To Create a Haunting: Decolonial Horror
“How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly?”
-Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters 1997, p. 16
“I am a future ghost. I am getting ready for my haunting.”
-Eve Tuck and C. Ree, Glossary of a Haunting 2013, p. 648
Western influence in the horror genre has controlled the idea of the ghost, with a common formula being that trauma is intertwined with revenge. A specter is an object of fear motivated by past infractions. Sociologist Avery Gordon theorized that a “ghost” could be created through these means, among others. While the ghost can feel more personal, the haunting can inhabit the modern social sphere (Gordon, 7). To be removed or forgotten by systems and structures and to feel the separation in between creates “gaps' ' for a haunting to occur, among other absences (Gordon, 17). All of this is applied through diverse methods, it is the ephemeral, the metaphor, or larger unanswered societal questions. Gordon's ghost and haunting are asking for a reckoning with our social lives and systems at hand. Every ghost and haunting has a story.
In Eve Tucks and C. Rees essay “A Glossary of Haunting” (2013), she also touches on Gordon’s application of social life as a creator of ghosts and hauntings. This is bound to settler colonialism and attributed to this horror, making for an ongoing cycle of creating ghosts. Settler colonialism created the largest haunting to date, but also created a dominant narrative: settler horror 1. The anxieties of revenge fantasies from those dispossessed and subjugated made way for a wave of tropes of invisibility. For a long time, it was assumed that our ghosts only seek one thing and that is to dispossess you of what was taken. Revenge must be an equalizer for the damaged ghost. Damage fashions ghosts, but desire turns the apparition into a complex fleshed-out being. Desire does not keep spectral in a loop, but instead releases them into a space of agency. A ghost of desire does not ditch the damage, they transform it. (Tuck, Ree 649)
Both ideas of the haunted and ghost are not asking us to bypass difficult dialogues but to carry our pasts not as burdens and as reminders of how we can transmute in the future. As stated earlier, decolonial horror is not motivated to repeat the trauma, but instead, presents what a future can look like if power was redistributed. This is about sitting next to the damage and not being afraid of confrontation or asking hard questions. Decolonial horror is a tool of colonial subversion, changing the gaze from the settler to the ghost/monster/ “antagonist”/other. It is hanging up the apparition’s costume and presenting a warm body with a heartbeat. It releases.
American Horror Stories: Stranger Than Fiction
“The Indian became a genuine American symbol who distorted origins are attributed to the folklore of Christopher Columbus when he “discovered” the “New World”. Since then, the film industry, or Hollywood, has never allowed Native America to forget it”
-Ted Lojola, Absurd Reality II Hollywood goes to the Indians 1998, p. 12
Horror as a genre is quite interesting, it lives in a space of high fandom, but academically it’s also been held in the same tier as porn and melodramas (Clover, 21). These three fit into a category known as body genres, films that “privilege physical sensation response” and deliver emotional excess to the viewer. In horror, the audience is inundated with imagery and emotions that elicit our most basic responses: fear and pleasure (Williams, 5). Directors and writers have used this as a vehicle to have larger social and political conversations like autonomy, racism, and censorship. From the moving image to the writing, horror gives way to nuance and asks the audience to really dive deeper into discomfort. Carol J. Clover2 emphasized the importance of horror because its stories are “crucial enough to pass along”3, it engages the repressed parts of us and activates those feelings around it. The audience's involvement in horror creates a space where “we are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, in horror, comes from ‘knowing” both sides of the story” (Clover, 12). With critique from other scholars, this idea of a two-sided experience is complicated by gender and culture, from both the fictional depiction on the screen to viewership. I find that in this argument there is still a binary within this type of storytelling because when delving deeper into American Horror, there are often more than two tales.
[1] Settler horror lives in various spaces, Eve Tuck explains it as: “Settler horror, then, comes about as part of this management, of the anxiety, the looming but never arriving guilt, the impossibility of forgiveness, the inescapability of retribution.” (Tuck and Ree, 4) As long as settler colonialism reigns and continues the same narratives, it will continue to stoke the cycle.
[2] Medieval History and American Film Studies scholar, Carol J. Clover coined famous terms like the final girl and urbanoia to further investigate societies’ anxieties toward gender and the other. The final girl character lives mostly in the slasher subgenre, her early survival relied on her being a symbol of moral and virginal purity. In later incarnations she is transformed by the trauma and game of endurance, embracing brutality and masculinity. Kill or be killed. Urbanoia is the fear of the “other” or space that is outside of suburban and city society. (Clover, 50-51)
[3] This is based on a quote by James B Twitchell, “The critic’s first job in explaining the fascination of horror is not to fix the images at their every appearance but, instead, to trace their migrations to the audience and, only then, try to understand why they have been crucial enough to pass along” (Dreadful Pleasures, p. 84)