I always used to say I don't like horror as a genre. That is not quite true, or it is not quite true anymore. Horror is such a varied genre with a multitude of utterly different subgenres that it is hard to decry the genre as a whole. And while it is true that still there are horror stories or subgenres I generally do not enjoy and would not usually seek out (slasher horror in most cases, anything revolving around torture, for example), there are also many horror stories I do like greatly, that affect me and that I connect to. So for this Halloween I decided to recommend to you some of my favorite horror media.
Hard mode, I cannot recommend anything I have recommended before which tragically eliminates one of my absolute favorite horror short stories Brian Evenson's Smear. Check the recommendation tag for those.
Let's start off with a simple definition. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica a horror story is "a story in which the focus is on creating a feeling of fear". The Encyclopaedia stresses the genres roots in folk tales and as such it is a genre as old as storytelling itself. Ever since there were people weaving tales for each other, they were telling scary stories intended to frighten. And so I, too, like to be disturbed.
I'll give you five for this year.
Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (not to be confused with the show with the same name) is to me a quintessential haunted house tale. A researcher invites guests into a mansion to study their reactions to the buildings supposed haunting. One of the guests, Eleanor, who takes care of her sick mother and lives a withdrawn life, sees more of the haunting than the others do and begins to be drawn into the house and its ghostly effects. The main selling point to me is the entwining of the characters' psyches with the haunting itself. It's not just ghosts - it's your loneliness and your grief and your trauma. Fantastic example of the genre I like to call 'the house is only haunted because you are'.
I've watched the TV show Midnight Mass because I do love vampires and everything to do with them. It's got a great atmosphere of slow and creeping unease and a - to me - fresh take on the vampire mythos. The beloved priest of a small and isolated island town returns from a pilgrimage transformed into his young and healthy self. This is not, however, the only transformation. I greatly enjoyed how the priest recontextualizes his vampiric transformation into something pure and divine and how he convinces (almost) everyone around him so he may hold onto his belief. The vampire here is grief and an inability to let go and the destructive powers those hold.
Jeff Vandermeer's novel Annihilation (not to be confused with the movie of the same name) hit me so deeply that I found the movie - although it is brilliant - and its changes hard to stomach. I have since made my peace with the movie on its own merits but still hold the novel dear. A woman sets out to research a mostly unknown area where her husband formerly disappeared and later mysteriously reappeared. As soon as she and her companions enter the boundaries between what is real and not as well as between her and the area begin to blur. I adore the protagonist's gradual loss of identity as well as a connection to the theme of alienation. This novel may have been the start of my appreciation of leaving the audience guessing, of not explaining and the unknown.
I found Which Super Little Dead Girl (TM) Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! by Nino Cipri in a Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy collection. It's short horror fiction in the form of a personality quiz. You can find out which Super Little Dead Girl TM, a group of heroic dead girls, you are. During the quiz you find out about the girls and their gruesome and tragic deaths. Apart from the unusual storytelling style I love the unsettling answers that hint at the reality of the girls.
Maybe it's cheating to recommend a Magnus Archives episode because I have written about it. But that wasn't technically a recommendation, so: "Killing Floor". In the story Jonathan Sims, the archivist of an institution collecting spooky stories, reads out the story of a man who works on the killing floor of a meat processing plant. The horror here is both about consumption and flesh as well as the inescapable nature of the meat grinder that is having a job under capitalism. Extremely unsettling to me.
