“Loving cinema”, Anna Bogutskaya writes, is a “one-sided”, “lonely affair”. But if film, in general, is a partner whose indifference is in desperate proportion to your devotion, then horror more specifically is a “secret lover”, and the relationship is especially convulsive and all-consuming.
The analogy is a somewhat breathless beginning to Bogutskaya’s examination of the genre. In fact, the metaphor itself turns out to be something of a figurative fling. Feeding the Monster is less about Bogutskaya’s personal relationship with horror than about its wider cultural significance, how the genre has “emerged as the defining language of the last decade”.
Horrifying events are in no short supply, but they do change how we approach and apprehend horror itself. Bogutskaya is quick to identify what haunts us most, including “war, pandemics and climate change”, but she is at her most probing when she is more specific than this. She ties our changing concept of space in the digital age, for example, to an anonymous post on 4chan, an imageboard mired in conspiracy and controversy.
The image of fluorescently lit, empty rooms (branded “The Backrooms” by Internet subcultures) frightens us because it is uncannily familiar and ultimately inscrutable. At times, Bogutskaya’s analytical agility falters: our homes are still haunted, she ventures, but perhaps this is because many of us have “never owned, and likely might never own, a house”. When she remarks “how convenient” it is “that in the year the cannibal dominated pop culture ... the dating app Tinder celebrated its tenth anniversary”, she risks leaving readers at the starting line of her reasoning. As it turns out, Fresh (starring Daisy Edgar-Jones) is the film that allows her to make the “jump” from “dating-app exhaustion to cannibals”.
As a “woman-in-horror”, Bogutskaya is attuned to the genre’s gendered dynamics. We encounter avatars of female anxiety and ambition in Pearl and Black Swan. But in the “body horror” of these films she finds an ethical potential; a “politicised body is a body in pain” and “horror makes pain undeniable”. We both witness and embody our fears. In this sense, Bogutskaya reclaims horror as the “genre of empathy”. It is not only a love affair from which we cannot escape but also one that we should embrace, wholeheartedly.
Pippa Conlon is a freelance critic.
