The Art of Fear and The Power of the Frame: Introduction

As I'm aging, and giving myself the permission, the freedom, to spend more time and energy considering storytelling, I've been taking a new look at things I have taken as givens, maybe taken for granted. Among them is the fact that storytelling, and the arts as a whole, are one of the ways we communicate to and with each other about the experience of being human with this consciousness that evolved within the human animal. We make art about every experience within the human capacity to communicate, and we've even learned to be able to communicate this with "What's between the words," and "The notes and beats we don't play." They are a continuous, never ending expression and discussion of what it is to be human.

Fear is a powerful thing in the human experience. It shapes human history. Right now, today, at this very moment, polling places across the United States are open. Fear has been on the ballot for every election in my lifetime. I'm not sure it's ever been as raw and urgent as it is this year, but it has always been there. It can shape or reshape nations. It is one of the primary drivers of human behavior. I don't think there's anyway to argue about this. It just is, like gravity. It doesn't matter what we might individually think about this, it's there, very real, and like gravity, shapes our lives in ways we don't always think about or realize. It isn't the primary driver, but it is one of them.

Horror is, at base, the art of fear. No matter what fear it is, we express and reflect the experience of it in the horror genre. What we think of as the horror genre, is just our attempt to communicate about our experiences of fear.  It's the language we express, recognize, investigate, question, fight and justify our fears. When I say language, I don't just mean words either. We can express it in music, visual art (including, but not limited to film), dance, every mode or medium of expression has some places or pieces in it we would recognize as being related to horror, the art of fear.

I think there was a degree to which I understood this instinctively, at first, because I felt it in the works in the genre, of course. I'm sure it didn't take long for me to encounter this idea in writing or other media about horror too. It's something I've taken for granted, I think. The question, "Why horror?" which seems less persistent now, was extremely persistent as I was growing up, and I was always a bit baffled by it. I understand now part of my bafflement was assuming these things were a given, and trying to find an addition to that answer in my bafflement. The answer to "Why horror?" is that it speaks to and about our fears which, whether we like it or not, shape our lives.

I used to assume this aversion to horror as a genre was an aversion to the emotional spectrum horror tends to deal in, and that in real life, we do our best to avoid what we think of as "bad" or "negative" emotions. They're not enjoyable in life. Things like fear, guilt, shame, betrayal. They're not fun experiences. We try to avoid them, as best we can, because they're not experiences we associate with a positive feeling. I would include anger, but realistically, anger can be enjoyable. It can be cathartic. It has its place, even as it can lead to horrific and terrible outcomes, there are ways to express it that aren't destructive, and we recognize it's healthy to do so. Is it a stretch to say it would be hard to reach adulthood and not know the feeling of saying the thing, giving expression and a name to an anger that's been building or festering, to have finally gotten it off of your chest? I don't think it is. We don't often consider fear the same way, but it is, if you think about it. Both anger and fear are universal to the human experience. How we express them is the thing that's healthy or unhealthy. It's a thing we experience. To say the places in the arts we explore the experience of fear are bad is to deny and refuse one of our avenues of investigation, excavation and understanding our experience.

I still think some of the reason horror has been a kind of "red headed stepchild" within the universe of the arts, what gets considered legitimate artistic expression and what gets considered either cheap commercial product meant to be a grift packaged as art or a kind of stupid pablum for those unsophisticated enough to know better, is this aversion to what we think of as negative emotions and conditions. It's part of why the genre was for a long time considered trash, low brow and so on.

I've come to think that's not all there is to it though either. As I said at the beginning, fear is powerful. It is one of the primary drivers of human behavior. It shapes nations, and shapes human history. I've come to think this is another reason, that can be both separate from, but also deeply intertwined with the fact that it's associated with emotions and feelings we associate with being negative. I've come to think this, because one of the ancillary benefits of an obsession with the arts is lessons in history. It's clear the arts can be both a challenge to or a tool of power. They have the ability to give meaning, definition, provide a sense of understanding. They can also be used to obscure those things. Our desire to evade the uncomfortable gets manipulated in the service of power.

One of the things that becomes clear from learning about the history of the arts in the 20th century, and especially horror, is that they are often the target of religious movements, and I think it comes down to this very base issue of fear. I don't think there's anything controversial in saying the history of religion is, in part, a history of the power of fear. In Western civilization, the fear of hell granted the Church great power, which it then used as one of its many tools in accruing wealth and more power. Religion, like the arts, provides meaning, definition, a sense of understanding. The arts are anarchic though, probably the most anarchic of what we would consider the pillars of a culture and civilization. Because they are means of expression by individuals or relatively small groups, and they can often be created without permission of some larger power structure, they are as likely to express feelings and fears about that power structure as anything else. They're also as likely to provide alternative definitions, mean and sense of understanding. Religion is so often at odds with the arts because it is in the interest of it continuing its hold on power for it and those who are allied with its power, to prevent the arts from providing those alternatives. It is the drive to keep those things outside of the frame of reference.

Among the many issues we're facing right now, as a nation, people and culture, is this fight over the ability to define, give meaning and understanding. Power has always been interested in narrowing the window, the lens, the frame through which we might see viable. To not understand our fears, individually or collectively, is to be far easier to manipulate. In many ways, this is the reason things like racism and sexism have continued to hold sway and power within the culture and its institutions. It's why there is an assault on the attempt to teach about their history within the culture and its institutions. To understand how our fears have been manipulated in the past, is almost like an inoculation against them today. In the last few years, I've found myself repeatedly saying, "If you can understand what Birth of a Nation (1915) is selling to white men, and what Gone With the Wind (1939) is selling to white women, you can understand the what and how of white supremacy being sold to every generation." Both of those films rely on what's outside of the frame never being brought into it, never being considered as part of the story. They both rely on obscuring or erasing the horror of chattel slavery and racism, in favor of presenting the protagonists, white Southerners in both cases, as either the righteous hero (The Klan in Birth of a Nation) or as the naive, misunderstood innocent, subjected to tragedy in a changing world (Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind). The horror in Birth of a Nation is presented in the destruction of the social order of the South, releasing the scourge that is the threat of Blackness, not in chattel slavery and Jim Crow. The horror of Gone With the Wind is the loss of the promised utopian safety and security, the social order that provided Scarlett a clear path to a life not filled with material deprivation and insecurity, and a loss of autonomy. It finds no sense of horror in the degree to which the character has no care for the conditions which promised her that future or her clear lack of interest or care in what it meant for the enslaved to be the foundation that provided that future.

This is exactly the same principle behind the attempts to prevent an authentic history of the United States from being taught in schools, and the efforts to prevent different books from being available in libraries. It is the effort to push aspects of history that are less useful to power out of the frame, and in the case of book bans, to prevent people who've purposely been excluded from the frame from entering it. Like fear though, keeping them out of the frame doesn't change that they exist. It just prevents us from reckoning with the reality outside of the frame that challenges the perspectives and narratives beneficial to power.

I've come to think this same kind of obscuring and obfuscation is the other part of why horror was for so long been treated as not worthy of "serious" consideration. One way to achieve that is to deny it legitimacy. If it's trash, there's no reason to consider what it might be saying, what fears it may be reflecting or unearthing, and what perspective an individual piece of work may have on those it addresses. The people we give legitimacy through credentials are taught its not legitimate, and to treat it as such is to threaten their status as legitimate. If this is true, horror becomes one less source of challenge to the ability of power to be the arbiter of meaning, definition and understanding of our fears. It gives power the ability to obscure what's outside the frame it prefers to show, offering only the perspectives which in some way serve it, at best, and at worst are no threat to it, a kind of efficient, effective distraction from what power does in manipulating our fears. By rendering it illegitimate, we don't ever get to what horror has to say about much of anything.

Now, I'm not saying this is a conspiracy. I think it more expresses itself, and is passed down through, those institutions that convey legitimacy, and teach what is and isn't legitimate. I would say the cultural aspect of Satanic Panic that involved an assault on the arts (including horror) was some measure of conspiracy, except that it was all done in the open. It was able to be done in the open because of the already existing consensus of those with power. It's something that is part of the perspective of the majority of the institutions related to and, for my purposes, that inform the public about the arts, including horror. My contention is that horror, because it is the art of fear, is as important as any other genre or mode of creativity, because it explores fear, and because fear is such an obviously powerful force in our world, horror should be taken seriously. In the sense that it is the expression of and discussion of our fears, how we experience them, what they are, where they come from and so on, it is important. I'm also contending that contrary to this sense of there being something negative about this, it is actually a positive. Chances are good that unless a college student decides to take a course specifying in horror literature, they can make it through a Master's degree in anything other than English or some more specific literary field, without horror being treated as a major part of Western literature. There's some chance Mary Shelley's Frankenstein will be taught somewhere along the way, but it's certainly not guaranteed. I think The Portrait of Dorian Gray was the only thing I was assigned to read that we'd consider in the realm of horror, through elementary, middle, high school and a number of college English classes. Maybe The Lottery by Shirley Jackson might make it in there too. The degree to which even film programs treat horror as not worthy of consideration is, at this point, legendary in the world of horror fandom and creators. There are usually a few select titles, granted a sense of legitimacy, the standard of being worthy. Kubrick's The Shining or Tournour's Cat People, Murnau's Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's how the institutions get to claim an "objective perspective" free of bias toward genre. It's the same reason the term elevated horror was created around 2015. It gave film critics and culture commentators an simple euphemism to say, "I don't like that horror trash, but this one is worth considering," without giving away their bias so nakedly.

There is utility in taking the art of fear seriously, because of the power fear has. If nothing else, it is to illuminate and reflect what our fears are, what symbols activate or speak to them, the many ways narrative expresses them. If we take the fact that fear is powerful, and we can understand how it works and how its manipulated, it can provide us a bit of protection against that manipulation. In this, I think I may have some utility, something to contribute that may have some value, and it's going to be a regular part of this Patreon from now on. I'm going to start writing what is essentially media critique, addressing the failures in journalism and media when they cover horror broadly or in terms of specific titles. The goal is to give readers a sense of where these biases are, how they're expressed, and what would be perspective that believes art is a conversation about all of the experiences of being human, and all of those experiences are valid and worth exploring. This doesn't obscure that some of the attempts to create these forms of expression are terrible, but it doesn't treat horror as being more likely to produce works that are just terrible either. It does require that along with any other genre, horror has its own language, and no small number of the journalists and outlets which end up writing about horror, because of the genre's history of being treated as illegitimate, don't know that language.

I'm going to start writing about this, critiquing different pieces from "general audience" media that isn't horror focused, and highlighting the ways they misrepresent horror or the ways in which they treat horror, and by extension the artistic examination of fear, as unworthy of consideration. It's not simply about "defending" the genre I love. It doesn't need me to do that. It has its own audience and subculture, that survive and thrive, either way. It's about doing my infinitesimally small part in starting to contribute to an environment where art is seen as the expression and discussion of human experience, and that horror is recognized as having value, because understanding our fears helps us to armor ourselves against the ways power manipulates them.