We Have Seen All the horrors
bY mIRACLE
One of my favorite novels is Frankenstein by the beloved Mary Shelly, and while Frankenstein is not the first gothic novel— The Castle of Otranto was published 54 years before the 1818 text of Frankenstein— it is the first known science fiction novel. The genre of science fiction being born from a horror story of hubris and humanity is exactly why I have concluded that we have already seen all things terrible because it’s all rooted in what humans do to each other.
There is an understanding that our brains cannot create a face we haven’t seen before. This doesn’t mean that every single person that you have dreamt of is someone you know in real life, but rather it is just a collection of features that you’ve seen in passing, catalogued, then mashed together in the dreamscape. When it comes to writing horror, I believe the same thing applies. Everything we know to be scary is something that we have seen in passing whether we consciously remember it or not, and in order for an audience to regard anything as scary, there has to be a sense of familiarity or closeness to it. T.S. Elliot explains this concept the best to which he calls the “objective correlative”, where “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion.”
Take for instance a footprint. A foot print on its own isn’t very scary, but what if it’s a large foot print? If you see a footprint bigger than your own, you would look at it for a little longer and wonder who it could belong to, but you probably wouldn’t worry about it too much. If you saw a clawed footprint on the side of your house, larger than the size of your body, then it would be cause for concern. The knowledge that footprints aren’t usually on the sides of houses, footprints usually aren’t clawed, and footprints aren’t the size of a human's body gave you enough reason to be afraid.
That’s what makes science fiction a great conduit for horror. Taking natural laws and bending them to an unfamiliar shape works only because it is so ingrained in us that science works in very specific ways, and if it doesn’t then it’s “impossible”, but anyone who works in the scientific field knows that nothing stays impossible forever, just unsolved.
H.P. Lovecraft is another household name when it comes to horror and his works heavily rely on bending the natural order of what we presently know through cosmic horror, with his most famous being The Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu’s description is a large, winged entity having a tentacled head with incomprehensible powers. The followers of Cthuluhu want him to wake up once again and control the universe like he once did before. On its own, Cthulhu is just another form of worshipping a higher power, rituals that humans have been doing for thousands of years, except this time, there is no reward for being such a loyal devotee, only madness. Lovecraft emphasizes that Cthulhu and all the other entities he has created cannot truly be explained nor understood, but to make it terrifying to the audience there has to be a level of understanding of cultish behaviour or indifferent beings with far too much power, things that have repeated itself many times over throughout history.
Personally I believe science fiction horror works the best when the audience is reminded how humans are not at the top of the food chain. Franchises like Alien, The Meg, and Predator demonstrate how insignificant and weak humans could be once put out of their own realms while showcasing worlds of systems that function without us. To make prey out of a predator makes people squirm in their seats because it puts us back into a primitive state.
So whether it is the body horror that comes with making a human from scratch or visiting an intergalactic planet that houses creatures with insatiable bloodlust, it is all something that
wouldn’t strike fear if it wasn’t based in truth. If the media can believably convince you how terrors are much closer than we think, like how Black Mirror rings the sirens on how technology can go way too far in a world similar to ours, it is effective horror and builds on the vague paranoia sitting at the back of our minds. Horror works best when we know what it is.