Does Horror Infect or Defend?: On Brandon R. Grafius’s “Lurking Beneath the Floor”

JANUARY 7, 2023

WHAT DO WE search from the horror style? In his essay of philosophical pessimism, The Conspiracy Towards the Human Race (2010), Thomas Ligotti deploys Peter Wessel Zapffe’s idea of “sublimation” to clarify the inventive creation of horror. Ligotti reminds us that some individuals are brooding and their ideas have cursed them. Like occultists who’ve learn forbidden grimoires, they’ve come into tragic consciousness of their ephemerality, their lack of company, and the meaninglessness of the cosmos. Furthermore, a few of these dispirited individuals — artists like Ligotti, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe — reply to those horrible insights in a curious method: with inventive show. As Ligotti writes, “That we’d annul a paralyzing stage fright at what could occur to even the soundest our bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open show of them.” For Ligotti, understanding the true horror of our state of affairs calls for a defensive response; one response is sublimation within the type of making horror artwork.

This view of horror artwork as a defensive maneuver to fortify oneself in opposition to horrible ruminations through inventive sublimation is curiously contradicted by Brandon R. Grafius in Lurking Beneath the Floor: Horror, Faith, and the Questions That Hang-out Us (2022). For Grafius, horror artwork’s worth isn’t in its capability to strategically obscure and so defend in opposition to the actual; as an alternative, horror artwork is effective as a result of, like a pharmacokinetic drug provider, it injects the actual into the unsuspecting thoughts. Commenting on the horror movies that left an “indelible impression” on him, Grafius writes,

They’re those that mirror the world round us. The reflection could appear darkish or even perhaps seem as a funhouse mirror picture, however the finish result’s that it both helps us assume extra clearly concerning the world as it’s, or it imagines different methods of being that could be doable.

In different phrases, one of the best horror, for Grafius, is the type that features as a cognitive prosthesis for illuminating and scrutinizing hidden however actual horrors.

Maybe the origin of this Ligotti and Grafius contradiction is vocational in nature. Grafius, in contrast to Ligotti, approaches horror as a critic relatively than an artist, and is thus involved with the evaluation and which means of horror relatively than the psychological roots of its inventive manufacturing. A biblical research scholar, Grafius frames horror media (and horror movie particularly) as one thing just like a corpus of sacred texts, a popular culture bible that includes the gospels of Romero, Carpenter, and Craven, and the Epistles of Peele and Eggers. For Grafius, the sacred textual content analogy is pressured and emphasised: studying the Bible — and watching horror movies — doesn’t inoculate us from horrible ruminations however strategically engenders them, and valuably so, for such ruminations present alternatives for religious development. Grafius writes in his introduction:

Lurking underneath the Floor explores this connection between religion and horror, exhibiting how horror generally is a invaluable — even necessary — dialog companion for the religious questions that animate so many people.

On this method, watching horror movies comes by means of in Grafius’s e book as a religious follow not in contrast to a Bible examine. Watching horror movies permits religious seekers to grapple with the mysteries of being.

Grafius’s argument — that consuming horror artwork may be understood as one thing akin to religious looking for — isn’t distinctive and has been made elsewhere in nuanced methods, resembling in Victoria Nelson’s traditional duology, The Secret Lifetime of Puppets (2001) and Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (2012), which take horror artwork critically as modern makes an attempt to revive a transcendent and Neoplatonic understanding of the world in opposition to a dominant, intellectually myopic materialism. However Grafius’s arguments turn out to be distinctive when, within the spirit of biblical interpretation, they try to articulate the concrete religious insights supplied by particular horror movies and tv exhibits.

The construction of Grafius’s e book mirrors these arguments. The ten chapters start with a “Prechapter Viewing Suggestions” listing to determine the horror movies to be mentioned. The chapters then open with an evaluation of scriptural passages and themes, and that is adopted by software of the commentary to horror to light up how sure movies may be located inside religious debates. For instance, within the fifth chapter (titled “They’re Us …”), Grafius considers how the priority of the Epistle to the Romans with humanity’s fallen nature reverberates with the people horror movies The Hills Have Eyes and The Witch, particularly with their rendering of evil as originating from the claustrophobic psychodrama of the household.

Or contemplate the ninth chapter, “Is God Good?” the place Grafius examines Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse within the context of the religious questions introduced up by biblical depictions of God as vengeful, sadistic, and insufferable to look upon. Blurring commentary on The Lighthouse and the Bible, Grafius muses,

At occasions, I can consider that God loves me. However when life will get tougher, I begin to surprise if God’s paying consideration or if there’s extra fact to the biblical portraits of a darker God than I’d prefer to admit. Possibly we endure as a result of there isn’t any God, or possibly God exists however is out to get us.

One other fascinating instance of this melding of biblical contemplation and horror film evaluation is the second chapter, “The Valley of Shadow.” Right here, Grafius examines horror movies that render characters who proceed to hope regardless of their hopeless circumstances. Inspecting the determined protagonists of works like A Quiet Place, The Factor, and The Strolling Useless, Grafius deploys a studying of Psalm 23: “Yea, thou I stroll by means of the valley of the shadow of dying […] I’ll worry no evil.” Utilizing this passage to preface his remarks, he states of those horror movies,

[Y]ou can nonetheless sense the form of hope by the grim absence of hope for the movies’ characters. These films take full lack of hope and ask us to consider what form hope may soak up our lives.

In different phrases, horror films, by rendering excessive hopelessness, educate us to hope.

Few would deny that some horror artwork permits us to wrestle with religious questions. Certainly, the worth of Grafius’s e book lies in concrete demonstrations of the potential for horror artwork to yield religious insights when purposely scrutinized. However Grafius’s conflation of studying sacred texts and watching horror films dangers downplaying these practices’ radically totally different contexts. Though some readers may admit to taking enjoyment of studying sacred texts, they’d, I think, be much less more likely to admit they go to them solely for leisure. Conversely, some horror style lovers may admit that horror stimulates sure religious ideas. And but, the picture of an viewers attending screenings of Noticed with the rapt perspective of Sunday sermon parishioners appears unlikely.

However Grafius’s concept of horror functioning as a backchannel quasireligious discourse isn’t so ridiculous when contemplating the longer historical past of gothic fiction. Gothic fiction, showing within the type of a literary hoax perpetrated by Sir Horace Walpole, emerged as a uniquely Protestant response to the milieu-specific cultural prohibition in opposition to the supernatural within the 1760s, what Max Weber approximates together with his evocative — although extra suggestive than exact — idea of “disenchantment.”

The gothic fiction of Horace Walpole, refined and mastered by Ann Radcliffe in suave novels of the supernatural naturalized, allowed Protestant readers to promiscuously flirt with the supernatural from a secure vantage level, whereas concurrently sustaining their faithfulness to Enlightenment rules of rationality, materialism, and a (largely) disinterested creator. Such a reader might thus meditate on life after dying, the character of evil, and the chic mysteries of geological and cosmic time, they usually might accomplish that in a socially acceptable method. That is, in a simplified kind, the essence of the argument that Victoria Nelson makes in The Secret Lifetime of Puppets when she argues for the endurance of a Neoplatonic “sub-Zeitgeist” transmitted by means of sure Romantic and post-Romantic literary works that “revived the traditional paradox of spiritualized matter” — i.e., perception within the soul and the supernatural. For Nelson, as for Grafius, horror isn’t merely for leisure; it additionally permits us to acknowledge and grapple with deep religious mysteries.

Or does it?

Grafius’s argument that horror permits us to confront religious thriller is at odds with Ligotti’s perspective as an artist whose ruminations have pushed him to sublimate and create new horrors as a type of psychological protection and therapeutic. When Ligotti adopts the angle of a critic, like Grafius, and speculates about horror artwork’s attraction to that group of viewers, his unflattering commentary emphasizes the Radcliffean, bourgeois, and conservative facets of horror’s historical past, the best way it features to inoculate the social extraordinary from critique: horror, Ligotti muses, permits middle-class audiences to “preserve their sense of being idealized beings, integral and undivided.” He continues,

They […] distract themselves from any petrifying information about human beings by watching movies during which the entire characters endure an uncanny doom that would not probably have relevance to actual life.

Put one other method, for the nonartist, horror renders a psychologically invaluable type of schadenfreude: COVID-19, uterine most cancers, and Russian nuclear weapons are materials threats, however a minimum of there are not any Xenomorphs, Cenobites, or Physique Snatchers to take care of in actual life.

You will need to recall that, for Ligotti, artists don’t merely show their fears neutrally however essentially stylize and intensify them:

[T]his is what thinkers and inventive varieties do after they recycle essentially the most demoralizing and unnerving facets of life as works during which the worst fortunes of humanity are introduced in a stylized and eliminated method as leisure.

In different phrases, aestheticizing horror is restorative to psychological equilibrium (or a minimum of the medical equal of being stabilized after a life-threatening trauma). As a psychological well being follow, making horror artwork inoculates sure artists from the psychological harm brought on by their horror-inducing ideations. So, the claustrophobic tales of Poe, the physique horrors of David Cronenberg, the biomedical sadism of H. R. Giger: these oeuvres and others may be interpreted because the psychological survival mechanisms of artists scuffling with harmful worries. These artistic endeavors are supposed to maintain insufferable ideas at bay, are charms, not in contrast to the garlic of the vampire fantasy or the anti-ghost bujeok talismans of Korean folklore. Creating horror artwork permits a sure sort of artist to hold on regardless of the ambient noise of cosmic slaughter and the suffocating aroma of decay.

Grafius’s shocking, and sometimes insightful, eclectic mental enterprise in Lurking Beneath the Floor brings into stark focus Ligotti’s understanding of unreal horror as being sublimated ruminations about actual horror. For Grafius, the worth of unreal horror is that it permits us to grapple with actual horror. For Ligotti, the worth of unreal horror is that it distracts us from actual horror. This stress elicits a troublesome query: does horror defend or does horror infect? The reply is that it does each, and its operate varies from individual to individual, from artist to critic, from believer to atheist, from flesh puppet to immortal soul. What can we search from horror? Grafius’s e book supplies one reply.

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Jason Ray Carney teaches well-liked literature within the division of English at Christopher Newport College.