On Fear: Social Justice in Horror
How fright highlights necessary conversations — the use of the horror genre to broach real issues like racial injustice and mental health.
In the stories we consume, fear is often used to heighten the tension, and to reflect on what led us to that point. Sometimes it’s fear of the antagonist that we construe, other times it’s fear of the consequences if the protagonist fails, and still, some bank on the fear of not knowing what happens next. Movies, short stories, and even video games often use horror to explore the shadows of our humanity. Over the years, I’ve found that I am less scared of horror movies than I am of horror video games, though short stories can still bring a chill to my bones. At the same time, horror is being used in a more metaphorical manner, whether if the works of horror comment on the state of the horror genre, or on the horrors of a reality where the worst of humanity exists alongside the best of it. I think video game horror scares me more because it interacts with social commentary very differently from the horror in movies and short stories. The horror we consume gives us the ability to reflect on the reality we exist in which humans are at once a godsend, and the devil incarnate. To that end, horror has become a tool for re-examining the social justice issues affecting our society and offer a compelling perspective, and it’s important to highlight how it does so.
The 1976 hit horror movie Carrie follows the titular character from being bullied for starting her period — and by extension, for being female — to discovering her telekinesis, to the bloody vengeance she takes. Here, the more-sympathetic portrayal of a young woman on her journey as victim, hero, AND monster calls out how period-shaming and other forms of sexist policing affect girls and women. And in talking about social justice and horror, one would be remiss to neglect to discuss a movie like Tales from the Hood. Released in 1995, three years after the historic Rodney King riots. This film featured a number of vignettes that handled subjects of police brutality, domestic and child abuse, racism, drug dealing, and gang violence. This film addressed those themes in a fairly straightforward manner, with each vignette calling attention to how society sweeps these issues under the rug, particularly as they affect African-Americans. The film threads these themes with the supernatural by playing with numerous horror tropes, such as the vengeful ghost of an activist killed by corrupt police officers or the symbolism of an abuser as a child’s monster drawing. Through this movie, we see one of the earliest horror movie commentaries on race relations, well before Get Out became critically-acclaimed. By juxtaposing these elements against standard, if over-the-top, horror tropes, audiences are shown how these issues and situations can make life feel like a horror movie for people of color. Still, these themes appear even in the parts of horror that aren’t quite so blood-and-guts.
Another example of horror used as a means of raising questions of social justice was in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Lacrimosa.” In this story, the time-honored tradition of La Llorona is rewritten where La Llorona represents the family left behind by Latinx immigrants when they come to the US or Canada. We see the story of a man with regrets for a disconnect with his family, presumably still in Mexico. Here, the humanization of the Latinx immigrant is given by likening their sorrows to a ghost of folklore, one that eventually consumed the main character in the end. By doing this, Latin-American immigrants are portrayed in an empathetic light counter to the negative stereotypes often placed on them. “Nightcrawlers” by Robert McCammon does something similar in depicting how war traumas affect veterans, and how their PTSD affects others. Of course, that effect takes the literal form of the ghost of one veteran’s past coming back to haunt him when he was unconscious, bringing wanton destruction with them in this story.
Many horror games; Eternal Darkness, Outlast, and the like tend to treat mental health in a very reductive manner. In Eternal Darkness, there is a “sanity meter,” which causes visual and auditory effects to randomly trigger and disorient players; such as bleeding walls, moving furniture, simulated screen glitches, and false game over screens. While this is certainly innovative in really making players experience the negative effects interacting with Lovecraftian-type creatures has on one’s mental wellbeing, it also reduces mental health issues like schizophrenia down to stereotypes. Similar things happen in games like Outlast, which are set in asylums and use narratives that turn these patients into players’ enemies, oftentimes involving human experimentation. Here, the problem isn’t that these games are set in spaces that have a history of unethical treatment of those who suffered from mental health issues. The problem comes from how those characters are dehumanized, whether they’re made members of a cult, criminals, or full-on monsters — harassing players extensively while playing.
In contrast, horror games like Fran Bow offer protagonists that suffer from mental health issues, which is a step in the direction of humanizing people that suffer from mental health issues. In Fran Bow, the titular protagonist weaponizes her PTSD-triggered hallucinations from the trauma of her parents’ deaths to progress through the story. This isn’t ideal, because the mental health issues she symbolizes are still being stereotyped, but it’s better to have them in a developed character that we empathize with than in nameless enemies we come to hate or fear as we play. With video games and social justice, we tend to see horror used less as a means of bringing awareness or attention to those issues. For example, Depression Quest is lauded for its depiction of living with depression, but it doesn’t use horror to do so. Whether if horror is used in social justice to comment on our relationships with other people, our minds, or the world we share, it is proving to be effective in the social justice realm.
As a genre of entertainment — which we can read, watch, play, or even listen to — horror offers a medium through which everyone can experience a horror of the realities faced by different groups of people. Of course, this is limited because that horror we see from works of horror, even if they’re based on true stories, is no substitute for the real-life horrors people experience. While the scene where the murdered activist returns and brutally kills the corrupt officers in Tales from the Hood draws strong emotions, it can’t fully depict the historied nuances of the tension between law enforcement and black communities. While “Lacrimosa” may show some of the regrets experienced by Latinx immigrants to the US and Canada, it doesn’t represent the full experience of immigrants of color. And often, games like Outlast cycle unhealthy narratives about mental health, but that is starting to change with more empathetic games like Fran Bow.
Time has shown that horror can be a very effective method for illustrating issues of social justice and giving a new dimension to what we call horrifying. We’ve seen this genre put to work in the discourse on these many issues in a variety of ways — from using horror to depict how justice issues “creep up” on folks, to taking the elements of the genre, and bashing the metaphors bloody over the audiences’ skulls with it. It is no longer just the jumpscares or eerie noises or grotesque sights, it is the way in which we’ve structured our society, and the divisions made by our history. A failure to recognize those social injustices will give life to the horror we enjoy as entertainment. And then, horror won’t be so fun anymore.
