What Is Horror Poetics? Part IV: Metaphor & the Monster

by J †Johnson

Read What Is Horror Poetics? Part I , Part II, and Part III.

Monster: VERB [with object]. To make a literal or figurative monster of oneself or others. To harass, torment, or scare. To cause or experience painful transformation. To get big. To feel and exert one’s uncontrolled power. To become supernatural. To be overcome or possessed by myth or suburban legend. To lurk, stalk, benight. To queer and exceed limits. To spread radical ambiguity.

Consider the monster: it is what it is, even when it’s also something else. For a monster movie to work, we have to fear the monster because it’s scary, might be coming for us, maybe even becoming us—either because it devours and incorporates us, or because we see ourselves in it. Monsters don’t scare us because they represent trauma or daddy or death, but if we think about real-world problems while the monster does their worst, we can at least separate ourselves from what really fucks us up. 

The monster can mean a lot of things to us—sometimes, the more the better. As J. Halberstam points out in Skin Shows, when we settle on one interpretation of a horror narrative, we can lose all the other possibilities, and the horror loses some of its power to generate meaning and make monsters that get us where we live. It’s not all up to us, though. The story has to be able to hold up multiple interpretations in order to have this dynamic meaning potential. Those that too easily lend themselves to a specific metaphor exhaust themselves on one viewing or reading, resolve in a way that doesn’t reverberate beyond the work, or fail to shake us up. The monster has to be an actual monster before it can be an effective metaphor. As Derrida pointed out, the monster stops being a monster once we are familiar with it, though the word monster is etymologically connected to both demonstrate and warning. So the monster is always revealing a threat, and perhaps showing itself until it is no longer monstrous, because it becomes known. Which sounds like a rationalizing kind of paradox. Anyway, if the monster can scare off our theories about it, rend our reductive analysis to shreds, it can find us again and again in the dark. 

Some of us go to those places not necessarily to process our neuroses (which can of course be its own kind of release) but to re-enchant the world even if it means rousing a monster. We call ourselves sickos, mutants, freaks, something else. Some of us call ourselves monsters. There’s more than one kind, and some of them are the best friends you’ll ever have.

It goes both ways, as monster movies often do. We meet a person who’s sort of charming but also has some shitty qualities. We watch things get worse for them. Caleb in Near Dark starts off flirting with a manic pixie dream vamp, literally asking for a bite, and pretty soon he’s creeping on her for a kiss in his truck. He gets his just desserts, and over the next couple hours we watch him be a reluctant vampire, chauvinist cowboy, and sorry sucker. When he basically kills Mae’s whole family then turns her back into a human without asking for her consent, we maybe finally see that he’s always been a monster, and not the sympathetic kind.

We not only make monsters of ourselves, we make monsters of people who are close to us. We groom each other, like Eli grooms Oskar in Let the Right One In, like T’Gatoi grooms Gan in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” like Jennifer grooms Needy in Jennifer’s Body. It’s messy and wrong, like life is. That’s how horror gets into (and comes out of) our heads. As Ginger Fitzgerald says in Ginger Snaps: “I get this ache. I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.” Typing those lines makes my breath catch. Our desire for others monsters us and them, whether or not we want to jump each other’s bones.

Let’s hang onto the monster’s complexity here. Monster does not equal bad, which doesn’t mean we need to be naive monster huggers either. Those things will kill you if you aren’t careful. And every monster with a conscience knows they have to be careful not to rampage when we mean to rumpus.