Defining Horror as Quality vs. Genre

Friends,
When I was on my book tour for Hawk Mountain, I did an event with Andrea Lawlor where we spoke, at length, about horror. In the Q&A, someone raised a hand and asked:

WHAT IS HORROR?

Andrea and I both laughed. We found ourselves at a loss.

Horror :
Once you consider it, it’s not clear.
There’s the assumption that horror is scary. Sometimes that’s true. But obviously what’s scary for you might not be scary for me, and vice versa, so that can’t define the genre. We say horror has certain elements, but there are different kinds of horror to define its contours, whether it's body horror, slasher horror, cosmic horror...
We might turn to the familiar face of horror - the monster - to see what they reveal to us. But while vampires, werewolves, zombies express, through their differing powers and weakness, different theories about horror, they can't give us a picture of what it is really. They're contained by it.

Horror: Always on, always available, always around us. So… what is it?

I asked my friends PHIL FORD and J.F. MARTEL - the cohosts of the WEIRD STUDIES PODCAST - onto the show to walk into the dark - or is it the blinding, malevolent light? - with me, and with you, to see what we would find there.

Weird Studies is, in my experience of it, anyway, a horror podcast. In fact, my last conversation with Phil and J.F. was on Weird Studies and about horror: on Weird Studies 144, we looked into Clive Barker's Hellraiser and the book it's based on, The Hellbound Heart.

But it's not a horror podcast because it’s always focused on horror; many episodes are about topics and artworks that seem less than horrific (their series on each card in the major arcana of the tarot, for instance, or their episode on Herman Hesse’s novel about enlightenment, Siddhartha).

But there is a quality on each episode - a quality which we discuss in this conversation - of the threat of art, philosophy, image and sound. The way they invade our lives. Rearrange our organs Destroy the world we knew. 

In other words, we might think of horror as a position in time, something approaching or orbiting. Or as something creates shadows by blocking the light, or by creating a void where an object once was. 

You can hear me going in many directions again. Conversation with Phil and J.F. inspires that in me - being pulled in many directions at once. That's another way of thinking of horror: horror as blob; as spreading epidemic, as destroying giant, vaster than the safety of our shelters.

This is what I love about talking with Phil and JF and about Weird Studies, and also why I often think of their podcast as the only true sibling to mine. In conversation with them, everything a springboard for everything. A web of connections. Or maybe better said, a transforming activity, everything metamorphosing into everything else through membranous, visceral, and expansive moves.

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You can also find an almost complete list of the books, movies, etc we mention on this episode there.