By 2007, when ‘The Washingtonians’ aired, I was already a massive Bentley Little fan. I was reading any novels of his I could get my hands on after picking up my first one not too long before (I believe it was ‘The Association, for anyone who’s curious, and it’s still one of my favourites of his). His novels were always dark and bizarre, weird and shocking, with a social commentary underlying them, and I couldn’t get enough. That fact alone made this episode (based on one of his short stories of the same name) one of my most anticipated. I do, however, believe this was the first thing I had watched that was directed by Peter Medak. Fast forward to today, and I think ‘The Changeling’ is an underrated genre classic, but in 2007, I hadn’t even watched ‘Species II’ yet. Shame on me, right?

We meet the Franks family at the beginning of the episode as they are travelling to the father, Mike’s (Johnathon Schaech) late grandmother’s house in order to attend her funeral and begin the process of packing up her belongings. When they arrive, they are met by Samuel (Myron Natwick) who is there to let them into the house. He seems genial and friendly enough, at first, A little eccentric maybe, but we won’t hold that against him. Still, something about him seems a little… off. He seems to spend an awful lot of time talking to Mike’s young daughter Amy (Julia Tortolano) and when, after Samuel has left, Mike assures her that “Not everyone’s gonna reach out and bite ya”, you do wonder whether Samuel may be the exception that proves the rule.

The Franks have an incredible work ethic because no sooner are they in the house but they get straight to clearing it out. Amy is startled by a huge portrait painting of George Washington down in the basement, knocking it over in her panic. Mike doesn’t seem too fazed. He confesses that he too found the painting a little creepy when he used to visit his grandmother as a kid. Turns out he had very good reason to as when he notices a rip in the corner of the painting, he spots something hidden behind it. A letter.

Most viewers will know at this point whether they are going to enjoy this episode or not. The big reveal is that the letter was seemingly written by George Washington himself (he was born in the town the Franks grew up in). The letter begins by stating “I will skin your children and eat them” before proclaiming that he will “fashion utensils out of their bones”. A somewhat surprising turn of events for the United States first president, and the founding father of America. If you think this is a silly development, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. If (like me) you found the concept hilarious, then you are in for a real treat.

I’m going to address the elephant in the room. Mysterious messages left by long-dead presidents, secret societies, clues left behind to find in present-day… It sounds an awful lot like a mix between ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and ‘National Treasure’. If you thought either of those films could have been improved with graphic cannibalism (I’m not sure I could handle seeing Tom Hanks messily chowing down on somebody’s spleen, but Nicholas Cage? Wouldn’t even crack his top ten weird movie moments) then ‘The Washingtonians’ is right up your alley.

Those strange vibes we got from Samuel? Turns out he is a Washingtonian.  A member of an elite society who is not only aware of George Washington’s child eating proclivities but also keep the tradition alive in the modern-day. The Franks even get a late-night visit from a couple of them, dressed in powdered wigs and sporting some awful wooden false teeth. They bang on the door and demand the letter, to which Mike responds (rather reasonably for a horror movie) by calling the police.

We get a lot of exposition on the Washingtonians from a local Professor (Saul Rubinek, who totally steals the show), who urges Mike to leave before the Washingtonians take the letter from him by force. It proves to be too little too late however as the Washingtonians return later than night in force, breaking into the house and kidnapping the Franks.

While the Bentley Little short is darkly humorous, the script for this episode (penned by another immensely talented horror author, Richard Chizmar) dials up the humour and embraces the ridiculousness inherent in the concept. I personally think it was a wise choice because, while the more serious tone totally works on the page in the Little original, I’m not convinced it would have translated to the screen quite so well if there weren’t a more overt nod to the outlandish nature of it all. Fun fact; Richard Chizmar also penned an unproduced screenplay for Stephen Kings ‘From a Buick 8 (one of my favourites). Based on this episode, it is a shame it never made it to screen, because I think he would be a great fit.

So far, the episode has been mostly build-up and very little action. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’m about ready to see what the deal is with these Washingtonians. I certainly get my answer, and it's crazier than I ever dreamt it could be. The Franks are brought into a lavish dining room by Samuel, where dozens of locals are dressed up in 17th-century get-up, getting ready to have their evening meal (someone who tells the Franks that they are “thrilled to have them for dinner” gets a rousing cheer from the room). A veritable feast is brought out for them, consisting of a large platter of people parts. It is not the best episode to be watching when you are eating a meal of your own. The Washingtonians are pretty messy eaters. Ambitious too, when somebody with a plate full of intestines declares that they’ll be eating Mike and his wife next, and saving Amy for dessert, I can’t help but wonder if they have eyes bigger than their bellies.

Overall, this is a pretty faithful adaptation of the Bentley Little short, but there is one change that was made that I wish hadn’t come to pass. In the filmed version, the Washingtonians are taken down by the police, but in the Little story, it was the redcoats. Maybe the budget didn’t quite stretch to the uniforms, or maybe it was just a little too out there, but I do think that would have been a pretty great ending.

I have gravitated towards the lighter, more fun episodes of Masters of Horror throughout this series, and ‘The Washingtonians’ strikes a really fine balance between the comedy and the horror. The Washingtonians spend much of the episode being a whispered rumour, and they don’t disappoint when they finally appear on screen. The ending more than makes up for a slow build-up with a lavish and grand scale set-piece that is certainly not for the squeamish. It’s a great finale to a very enjoyable episode.
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Speaking of finales…
Join me next time as I’ll be wrapping up this series with a look back at the final episode of the second season, Norio Tsurta’s ‘Dream Cruise’. See you then!

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Fair enough; you might say that I'm stretching the bounds of what constitutes horror with this one, but, in my defence, the new Kevin Smith-authored Netflix release of Masters of the Universe: Revelation does include an entire sequence involving – the wonderfully hokey-named- Scareglow, a character played by none other than the Candyman himself, horror-legend Tony Todd. Besides which, this present-day resurrection of the classic 1980s toy and cartoon franchise represents a “growing up” thereof in almost every respect, not least of which in terms of what it is prepared or able to portray: 


As well as introducing genuine stakes, psychological depth and character complexity, the show includes multiple scenes of sincere horror. Forced to delve into the Hellish depths of “Subternia,” a realm of the dead not unlike the Greek Hades or even the Christian Hell, our heroes are encountered by Scareglow, a character that boasted a toy in the original franchise but barely featured in any original media at all (certainly not the iconic Filmation cartoon). Despite this, he has long-exercised a certain fascination with fans, owing to one -likely poorly-worded- entry in a single comic book from the late 1980s, in which he as described as “. . .the evil ghost of Skeletor.” This, along with his obvious resemblance to old bone-bonce, has led fans to speculate that he may in fact be a future, undead incarnation of Skeletor pulled back through time by arcane chicanery. This factor has been incorporated into various different lores and timelines that have come after, with some establishing that this is indeed the case whereas others have expanded into other arenas (in the Masters of the Universe: Classics mythology, Scareglow is actually the son of Skeletor and right-hand Evil Lyn, who, following in his Father's foortsteps, finds himself cursed by the power of Castle Grayskull, bound to it as a sort of spectral guardian forevermore). 


Quite what side Kevin Smith's work comes down on is open for debate, as the character makes reference to these potential origins without coming down on any one side. If anything, what Smith has done is taken this oft-neglected but much-beloved character and re-imagined it for the present day:


Far from being merely just another villain for the heroes to defeat, Scareglow is more of a force of nature; the presiding lord of Subternia, and therefore a kind of Hades or Plutonian figure: He rules over the dead of Eternia that, for whatever reason, failed to make to the celestial realm of Preternia, feasting on their fears, dreads and neuroses (he describes himself at one point as a “. . .collector of curios”). In this manner, not only does he provide an excellent basis for some superb horror set-pieces, but also allows the characters to directly confront the dreads and neuroses that plague them. 


Take, for example, protagonist Teela, who has been in a state of anger and denial since the series' opening (which sees not only her best friend destroyed but her life come crumbling down around her as secrets are revealed that turn her assumptions upside down and inside out). Scareglow hurls her headlong into those fears, manifesting them around her and forcing her to confront them directly. In this, he is not trying to aid her, rather wishes to parasitically feast on her doubt and dread. She is confronted not only with the avatar of her dead friend and ally, He-Man, but also with a shade of herself; the naïve but steadfast woman she once was. This allows her to see who and what she has become, but also who and what she needs to be in order to do what she came to do, providing the means for her to confront and conquer what has plagued her since Prince Adam's untimely demise. 


Likewise, comic-relief character Orko is presented with a vision of his home-dimension Trolla, in which he was regarded as little more than a joke: born to a species that is naturally magical, Orko became a disgrace to his parents and family name when he couldn't even master basic conjurations without them going -often spectacularly- awry. This is the fundamental fear that Scareglow confronts him with: his own lack of self-worth, his embarassment at being one of the few Trollans that can't master magic and be as his parents demanded (as Evil Lyn puts it in one of her more heartfelt moments: “...that sounds like your parents talking.”). ​

Of course, this being a new adaptation of a much-beloved 1980s kid's toy franchise and cartoon, none of the imagery presented is overtly horrific, though the trek through Subternia and the various nightmare-scapes Scareglow conjures are framed in such a manner that they are meant to elicit dread and fear. 


Rather, they stand as an example of how the tropes, themes and subjects classically redolent of horror can be found anywhere and in almost any medium. Masters of the Universe: Revelations is in no way unique in this regard; any number of children's cartoons and toy franchises -both classic and recent- boast similar qualities. Take, for example, the 1990s show Mighty Max, a cartoon based on the toy line of the same name, whose episodes generally drew inspiration from numerous horror, mythological and science fiction archetypes, from vampire stories -notably gruesome, for its era- to brain-eating aliens from outer-space B-movie fodder. Or, in more recent examples, the various Nickleodeon adaptations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, which boast various homages to horror, ranging from Cronenberg's The Fly to Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. 


What makes the Scareglow sequences in Masters of the Universe: Revelations notable is not only their deftness and significance to the overarcing story, but the manner in which they encapsulate what horror manifests at its most ideal: 


Here, fear is used as a meditation upon itself: Scareglow might seek to induce dread and despair for their own sakes, but, for the characters and wider story, those confrontations are necessary for healing and transformation. Protagonist Teela cannot function or put down the baggage of her past without the experiences Scareglow provides; without facing her fears and acknowledging them for what they are, she is doomed to failure. Likewise Orko, a character who -up to this incarnation- has been nothing but comic relief: here, his cartoon-buffoonery is revealed as the source of his despair and lack of self-worth; his dread of ridicule what he ultimately has to assimilate and transcend so that he can fulfil his true potential. This leads to an almost zen-like condition in which he matches his -dubious- magic against that of Scareglow and ultimately wins out, even though it means his self-sacrifice. 


These sequences stand as microcosms of what horror can be and do when it is allowed to swell beyond the assumptions of genre and proscription: the experience of dread, fear, repulsion -as induced by art or fiction-, whilst visceral and worthwhile in that regard, also serves to place us in a condition whereby we are more pliable, open and exposed, able to confront and work through what most distresses us in ourselves and the wider world. Through those experiences, we are able to grow beyond assumed contexts, become broader and more comprehensive human beings. Those of us who make a habit of experiencing horror in that manner know this well; we often emerge from our consumptions of disturbing or distressing material shuddered, unsettled but also transformed. We actively seek it out; the fictional experiences that touch the raw nerves, the barely-healed wounds, that dare to violate us in the most intimate and traumatic fashions. Far beyond the assumptions of wider culture, this is not merely a prurient love of the deviant or a momentary thrill (though horror can readily incorporate that experience, too). Rather, it is deeper, more profound and traumatic: an experience that, at its most heady, resonates for days or even weeks after, working its slow metamorphoses in our minds and souls until we emerge newborn on the other side. 


Whilst the Scargeglow sequences of Masters of the Universe: Revelation are primary-coloured, cartoon-overt exaggerations of that phenomena, that they are examples at all is noteworthy; evidence of how the show attempts to take the hokey, “saturday morning cartoon” ethos of the original show and reimagine it for an audience that is now in their adulthoods and demands more complex, challenging fare. They serve as a synthesis of the principle that can be found throughout horror in various forms and sub-genres: that what we fear, what we dread, can also be a pathway to transformation, even a kind of redemption (as in Orko's case). 


Taken on a purely technical level, the sequences stand out as some of the most brilliantly written, framed and animated in the entire show, the sense of threat Scareglow and the environment of Subternia elicit pronounced and tangible, the character himself a strangely threatening Hades or Pluto-analogue who has a quality of near-omnipotence within his nightmare realm, but is revealed as being akin to a nightmare himself: something that has power over us only insofar as we allow it. 


That he is the trial that the protagonists must face before opening the way to Preternia (effectively a form of Paradise or Eden) echoes certain mythological templates and traditions in which it is often the case that heroes must pass through the annealing process of being broken down, brought to states of uktimate disgrace, before they can truly ascend to new heights. 


In that, Masters of The Universe: Revelation demonstrates how horrific tropes and subjects are part and parcel of such storytelling traditions; the most fundamental and ancient humanity is able to identify, and which recur throughout our works and media, no matter how far removed or complexified by time and shifting contexts from their original incarnations. 


There is a universality to much of the storytelling in the show; a post-modern reimagining of myths we are all familiar with (in this, it echoes the likes of the Marvel super hero films and comic books in general). Nowhere is this more true than in Scareglow, who is one of the principle threats and obstacles the protagonists face during a journey that is as much spiritual as actual. 


Beyond a superbly chilling performance by Tony Todd (more than redolent of his Candyman role), some superb design and animation, the reimagining of Scareglow as an avatar of fear itself, a demi-god of dread, is a superb one, and demonstrates how even material as -ostensibly- unlikely as 1980s toy and cartoon franchises can become the basis for deeper and more enduring discussion. 

You get inured, sometimes. The sheen goes out of the world. All you see is the grim and the gritty, the sour and the shitty. Times like that, you don't want something fancy laid out on the bar; you just want a hit of something raw to match the horror and hollow you out awhile. What you've got here is simple, hard-hitting, and straight down the line: Something is Killing the Children. You gonna just sit there and take it?

When the children of Archer's Peak begin to go missing, everything seems hopeless. Most children never return, but the ones that do have terrible stories of terrifying creatures that live in the shadows. Their only hope of finding and eliminating the threat is Erica Slaughter, a mysterious stranger who believes the children and claims to see what they can. She kills monsters. That's all she does. She bears the cost because it must be done.
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I took a bit of time away from the world of comics while I was setting up my editing business, so I had no idea what this little beauty was when it dropped through the door. It sat there for a couple of days before I cracked the cover. There was something unsettling about the scratchy white lettering, the...directness of the title, the shadowy menace of the cover. It held a promise (and a memory) of fear that I wasn't quite ready to face. Ridiculous I know, but true horror is a visceral experience; it bypasses rationality.

​This is emphatically not Jaws set in the deep dark woods, but James Tynion IV does tap some similar sensibilites: vulnerable people vanishing, periods of uneasy tension both built and shattered by a trail of bodies, an expert haunted by long experience (yet widely disbelieved), and a creature which remains invisible or only half-seen for much of the story. The focus shifts neatly between the panicking populace whose fear sparks our own, and the (ambiguously) heroic hunter we cling to for comfort. Erica Slaughter kicks all kinds of ass, but she's probably not the kind of person you want to hang out with. She's more Blade than Buffy, and I have a sneaky suspicion there's some kind of demonic pact going on with that weird-looking toy octopus she lugs around with her.

It's not enough to have a cool character, though; presentation is everything. Fortunately for us, Tynion is a *cracking story-teller with a deep understanding of the craft. Fuck, it's all right there from the start, at the heart of this book: monsters may be shaped by a skilled hand, but it takes an audience to bring the shadows to life - animated by our shared imagination. The first issue **alone is a densely-packed masterclass that gives us the themes, the world, tone, characters to root for, plot seeds for the future, and a monster that will mess up your pants.

Bringing this vision to life is the partnership of Werther Dell'Edera, an excellent illustrator, and Miquel Muerto, whose subtle colour-work adds essential depth and highlights to the world. The cool blues, greens and autumnal browns have a chilling effect, helping to evoke the atmosphere of quiet dread in town, raising goosebumps with every shadow and breeze in the woods. There is a starkness to the artwork - the  expressions on the characters' faces, the pacing of the ***panels, the long-shot perspectives of the town, dwarfing its sparse population - all of which suits perfectly the mood of Tynion's story.

​Dell'Edera uses delicate fine-liners which allow for sharper detail and greater nuance of expression: anger, fear, aggression, suspicion - scratched into the canvas with every twitch and wrinkle. These feel real to me. Human beings. Captured in moments of quiet vulnerability, emotional pain, and day to day life, rather than those familiar comic-book heroes who live in perpetual extremis. That said, the action - when it comes - is furious, painting devastation without excess. Both artists and writer understand that the result of an attack is far more impactful than the set-up (particularly when it comes to the monster), giving us the sense of terrifying speed and a helplessness to do anything about it. Quite the trick really, when you consider that all we ever see in comics are static images, perused at our own damned time. 

I was hooked by it. This book ticked every box for me in terms of emotional investment, gripping plot, a world to admire and explore, and a whole bunch of questions begging to be answered. If I have any criticisms at all, it's that it is occasionally hard to know whether the panels crawl across the double-page spread or should be worked down individually. I understand why it required so many panels and so many pictures for pacing and tone, but flow is an essential part of the comic-reading experience. Can I recommend it? Abso-damned-lutely. Will I be buying the next volume? Hell yeah! I don't know if this is a limited run or an ongoing series, but if the quality of story-telling remains this high, and the artwork this compelling, I'm in it for the long haul. Now...where’s volume 2?

Written by https://tinyonionstudios.com/
Illustrated by Werther Dell'Edera
Coloured by Miquel Muerto
Lettered by Andworld Design
Published by Boom! Studios

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Available now!
Reading experience: 4.5/5
Reviewer: Dion Winton-Polak

* In point of fact, he's just won the esteemed Eisner Award for Best Writer, 2021.
** And happily, we get 5 issues in this volume. Savour them!
*** Numerous, capturing small moments, giving us time to think and to empathise.

Today we welcome Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum to Ginger Nuts of Horror to mark the release of their fantastic collection.  Zhiguai: Chinese True Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix (read our review here), with an amazing article:- 

Some of our favorite horror stories are not fiction, but rather creative nonfiction.

Take Joy Williams’ short memoir “Hawk,” for example. Published in Granta in 1999, it weaves together meditations on the life of Slaughterhouse-Five composer Glenn Gould with the narrative of Joy William’s sudden, shocking mauling by her German Shepherd, Hawk. Hawk’s attack is a bloody one, in a story that’s also shadowed by disease, casual cruelty, the ultimate unknowability of other living beings, and Joy William’s decision to have Hawk put down.

The story even seemingly leaps into the paranormal when Williams presents an ominous dream visit by Hawk, who is as much totem as flesh-and-blood being, the night before the attack:

“In my sleep, in the strange bed in the old farmhouse, I saw a figure at the door. It was waiting there clothed in a black garbage bag and bandages. Without hesitation, I got up and went to the door and opened it and Hawk came in [ . . . ]. ‘Oh there are ghosts in that house,’ our friends said later.”

“Hawk” is a fabulous if unsettling achievement. It’s Cujo filtered through Kelly Link. And our students are all googly-eyed when we cover it in class to talk about the moves it makes as animal, illness, and relational memoir. But it is also an example of several notes of horror too—ranging from dread to the grotesque, the weird, and the uncanny.

In this, “Hawk” is emblematic of a stream of literature that’s just starting to get wide recognition—horror creative nonfiction.

This subgenre is powerfully illustrated by longer memoirs like Carmen Maria Machado's Dream House and Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Man on the Ceiling. One finds shorter examples all over the modern literary landscape too. These range from the brief memoirs in Granta’s horror issue (#117) and the Hippocampus Magazine’s 2015 possession-by-trailer story “Things in the Shapes of Trailers” to our current obsession, the autobiographical genre of “glitch-in-the-matrix tales”—short but harrowing first person-accounts about encounters with strange entities and dimensions of reality which, when it comes to artistic polish, run the gamut from told-in-the-rush social media posts to reflective personal essays.

Of Monstrous Children

While horror creative nonfiction might seem like the latest flavor of pomo genre-crossing, it goes back to horror’s beginnings in early religious accounts. Such tales detail encounters with demonic spirits and angelic OTHERS, alternate states of consciousness, psychic phenomena, divine interventions, and of course confrontations with evil. In addition to their distinctive subject matter, these accounts are habitually marked by striking liminality too. This is to say that they gleefully violate the boundary between our material, everyday world and various spiritual planes, as well as the boundaries drawn between myth and history, narrative and philosophy, and the literal and the symbolic.

Far from disappearing with the secularization of literature, this liminality profoundly influenced the moves made by creative nonfiction early in its history and set important precedents for later creative nonfiction, effectively giving it permission to be highly experimental in form and speculative in content despite its fidelity to mimetic reality.

Take the work of Michel de Montaigne, for example, who is credited with popularizing the literary essay. In his 1580 "Of A Monstrous Child,” Montaigne narrates an encounter with a conjoined set of twins, whose aunt, father, and uncle are carrying them around to display for money.

Montaigne begins his short piece by graphically describing the twins in vivid, proto-scientific detail. The description is the textual equivalent of a display in a museum of medical anomolies. We see a breast forced into the twins’ shared mouth (they have only one head between them). We learn that their cry is odd. We are given a detailed physiological map of their fusion to one another. Montaigne then shifts gears to offer us a meditation that is both religious and philosophical on the twins’ metaphorical meaning, while also moving the reader to question who the real monsters are in the piece: the twins or their parasitic relatives who exploit them. Along the way, he delivers lines so powerful that they inspire centuries of horror writers to come:

“Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein.”

East Asian Strange

The deep roots of horror creative nonfiction are by no means consigned solely to the West. In the Chinese tradition, one finds just as many—if not more—early examples.

Want a predecessor to Andy Muschietti’s 2013 Mama, in which two abandoned children are cared for by a ghost? Then check out the Soushen Ji, a collection of strange, historical narratives assembled by the famous imperial historian Gan Bao (286−336 CE) in order to demonstrate “shendao,” the way of spirits. It’s filled with such stories. And Gan Bao’s decision to compile the Soushen Ji was motivated by his own own experiences—as recorded in the Tang dynasty historical chronicle, the Jinshu. One such experience concerns a maid who Gan Bao’s mother sealed inside his father’s tomb alongside his father’s body, after discovering an affair between the two. This by itself is shocking enough in a “The Cask of Amontillado” way. But then it is revealed how ten years after this cruel act of revenge, the tomb is opened and the maid is discovered alive—having been fed this whole time, according to her, by the ghost of Gan Bao’s father.

Closer to our own century, and more sophisticated in their narrative moves, are the creative nonfictions of Ji Yun (1724−1805), most recently collected in The Shadow Book of Ji Yun. Ji Yun was Special Advisor to the Emperor, Head of the Departments of War and Public Works, Imperial Librarian, and one of the most brilliant scholars and writers in Qing dynasty China. He was also, incredibly, an investigator and artful teller of true weird and supernatural tales. These he assembled into five volumes, alongside urban legends, parables, and satires.

Far from being outdone by their more fictional siblings, Ji Yun’s autobiographical and biographical accounts are just as, if not more, disturbing and chilling than his more fictional inclusions in these collections. He details encounters with ghost cities, and explores unsettling reincarnations, Tibetan black magic, sentient fogs, and even an early alien abduction. There are less supernatural horrors in abundance too—from accounts of unnatural human appetites and criminal depravity to darkly comic experiments with aphrodisiacs.

The Horrors of Childhood

When you think about it, the long, global history of horror creative nonfiction is to be expected. Horror is perhaps the most primal of genres, and one finds its tropes not just in horror literature itself but in that which came before and gave rise to horror literature: children’s play and dreams.

As the scholar Jonathan Gottschall points out in his 2013 The Storytelling Animal, at the center of children’s play is trouble. Citing a study of 360 stories told by preschoolers, he lists some of these typical troubles: “trains running over puppies and kittens; a naughty girl being sent to jail; a baby bunny playing with fire and burning down his house; a little boy slaughtering his whole family with a bow and arrows; a hunter shooting and eating three babies; children killing a witch by driving 189 knives into her belly.” The predisposition of children for horror storytelling is so strong in fact that it led educator and play theorist Vivian Paley, who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” for her work, to refer to children’s play as “the stage on which bad things are rehearsed.” Such rehearsal, mind you, adds to an already existing proclivity in children for occult thinking, which expresses itself in everything from a fascination with psychic powers and magical objects to habitually, in an animistic manner,  attributing consciousness to toys, imaginary friends, etc.

Children’s dreams continue the pattern of serving as stages for bad things and occult thought, as well as serving as stages for giving misshapen bodies to fears and anxieties. As such, they too are wonderful sources for proto-horror stories, as are adult dreams (over a 70-year lifespan, btw, a person has around 60,000 scary REM dreams according to a 2009 study by Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo in The American Journal of Psychology). Our young daughter, Frankie, for example, has taken to naming her dreams, especially those whose themes repeat. Among these are “Log Monster I” and “Log Monster 2.” And don’t even get us started on her evil bunny pictures.   
                                
Of Abject Genres and Forbidden Philosophies

Given all this, you would expect horror creative nonfiction to be a fairly robust subgenre today. However, most horror outlets don’t recognize this Frankenstein’s monster. Sure, you’ll see calls for horror nonfiction, but once you read about what a given award or magazine is looking for, generally you’ll discover that the call is for articles about horror, not for horror creative nonfiction (although there are notable exceptions, such as Nightmare magazine, which recently featured E.K. Wagner’s brilliant memoir piece, “Let Me Be Clear”). The same holds true for publishing categories. Horror narrative prose is generally assumed to be fictional, and horror nonfiction is generally assumed to be scholarly.

It’s even worse in the field of creative nonfiction itself. Mention horror creative nonfiction, and most colleagues will flash you a look no less shocked than if you’d pulled a dead ferret out of your underpants and flopped it in the middle of a café table during a business meeting.

Why is the very concept of this subgenre so abhorrent? After all, our lives are full of all kinds of horrors.

A major reason is of course the ever-continuing misrepresentation of horror’s range and potential sophistication in many literature departments, where the field of creative nonfiction is largely situated.

We’ve yet to teach a single horror class where the majority of literature and writing students aren’t shocked by the genre’s range. This is largely due to their being taught that hoary old fallacy that genre lit sacrifices everything—from thematic depth to artistic skill—at the altar of plot and titillation, while literature with a capital L hits on all the higher notes of what it is to be human.

But there are less discussed reasons as well.

For one thing, horror is, let’s face it, a bad fit for some universities—which, for good reasons and bad, are devoted to taming, ordering, and taxonomizing the irrational and the emotional; and dedicated to generalizing, defanging, and depilating the sensual. Even when sex is discussed, it is discussed in a peculiarly sexless and disembodied way—largely divorced from personal experience, idiosyncratic perversions, and the description of liquids and flecks—the conversational equivalent of a naked barbie doll. As far as violence or darker human impulses are concerned, they almost always conveniently belong to someone else. In other words, the unspoken general rule of academia (although, thankfully, there are many exceptions) is the fewer smells, teeth, and sticky hairs the better. When it comes to the mind/body split, it is usually very much on the side of the mind.

But perhaps the biggest reason of all for the frequent non-recognition of horror creative nonfiction in both the university and the wider world is the most interesting.

At the end of the day, horror—even though much of it revolves around the non-supernatural—is nevertheless strongly associated with the supernatural and the occult (one perhaps sees this, for example, in the fact that the name of the Horror Writers Association was originally the Horror and Occult Writers League). Because of this, horror is also strongly connected in many people’s minds with a supernatural model of reality amidst an ongoing, centuries-old culture war between that model and a materialist one.

Writer and scholar Victoria Nelson (following in the footsteps of critics like Kathryn Hume, Rosemary Jackson, and Robert Scholes) lays out the connection between genre and models of reality exceptionally well in The Secret Life of Puppets. 

On the surface, Nelson argues, most moderns seem wedded to a “Neo-Aristotelian” view of existence: a materialist, deterministic, and mechanistic model that privileges empirical [Western] rationalism and that holds that the world is the result of material properties and their interactions. In this view—which is replicated in the front-page news—nature is de-spirited and the subjective and objective are distinct, as are mind and matter.

But scratch this surface Nelson goes on to say, and you see people also commonly entertain another model of reality on the downlow: the “neoplatonic,” even if they’re often too embarrassed to talk about it in public or in professional circles.

This model is basically the opposite of the first. It sees the world not as the product of dead matter but as the product of consciousness. Furthermore, it holds that our material reality is but one plane of existence among many and espouses the belief that we reside in “a living [and animistic] cosmos in which all things in the world exist in a hierarchy of interconnections with one another and with a timeless, invisible world.” In this model, mind and matter interact, the subjective and the objective entangle, and our identities are multiple and multidimensional. It has room for astrological beliefs, signs, omens, precognitive dreams, spirits, magic, exotic physics, weird biology, astral and virtual realities, and all that good stuff.

In a nutshell then, the genre of horror is a major place where this second model can be safely explored. Or, as Nelson puts it: “Art and religion have reversed roles in the last several centuries. Whereas art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion [and taboo occult and metaphysical ideas of the non-religious variety], covertly, through art and entertainment.”

Nelson’s claim certainly seems borne out in the playing field of our classrooms.

In addition to teaching creative nonfiction, we both also teach speculative fiction. In such classes, we typically begin the semester by asking students why they read horror or fantasy.

Inevitably, their first response is “escapism,” largely because that’s what they’ve been taught to say.

Certainly, escapism is a wonderful use for literature, and we embrace this literary function nearly every night when we hit Netflix or Kowaca. But, as the semester goes on, it becomes obvious through further conversations and student work that students are not just seeking to “escape” from reality through horror and other speculative literature. They are also seeking a deeper engagement with reality by exploring other models of it and other ways of understanding their own experience in the world. Our students love anime like Airbender and Mushishi, and authors like Tang Fei, Chen Qiufan, and H.P. Lovecraft because of the space they provide for all kinds of metaphysical speculation about the nature of qi, the cosmos, beauty, identity, nature, mind-matter interaction, you name it.

This holds true even when exclusively non-Western horror is being discussed. Because while Nelson frames her materialism/idealism argument via drawing upon Western schools of thought, similar divisions of worldview can be found in the differences between Taoism and Confucianism or between other schools of thought—because, really, what we’re ultimately talking about are ancient and primary ways of interacting with, and conceptualizing, reality—ways that furthermore are not mutually exclusive but interdependent and mutually defining.

Out of the Dark

Victoria Nelson makes a final observation in The Secret Life of Puppets that we find useful to think about—as both writers and teachers of horror:

“The greatest taboo among serious intellectuals of the century just behind us, in fact, proved to be none of the ‘transgressions’ itemized by postmodern thinkers: It was, rather, the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview.”

While “greatest” is certainly an arguable modifier here, it’s hard to deny some measure of validity to Neslon’s point after even a cursory glance at syllabi, essays, and reading lists, or after paying attention to the preconceptions and assumed premises of hallway conversations between faculty. In short, it seems likely to us that this unspoken taboo is at least partially responsible for horror creative nonfiction striking many as a shocking proposition. At the same time, however, this taboo is also one reason that horror creative nonfiction is such a valuable and necessary subgenre, one whose time has come. No matter how scary the idea may be.

​In this collection, award-winning writers and translators Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum share paranormal and glitch in the matrix tales from across present-day China. Confided by eyewitnesses, these true stories uncannily echo Western encounters with chilling dimensions of reality and supernatural entities. At the same time, they thrillingly immerse the reader in everyday Chinese life and occult beliefs.

Zhiguai: Chinese True Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix includes such accounts as:
*The reincarnation of a teenager whose fate eerily mimics his predecessor’s
*A girl who dies in the womb but nevertheless continues to communicate with her twin
*Terrifying shifts into demonic parallel universes
*Walls desperately painted with blood to save a family from tragedy
*Huge populations that disappear into thin air
*The revenge-seeking ghosts of murdered cats
*Weird temporal shifts
*Occult murders
From the terrifying to the uncanny, this collection will not only change your understanding of China but of reality itself.