Happy Death Club

Everything’s a metaphor for death if you want it to be.

I don’t notice that my face is wet until I start screaming and I don’t know why.

I google ‘Sylvia Plath Blackberrying meaning’: ‘Throughout this poem, the poet engages with the theme of the inevitability of death and nature.’ Touché, poemanalysis.com. Maybe Sylvia just really fucking loved blackberries?

I always felt, even before I experienced bereavement, that my emotions were too big, too loud, too colourful to really be socially acceptable. The heightened emotion and, yes, craziness of horror
allows me for a brief time to feel that the enormity of my emotions isn’t out of sync with the whole world, that I am not alone, that women are allowed to scream and get scared, get angry, be ugly, be LOUD. To do whatever it takes to survive.

‘We have control over our experience, we can decide to shut our eyes or walk away, when the narrative gets too disturbing. For as long as we maintain this control we are able to enjoy the negative emotions that the fiction elicits in ways we would not be able to in real life.’44

It’s also about trauma – people with extreme child-
hood trauma (hey c’est moi!) tend to love horror because horror creates the same somatic experience of trauma but you’re in control. You have the power to pause it, lower
the volume, hit the mute button or the stop button.

‘One of the reasons horror is such a universal force is that all human beings are afraid of the same things. We’re afraid of death, loss of a loved one, disfigurement, loss of identity. Everything that you’re afraid of, I’m afraid of.’

Elevation posits that ‘grief films’ (‘Gothic melodramas’, or ‘weepies’) have traditionally been coded as female, and that horror/grief films have inspired and furthered our understanding of trauma, using flashbacks many years before flashbacks were confirmed as a symptom of PTSD.39

‘Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.’40

Is that significant, or it is simply that everyone has suffered loss and trauma? Are we drawn to horror as a way of processing those intense feelings safely? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s simply escapist to know that even if you feel that grief has shaken your world, you are still safe in your home, serial killers aren’t out to get you, zombies aren’t tearing down the doors. That things can get worse.