Good Horror
[cw: violence, abuse, depression, horror]
There’s a sort of strange comfort that comes from watching a slasher movie. Perhaps it’s the predictable nature of the genre, the way it’s typically a mystery until the very end and then you find out who the killer is, and sometimes even why. We sit happily through the terror, knowing that it will culminate in an answer. Sometimes we know who the killer is from the beginning of the film. Sometimes we don’t find out until the end, and sometimes we never find out their reason for hunting. Sometimes the victims know their killer. Sometimes they don’t. Any horror fan knows that good horror will have you thinking about it long after it’s ended. Good horror will leave you with a stomach still turning, hours or even days later.
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It has been almost six years, and yet I think about that one year on an almost daily basis. It’s embarrassing to admit. It’s embarrassing to be married, happily so, and still be thinking about it. My life is good, and full, and I am loved and loved well. But the truth is I’m absolutely haunted by a relationship I had in my early twenties. I have dreams about it. I think about it in passing, and willingly, too. I can't look at a picture from that time and not be completely cognizant of my emotional state at that exact moment, a direct product of how I was being treated. I can see reflected on my face, the amount of love I was receiving, or that was being withheld. It seems that as time goes on, the more I remember. I see a therapist, but I can’t afford to fill our infrequent sessions with my retrospective frustration and anger. At $175 an hour, the cost of confronting that during our time seems wasteful. There are other, newer topics of my life to discuss. I want to be over the details, healed from what happened and ended, but like a killer who never gets his exact revenge, I can’t let it go. I fantasize about sequels, a reversal, one where I come out unscathed. I emerge from the thick fog of a December night and exact my confrontation. I fantasize about a psychiatric medicine capable of doing more than just reducing panic attacks. I dream of technology like that in the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I dream of a world in which I have nothing to say, or a world in which I have everything to say, and actually say it.
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Often in horror films, our protagonist catches on early as to who is orchestrating the torment of the town. When she comes forward to seek help, to the sheriff or her friends, they dismiss her suspicions. They don’t believe her. Soon, they receive a sort of karmic punishment for ignoring her premonitions. They die brutal and barbaric deaths. But more disturbing than how they die, is their apathy. They don’t believe her, or worse, they believe her and they don’t care. What are the real consequences of not caring? Surely they can’t possibly be as fatal as the ones in the movies. Could they?
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I scroll through Instagram often. It’s a distraction to whatever I don’t want to consider, or at least that’s what I’ve told myself, what many of us tell ourselves. I follow acquaintances, family, people from college. One day while scrolling, I see him in his friend’s story post; it’s a picture of him standing next to his friend’s girlfriend, and a cake. The image knocks the wind out of me, even though I’m sitting down. I haven’t seen a picture of him in years. His absence from social media both heals me and haunts me. What don’t I know? What would I want to?
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On my twenty-second birthday, I ate cake with my hands alone on my kitchen floor that evening, an act lit only by the light from the open refrigerator. Hours later, after I fell asleep, he unlocked my door and crawled into bed with me. In some alternate script, the film ends there, or the following day, when I change my locks and ask someone, anyone to move me out of the house I keep letting him into. But there’s no time for that. I have a full time retail job and graduate school to start, and proximity will be an accomplice. The story will last at least another half a year. Grief will weaken me, make me better prey. And every time I think I’ve found an ending, the sequel will arrive. Once again, I’ll be stuck in the labyrinth of forgiveness, returned to controlling behavior, brutality under the guise of intimacy, and intense affection immediately followed by disinterest. When I do make it out, I’ll be sick with altered brain chemistry. It will take another six months, at the very least, to begin to feel and function like a human being again.
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The final girl is the character in slasher films, typically the protagonist, who is one of the few to survive the events in question. She is often the only one remaining at the end who confronts the killer, and lives to tell the story. If I lived to tell the story but never told, does that still make me the final girl?
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I have always loved Carrie. It has never been a horror film to me so much as it has been a story of cruelty and its consequences. Carrie is not a horror film; it’s a tragedy, one capable of being avoided had anyone besides her P.E. Teacher offered her empathy. Who the villains are is clear, but the villains are also everywhere. It is a story of failure: failure of a community, failure of compassion, and what failure does to a person, to a young woman who, at the very heart of the film, is perpetually and permanently alone. She is alone in her young life, and alone when she dies, grieving her own solitude under a torrential downpour of stones.
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I am not Carrie. I was not wronged by more than one person. But I carry with me the weight of disclosure and its indifference. Even though I was a recurrent figure in their home, his friends never noticed anything wrong at the time; not the rings around my eyes, the frequent discoloration on my arms, or my quiet compliance. When I told one of them years later, he seemed neither surprised nor concerned. “I remember seeing a dysfunctional relationship.”
The cruelty continues most notably in his future and its freedom. He gets to live a life that doesn’t circle around shame. His friends are still his friends. My best friend from that period of my life, and perhaps my only witness to it, has been dead for years now. He gets to tell a story that does not include me and his brutality. He likely doesn’t remember the details that I do. He gets to have his cake, and eat it too.
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In the same way psychological thrillers feed on fear, so does emotional abuse, its impact often as heavy as the physical.
What haunts me similarly is the level of revelation that women have to provide just to be heard, and then more often than not, dismissed. What do the details do besides illuminate an image that can’t be unseen? The messy gore of a murder scene, shared just for the audience to feel satisfied, sufficiently disturbed. The details often feel like they’re told more for an audience and their pleasure, so I keep them to myself. I keep the details to myself and maybe there are consequences to doing so, but I’ve seen the results of the opposite. And I would not survive that.
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One of the most captivating parts of a slasher film is arguably all the fucked up ways in which people can die. Filmmakers think up the most cruel and irrational circumstances of death humanly possible. Then they share them with us in ways that are almost physically painful to watch. You know their success when you hear the chorus of disgust from a theater audience, a mutual, verbal agreement that yes, this is painstakingly brutal. It’s said that in screenings of the new Terrifier film, some audience members responded to the visuals in vomit.
My husband is not a horror fan. He thinks it gratuitous, too much, the genre and its tropes. I would tell him that he’s wrong, but I don’t exactly think he is. I just think people get different things from it. I myself, get release, reprieve, and in some sick way, justice,
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On the second and last Halloween I spent with him, we went to a screening of Halloween. Surprisingly, I had never seen the film. I don’t remember the night in full. I do remember sitting in the theater and wishing someone would kill me, putting an end to me and in turn, this relationship I couldn’t seem to escape.
In Halloween, we know who our killer is from the start: a psychopathic child turned adult, who breaks out of an asylum to continue his rampage that has seemingly no motive at all. The film is chaotic, absurd, and the palm trees in the background do a poor job of convincing us that the story is set in Illinois. The film, in all its flaws and inconsistencies, is still a success, a beloved cult classic. I like it, too. Something that haunts me most about it is the lack of motive. We never do find out why he does what he does. Sequel after sequel happens and we still don’t get an answer.
We’re forced to sit with the conclusion that there is no conclusion. And maybe that’s the answer. Sometimes a killer kills just because he wants to. Because the victim was at the right place at the wrong time, and the knife was already in hand. Maybe the killer only has one victim, and never kills again for the remainder of his life. Maybe the victim just got lucky. Maybe the living victim is particularly haunted by that fact alone, the fact that they may actually be the only target that this killer has ever had. Maybe the victim is sick with the shame of potentially being his only victim, and then the guilt of that feeling.
Laurie, the final girl in the series, spends her entire life fighting off his retribution, seven times to be exact. Is she not exhausted? Doesn’t she realize she will never escape being hunted? In some ways, it’s admirable, her persistence to live in the face of continuous, frequent persecution. In the last film, Michael Myers finally dies, but I imagine it’s not where this story ends.
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I want to be over that part of my life, a part so far behind me in years but still so present in my consciousness. I want to be haunted by boogeymen, demonic entities, choreographed violence, and not my own ruminations on moments from half a decade ago. The constant reflection, my willing recollection, is a torture I subject myself to often, a personal Saw. It doesn’t have to be like this, but I don’t know how to bludgeon my rage.
I am a horror fan, and any horror fan knows that good horror can be assessed by its half-life. How long it sits with you after it has ended is an indication of its success.
What does that make this?
Beeper Peddle is a writer and healer living on the East Coast. She lives with her partner and their beloved soul puppy. Beeper writes about sorrows, lies, and deep loves. When you read her work, you will dip down into her heart and end up in all manner of body parts. Should you find yourself reflected in these words, it is merely coincidence; however, it does not surprise her you share the same heart. Find her at bethpeddle.com and @beeperpeddle on Twitter and Instagram
Danielle Shorr (she/her) is a professor of creative writing in Southern California. Winner of the Touchstone Literary Magazine Debut Prize in Nonfiction, a finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Non-fiction, and nominee for The Pushcart Prize 2022 & 2023 and Best of the Net 2022, 2023, & 2024, her work has appeared in The Florida Review, Driftwood Press, The New Orleans Review and others.
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