This post is the print version of my audio essay “Where Does Nonsupernatural Horror Fit?” from the August episode of the Typical Books Monthly Magazine.
For a story to be within the horror genre, it apparently needs to have supernatural elements. This is a facet of literary criticism or taxonomy that is woven into many courses and workshops on the topic with roots in The Nature of Horror by philosopher Noël Carroll who says:
“Initially it is tempting to differentiate the horror genre from others by saying that horror novels, stories, films, plays, and so on are marked by the presence of monsters of either a supernatural or sci-fi origin. This distinguishes horror from what are sometimes called tales of terror.”
And then Carroll narrows the scope further, saying:
“One indicator then of that which differentiates works of horror proper from monster stories in general is the effective responses of the characters in the stories to the monsters they meet.”
So, you can have a story that is 100% melded to the real world yet it is not horror if there is not some aspect of the supernatural be that a monster or ghost or some sort of other “side” or unexplained aspect to the story.
Where does nonsupernatural horror fit? What is a story then, without a supernatural aspect, when it is horrific? is it not a Horror Story? Are we then forced to fold a story that scares us into the genres of crime or drama or general fiction? Or does the setting reign supreme and because a Horror Story takes place in space it is science fiction or at a particular time is it a Gothic or in the West it then a western. I’m quite against the idea that the absence of the supernatural aspect in a horror story strips it of its very is genre.
It is no wonder the horror shelves are shrinking in the bookstores. Certainly, some have jettisoned it for other reasons, and others expand their horror sections when they can, but the genre has shrunk when stories are considered under these other larger genres, and their horror content discounted.
For readers, this is a cruel trick. Not only for those seeking scary titles in one spot. They are sent into adjacent and sometimes far-flung shelves to find books they like. For those that dislike horror, the genre has been woven into others, hiding like a silverfish in the shelves. It poses another problem altogether for writers and publishers as the genre could be cut in half entirely when we exclude nonsupernatural horror. It could leave us asking is this even horror at all when the elements are there, the horror is there, the readers and writers agree on the spine where it should say horror. Save the one dangling caveat; it must have a supernatural element.
Looking for the Real in Horror
My training as a journalist came about because of two thoughts; one is that my asocial nature was working against me and I needed the training and the tools to conduct myself in an increasingly socialized world and journalism would be a way to go about gaining those skills. The second driving force was my fascination with that which had bled that had led, as the saying goes. It was curious to me how some popular publications would revel in violence and murder and deception and treachery; namely, our national magazines and journals of record; and other publications were quite the opposite and wanted to have the up a beat and the good-news news and tried to not use the word suicide in their publications. I knew that behind both of those facades there were reporters; people just like you and I knocking on the doors of the recently deceased and asking the hardest questions. Those were the people in the face of Real Horror they were speaking to the people who had lived Real Horror.
I found a shade of that within some horror novels I had read, and mainly in the books I enjoyed the most. Authors asking the hardest questions; namely Jack Ketchum in Stephen King. Both authors were approachable, balanced, emotional creatures who so believingly write horror and did so unflinchingly. Akin to the reporters knocking on the doors of families who lost loved ones, interviewing soldiers on the battlefield, and hanging out with detectives in their midnight haunts after a lead goes stone cold. One of those, King, has a knack for injecting the supernatural appeasing if not soothing those who believe it needs to be in horror.
On the other hand, Jack Ketchum’s work is devoid of the supernatural. For the most part, they share fans, yet Ketchum’s work is less approachable, less shareable, less talked about and perhaps, scarier.
Much of Dean Koontz’s work has no Supernatural angle as is Thomas Harris’ work yet both are unquestionably within the horror genre. Award-winning horror authors at that.
Nonsupernatural horror fiction differs from the real-life horror we see in the news in that the horror we are subjecting ourselves to is quasi fictionalized in our minds. Fiction is fiction, after all, though it seems that without the comfort of a supernatural or unreal angle there is, for some, grave discomfort.
This discomfort goes beyond the popularity or novelty of a story and seems to force a story that is nonsupernatural out of the genre entirely. Is it because the horror is so abject, so visceral, and could truly happen, or has happened that we can’t revel in our arms-length suspension of disbelief anymore? Is it really so discomforting to be fed back an accurate reflection of the human condition in art? Should we all prefer to have the convenience of taking a third-party role strictly as a bystander that injects a certain amount of supernatural into the story to preserve, what exactly? We can believe in a bump in the night and not believe in ghosts.
To that end, it is much more terrifying to be living with a bump in the night than it is to be told it is a ghost.
Preying Upon Our Fear
There is something to be said for the escapists. Many would turn to fantastical or unreal horror fiction because the day-to-day horrors that we encounter are too real and this facilitates a yearning to have our fears explained away in a safer space. Some readers have no desire for that exposure therapy that nonsupernatural horror may provide. Often, our monsters and ghosts are a knee-jerk reaction to real horrors going on. There are often, if not always, socio-political themes hidden underneath the layers of a fictional monster. Readers perhaps ignore that and trick themselves into believing they’re reading about something that is not a reflection of this day in age or our human existence. Reading about a fantastical zombie or a werewolf tearing the town folk to shreds is a thrill ride and it’s exciting. However, when it is simply a human doing these things becomes too dark, setting aside that the roots of many historical monsters are stories of plainly monstrous humans. Even worse when these are realistic horrors without any supernatural angle based on true stories many find this too depressing. Attempting to correlate this escapist recreational activity of reading horror fiction with the horrors that play out in the news are at odds.
Robert C. Solomon posits in his 2008 essay Real Horror that…
“Horror is not the same as fear, and while fear contains an essential action tendency horror does not. And while we can enjoy fear there is no enjoying of horror.”
Giving a name to the unknown be it a monster or a ghost or an entity or some other unexplainable deity or presence is at the same time explaining away the things that elicited the fear; the real terror. The bumps in the night, the breath on your shoulder, the threat of violence; or in the most effective, the nearly tangible terror and sense of foreboding dread. Those, I think are the things that truly elicit the horror, and it is an act of sabotage in many ways to inject a supernatural quotient. Perhaps science and history are to blame here but the supernatural and paranormal water down a story’s horror elements by explaining it all away with the unknown.
From a 2018 Pennsylvania State University paper, Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey on the Psychology of Scary Media they say…
“We find that people with stronger beliefs in the paranormal tend to seek out horror media with supernatural content, whereas those with weaker beliefs in the paranormal gravitate toward horror media with natural content, suggesting that people seek out horror media with threatening stimuli that they perceive to be plausible.”
Through the use of science with disproved many theories that existed within horror literature before the turn of the century and although small pockets of psychometry or cryptozoology, for example, remain by and large these things have been explained away. Throughout history, violence has substantially decreased likely due to the journalists of bygone eras; the travelling bards sharing tales of the heroes and villains of real life used as a warning against horrific acts and that history should not repeat itself. The most effective of contemporary horror stories often have one foot firmly planted in the real and one in the unreal. Perhaps this is to appease those who would only suspend disbelief to a certain extent and went stepping too far into the unreal it ceases to be scary anymore.
Horror, by any other name…
Horror is an emotion, which was touched upon in the previous essay on Content Warnings in Horror. For horror to be effective, to illicit the sensation to any degree of being horrified, we rely on our fears. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. That wasn’t written to be a Pinterest quote, but as the introductory line to a long treatise on the history of the weird entitled Supernatural Horror in Literature. There are lines drawn between the humorous and mundane ghost stories and those that fill the reader with dread.
Tracking down its fraternal twin, a study of the nonsupernatural in horror is a daunting task. Few essays that work as a counterpart to Supernatural Horror in Literature can be found, and the few that are most often cited seem to be contained in out-of-print textbooks, as the forward to out-of-print collections, or hinted at in the abstracts of papers behind academic paywalls. Even then, there seem to be relatively few focused on the topic of nonsupernatural horror and that focus on literature as opposed to films.
I found a small note within a larger essay by literary critic S. T. Joshi who refers to “… a form now termed nonsupernatural horror or psychological suspense. A form that really came into its own with Robert Bloch’s psycho and gained wide notice in the 1980s with the novels of Thomas Harris.” With little more said on the topic that I could find. While I am no academic or historian there are older horror stories that had horror come into its own without a supernatural element and that was never mistaken for dark drama, westerns, or general fiction; The Cask of Amontillado, The Yellow Wallpaper, Rebecca. These are only a few tales dealing with despair, treachery, and depression. They are masterfully told and often from the point of view where we really want to believe there are supernatural forces at play somehow but it is proved otherwise. Much of Shirley Jackson’s work relies on the fantastical edge where madness and the paranormal meet, but with much plate glass between them.
Listening to an interview with Bracken McLeod recently, and he spoke of the term secular horror as used by Jack Ketchum. As a protege of Ketchum, he spoke of the darkness of man and the relatability of Ketchum’s work to a wider audience. It played well, now knowing a term that applied to the nonsupernatural that is not as clunky or adversarial, when hearing Tim Waggoner talk in a recent video, Does Horror Need to Be Scary, he noted something that helped me parse out why secular horror is far scarier to me than the supernatural. He suggested avoiding the tropes or monsters in horror if you want your writing to be scary. We know these things don’t exist, science has told us, and even more, fiction has informed us. We know the rules, we know the solutions, we know how to kill it. Even with creative werewolves and vampires, we recognize their basic shapes and skills so can, at worse, see the end of the book coming, or at best know we won’t encounter one in our daily lives. Between horror, art-horror and tales of terror as differentiated by Carroll, secular horror noted by Ketchum and plainly nonsupernatural horror as mentioned by Joshi there seems to be little motion on better defining the term horror as it relates to genre.
Fear works, as Lovecraft said, when it preys upon our fear of the unknown, and happily, for the escapist horror fan, these monsters are known to us and we can find comfort in their boundaries and marvel at our fellow’s creations of them. If you are looking to be scared, however, truly made afraid, to think on and to tease out fears beyond the bump in the night there must be a better compass to use. In essence, if the horror genre cannot be expanded to include the nonsupernatural, as many already do instinctively owing to the fear response when reading, a new genre may be in order.