Me+Horror=?

I have been an avid lover of the dark and the macabre most of my life.  For as long as I can remember I have had a perhaps unnerving fascination with death, monsters, ghosts, and things phantasmagorical.  It would be no lie to say that my mother encouraged this in me.  I have a picture at home of myself at age 5 holding up a drawing I had just done of the grim reaper in his cloak moving through a forest with glowing hands.  This photograph has a caption in my mother’s hand: “Bobby is an artist!”  This was indicative of my interest.  I would often sit on my mother’s lap in church and she would show me how to draw spooky or gruesome things on the program.  My favorite is a disembodied eye-ball with the trailing retinal nerve pierced through with a nail.  I am sure that my school teacher’s worried looks came as a result of my copying my mother’s work in the margins of my worksheets.  

This fascination followed me as I grew.  I am sure that my lack of playmates at recess was due at least in part to my wandering about the schoolyard as a slobbering beast of my own design, the which had long sharp nails that folded back on hinges and stored his dagger by stabbing it into his own leg as he had no sheath.  Clearly horror would be my friend when no one else would.  I loved the old universal monster films.  My favorite was The Mummy.  I watched it over and over.  I loved it and so did my Mom.  She would tell me about going to the movies as a child and see the latest horror flick.  She often would tell me of the one movie that really scared her The Crawling Eye.  One Halloween my grandmother came to visit and had a copy of that movie that she had found in a bargain bin at Walgreen’s .  I however thought that it was cooler than scary.  

And so my love affair with horror continued until death came to visit at the age of 13.  My mother had been sick for some time and finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 40.  She left 6 boys from 4 to 16.  Horror in film took a back seat as the horror of my real life took charge.  I don’t remember watching a lot of horror through high school, though the horror in my mind did occasionally surface in macabre poetry and journal entries that garnered more worried looks from teachers.  I didn’t need to watch horror.  It was inside of me every day.  It was in that empty seat at the dinner table. It was in every coo-coo lady that tried to replace my mom. It was in the awkward silence from my peers.  I didn’t need to take it in.  I needed to get it out.

So I drew more pictures.  I drew death.  I drew violence.  I drew upon the grotesque that my mother had taught me.  My monsters became more sophisticated but had essentially the same aesthetic that was found in that crude drawing from my 5-year old self.  I took art and used that as an outlet for my internal horror.  Instead of drawing the girl lying on the bench for figure drawing, I drew her impaled with her tortured spirit  fleeing the corpse.  Instead of drawing the forced 2 point perspective of our school building, I drew it collapsing and burning with the flaming corpses of the students lying in a heap.  I drew decapitation, evisceration, dismemberment, combustion, disintegration.  The common theme was death.  I was less interested in monsters and more in the horror of the end.

Gradually I left that behind.  I became interested in Theatre.  Death followed me there.  No longer were monsters present, nor was death a gory splatter; it was the quiet real death of Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables or Eugene’s older brother in Look Homeward, Angel.  It became more like the real death that I saw and less like  the horror I felt inside.  This also gave me the opportunity for real friends.  Drama students are great that way.  They accept you precisely because you are kind of freaky instead of in spite of being so.  So they helped fill that void in my life.  Eventually, time faded the sharp pangs of death and horror that I felt and I became a successful, contributing member of society.  I became a drama teacher and dove into the myriad possibilities of my career.  I bought a home.  I had a family.  But time, I learned, does not cure the pain, I just covers it with more stuff, more life, more busy-ness.

Around age 30 I found that I still had problems.  The beast had slumbered long enough and was ready to come out.  I became afraid again.  The funny thing about the monsters and horror of my childhood was that I loved it and I was scared.  I loved it until I woke up at 3:00 am thinking that a giant tongue was going to come out of my closet and suck me in.  Then I was afraid.  In my thirties I became afraid in the day.  Death took my mom.  He could also take me.  I was scared of that.  So, I had horror in my life.  I didn’t need horror movies.  I was scared enough.

There were a few exceptions.  I loved zombies.  I was fascinated by the things that they could represent.  I was intrigued by connections between the work of George A. Romero and the likes of Brecht or Marx.  I was fascinated by how people trapped in a mall with zombies could have so much in common with two men waiting by a tree for some guy named Godot.  Maybe the distance between the Undead and    Hamlet was far less then I thought.  This was a ticket in.  If there was a place for zombies in my theatrical study and praxis, then maybe there was room for something else.  I was given a Film class to teach at the high school and once semester I had a few weeks left for a unit so I taught horror.  I went back to my childhood.  We watched Dracula and Frankenstein.  We watched King Kong and the delightful House of Wax.  I realized something as I took my students through those films: there was a catharsis for me.  Not only did it connect me with my memories of my mom, but it helped me to accept death, to see it as something that happens to all.

So I became a lay student of horror.  I would read about it when I could, to see what other writers were saying about the genre.  I watched what I could (which wasn’t much as my family are no fans of the genre).  I found that it was a rich genre of meaning for me.  I still liked scary movies, and monsters, and, honestly, death.  How could I?  I hated death.  Death stole my mother and would eventually steal me.  What could he possibly have to offer me?

So I wrote a play.  It was about a youngish married man whose best friend is death.  Only he sees death and it is unclear if death is real or imaginary (which doesn’t really matter anyway).  The mostly sit and chat about movies and music, but they never talk about why death is really there, why he took the protagonists mom. These scenes are interspersed with classic poems about death and scenes that ape portrayals of death in the media (zombie films, police procedurals, Tarantino, etc.)  The play ends with a replaying of the death of the protagonists mother and the protagonist taking out his revenge on death.  The play helped me to understand my experience with death and by extension, horror.  The fictional portrayal of death is a way of coping but not really dealing with death.  Or perhaps better, it is a bridge to healing.  Sometimes the horror of death is too real for the mind to deal with.  Sometimes the terror of loneliness cause by death is too hard.  Horror helps to cross that gap by giving us a false representation to grab onto until we can reach the real fear.  I think that is why my mom liked it too.  She also lost her father to cancer at a young age.  Her fascination with horror and the macabre was her bridge to healing.  I think that it has been mine.

Five years ago, I would not have been able to handle a class that focused on horror, and not just the campy B-film stuff.  But my experiences of creating, writing, reading, and viewing helped me come to a place where the horror on screen connected me to reality, bridged the gap of pain to catharsis.  The films that I have viewed in my horror class have not destroyed me.  They have not numbed me to reality.  They have taken me to a place of healing and provided a connecting piece to my childhood, to my fears, to death, to my mom.  That little boy with the picture of Death never knew that his childhood fascination would end up being a doorway to survival, but sometimes the surest path to change is what looks the most dangerous and destructive.  The fear and dread of horror can lead us to seek for connection and love; for hope and healing; for eternity.