Let Us Be Monsters – How Horror Has Helped Me Cope in a Hostile World
CW: Dysphoria, depression, transphobia, abuse, references to self-harm and suicide
I am writing this as a piece for Pride, but I want to be clear that this is not rainbows-and-glitter, this is not a parade and a party. I will be talking about oppression and trauma, and the scars they leave. I want to talk about horror media as a path to confront the horrors of real life, and as a reflection of us as humans in all our contradictions. I also hope to demonstrate our strength and resilience of our communities, and that it’s through small acts of kindness that we keep each other alive.
As many have said before me, this past year or so has been a lot. Even more so if you are a member of any marginalised community. Me: I am queer, trans, neurodivergent, mentally ill, and I live in the UK. Pleased to meet you. I know that I am far from a unique case, but at the beginning of this pandemic I had never felt more alone. As a lifelong horror fan I find myself taking refuge in it in hard times. Absurdities on the screen and the page have been a welcome distraction from the outside world, and yet inadvertently within the genre I have stumbled on works which plumb the depths of human suffering, yet somehow have left me hopeful. Things are still awful, and we may not be okay just yet, but there is light ahead, and there is someone who loves you.
The two works that have made the deepest impression on me are Pascal Laugier’s harrowing masterpiece Martyrs, and Laura Mauro’s exquisitely mournful short story collection Sing Your Sadness Deep.
Martyrs perfectly represents the depressive mindset. If you are fortunate enough to have not experienced this, I ask you to believe these three things:
The universe is cruel.
Pain is inevitable.
People will inflict pain on each other, whether we want to or not.
Laugier’s world is utterly bleak and hopeless. There are no happy endings here. The family we see at the very beginning dare to be content, to tease one another, to have ordinary petty family conflicts, and they are very swiftly dispatched by Lucie. The scales fall from our eyes; we learn that this very same family tortured Lucie into the broken thing she is now.
Basically, watching as a depressed trans person in an increasingly hostile country, I felt that this film levelled with me. Though I fully understand the motivation and meaning behind the various “Trans Joy” comics and graphics, in the depths of my illness these appeared at best naïve and at worst insincere. Martyrs confirmed what I thought I already knew: people are shit.
More than that, people will smile and express sympathy all while twisting the knife in your gut. It is significant that we do not get a good look at the torturer’s faces during Lucie’s flashbacks or while we witness Anna being tortured. We know exactly who these people are; the woman who beat and starved Lucie was also a loving wife and mother. The couple who take over the house and set about martyring Anna beat her senseless, then upon leaving her room express pity and admiration for her courage. Does this situation sound familiar to anyone? I for one cannot count the number of times I have explained what it’s like being trans to a cis person and they’ve nodded their head sympathetically, only to discover later they support the same government that is hurting us so badly.
The fifth story in Sing Your Sadness Deep, titled “The Grey Men”, opens with a fog “thick, pale mist… choking the streets with cloud”, and this perfectly encapsulates the atmosphere throughout the book. Like Martyrs, it is depressive, but unlike Martyrs, it is not apathetic. As the title indicates, this depression derived from grief, nostalgia for things lost, and a keen, aching loneliness.
Not every story in this collection contains explicit queer content, but it is queer to the bone. Mauro’s world is not as hopeless as Laugier’s, but I have never come across a work like this before that really, truly understands that feeling of isolation that often comes with being queer or otherwise marginalised. Martyrs affirmed my worldview that to live is to suffer and there is no greater purpose behind it, but Sing Your Sadness Deep served to remind me that I was not alone. This is an overused phrase, but I felt seen through these stories, to the point where I was more than once moved to tears.
Sing Your Sadness Deep is very preoccupied with monsters, whether they be monsters by nature or humans who have done terrible things. It is a wonderful collection, but the story that resonated the most with me is “When Charlie Sleeps”. Charlie is a creature “neither man nor frog, but something else, something other.” His description is disgusting, “ugly and alien”, so it is only natural that a person would be repulsed by such a thing.
As a rural queer, even before COVID-19 put us all into lockdown I was isolated. My own internal dysphoria about my body, my voice, my presentation, as well as the overwhelming hostility and transphobia from the British media has left me feeling like I must be some sort of monster. I have a long history of being bullied and abused, leaving me feeling that I must be some sort of broken thing. It is accepted as fact in our society that trans people are an aberration. Trans women are said to be perverts and fetishists, trans men are deluded or self-hating lesbians, and non-binary people just want to be special and are not to be taken seriously. Whichever category we might fall in to, we are still viewed as an inherent threat to cishet society. To deviate too far from the norm automatically invokes derision and disgust in many.
So I think it makes sense that I would feel affinity with a creature such as Charlie. He is described by the character Mercy as a parasite, as all she can see are the problems he causes her. When he is awake, he emits illusory beetles as messengers, and he causes power outages and is even blamed for spreading disease. While Mercy admits that Charlie is helping her by keeping the house hidden, this is not appreciated until after she kills him. The main character, Hanna, is also instinctively repelled by Charlie on first encountering him but realises that there is no malice in him. Hanna is herself one of society’s outcasts; a women rendered homeless after escaping a violently abusive partner. She knows well the evil that ordinary people are capable of. Charlie is what he is, and it is made abundantly clear that he does not intend to cause anyone any harm, whereas it was an active choice on the part of Hanna’s boyfriend, Steve, to beat her.
This then, is the difference between the human and inhuman monsters, or perhaps we should say monsters and villains. A monster is a monster by nature, and you become a villain by choosing to enact harm on others. Society has designated me a monster because of who I am, not because of my actions. Therefore, I seek to reclaim the term “monster”. It may not be a slur thrown at us in the streets like “queer”, but it is always there.
I believe this is also why I find myself most at home in the horror genre and community. We embrace and celebrate the monsters in all their forms, and in exploring darker elements of humanity one can gain a greater appreciation for the goodness in us as well.
In Martyrs, Lucie’s trauma psychologically manifests as the corpse of the woman she failed to save. Her intense survivor’s guilt was what drove her to find the family that tortured her and enact revenge, and she commits suicide on the realisation that her guilt and trauma will never leave her. Lucie stands in contrast to the monsters such as Charlie in that she was not born a monster, nor did she choose to become what she is. She cuts herself on the arms and back with a razor, perceiving it as the dead woman. Physical and emotional scars, self-inflicted or not, are yet another thing that cuts people off from wider society. Most everyone carries some form of trauma on their shoulders but it is implicitly understood that we should hide it away from each other.
Stiff upper lip. Keep calm and carry on. Leave your personal life at home. Trauma alienates us from each other, if you are not seen to be coping with it in the correct manner or recovering in a timely manner you are set adrift, not welcome here, not fit to be seen. For all the drives, initiatives, and infographics, I have still been taught to be ashamed of my scars. There is a great deal of lip service paid to mental health at the moment, but it is just that: lip service. There is an ever-present subtext that I am unfixable and unlovable, and it is difficult not to internalise this message even knowing I could be passing several people on the street who are experiencing the same thing.
Lucie is defined by her trauma in Martyrs, being hounded by her dead woman is what drives her to take revenge, we also see the other victim Sarah, riddled with scars and metal plates stamped into her skull and groin, then eventually Anna being flayed. As already stated, Anna’s torturers comforting her feels like something of a cruel joke, but what stuck with me about Martyrs was Anna’s relationship with Lucie.
Anna and Lucie are shown to have been best friends since childhood, beginning after Lucie’s victimisation. A cynical take would be that Anna feels sorry for Lucie, but it is clearly demonstrated that she genuinely loves her. When Lucie reaches out to Anna to comfort her after seeing the massacred family, Anna attempts to respond with a passionate kiss. When Lucie dies, Anna gently tends to her body. When Anna is tortured, it her memories of Lucie that carry her through and allow herself to let go from the pain. That Martyrs is so nihilistic, and that the characters’ pain ultimately is for nothing is what makes the gentle, loving moments so important. It would appear it first glance that Anna and Lucie’s relationship is one-sided, but a phone call after Lucie’s death suggests that Anna has a history of her own. In a world that had so mistreated them, they found solace in each other. In my depressive pit, this to me was a revelation. Even as Martyrs confirmed that suffering is pointless, it proved the importance of human connections and community. Those tender moments were vital; brief as they might have been, they mattered. Anna and Lucie, both broken in their own ways, mattered to each other.
The focus on Martyrs is on the pain; the touching moments feel incidental but that is what makes them all the more powerful. On the hand, Sing your Sadness Deep, while melancholic in its outlook, does have a decided focus on relationships throughout. As established, “When Charlie Sleeps” centres around a homeless woman caring for the monster in her squat, and “Obsidian”, for example, is a fairy tale in which a girl gives herself to Vetehinen, the creature in the lake, in place of her sister. They are not so much about love triumphing in adversity, but about enduring, and in times such as these, that is just as strong a message: together we can endure.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Martyrs and Sing Your Sadness Deep saved me. More broadly, horror has saved me. My mind was dark and fogged and I sought to wallow in it. Horror is cathartic; watching people get hacked to pieces on screen or jumping out of my seat at a ghost can bring about a momentary relief, but for me Laugier and Mauro exemplify the best of what we can do with the genre. Through exploring the worst of what people and the world have to offer, they have also reminded me of what makes life worth living.
There are new legislations being proposed and brought against trans people every day. Movements against us are gaining steam and it seems like the hate is never-ending. We are monsters in society’s eyes, and society still doesn’t understand monsters. For example, compare the creature from Frankenstein in the original novel to what he is now in pop culture. And us real monsters are far more complicated than that
But in horror the monsters are never asked or expected to be anything other than monsters. Here, as a queer horror fan, I am free to be a monster, I feel I can bring my entire self and invite others to join me. I have discovered community and worked up the courage to reach out and take part, and I hope more do the same in all their messy glory. We are bruised and battered, traumatised and ostracised, so let us all be monsters together, and keep each other safe.
Essay by Dai Baddley
Dai Baddley (he/him) is a queer trans man horror fan. He lives in South Wales with three tarantulas and a terrier. You can talk to him on twitter @PrepareToDai
