It’s often been noted that horror characters rarely possess the genre awareness to know that they’re in a horror novel or movie. We can look at Linda Williams’ writing on horror as a kind of “body genre” to see that the temporality of this genre is permanently premature. Too soon! we and the characters may think as they succumb to the monster’s clutches, our own startled gasps a dim echo of theirs. The problem with the monster, human or otherwise, is that you’re rarely prepared for them—and this goes double for erotic horror, when fear and arousal mingle into something deliciously overpowering.
Despite our own genre awareness, it’s being with the potent, painful uncertainty of not-knowing that makes reading (and writing!) horror so electric. That not-knowing, a kind of Beginner’s BodyMind of terror, helps us cultivate states of overwhelm and receptivity that can usher in all kinds of surprises.
One such surprise might be found in erotic horror’s probing of the thin veil between disgust and desire. Upon first appraisal, these might seem like contradictory embodied responses, but I think we can find ample evidence that suggests their nature may instead be co-constitutive. Obsession can lead to an interweaving of disgust with desire. If you cannot stop thinking about something, if it constantly echoes in your mind, what might it be trying to tell you?
What erotic horror provides is an opening to unsettle our own understanding of desire, and what we think the world is “supposed” to be like. The desires of white able-bodied male cisheteronormativity are inscribed into our culture as default, but it’s only the unfolding of historical events in the exact ways in which they occurred that renders those desires normal in the eyes of many.
In other words, this genre of wanting, this particular configuration of desire that we can ascribe to patriarchal culture more broadly, is not now and never was actually inevitable.
It’s this kind of unsettledness, this gap between what happened and what could happen, that compels me about horror, and erotic horror in particular. I see in it the potential to engage both curiosity and desire. What might emerge when we suspend our genre awareness and embrace overwhelm and uncertainty?
On Sunday November 15th, I’m teaching a two hour zoom workshop called Visceral: Writing and Responding to Erotic Horror that takes this unsettledness as a jumping-off point for developing our own fiction, nonfiction, and/or cross-genre writing practices. We will get curious about asking questions and being in the not-knowing process of brainstorming and early drafting as potent stages of possibility, and ultimately we will ground in that which the erotic horror holds in highest regard—exquisitely sharp sensory detail.
