What Is Horror Poetics?

by J †Johnson

Photo by Jaime Fountaine

Poetics in its contemporary usage describes not only prosody and elements of technical craft, but practical, embodied matters of writing. We write with our bodies and live with our writing. This is not to say our poems and novels are our babies: children are children, cats are cats, and words are words. But they do matter to us, and they say something about how we live in the world because our writing is part of how we live in the world. We write as we think, and we write as we care.

So, what do we care about? What does technical craft have to do with communal care? How does form form us? The ongoing practice of writing addresses these questions and enacts the questioning, even if writing is better at questions than answers, and writing is a limited (and perhaps preliminary) sort of action.

What, then, is horror poetics? What does horror writing mean to us? To follow that webbed hall, we’ll have to ask (and keep asking) what horror writing is. So let’s start by suggesting that we can draw in the obvious—stories, novels, film scripts, essays—and the less obvious—drawings and comics, poems, social media discourse, goth fashion and costuming, haunted baking. And, yes, theory. Even if you haven’t had a look at Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws, if you’re into horror, you’ve been informed by Clover’s theorizing about the final girl. And if you haven’t taken J. Halberstam’s Skin Shows to bed, you have new thrills coming. Derrida wrote well about horror, as does Judith Butler, as did Mark Fisher. There are relevant horrors evoked in the writing of Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Harmony Holiday. Let’s talk about it.

And let’s talk about our own writing, just as we put thought into practice, and all of the decisions we make with every chosen and arranged word. If there is a lingering aversion or even taboo about discussing what goes into our writing, what it means to us, and who we have in mind when we write, let’s transgress the convention of keeping ourselves in the shadows (even if we do some of our best and most exciting work there).

Here at Cul-de-sac of Blood, we want to go there with you. There: the cemetery, sure, but also the hypnagogic places we all dip in and out of whether we’re nodding out at a triple feature to better explore a scene, or transgressing the mouth of Erebus in the forest of dreams. Every book is a door, an architecture of doors, and we don’t know what’s behind most of them. Stephen King loves to remind us that horror starts with a closed door, and what happens right before we open it. (And let’s come right out and say that for all King has contributed to turning people on to horror, he’s also poisoned the well with moments of fat phobia, ableism, racism, sexism, and homophobia in his writing—whether or not we can debate moments where he is reflecting rather than projecting or inflicting harm.) It can be scary, but we’ll need to throw open more doors and visit some of those skeletons stashed away in closets. We can bring that drama of opening up into our horror writing, and we can do it in a way that does more than scare us: we can clear out some old things, and let more people in.

We’ll of course have to talk about what a monster is, and what makes a monster, and what monsters say about monster hunters and the good and totally non-monstrous townspeople who are more and less tightlipped about the monsters in their well manicured hedges. We might have to use some big words and bigger ideas, constitutive outsides that help us see ourselves more fully. But we aren’t afraid of words, are we?

Oh, and isn’t the world horrible enough? Too horrible. More and more horrible all the time, it seems. We need to ask questions about how we got here, and where to go from here. Sometimes the way out of the house of horror is through the house. We’re never safe in horror, but we don’t ignore what’s after us (even when it comes from within). We fight. We try to do more than survive. 

Horror writing can be better than it has been. It can be more thoughtful, less subject to small-minded fear. It doesn’t have to be racist, sexist, trans-phobic, fat shaming, ageist, ableist. We don’t need guns. We do need bodily autonomy. We can do better in the worlds we make, and the ones in which we live.