You probably know the story of Lord Byron’s house party at Villa Diodati – the o
You probably know the story of Lord Byron’s house party at Villa Diodati – the one in which he challenged his guests to see who could write the scariest ghost story. Teenage Mary Shelley won his challenge on infamy, if not technicality, when she wrote Frankenstein. Thus the horror genre was invented by a disenfranchised teenage girl.
While it might be more precise to say that Shelley invented science fiction in this moment, her story, a non-religious creationist myth, would upend the rules of literature. Frankenstein has become such an influential examination of the distortion of nature and hubris of man, that it looms larger in the gothic horror genre than any other work of literature.
Horror is one of the only genres that allows for a constantly evolving interplay of the factual and fantastical. “When you enter into horror, you’re entering into your own mind, your own anxiety, your own fear, your own darkest spaces,” said American author Carmen Maria Machado, speaking to the Paris Review in 2017. Having won the Shirley Jackson award for her short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, Machado went on to use a horror framework to tell her personal story of queer domestic violence in her 2019 memoir, In the Dream House. With gothic tropes and style, Machado replayed physical and emotional abuse within the walls of her mind and the memories of the old house she shared with her partner – now haunted by the past and their relationship. “Horror is an intimate, eerie, terrifying thing, and when it’s done well it can unmake you, the viewer, the reader,” she said.
Horror increasingly slips between the personal and political, the real and surreal. “Black history is Black horror,” author and educator Tananarive Due said in the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. This greater understanding of the genre to reflect ourselves and our realities has seen a reshaping of horror narratives, particularly those written by women, and even the reconsideration of stories that are traditionally not seen as horror. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1988 – the story of a family of former slaves whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a restless spirit. The trend now is to read Morrison through the horror lens, while also acknowledging, as Due does, that: “Beloved is horrific because of its rendering of the horrors of slavery, as much or more than because of the presence of a ghost.”
Horror can also offer us a collective frame of reference for our fears and experiences. Consider the Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light, which was adapted into the 1944 Ingrid Bergman film of the same name, becoming the predominant shorthand to discuss forms of domestic violence and even nefarious politics. And in a post-Trump and post-#MeToo landscape, we’ve used fictional horror tropes and shorthand to better describe our morphing realities.
It is this strange coalescence of the #MeToo movement and behind-the-scenes horrors in the world