A Reality of Horror
There are inescapable experiences for lifelong horror cinema obsessives. Those adults who fit the description, and many adolescents, can probably recount examples when someone reacting as if there as if there was something wrong with someone who would get so much from morbid, macabre and strange, along with occasional half joking comments about being a budding serial killer or some such nonsense.
One of the other regular experiences for horror fans is to being asked what the scariest movie you've ever seen is. As I aged out of adolescence, I vacillated between a few of the more well known horror films when I answered, more to have an answer than because I knew genuinely knew the answer, even on a subjective level. Watching horror films and reading horror fiction on a regular basis does help build up a tolerance, but it also means you come to know different things scare you in different ways. Sometimes, it's not necessarily the intensity of fright or thrill, which is generally what most people are asking about when they ask what the scariest movie you've ever seen is or what the scariest book you've ever read is. There are other varieties of frightening and disturbing, and they can be just as effective.
Reading Pet Sematary as a boy, a handful of scenes involving the remembrance of the sister one of the main character's, Zelda, scared me witless. I can vividly remember putting the book down, because I just needed the image my mind had conjured to recede or I might either burst into tears or have to jump up and run into my parents bedroom. Being that I was often reading by flashlight, long after I was supposed to be asleep, this would blow my cover, and worse, might mean my parents started restricting what I was reading. Something about Zelda, Stephen King's description of her young sisters perception of what spinal meningitis had done to her body, combined with the nightmare image brought about by her sisters guilt (whose perspective all of this is seen through in the book) absolutely terrified me in a way few other pieces of written horror have. The many other monsters, aliens and serial killers who'd come through the big theater in my brain as I devoured books didn't quite get to me like Zelda.
Being a child with an obsession for reading in the late eighties and early nineties meant Stephen King was regularly part of the diet. His books were incredibly popular, so it meant there was always a used paperback to glom off of an adult relative or family friend. One of the other deeply affecting things I read, also often in my room with a flashlight, trying to keep myself together, was an entire section of the book The Talisman, which was an epic fantasy, road adventure and fairy tale, all kind of rolled into one. There is a section in the book which takes place in Sunlight Gardener's school for wayward boys. Robert "Sunlight" Gardener is an evangelist by trade and a sadist by nature. The entire section of the book was a grueling experience in fear, sadism and sadness, especially as the protagonist is a young boy around twelve years old, not so different from my own age as I read the book. It's also first times a book made me sob. Not just cry, but sob. Fans of the book will know exactly what I'm referring to, those who don't, should read the book and find out .
The sequences in Pet Sematary involving Zelda were built on a lot of the kind of fright people generally think about. It was the chilling, goosebumps kind of fear. The subtext related to guilt Zelda's sister felt was something I understood, but not something I could identify with. I experienced it as fear, in the way we popularly use the word. Someone who experienced caring for a catastrophically ill sibling might experience these scenes in a more complicated way. Zelda scared me to death, and that was all there was to it.
The Sunlight Gardener sequence in The Talisman, was a whole different variety of experience. It produced an emotional response which is best described by the word "horror." Fear is a singular emotion. Horror is an emotional response built from layers of emotions which are inextricable from each other at the time. Fear, is certainly in the mix, but so are other emotions, shock, disgust, sadness, pity, anger, all overlaid and interlaced as an experience.
At the time, I had no knowledge of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, but learning about it later struck deep, down to the place which had been created by the boy reading the book about the sadistic reform school, and the horrific experiences of a fictional boy not far from his age. The Talisman involves what most simply explained is a kind of dimensional travel. Part of the mechanics of this dimensional travel involve places on both sides which seem to have some kind of gravity. In the book, Sunlight Gardener's reform school was connected to what were essentially slave mines in this other fantasy dimension.
Throughout the book there are different places whose flip side mirrored how horrible or how beautiful they were, and to later have learned about the century long history of scandal at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys can only leave one to wonder if co-authors Stephen King and Peter Straub might not have touched on some kind of elemental truth in the concept. The history, so long and so brutal, lends credence to the idea this place drew men whose combination of sadism and self righteousness knew few bounds. As I read about Dozier School and later even more reform schools whose daily cruelty and sadism toward children pushes the imagination to near breaking point, I couldn't help but notice that one of the most horrifying fictional creations I'd encountered as a child was only partially fictional, and the most disturbing aspects of it were drawn pretty directly from reality.
In 2006, the scariest movie I've ever seen was released. Jesus Camp (it's available to watch free on YouTube and Tubi, currently) hit theaters detailing the exploits of Becky Fisher, and her evangelical summer camp, Kids on Fire. It detailed an indoctrination into into a perspective which saw a great many of the other people in the society it shares as inherently evil or emissaries of Satan, simply because thy existed or because they had different beliefs. It was a constant message of being at war. It's not like I wasn't familiar with this vein of evangelicalism, it was just the certainty with which children were being taught how many "enemies" they had, right in their own communities.
Becky Fisher isn't anything new. Kids on Fire isn't anything new. I don't remember much related to what her background is, but it's safe to assume Becky has spent a good portion of her life being taught the same message. That's what was the scariest part about Jesus Camp, the realization of how many other people out there believe the same things, and that those kids in the movie were going to grow up, and vote and have kids, and so on and on. It was the realization of just how many people were already adults, fitting those descriptions, voting, raising kids they were sending to places not all that different from Kids on Fire. Mind you, Kids on Fire isn't around anymore, instead Becky has gone on to start a company dedicated to children's religious education.
Fast forward 14 years, and here we are, with people actually celebrating Americans shooting each other in the street. The enemy is in the streets, in the form of protests for racial justice, and they are the enemy, because they're protesting righteous punishment, of the same variety doled out at the Dozier School, but not by a reform school against it's charges, instead by police departments against the civilian populations they're stated purpose is to protect. Be clear, I say, "stated purpose" intentionally. It's clearer all the time the stated purpose of the police is no more the institutions real purpose than the Dozier School's purpose was to "reform." It's no more the purpose of forced hysterectomies or family separation to prevent illegal immigration.
Places like Kids on Fire, and millions of churches nationwide, entire media empires and cultural institutions are about reifying community identity by identifying the outsiders who must be punished, and institutions like ICE, the police and the various forms of detentions centers, jails, prisons and reform schools are about the punishment of the outsider for their existence. There are so many echoes of the Catholic Church scandals too. Sadists, purposely targeting the community outsiders, because they know a substantial portion of American society wants to see those outsiders punished or is actively attempting to erase their existence by not considering them at all, it will overlook whatever abuse an authority visits on them, and excuse whatever institution happens to be the instrument of that abuse. It shouldn't go unnoticed how similar the language of "war" is in all these things. One of the most damning criticisms of the culture of policing has been the evolution of training into one which teaches the perspective of police being at war, with the nebulous "bad guy," in the communities they are at least rhetorically meant to serve.
The same evangelical base which has spent a century teaching some Americans their neighbors are evil, have fully aligned themselves with one of the more morally bankrupt, narcissistic personalities in American political history. Given what American history is, few people seem to be fully recognizing the feat it is to be so clearly at the top of the list. Evangelicals certainly haven't, and a good deal of their support is based on the belief this narcissistic maniac will see to it the right people will be punished. Family separations, forced sterilization, federal troops brutalizing people simply seeking equity and justice, unvarnished disdain for the public well being where COVID has been concerned, the attempts at the Muslim ban, refusal to pass another pandemic relief bill, even as it's clear the economic consequences to the poor and working class are dire and the celebration of both Americans shooting each other in the streets and police shooting people who will never have the right of trial for their guilt to be decided, are all ideas which square well with the "right people" being punished.
During Occupy, police illegally beating and brutalizing protesters across the country were cheered on, and it was regularly suggested the beatings and brutality weren't enough. The simultaneous expression of confusion, saying they didn't know what Occupy protesters wanted, with the gleeful expression of joy at seeing them being illegally beaten, gassed and arrested was telling. Never mind the stream of disinformation being tapped into, as the excuse to make them "the enemy," the dichotomy of claiming ignorance to their message, claiming they wanted to hear "rational discussions" and then the celebration of unlawful violence, all at the same time crystallized to me the function of the Kids on Fire camps, the many places like the Dozier Schools and the police were all part and parcel of this same cycle. There have been over 100 vehicle attacks on BLM protests since they began earlier this year. They've been celebrated so vociferously by the far right, and so thoroughly covered by "respectable, objective" media as if they aren't a phenomenon of the far right, they've become normalized. How long before shootings are normalized as well?
The election of the Black guy with the funny Muslim sounding name, Occupy, Gamerate, BLM, and #MeToo, all have served to harden their sense of righteous fury, their sense of being a "persecuted community" and the desire to see these "others" punished for transgressing against the norms and traditions which have protected their ability to adjudicate and implement punishment for centuries. Each of these different movements and cultural moments have solidified central identification as white and evangelical in culture, if not religion, among different groups among the right, and arguably, further exposed the distance between the left and the "mainstream liberal." Where the mainstream liberal and the conservative have found agreement on presenting anti-fascists as the bogeyman, the reality is still that in 25 years, there has been no murder by someone acting in the name of anti-fascism. Zero. There have been 329 murders driven by the far right, in the same time period.
It's hard to read through the descriptions of what was done in places like the Dozier School, and not see the love of cruelty, administering pain and indifference to the lives of the "unworthy," as similar to what we've been told about ICE detention centers, and jails and prisons during COVID. It's also hard not to hear the language of those motivations in so much of what is the celebrations of violence coming out of America's right these days.
I can't help but wonder if wrapping so much of one's life around the ability to believe without evidence, the basis for faith, doesn't also make it easier to believe things like Q Anon and the multiple other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories solidifying the in group solidarity of todays right wing. These things seem to be most virulent when there's anything happening in the culture or society which reveals or challenges the depth of Christian hegemony. The "proof" of these conspiracy theories, sliding around the internet constantly, also seems not so different from the digging through the otherwise contradictory and at odds passages of the Bible for the meaning you need. I wonder if the skills needed to be able to get to these perspectives aren't at least founded, if not outright built, in the lessons and mental scaffolding of the more fundamental varieties of Christianity.
Belief, faith, can bring people incredible strength. Reverend William Barber is currently attempting to muster a social movement of vast and deep enough purchase to create the policies and programs which demonstrate a love for our fellow man, and which force the most fortunate to give back commensurate to what they've been given. He has many thousands of people dedicated to the same ideas, trying to follow his example and to leverage their power, non-violently, as a collective. At this point, looking at where we are, how we got here, how much we've tried not to have to even acknowledge, much less face, as well as the now howling desire for violence to be visited on people asking for so little as equality in justice and freedom from constant fear of violence and death, faith seems to be the only thing which makes the motivation to continue the efforts of people like Reverend Barber make any sense to me.
All of this leaves a non-believer like myself unsettled. What I know is the demons, devils, ghosts and goblins of our horror stories aren't nearly as frightening as the spirit of wanton violence and sadism which so easily overtakes human beings. There is no evidence of gods and devils. Human history is littered with our capacity to slaughter each other en masse, often even in the name of God though we've found plenty of other excuses too. This slaughter committed against those who have been deemed the "evil" or the outsider, whether or not there is the slightest gram of objective truth, self reflection or anything else we often attempt to praise ourselves for is a continuous part of human behavior. It's not a matter of faith to acknowledge their existence, but it's certainly a matter of faith to believe something about this country exempts it from all those bloody histories, including our own, for no other reason than today is today, instead of being past history.
In this, it's funny to think of the fear underlying the comments which suggested children who'd developed an interest in horror fiction, no matter how intense would be drawn to commit acts of terror and horror, when really, the interest in horror just helped to make it hard to obscure the real horrors so many others can't recognize because their faith requires blindness to them. Unable then to learn how often in history it's been the righteous, in their certainty, who have caused the most horrific death and destruction. Sunlight Garderner and his school horrified me, in the full sense of the word, and in so doing impressed on me something I recognize pieces of in the Dozier schools, the ICE detention centers, the history of eugenics in the United States, the many atrocities we committed against Native people, and so much else in our history. To some degree, this familiarity with horror, as a fictional narrative, as well as first hand familiarity with it in experience seem to have made me incapable of feeling or believing, "it can't happen here." It's been happening here, for so long already.
To say one recognizes this same instinct in so much of the rhetoric of the right is to court what amounts to gaslighting, despite the very clear parallels, and the very clear danger, all because we're more afraid of being horrified by who we are than we are of understanding how we became who we are. Even now, on the precipice of what is likely to be a national disaster and emergency, we can't face it. More than anything else, it's this refusal to see the horror of this reality which makes this national disgrace more and more likely.