A tad more horror please
I’ve read a couple fo books recently that have had me pondering about some aspects of the current political climate and in particular the sheer relish in cruelty that we see from some of the Maga or Reform crowd. The first book was Scott Poole’s Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. He traces the impact of the First World War and how it shaped the early horror output, especially the burgeoning film industry. He argues that films such as 1924’s Nosferatu are direct results of the horrors people experienced in the war, and partly that was why a lot of this influence came from Europe, which had witnessed it to a greater degree than the US.
A point he makes is that horror provided a means of dealing with this trauma. The disfigurement of soldiers, the undead like status of many of the shell shocked, murderous automata, these were all reimagined as horror tropes which would form the basis for the horror sector form then on. He suggests that part of the function of horror is to render the inside of the body visible on the outside. The corpses of the War had made this view all too present.
In modern society we have succeeded in making death (at least for the middle class), largely antiseptic and removed from view. This has possibly meant that the reality of violent death is not felt as readily, allowing people to make sick jokes about alligator Alcatraz, because it doesn’t have the weight of reality that it used to. In the same way that Remembrance Day in the UK used to be about remembering the horrors for war and all those shattered bodies, as time has eroded that memory, it has transformed into a celebration and a competitive poppy wearing festival, a kind of war cosplay for men who grew up reading Commando comics.
The second book is Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. This wry, acerbic book draws a rich picture of the environment where serial killers thrived in the US NorthWest. It doesn’t directly make a link between factors such as lead and arsenic poisoning, but the detail Fraser provides and the endemic disregard for public safety establishes a fertile soil for such depravity. For instance, she recounts how smelter owners casually made a calculation about how many children they could poison and get sued for and still make a profit, and then in the next breathe how Bundy lured victims by feigning an injury.
The environment helps create monsters is the message. It is not solely responsible and is definitely not an excuse, but like with the current situation, the psychotic cruelty on display from people such Lauren Boebert, is enabled by the environment. That is also exacerbated by the unreality of violent death that so many years of isolationism and world peace has facilitated. I’m not saying that unless people watch more horror, we’re heading to an apocalyptic world war. But I’m also not not saying that either.
