Dark Narratives: Giving Thanks
Saying thank-you and exploring the world of "survivor" horror
The bite of winter’s chill is a promise lurking in the night, and stores have end-cap displays of stuffing, dried potatoes and canned cranberry sauce. It can mean only one thing: Thanksgiving is upon us, and coming fast.
In the spirit of gratitude, I wanted to do something a little different with this month’s newsletter. Instead of my usual news roundup…here are a few of the people in the community I’m thankful for this year.
Elford Alley and Michael Estrin for always having an open ear for my nonsense at odd hours
Gabino Iglesias, for everything he brings to the horror community
The Ladies of Horror Fiction for the tireless work to promote women in horror
Sans. PRESS for publishing my story “Hair of the Dog”
The entire Bleeding Pen community on Discord <3
The team behind WritersCONNx for inviting me to speak on their panel and the tireless work to create a by-the-writers, for-the-writers virtual learning space
My patrons, without whose support and enthusiasm I may not have the energy to keep up with these monthly deep dives, guides, short stories, and everything else I strive to do. You’re the best.
And, of course — you. I am thankful for you, dear reader, whether you’re a long-time subscriber or a first-time visitor. There has never been more competition for your valuable time, and I am honored you’re choosing to spend some of that time on my words. I truly appreciate it.
Share this blog with someone you’re grateful for — sharing is, after all, caring!
By now, you’re almost certainly familiar with the concept of survival horror — whether in a video game, film, book, or so forth. In survival horror, a character is placed in a position of extreme disadvantage against nearly insurmountable odds and must survive the night. The characters involved are often “everymen” whose lives have been perfectly mundane up to this point. Their harrowing experience in the crosshairs of a monster or masked killer constitutes the worst night of their lives.
These experiences, if a character survives, will no doubt have life-long implications. But survival horror does not linger on those consequences. It does not usually hang about to ask what happens after the credits roll and the final girl must face her new reality.
But that question is one fiction has increasingly begun to ask — and along with it, over the past decade or so, we’ve seen a strong rise in a new subgenre of horror. What I like to call “survivor horror.”
What Kind of Stories Can We Tell About People Who Have Already Experienced the Worst Day of Their Lives?
“Survivor” horror, as I see it, is horror centered on trauma and the process of overcoming trauma, or at least a snapshot of working through it.
In these stories, the horror at the forefront of the tale is often a metaphor or dramatization of a character's unprocessed grief or trauma. By battling the monster, the character comes one step closer to overcoming the skeletons in their closet (or, indeed, succumbing to them -- horror is a rare place in fiction where we are allowed, from time to time, to admit that defeating our demons is not easy work).
The characters in survivor horror, in contrast to survival heroes, are not blank-slate “everymen” confronting evil for the first time. They are deeply wounded, complex characters whose individual circumstances are inextricably wound up with the horrors they experience. You could easily swap out the cast of most traditional survival horror stories without suffering any consequences, but survivor horror would become a totally different story with a different protagonist.
Ghost Stories and the Grief at the Heart of Gothic
Ghost stories have long been a vehicle for grief, for pretty obvious reasons: A ghost story requires that one of its characters be dead from the beginning, and death and grief go hand-in-hand. Since the ghost is already departed, you cannot really tell a ghost story about the fear of death; it is in its purest form an exploration of the living’s relationship to the dead.
You know. Grief, in other words.
Though by no means the only valid ghost story formula, an overwhelmingly popular one is as follows:
A family with a recent struggle or difficulty attempts to run away from it, starting fresh in a new place
Unbeknownst to them, this new home is the site of a terrible atrocity, causing it to be haunted by the spirit of the victim
The ghost's behavior causes the main character to dig deeper into the history of the home and uncover the crime
The atrocity is set right in whatever way is still feasible
The ghost is freed of its tether and can at last be at peace
In this way, ghost stories have made a home for grief-based horror for a very long time indeed. But of late, the survivor horror genre has expanded beyond the trappings of ghost stories to explore other types of horrors, from demonic possession to cult ritual, evil talismans, monsters, zombies, and even serial killers.
When grief and trauma are personified and given form through monsters, stories have room to explore the painful, ongoing battle against these dark feelings. “If you don’t make time for your feelings,” these stories suggest, “they will come for you in the ugliest way imaginable.”
A Brief History of Survivor Horror
In 1973, a Daphne du Maurier story was adapted into Don't Look Now, a film that lays down many of the tropes common in future tales. In it, a couple travel abroad for a new beginning after the death of their daughter, only to learn that she may be trying to contact them from the other side. It's a portrait of the effect of child death on a marriage, and a warning against investing too long or too deeply into the pain of the past -- a set of themes that would be echoed closely in White Noise (2005), for an interesting compare-and-contrast.
In 1980, The Changeling would go on to cement many tropes of the modern ghost story -- the grieving father, the cold and empty mansion, the seance, the boarded-up rooms hiding awful secrets, the deep injustices that must be resolved. Compare and contrast with 2007’s The Orphanage, in which cycles of trauma and abuse play out against the backdrop of a Gothic ghost story.
When you’re done with those, you’ll be well-primed for other ghost-story-as-tale-of-grief films. Consider rounding out your education with Stir of Echoes (1999), The Others (2001), Lake Mungo (2005), Crimson Peak (2015), We Are Still Here (2015), The Housemaid (2016) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020).
Moving away from ghost stories, Pet Sematary (1983) and its film adaptation in 1989 remain one of Stephen King's most deeply disturbing tales. Here is a rare case where the most significant trauma occurs near the midpoint of the story, but even before that shocking moment the book is a treatise on the power of grief. Compare and contrast with Before I Wake (2016), a dark fantasy about the allure and danger of replacing a departed child.
The Babadook (2014) envisions trauma as an all-possessing monster, an insidious threat that worms into a home and threatens to drive a grieving widow to a horrific act. Its resolution is bittersweet: a reminder that we cannot really get rid of grief, only learn to live with it. Compare with Hereditary (2018), which takes a far more cynical look at the way loss can rip apart a family. Indeed, grief and trauma seem to be filmmaker Ari Aster’s signature theme, because he revisits them again from a different but no-less-brutal angle in Midsommar (2019).
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention Antichrist (2009), although I’ll warn you that it’s a hard and at times nonsensical film to watch. For a palate cleanser, try Relic (2020), which tackles grief from the angle of aging parents rather than dead children.
Lately, there’s been particular interest in the iconography of horror’s “final girl.” Gillian Flynn tackles it in Dark Places (later adapted to film in 2015), as does Riley Sager in Final Girls. But perhaps nowhere is the theme as thoroughly explored as Grady Hendrix’s newest release, The Final Girl Support Group. It’s a trend just beginning to find its footing, and I think we’ll see more of it in the next few years.
Blessed Are the Broken
Often in fiction, trauma is part of the villain's backstory, an explanation or excuse for his evil deeds. While this does sometimes occur in horror as well, it's just as common -- if not moreso -- for the villains to have no human motive at all, for their backstory to be shrouded in mystery, or for them to follow their own twisted desires above all.
Where other genres may demonize survivors of trauma (or at least use their traumas to explain away any character flaws), horror often acknowledges that evil is frequently stupid, senseless, and cruel. That the traumatized are often at the heroic center of the tale, and that their story arcs are often wrapped up in the process of healing and overcoming past trauma, is one of many reasons why horror speaks so loudly to the disenfranchised.
Moreover, horror does not demand that its suffering be meaningful. It does not offer an assurance of better tomorrows or suggest that pain is a stepping stone toward character or maturity. Horror, more than any genre, has the courage to admit that sometimes bad things happen for no reason, and that finding a way to overcome — or at least survive — that adversity is a tremendous struggle. It’s not an uplifting message by any means, but it may be a comforting one for many.
Maybe that’s why I like these stories so much, and why it’s a trope or subgenre I find myself returning to time and again in my own work.
River of Souls and House of Lazarus envision a world where the dead persist, walking and talking and feeling their feelings while slowly decaying and grappling with the cruelties of a world that finds them inconvenient at best and a menace to society at worst. The dead carry their scars with them forever, often wearing their cause of death openly as a constant, painful reminder. How do you grieve when the dead don't stay dead? How do you cope with a life that is no longer, exactly, living?
The Darkness of Dreamland sends its hero down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world where he must confront the worst memories of his past -- just because he's buried and forgotten his trauma doesn't mean it's done with him. The things you ignore will come back for you.
Ashes, Ashes is about friendships going sour, and what happens when pain gives way to revenge. When does the revenge end? When it cannot be satisfied, and manages only to generate more pain and horror, can it be called justice?
One day, perhaps, I will have made peace with the themes of grief and trauma and find something new to write about. But until then, I’m grateful that horror provides such a warm embrace for these troubled thoughts — and I hope you find some solace within them, too.
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