to my feeling a great deal like a monster in a human suit. And some days that was (is, really) something I'm proud of, and some days (less of these now) there was this vast grief that I couldn't understand or become human. I was at points afraid that enjoying tales of fear and suffering meant that I was myself a bad or dangerous person. It sounds silly now, but I avoided certain martial arts and research options because I didn't want to risk it. (Knives are pretty, but maybe I shouldn't be allowed access to them because I think that. Fire is beautiful, but perhaps I would be unsafe?)
I'm not a teenager anymore, and I know all of that last is bullshit (and when said by others, was said in jest), but it stuck with me for years, and in the same way that I spent time building an artificial system for socializing once I realized mine was unexpectedly different from those around me, I devoted time to codifying my own internal morality, so that I could be certain that even if I was weird or different, I was at least comfortable that I was a good person. Which I was, and am, but it will always be something I watch and try to improve.
So is it any wonder that I developed sympathy for monsters? I still love a good ghost story or slasher flick, but tales of monster protagonists choosing to do the right thing out of love or wonder, or reverting back to their base natures, or trying to find a balance...these are all near and dear to my heart. What is humanity and what is human? What do you do with the knowledge that the terrifying Other in the narrative is, in fact, you?
The undergraduate thesis that I devoted woefully little time to was specifically about the exploration of the relationship between Other and Self in Gothic literature, and the texts I looked into were all about blurring that line. Possession, doppelgangers, revealing the monster within.... It's a topic I'd like to revisit now that I have some distance, because I had no idea what to focus on or what I was looking for at the time. If I were to look at it again, I'd spend more time on Othered identities in society, which is clearly the key I was looking for and never quite managed.
What I didn't fully understand growing up was that I'm not just "weird," and I'm not alone. I'm neurodivergent, which is true of many people and means there are people out there who speak and understand the world the way I do, and I'm very queer. Both mean that there are vast sections of the country that think that I'm broken or damned or better off dead. (And if you don't think that's true, you haven't been paying much attention to the news this last year.) A significant chunk of the world has already decided that I'm Other and the monster of their story, and if that's the case, the idea of being scary instead of helpless becomes a power fantasy, and monsterhood becomes wish fulfillment.
I'm also fond of flipping the script, and rightfully calling out horror behind prevailing social norms. Because horror touches on who is and has a right to be human, and the inherent monstrousness of man. But if I go too much further down that path this will become a love letter to Get Out, and that deserves to be more than a post-script in a Sunday ramble.
So there. Some thoughts about monsters and what they mean to me. That's not everything I love about horror, or even everything that appeals to me about the topics mentioned here. And I haven't even gone into my love of ghost stories as healing narratives. But...let's leave it at that for now.
* The one and only ghost story that managed to get to me is Bloody Mary. It frustrated me to no end, because I knew better and none of the other bloody and horrific stories I was consuming even in elementary school ever stuck with me. But to this day I can't sleep if my image is being reflected in a mirror.
** I eventually discovered roller coasters and violent hobbies, and yes, adrenaline is indeed great.
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