The Gist 20: Fear & Queer Cinema

A roundup of news from this week at Gestalt Media

Days here have been filled with final interviews, setting up film dates for Self-Scare cut scenes, and sourcing an inordinate amount of nostalgic material from the ‘80s/’90s. All these things will be highlighted in future updates, so let’s get to business:

Make Me Bad

“I saw myself in the monster.”

The first time I heard this, it hit me in a weird way. Of course, over the fifty-plus interviews we conducted, I expected to hear something like this, some form of empathetic concern for the creatures that lurk in the darkness, an understanding that ‘the monster is us’. This is well-trodden territory, understanding the metaphor of horror as a way of looking into a mirror. But the monster we were speaking of wasn’t a sympathetic creature. This wasn’t Frankenstein. It wasn’t The Creature from the Black Lagoon, disturbed from his rightful home by intruders, it was not the unfortunate St. Bernard in Cujo…nor a complicated character pushed to their limits, a la Carrie White. We were on the topic of slasher films, and at the time, we were discussing monolithic serial killers like Michael Myers & Jason. I saw myself in them.

The second time I heard it, we were talking about being queer in the 80s and 90s. Growing up in an unkind world, living in fear of exposure, and being unable to hide our true selves. Here, it began to come more into focus.

“On that screen, I was able to see myself, and I learned empathy.”

Empathy is the key. Because many of us are looking at the monster, and that’s the first step of the process, but it takes longer to unfocus, to become aware of the world around you, and see yourself reflected back in the glass. It’s not revolutionary, in fact, it’s by design, but the route to get there is interesting, and I want to walk it for a moment here:

I have to condense some things for this space here, so please forgive generalizations.

Face Your Fear:

Horror has stood apart from other genres of storytelling precisely because it deals with what scares us. It confronts it head-on and does not flinch. In fact, at times it revels in the darkness. It embraces a fundamental truth of our existence. Namely, death. Our impermanence, chaos, the unknowable nature of the universe, the uncertainty of our psychological stability, and the inevitable conclusion of our existence are all topics not run from but openly engaged with to form a better understanding of who and what we really are. This is how horror serves us as a species. The first step towards empathy. Identify the fear. By creating monsters on screen that mirror our inner realities, we’re able to put a face and a name to what scares us. Psychologically, this moves the fear from existential threat to a problem to be solved. Now the PFC (Prefrontal Cortex) can get to work at what it does best: social cognition & pattern recognition.

Forced Perspective:

The second step on our journey is what we call Theory of Mind or Cognitive Empathy. This is the WHY in the what. We watch films as serial killers stack bodies by the dozen, as werewolves tear limbs from torsos, as demons and monsters run amok, and we ask ourselves…why? In fact, the entire structure of narrative is designed specifically with this question in mind. I’ll get into that elsewhere, but suffice to say, while we’re absorbing gore fests and supernatural thrillers because we enjoy it, our brains are hard at work looking for clues to the why. This shows up in our responses to horror. We don’t go down in the dark basement, because we remember that was how the babysitter got chopped up and stuffed in the freezer. We don’t drive behind log trucks because we know what happens if you do. We see all the ways people meet grisly ends on screen, but we remember the why. In the case of the slasher films, we also remember why the killer became who they are in the first place. This may be coded as morality:

Jason Voorhess was ignored and ultimately murdered via neglect for being different.

Freddy Krueger was brutally murdered by a vigilante mob for being a pedophile.

Candyman was the victim of vengeful racist violence for crossing bigoted social boundaries.

and so on. This is motivation, and that is so important.

All of these and more provide a framework for beginning to understand why things happen. What is the engine behind the terror that is visited upon us, and how do we prevent it? Most of us get stuck on the second part. How do we prevent the horror of living and maybe stay alive a little longer? But the first is important as well because once we understand the motivation and the PFC can put us in perspective of things coming our way, we can move on to:

Resonant Evil

Not sound in this case, but emotional resonance. Our brains contain what are known as mirror neurons. These are the key elements in our ability to learn from watching others and very likely the contributing force to our accelerated evolution. The ‘monkey see, monkey do’ function of the primal brain. This skill, this ability to imitate, comes with another benefit: to understand. A story about the emotional significance of a tragedy followed by a bloodbath revenge tour would fall flat without the ability to put ourselves emotionally in the position of the villain. To understand the short route from where we are to where they are now. This single fact of narrative storytelling, cognitive role swapping, is why storytelling has remained popular for thousands of years. We can take ourselves on a grand adventure, we can experience the wonders of outer space, we can experience a love story, a high-seas drama…we can inhabit people and places that are far removed or entirely fictional…and we can put ourselves there emotionally and mentally as well. In this space, viewing the monster from within, the world may not look all that different. At this point, we can move to:

Empathetic Connection:

From inside the brain of a monster, we might find that things…don’t look all that different. Maybe they smell a little worse; we could definitely use some housekeeping in here, but overall…there are similarities. Largely, we want the same things, though the creature’s motivations may have been warped through trauma and abuse…or situations beyond the norm of everyday life. These stand-ins for the traumas we all experience exaggerate and over-emphasize the effects of those events, but that is the point. To make it larger than life, too big to ignore, easily understandable beyond the nuance of lived experience. Here, we can see the horror of reality for what it is. Here we can see ourselves, through the monster’s eyes, because their life looks much the same as our own.

Queer Eyes

What does this have to do with queer cinema and the LGBTQIA+ experience? Many things. I believe that it is easier for those of us who grew up queer (not necessarily in the community, because it often felt like we didn’t have one) to see ourselves as the monster. And in fact, cinema has painted queer people as monsters for much of its history. From Dressed to Kill to The Silence of the Lambs, divergent genders and sexuality were seen as mental illness, a threat. At best, they were explored from a position of scientific curiosity. At worst, they were exploited for shock value and perversion. What was not present was empathy. In the long history of horror cinema (and other genres as well), the queer person was not accepted, morally justified, or socially encouraged. We were an oddity, something to fear, and queer people saw ourselves in these monsters. We identified with their motivations (whether overt or not) and developed an affinity for them. Because in them, we could see ourselves.

But I believe something else happened, and it is evident in the evolution of our media over the last hundred years (and before). Those who were not queer, by definition, began their journey as well. What was a curiosity became something more. Horror, as stated, serves us in that it takes what we’re afraid of and it makes it larger than life. It drags it out of the darkness and forces us to see it for what it is. What that is depends on the viewer, because as we’ve seen, horror is what is inside of us; it is us.

For the queer viewer, it’s our inability to survive in a world that fears us. For the non-queer viewer, it’s our fear of the unknown. On this stage, both perspectives are laid bare and both are able to be viewed in an abstract way, free from nuance and factual complication. We can explore, and we did. PFCs working overtime, we’ve begun the process of identifying the horror. Then, we placed that unknown in situations. Time and time again, we explored it, starting first from a place of abject terror, viewing through the lens of mental illness, or even for some religious abomination. Slowly, our society has confronted what makes it uncomfortable, that not all of us are the same.

Recognize Ourselves

And so, as we evolve, we begin to see two paths emerge and eventually join into one. A social group, instinctively wary and fearful confronts its fears of the ‘other’ through a fictional narrative, in a controlled, safe space. Meanwhile, an ostracized and abused subculture finds solace in the recognition of an empathetic ‘villain’. We see that sometimes, we’re not entirely what society paints us as, and those two images begin to blur.

We are different, but we are the same. Empathy allows us to understand that what we fear isn’t always dangerous, and even in some ways, we can see ourselves in depictions of others, under different circumstances. It also allows us to remember that what a social group holds to be true isn’t always, and sometimes being ostracized and abused is a sign of nothing more than a great divergence from the norm, and that divergence is precisely what makes us special.

“Empathy is choosing to see ourselves in another despite our differences. It’s recognizing that the same humanity—the same desire for meaning, fulfillment, and security—exists in each of us, even if it’s expressed uniquely.”

— Dr. Vivek Murthy

The Gist

Fear is a natural response to the unknown. It is continued ignorance that is truly dangerous.