"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

• Loose translation of an excerpt from Antonio Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks

I've always had an infatuation with horror as a genre of media and with the horrifying as a mode of understanding. Two of my favorite pieces of media are John Carpenter's The Thing and Hidetaka Miyazaki's Bloodborne. The former is a movie that paradoxically combines the lonely isolation of the Antarctic with the extremely personal relationship between a group of scientists and an alien visitor. The latter is a video game that seamlessly combines traditional Gothic horror with Lovecraftian horror to create a world where the past's mistakes almost literally weigh "like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

Please, bring an end to the horror...

...So our forefathers sinned?

...We hunters cannot bear their weight forever...

...It isn’t fair, it just isn’t fair...

But what is it about horror that makes it so easy to fall in love with when at the surface it is a genre of violence, shame, sadness, death, and hopelessness? And how can we take advantage of horror's language to better understand the world and how to change it?

These are the questions that Jon Greenaway attempts to tackle in this book, which feels like an extension to Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie. Like Mark Fisher, it borrows from the language of continental philosophers and of the extremely online intellectual types, a language that I've grown quite tired of in the last two years or so.

Thankfully, Greenaway doesn't take it too far, so this ends up being pretty digestible and contains interesting Gothic Marxist analyses of many famous pieces of horror media. Also, I had no idea Frankenstein's monster was an intellectual! The more you know 💫

Horror as a genre is generally looked down upon in the mainstream. For good reason. It's easy for horror to be done wrong (there's no way all 13 Halloween movies and all 12 Friday the 13th movies are bangers.). When it's done right, the haunting shines through the more disreputable interpretations of the genre to reveal a hopefulness for something new. It's this underlying hopefulness that keeps me coming back to horror, and it's this disreputableness that should attract us to give it a chance and to identify with the monstrous.

If now is the time of monsters, then let us be the monstered that bring something new.