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Connor Gorman

June 14th, 2015

Transgressions, The Other, and Truth: Defining the Horror Genre

In exploring the literary horror genre, certain patterns surface that suggest that horror is

constructed from a set of recurring and predictable themes that can be arranged into a defining

formula for the genre. To demonstrate this formula, I turn first to Gothic writer Thomas De

Quincey, who in his article “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” found patterns similar to

those which I will demonstrate being present in modern horror, and which he mapped out into a

thesis on what was then called “dark tragedy”. While my formula somewhat modifies De

Quincey’s theory in order to adapt it to modern horror, it remains fundamentally similar; and

furthermore it has been tested against such known works of the genre as by Lovecraft, Barker,

and Mieville, as well as against a few films to demonstrate functionality across mediums as well

as generations. Specifically, my formula is concerned with the concept of “The Other” which can

be defined as all radically alien forces that exist outside the bounds of “The Natural”, and whose

intrusion marks a fundamental principle of the horror genre. To better define these terms and

their importance to this argument, let us first return to De Quincey and to the creation of the

formula itself.

De Quincey’s original theory, derived from his reading of Macbeth, is most concerned

with the rupture of the natural (and divine) world. For De Quincey, the tragedy of Macbeth

begins when Duncan is murdered, an act that, in affronting nature, near-literally rips the world

from “reality” and sinks it into a shadow state: “Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human

heart and the entrance of the fiendish was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world

has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes,

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human desires.” (De Quincey, 582-3) This worldly change is heralded by the iconic knocking at

the gate that awakens Macbeth to the terrible truth of what he has done, and he reels in horror.

Simultaneously, the murder reflects a much deeper truth that specifically targets the audience: De

Quincey notes that “We were to be made to feel that the human nature--i.e., the divine nature of

love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from

man--was gone, vanished, extinct, and that a fiendish nature had taken its place.” (582) Like

Macbeth, we reel in horror at this realization: the presence of such violence can only indicate

some terrible truth, or otherwise a distinct lack of it, since truth=divinity for Shakespeare and De

Quincey. Lastly, this horror persists in the form of permanent unease and anxiety: even with

Macbeth slain and the world restored, there is no bright future to be made out of it: “the human

has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-

establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first make us profoundly sensible

of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.” (583) Macbeth is a permanent scar in the

history of that world, and part of the fear and despair is acknowledging that the world can never

be wholesome again, but that it can always be ruptured once more by shadow.

Evolving this theory involves focusing on the process of discovering the irreconcilable

truth. To that end, I suggest that horror is constructed from a formula that can be summarized

like this: first, a transgression against nature takes place (a la the murder of Duncan), by which a

hole is opened that allows Otherness to flood in. This transgression can be performed by humans

trying to break out, such as in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” in which human antagonists

cross the natural boundary by involving inter-dimensional summoning and breeding; or, the

break can be caused by The Other itself, such as in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”

wherein the people do no wrong and are simply preyed upon by an entity whose very existence is

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an act against nature. Both amount to the same effect: The Other invades, and our contact with it

marks the discovery of a terrible truth in that whatever ‘it’ is that invades us, it is beyond

explanation and threatens our natural stability. “The Other” can therefore be reasonably

explained as anything which does not submit to natural law: when supernatural beings like

Dunwich’s Horror enter our world, they break even the principles of physics that deem their

existence impossible. Referencing Lovecraft again, his mythical god-beast Cthulhu is a terror

that threatens our world with what the narrator can only describe as chaos but what really

amounts to a paradoxical unity of both our world and The Other. Lastly, even in incapacitating

Cthulhu in the story, the narrator can’t escape this horrific truth: The Other waits just beyond the

border of our world and will inevitably invade us again. Summarily, the formula can be reduced

to this shorthand process: a rupture triggers an invasion of The Other, which upon contact

creates horror in facing the irreconcilable truth of its existence. Regardless of if the invasion is

repelled, the horror persists like a permanent scar--the truth cannot be unlearned, nor can it be

alleviated in knowing that The Other can always invade again, thus repeating the process.

The next step is to apply the formula to the genre to cement its validity. However, as it

would be tedious to do this for every story, instead we will apply it to the most universally

present themes of the genre in order to demonstrate how those themes support the formula. One

such theme is recurring concept of “infinitude” which can be found across the genre. Infinitude is

one way by which The Other differentiates from the natural: consider that time is one of the most

binding laws of our universe, sometimes even being considered as the 4th dimension, and that it

is very common that The Other is presented with an anachronistic or otherwise timeless quality

that distinguishes it from the natural. Lovecraft was the first to popularize this distinction, as his

cast of Old Ones and ancient gods are known for their magnitude of existence in that they were

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around before the world itself and will remain long after it (and we) are gone. This has the effect

of showing us to be powerless in comparison to The Other, being that it doesn’t obey the basic

chronology that defines ourselves; or, if it does, it possesses such a greater timescale that human

existence is still merely a drop in the bucket compared to its own extensive “lifetime”. It has

since become a recurring theme that horror be defined as something from out of time: for

example, both Robert Howard’s older short “Pigeons from Hell” as well as Clive Barker’s more

modern story “The Forbidden” have us chasing last year’s myths of the zuvembie and the

Candyman respectively, whilst sci-fi horror like Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must

Scream” turns us toward an infinitely stretching future with no escape or end. Barker’s “The

Forbidden” goes further in demonstrating how an aberrant timescale translates into fear: in

following the formula, the narrator Helen investigates the old legend of Candyman, which is

revealed to be the transgressing act that summons him: “You weren’t content with the stories,

with what they wrote on the walls. So I was obliged to come.” (Barker, 602) The realization that

she is not the first in a long past history of Candyman victims, and that his existence will carry

on after her even if she gets away, proves to be crucial to the irreconcilable truth that he uses to

break her: “If you would just learn,” says the Candyman, “just a little from me… you would not

beg to live.” (630) Candyman, “just a little from me… you would not beg to live.” (630) “Be my

victim,” he adds, wherein “The sweetness he offered was life without living: was to be dead, but

remembered everywhere; immortal in gossip and graffiti… ‘Was fame ever so easy?’ he asked.”

(637) While it appears that he is offering Helen infinitude in making a legend of her, what he

really offers is escape from that terrible truth: the world is not worth living in. Whether or not

that truth stops at Helen is up for debate: is it not worth living in because the Candyman and

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beings like him exist in it, or is it a much simpler argument--that her world, and by extension our

world, is not fit for life--period.

But of course, horror rarely stops at death. In fact, in offering Helen freedom in death, he

acknowledges that he is actually releasing her from the horror of existence: the horror of

inescapability. Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth” captures this theme well: it isn’t the suffering of

the protagonists that creates fear, rather it is the prospect of suffering whilst immortal and being

unable to escape life itself. Inescapability is tied closely with that of another pervasive theme:

monsters. Basically, the monster embodies the inescapable, irreconcilable truth: we ask, “how

can this thing exist in our world?” and fear what is essentially a combined manifestation of The

Other with The Natural, wherein Otherness is given a physical body. Take the newly released

film It Follows for example, which depicts its monster as simply a humanoid form that walks

toward its target. Why should this be frightening? The reason is that despite its familiar shape,

this monstrous entity is wholly enigmatic and unpredictable (despite only doing one thing); the

95/5 split between “Other” and “Natural/Human-like” plants this “It” squarely in the deep end of

the Uncanny Valley. The more inexplicable the monster and the more natural laws it disobeys,

the more frightening it is; consider that early in the film the thing is shot, but persists--did they

miss? Does it regenerate? Invulnerable? Unbeatable? Discovering the monster’s unwavering

resilience becomes a moment of increased fear: if this thing is unstoppable beyond our

understanding and capability, what can we hope for? Already, the fear of infinitude has crept into

focus as both the characters and the audience come to terms with the possibility that this monster

represents an inescapable, irreconcilable future: “It doesn’t think. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t give

up--It Follows.”

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However, this raises the question of what happens when we encounter a benevolent

Other: suppose that the entity of It Follows hugged those it caught; how does this interact with

the genre formula? Surprisingly, it is important to note that evil does not necessarily play a role

in this equation. Using the previous example, it was shown that the monster of It Follows is more

like a force of nature: it is impersonal and without clear motives, let alone a sense of morality. It

is destructive, however that destructivity and threatening mystery is part of what makes it “The

Other”. While evil is presented as a thing to be battled, The Other imposing itself as a force of

permanent change is much more frightening in its inevitability. Lovecraft tapped into this feeling

best: his Old Gods may be given certain sinister qualities, but ultimately they represent the

infinite uncaring universe that we live in and that will eventually swallow us up without

objection. He took great pains to demonstrate that the most frightening thing imaginable is

beyond our conceptions of light and dark: it simply “is” and is not a thing we can fight or stop

from imposing itself on our world. Going back to the question of a benevolent Other, the fact is

that the horror monster must seek to impose “Otherness” onto our world in order to be horrific

(as opposed to fantasy, for example). In acting benevolently, The Other is conforming to natural

laws rather than actively breaking them and imposing change; for example this is seen in

Barker’s “The Yattering and Jack” wherein the demon Yattering submits to being controlled by

natural law and a human master, thus losing his Otherly qualities by making them bend to a

human will. This is why out of all of his stories in the set, “Yattering” is the most light-hearted:

The Other comically fails to impose itself over Jack and over the natural world, and eventually

the reverse happens where our world assimilates The Other into it, cutting the formula short by

not producing any sort of terrible truth. This phenomenon might explain the trope seen in so

many horror films where the monster is shown to be “dead”, only to open its eyes in the final

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scene, promising its return: killing the monster through any conventional means is to bind it

under natural law, thereby reducing the lingering fear that the best horror stories leave us with.

Overall, this demonstrates that it is not the malice of the monster that is required for horror, but

rather the extent of Otherness it imposes over us.

So far we have found that several of the popular themes of the genre support the formula,

but now we should look to more difficult ideas, especially those that potentially challenge it. For

example, while we have found monsters to be wholly embracing of the formula, I’m sure many

have doubts as to where people fit into it--the fact is, humans often have mixed roles and

dealings with The Other that results in them aiding or even replacing the Otherly monster. Even

in Macbeth’s case, it is very arguable that there is no supernatural influence on that play

whatsoever, and therefore the horror is the product of “human” action. However, I am adamant

that this still fits completely under the formula by the fact that Macbeth is transformed into The

Other when he commits a crime against nature in murdering the king. Consider that while there

is an infinitely stretching Other outside of our world, there is also an Otherness borne deep inside

our consciousness; and that in slaughtering Duncan and the two guards, Macbeth comes in

contact with that subconscious, which consumes him and makes him inhuman in his vicious

instinct. This harks back to the first step of the formula process: oftentimes a person brings on

the horror themselves by contacting The Other; two other examples include Whedon’s film

Cabin in the Woods and Barker’s short “The Book of Blood”. In Cabin, there is the idea similar

to Macbeth that humans are behind the horror of the story, being that a government organization

uses monsters in ritual sacrifices to placate Old Gods within the earth. This demonstrates a

situation where we have both protagonistic humans, and then humans working under an

antagonistic Otherness. This dichotomy is permissible considering that when humans submit to

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The Other they are assimilated by it to the extent that they are even transformed into monsters

themselves. The entire transformation horror genre works on this principle; from zombies to

possession, to werewolves and vampires and contagion, the formula maintains by reflecting

horror in the broken mirror of our own image: in Cabin, the climactic point involves the

protagonists unleashing a monster menagerie inside the agency, forcing the evil controllers to

face their own horrors.

Barker’s “The Book of Blood” however, offers a true resistance to the formula that may

lead us to discovering the boundaries of horror. In this story, humans interact with The Other in

various ways and to various degrees; take the first eponymous story for example in which the

secondary character accidentally summons angry spirits (thereby transgressing nature) and they

carve their stories into his skin, transforming him, in a sense, into a vessel of Otherness. He

survives with the help of the narrator, but interestingly another character sees what happens and

is stricken dead instantly: he faces the the irreconcilable truth and is consumed by fear, as would

be expected of the formula: “Where the familiar interior had stood the vista of the highway

stretched to the horizon. The sight killed Fuller in a moment. His mind had no strength to take

the panorama in.” (Barker, 177) But the narrator resists, and does a curious thing: she assents to

the presence of The Other without being transformed by it: she rises to save the first man, noting

that the spirits “clearly didn’t want her up there” and were even possibly afraid of her, suggesting

that “her very presence, having once opened this hole in the world, was now a threat to them”

(194). Somehow this narrator transcends the formula in her defiance; she cuts short the discovery

of horror by eagerly accepting and even embracing it in a way wholly unlike that of the agents in

Cabin: “She touched him now… running her fingers across the raised skin like a blind woman

reading braille. She could even read… oh God how she wished, that she had not come by it. And

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yet, after a lifetime of waiting, here it was: the revelation of life beyond flesh, written in flesh

itself.” (241) The moment spurs a special, apparently loving relationship between the narrator

and the man, to whom she declares she will “read to” in time: “She would trace, with infinite

love and patience, the stories the dead had told on him.” (247) As to whether or not the formula

can account for this sort of triumph is uncertain as it definitely appears that the process has been

warped in allowing for it. One could certainly argue that any victory at all is a distancing step

from horror, which requires a crueler fate. Obviously it would be too far a stretch to simply

write-off the story as non-horror, but perhaps this grey area marks the emergence of a new genre

with horrific elements?

Some would call this genre “Weird” fiction, or “The New Weird” depending on which

camp you follow and how distant you desired it to be from previously established genres like

fantasy, science fiction, and traditional horror. The Weird traces all the way back to Lovecraft,

representing his trademark style which horror/weird anthologist Jeff Vandermeer argues was

“typified by magazines like Weird Tales” and which “refers to the sometimes supernatural or

fantastical element of unease in many of these stories.” (Vandermeer, ix) This sense of unease as

opposed to pure fear or horror becomes important with the introduction of The New Weird,

which still draws from authors like Lovecraft but that Vandermeer feels was crystallized in more

recent writers Moorcock, Ballard, Barker, and Mieville (to name a few). Where I diverge from

Vandermeer’s line of thinking is in his enormous, shifting definition for “New Weird” as a

distinct genre, choosing instead to focus on one of his more concise arguments: “In many of

Barker’s best tales,” he begins, “the starting point is the acceptance of a monster or a

transformation and the story is what comes after.” (x)

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This I believe to be the heart of Weird fiction: it is a genre focused on the aftermath, on

the sense of unease that lingers after a moment of horror, and the reader is left feeling that

something is wrong and yet is never made to see the truth in the same way horror requires us to.

Going back to “The Book of Blood”, this explains why triumph over horror is allowed: it sets the

stage for a pervading sense of uneasiness that frames the other shorts in the series. This is evident

in not just Barker but in Mieville as well, whose short “Looking for Jake” is a chronicling of

strange, unexplained events about a semi-apocalyptic London that loses over half its population

to mysterious predatory forces. In fitting the pieces to our formula, there is definitely a vague

contact with The Other, however there is no mention of an original transgression, and also the

required truth of horror is absent: it was either already faced earlier when the apocalyptic forces

began, or has yet to come if we consider that the chronicled events are leading up to some big

revelatory change. Similarly in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Town Manager”, the narrator describes

the present decay of their town, but is unable to discern what started the problem or where it will

eventually lead, he just knows that the world has been wrong for a long time and that his unease

is connected to the origins of the Otherly Town Manager. And this is the defining separation

between horror and weird: the events of these stories appear to take place after a horrific event

has already occurred, and the sense of unease that is inherent to the weird genre is actually a

byproduct of our horror formula: remember that when The Other recedes, it leaves behind a

lingering trace of its existence that permanently changes the world; it is in living in this changed

world that Mieville and Ligotti’s narrators describe their lives. The Weird in this way actually

supports the horror genre formula, as stories that don’t quite fit within its parameters find a place

in this sister/sub genre.

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Works Cited

1. Barker, Clive. The Books of Blood. Vol. 1-5. Santa Cruz, CA: Scream/Press, 1985. Print.

2. The Cabin in the Woods. Dir. Drew Goddard. By Joss Whedon. Perf. Kristen Connolly,

Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison. Lionsgate, 2012. Digital.

3. De Quincey, Thomas. "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth." The Norton Anthology

of English Literature. Ninth ed. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2012. 580-83. Print.

4. Ellison, Harlan. “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream.” Gutenberg Press. PDF.

5. Howard, Robert. “Pigeons From Hell.” Gutenberg Press. PDF.

6. It Follows. Dir. David Robert Mitchell. Perf. Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist. Northern

Lights, 2015. Film.

7. Ligotti, Thomas. “The Town Manager.” Gutenberg Press. PDF.

8. Lovecraft, H.P. H.P. Lovecraft: Great Tales of Horror. New York: Fall River, 2012.

Print.

9. Mieville, China. Looking for Jake: Stories. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 2005. PDF.

10. VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. Introduction to The New Weird. San Francisco:

Tachyon Publications, 2008. ix-xviii. Print.