This is a companion piece? extension of That's My Emotional Support Horror, which was an exploration of my relationship with horror as a whole; this one focuses more on my approach to horror when I write it.
Most of horror's draw is the spectacle. The reveal of the monster, the practical effects, the gore, the lingering uneasiness. Understandably, so much of the genre focuses on the traumatizing and less on the effect of the trauma, the recovery from it. The traumatizing event is a way of confronting what we fear most; we fear Jason Vorhees' brutal killing, the targeting of morally "impure" teenagers. We fear Michael Meyers' inexplicable drive to kill without ever sharing a word, giving us insight into why. We fear what the Cenobites represent on multiple levels: the gay community and specifically the S&M lifestyle, the overindulgence in hedonism turning us into monsters, the seduction drawing us towards everything they stand for.
We watch characters murdered in creative ways as a way to essentially exposure therapy ourselves into being able to function with the idea that horrible things happen to real people every day. From my understanding, it functions the same way we increase our tolerance for pain; a scraped knee as a baby might have us wailing because that might be the actual worst pain we've experienced at that point. Once we're adults with tattoos, broken bones, illnesses, or other injuries, a scraped knee will often barely register. The more we have an opportunity to witness and digest horror, the more we're able to compare our feelings, from Pennywise devouring children to The Priest inserting a winding mechanic that plays a man's nerves like a wind-up music box, to whatever the hell happens in The Last House on the Left.
But for people who turn to horror because of trauma, the spectacle is only a portion of the experience. Once the spectacle is over, audiences are less likely to stick around to view the healing process.
There are more movies and books filling in the missing pieces now, however.
Smile (2022) is one of my recent favorites, and it essentially follows the cycle of trauma and how trauma propagates—even though it uses spectacle to get across the initial trauma, most of the focus is on how that trauma affects main character Rose. She hallucinates, she lashes out, she loses time. She becomes a "problem," upending her perfect life and driving away her friends and loved ones.
The Babadook (2014) is not a movie I enjoyed, but it also skips over the spectacle of the trauma; we don't see the car crash that kills Oskar, but we see how it influences Samuel and Amelia even years later. We don't need to see Oskar's mangled body to understand the significance of his death. Samuel acts out, becomes Unruly (something very familiar to me as a traumatized child), and antagonizes his mother, who is also barely going through the motions in life because she's depressed on top of having a child she doesn't understand. The film follows their journey to identifying and healing from their grief and trauma.
Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group shows glimpses of the massacres that turned the main characters into final girls, but he instead has them all in at least their 20s, showcasing the different ways their trauma has affected them. They can only rely on each other in their group therapy, the same way many people who have experienced trauma feel like they can only reliably turn to other survivors to help them process.
Similarly, in my own writing, especially the shorts focusing on trauma recovery, I don't want to focus on the spectacle of the trauma; in Skeletons in the Closet, I don't even name the trauma because, on some level, it's not the reader's business what traumatized the character. If it's named, it can be turned into a spectacle, even by the reader. The reader is capable of speculation, but I don't have to necessarily cosign it. The focus is on what I'm presenting: how that trauma affected the character and how they can start to heal from it. The other character is able to see the narrator's skeletons because she's also healing from trauma; like the characters in The Final Girl Support Group, only other characters with trauma are able to understand the others. In other words, only people with skeletons in their closets will be able to see and understand the skeletons in yours.
Good Bones isn't on the surface about trauma, but the reason I started piecing together scraps of an identity for an online space (the initial inspiration for Brook's desire to start trying out skins and then going full May (2002) to create their own sense of self) was because of a trauma response: I wanted to create another layer of separation between myself and other people, to have a layer of armor to protect my soft, recovering insides after Big Trauma Round Two in college so that I could talk about what was happening to me, how I was processing, and the frequent triggering I had to face, especially because I was only just beginning to process what happened to me in childhood. In other words, because I lost my sense of self and had to rebuild with the new context of being a survivor and how that affected my ability to navigate the world, I had to stitch together pieces of myself and people online I enjoyed or admired to make a new skin to wear.
The Longevity of an Acorn is also not a surface-level exploration of trauma, but I wrote it when I first entered into a relationship with my current partner after getting out of a series of very bad relationships; the one I had in mind when I wrote Simon was...neglectful? He treated me poorly, but whenever I brought it up or tried to discuss it, he would shut down and refuse to engage. I could be on the verge of bursting out of my own skin with needing to deal with an issue, but he would give me nothing except silence. So ultimately, he had the ability to control how the relationship developed, what behaviors he was allowed to exhibit unchallenged—meanwhile, my own shitty behavior born from the stress and degraded mental health was open for criticism, even when I was talking to my friends about my relationship issues; it was always "I know I'm hard to live with, but..." as a way to accept accountability even when he wouldn't, to assign at least partial blame to myself unfairly. Everything was on his terms. It helped to drive my mental health into an even deeper level of trash when it was already nestled into a sun-baked garbage pile. I wanted to try to get across the feeling of wanting to claw off my own skin with the need to scream at the pain and frustration and betrayal into Celia's longing for a man who ignored her.
Skeletons in the Closet is the most accurate to life of the three; all of them are based on trauma that has already happened, that isn't named, but reflects characters who have stories inside the trauma recovery process—it's a story within a story. The trauma recovery process isn't easily wrapped up in a large spectacle the way the trauma or the horror are; it's the story that will probably cover the rest of the survivors' lives even if those stories are as unique as the rest of the lives they live, but that's not the only thing about their lives worth talking about.
My interest is largely in following characters as they get through the trauma. How do they live with the trauma? How do they survive more than the immediate danger of the monster chasing them? How do they push on and make it through the next struggle? How do they face what's waiting for them in the quiet? Even if, for example, in the novels I'm working on, the main character's trauma is shown, it's a piece of the story, not its climax. It can't be the entire focus of the story like an 80s slasher.
Much of the horror in my writing is the standard tropes made mundane; it's not skeleton jumpscares, no unearthed and moldy remnants reminding you of viscera. It's dry skeletons walking and talking; they're people, because it was people who traumatized me and many other survivors. There's horror in the need to rebuild yourself, in being Perceived by people who don't know how to handle the New You, like you're now the monster, and they have to learn how to tiptoe around you to avoid your weapon of choice.
When everything has the potential to be horror after experiencing trauma, horror is mundane. It's not a grand spectacle; it's a throwaway line. It's cooking eggs because you have to eat but you're sobbing as you do it. It's a ghost haunting; there might be the occasional jumpscare, but even if they still look like the corpse left behind by Chucky, they're familiar and constant. Someone else walking into your haunted house for the first time will scream and have to resist fleeing, but for you? It's just another Tuesday. Oh, him? Yeah, that's just Frank. He lives here too. Stop screaming, it's rude.
The above concept is why I really didn't like the ending of The Babadook; if the Babadook represents grief or depression, the metaphor was completely wrong—it didn't reflect my experience with depression or trauma at all.
There are a few pieces of the ending that resonate with me; "How was it?"/"It was quiet today" and the awkwardness in the very beginning of the video are about right.
The blank stares as you discuss something mundane in your life related to your trauma from people who don't understand? That's on point. The attempts to distance themselves from Amelia's claims, from Samuel's cheerful recounting of breaking his cousin's nose and his father's death—the tone is wrong for the topic of discussion in the eyes of the strangers; these are topics that should be spoken about with reverence, with the Appropriate Tone Of Voice, and yet here's two people who are separated enough from the trauma that they no longer feel the need to follow those rules. They're able to look at the events in retrospect and not to relive the moment, and that allows them to keep their emotions distant. They're recounting facts, not performing emotionally as they "should" be in the rules of society.
But that should have been pushed further. What does it mean metaphorically that the Babadook is tucked away in the basement like a pet, lashing out and then almost cowering once Amelia gives it a few shushings? She's pushing her depression down? Feeding it? And the worms and grubs; they could represent important parts of life, the churners and protectors of the soil Amelia is tending, or they could represent the lowly, unpleasant parts of life. Which is Amelia feeding to the Babadook? Is she repressing her bad feelings, her continued grief, and feeding them to the Babadook to free herself from the burden? Is that healing? Or do they represent pills or other medication to treat her trauma-born depression? Why would her depression be lashing out? To represent the way symptoms come back without consistent medication or therapy? But taking medication to me is not "feeding" the depression: it's starving it.
Amelia still fears the Babadook when it lashes out at her, but it takes a gentle soothing and goes to cower back in its shadows, like the depression is afraid of her. It's a timid creature cowering to eat its worms in peace. It seems to be a message of hope, but it doesn't give me hope.
It's living with her, but not in a way that reflects the experiences of anyone I know surviving trauma or living with depression. Being in the basement means she can ignore it for most of the day; it's a non-issue, out of sight, out of mind. I've described my depression as a roommate before. Sometimes it hangs out quietly in its room, other times it's trashing the apartment and driving you back into yours, but mostly you're just coexisting. You have to work around that depression, live with it in close quarters. It affects your very way of thinking, so it should be bumping your elbows as you're trying to cook. It affects the very way your brain works, so it should be...invasive, but in a way that roommates can be. It's not necessarily an aggressive invasion, but it's another being in your living space with whom you have to cooperate and compromise to survive—you have to manage your spoons, change your plans around what your depression will allow for, claim as much space as you can without overextending and risking your mental health.
If I could rewrite the ending, it would have shown Samuel's party, but the Babadook would have been a guest. He wouldn't have to do anything, just Linger, and the guests would have some varied reactions:
Politely ignoring the Babadook the same way people politely ignore signs of someone's struggle or trauma, mirroring the attitudes of the agents visiting Amelia at the beginning of the video; they treat Amelia and Samuel's candid discussion of their traumatic events as strange, unseemly, like the guests would treat the Babadook as strange or unseemly
Anger at the Babadook showing its face, especially if it dares to eat some chips and dip; anger is often a reaction to trauma not being hidden away in the basement—another reason why I dislike the metaphor so much. The basement is where so many people want it to be; it doesn't have to be gone, but they better not SEE it. So scolding Amelia for allowing the Babadook to mingle among normal people would mirror the way trauma survivors are treated for showing symptoms or similar, where they're treated as weak or seeking attention, etc.
Infantilizing Amelia, talking around the Babadook like a mixture of the first guests and the people who turn trauma survivors into Pity Porn, trying to turn their survival into a spectator sport that they can have first-row seats for
The Polite Ignoring and Anger are the ones I most frequently ran into, either quietly steering away from any discussion of my trauma, ignoring the symptoms I had on display, or threatening to kick me out if I didn't start taking meds to regulate my depression without being curious for a second about why I acted that way at 15, 16, 17.
There was no burying in the basement for me, only days when my trauma was quieter, letting me exist in a space where we're not bumping elbows, not fighting for limited resources.
That's the mundane horror I want to explore in writing. What it is to live with skeletons, ghosts, monsters, and seeing them not in dramatized glimpses but in lingering gazes that do not falter.
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