The Radical Acceptance of the Macabre

For centuries people have associated anything that even remotely diverged from the pre-conceived notions of what humanity should feel like, look like and entail to an enemy. A harbinger of doom, perhaps, sent to unleash unspeakable evil upon unsuspecting households, raise the dead from their eternal slumber, torment the souls of the living, and, for good measure, bring about the inevitable end of the world… let's hold the horses of our imagination from trotting away with our wits here. Transition to a new era, where wits and curiosity take precedence over emotionally-driven judgments and anything labelled 'deviant' is seen as something to be considered with gentility and sympathy, to understand its origins and treat it with dignity… to an extent, of course. For when has society ever been a utopia? This is what this article seeks to uncover. The why, when and how of this shift in society's view of beings considered as 'deviant' from widespread social norms, both in terms of behaviour and appearance, especially in the world of horror this Halloween.

From Frankenstein to the Addams Family to the Munsters and many more horror shows that placed the very supernatural element presented as a Macabre, gory and off-putting at the center of their plot, they also showed the world that the Macabre needn't be equivalent to the violent or to evil.

We all have a predisposition to dislike things that we associate with death, disease and rot. We're generally easy to frighten, so well suited and acclimatised to the 'normality' of our lives that anything out of it is off-putting and instantly elicits an intense reaction of disgust and danger from us. But so are we deeply fascinated by it. Horror, especially the 'morbid kind', lies at the intersection of human curiosity, fascination and disgust and aversion to anything that appears as socially-deviant or physically unpalatable. At first, the latter held more sway in the general audience of gothic readers or horror-film enthusiasts but with time, the fascination has gained much more momentum over fear. There are two major catalysts driving this change — the rise of psychology as a discipline and rationality.

Firstly, the rise of psychology as a discipline even at its early stages already started changing the ways horror stories were created, interpreted, and perceived. With the focus starting to shift more and more on the mechanisms of the human mind, the motives, emotions, and psychological situations that were responsible for the characters' behavior became impossible to ignore. Take Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for example. In addition to being portrayed as a monstrous creature whose physical appearance alone instills fear, the monster created by Victor Frankenstein can be considered to be created out of isolation, rejection, and a longing for a companion. The monster's violent behavior doesn't excuse him, but it changes the way we view him, making us wonder about whether he really was a monster or if he was at least partly turned into one by the abuse. Similarly, Victor who would otherwise have simply been seen as a victim of his ambitions and the perfect cautionary example of 'The Vitruvian Man' (reaching beyond his capabilities), was criticised by the audience for his neglect and abuse.

"Villains are not born; they are made."

This subgenre of horror movies has a dirty job — it appeals to the very worst in all of us. Not to psychoanalyse everyone at a Halloween party, but it taps into the desires we don't even know we have. As Stephen King famously purports in his essay which he wrote while thinking of It (1986) in 1981, there lies an animalistic, barbaric side to all of us smoothed over by years of societal conditioning, restraint and the 'goodness' in us, which we're suddenly allowed to see a reflection of in whatever horrors are shown on screen or on paper to us by morbid horror.

"A trapdoor in the civilized forebrain… and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath."

— Stephen King

The gators are all inside us, innately, but we don't exactly know why or how. But they are there. What happens when we experience gore or the 'morbid' in horror movies is a 'catharsis', a sudden but exhilarating release of buried emotions. There is a strange sense of relief and freedom in the macabre, in the unknown or the dangerous. If I were to give you two scenarios: one, where you live in a perfect utopia, where law and order is maintained by following a rigid set of rules with regards to how one dresses, speaks, behaves and the likes with panoptic surveillance in place to keep you in check and the other where there is no code of conduct as such at all resulting in a disorderly society with rampant crime; and ask you which one of these offers you more freedom or catharsis, your answer would be the latter. Note how the question is not which one is better, more humane or more preferable but which one of the above grants you more freedom.

Similar is the idea that is explored by the Purge movie franchise where the world adopts a system where for one day, all rules and laws are null and void and the individual is free to do as he/she pleases. The world quickly turns hellish, a nightmare for the weak, helpless and marginalised and a place for people to unleash their worst without consequence. We see a similar reflection of ourselves, of something unknown and complex that we'll never get to explore (hopefully haha) in the morbid world of the macabre. The sense of freedom one can find in it is irreplaceable. To take a more relevant example, The Addams Family has received so much love through decades because the Addams accept themselves the way they are and don't feel the need to 'fit in'. Catharsis is a positive feeling; people watching the show feel exhilarated, free and motivated to be themselves without caring for social norms that have begun to feel oppressive over the years by trying to fit everyone in a box.

Not to digress too much, let's get back to the second catalyst for the shift in the audience's reception of the macabre which is rationality. With people learning how to doubt the truth of certain beliefs instead of taking everything they see as the absolute truth, macabre became something that one could understand rather than something that should be condemned. Rationality has helped us differentiate between things that scare us and those that are truly dangerous. Take for example the story of Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water. In the movie, a creature which would normally play a part of an antagonistic character becomes one whom we sympathize with and whom we feel affection and even romantic attraction for. However, the fact is that the creature did not change to become less scary or more palatable for the audience. Instead, the audience was forced to change its perception of what being a monster actually means. After all, if a creature capable of tenderness and compassion is still deemed a monster, what does that make the supposedly civilised humans who subject him to cruelty? Of course, this is not to suggest that audiences have suddenly become paragons of rationality (we are only human, after all). Rather, our growing appreciation for morally complex narratives reflects a willingness to look beyond appearances and question the assumptions that shape our fears.

Lastly but most importantly, pop-culture answers most of our socio-cultural questions today. Needless to say, it applies here as well. Pop-culture has in a way made horror and the macabre more popular. The various monstrosities that we now see on-screen have been adopted and celebrated by fan culture for their genius to such an extent that cosplay has become mainstream — people not just appreciating the morbidity and sometimes evil genius of these characters but actually 'becoming' them for a while, turning it into a spectacle. This repeated exposure and humour has normalised the macabre to some extent or at least made it openly fascinating for us such that the audience doesn't dismiss anything outrightly deviant as 'evil'.

To conclude, where once the grotesque was readily equated with evil, we have grown more willing to separate appearance from character. We no longer need to make the macabre familiar, beautiful or entirely palatable before allowing ourselves to appreciate it. We can be repulsed by it, fascinated by it and, sometimes, find ourselves rooting for it, all at once. Perhaps the greatest change is not that we have become less afraid of monsters, but that we have finally become curious enough to let them tell their side of the story.