A Horror Poetics
by Nick Rattner
I was eight when I was born. The babysitter tasked with keeping me safe while my parents went out for dinner was a sweet Cerberus. My godfather, Tony.
At the time of my birth, there were seven channels available on TV, the seven wonders of the world. That night, one of them was showing Joe Dante's The Howling. Undone by desire, as the moon passes across the waiting room into a quadrant of sky visible from the examination room. A powerful lust causes a man's skin to rip open revealing a vestigial hunter, an ancient self no longer a trace but a being. The transformation is so powerful that it opens the TV screen and a pool of primordia begins to rise on our living room carpet.
Enough of it so that I am carried out of the womb over which Tony is keeping watch. I can't breathe, or cry.
I leave a self behind so Tony thinks an innocent boy is still sitting beside him, watching the werewolves. And then the return to the old self, to bring it with me into the dream world into which I've been born. But the old self while recognizable as the old self is not the old self.
A truly terrifying film reunites the present self with an ancient self, often horribly disfigured by loneliness. Freed from the prison cell of technology, the zombie, the demon, the witch cross the air, from screen to subject, ripping themselves and others apart for our dreams. "Nightmare movies," as Kim Newman calls them, grant the dream self a parole, they bid us wander among the living.
Thank you, Tony.