Horror After Horror

One of the most enduring genres in film and literature, horror offers allegorical readings of societal tensions and anxieties. Horror stories allow for conflict to manifest and find resolution within a controlled, safely contained context. Horror tracks social contestations of power, of humanitarian concerns, and of the ontological boundaries of the human, reflecting them back to audiences as distilled parables. As a medium of displacement, a subconscious defense mechanism or organizing principle, Horror is a mode by which we process the impossible, the unimaginable, or the unspeakable. It often resists culturally constructed binaries—those between living and dead, good and evil, human and nonhuman, to reflect upon how such binaries enforce societal stratifications and delineate hierarchies of power and hegemony in a given time and place.

This issue, Horror After Horror, explores a range of interpretations and evocations of Horror as a medium of displacement through which to process extreme feelings and cultural conflicts. The title alludes both to the relentlessness of horrific events unfolding on a global scale and to the anticipation and unthinkability of what could come next. As Charles Mudede, in our preliminary conversations with him, asked “What do we do when hell is empty?”

To read the history of Horror is to trace the history of humanity’s epistemological limits. From vampires and zombies to aliens and AI, Horror indexes the fears intrinsic to the human condition—the fear of replacement, of bodily harm, of the unknown, of losing control. The genre is also revealingly idiosyncratic, divulging the particularities of those fears that we may or may not share with others. Stories of ghosts or haunting, for instance, may relate to an experience of loss or prolonged grief. In Beloved, among the most prevailing ghost stories of the 20th century, Toni Morrison writes of haunting as “rememory,” a means of recollecting an obfuscated past, a veiled or suppressed narrative of subjugation, that needs to be retold. Hauntology, a term first coined by Jacques Derrida, describes how social and cultural pasts linger into the present. As a critical framework, it can also speak to the ongoing aftermaths of historical traumas, from enslavement to colonization to dispossession. In this way, Horror takes on a particular durational aspect as a feeling that persists, that lingers outside the boundaries of temporal constraints. The violent reckoning with a personal or collective history as it manifests in the present is one of the most quintessential traits of horror stories—the past may not be front of mind, but it is never far behind.

In co-editing this issue, we discovered a mutual aversion to zombie-centered horror. Zombie narratives often epitomize apocalyptic terror and the mindset of ultrapreparedness, but they also reveal fears around conformity within a voiceless mass. George A. Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968), which was, in turn, inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, popularized the genre on screen and reflected Cold War–era anxieties about invasion and so-called enemies from within.

The zombie subgenre returned to prominence in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and into the amorphous “War on Terror” that it spawned, evoking the unkillable, relentless foe in an unending zombie apocalypse. This time, it drew on AIDS-era fears of infection as a new vector, reframing the zombie condition as a result of viral contagion. Clearly, the use of horror to negotiate cultural change and shifting notions of ally or enemy finds almost literal expressions in this particular form. This zombie subset of Horror carries allegories for the treatment of the nonhuman, or the mass dehumanization of a people as a weaponized majority. Here, the monsters represent a putrified version of humanity, one absent of free will but possessed of the ability to transform us into something else, something other.

Horror is the other, the foreign practice, the unknown and unknowable elsewhere—but it can also upend assumptions, play with subject position, and subvert the perceived stability and safety of the normative and the powerful. In some instances, we use the tenets of horror as an ethical framework for the reality of living alongside images of brutality and violence. In other instances, we are drawn to it as an ironically self-soothing mechanism, one that trains our physiological responses and maps neural pathways to deal with distressing triggers we encounter in the real world.

But where do the markers of horror emerge within contemporary art and visual culture? That question informs this issue of ART PAPERS. As we sit with the reality of horrific images—of extra-judicial deportation, of genocide, of ongoing racial injustice—we turn to this question to unpack the visual representation of true horrors haunting our past, present, and future.

In “Listen to our muertos,” Camila Palomino interviews Peruvian artist Emperetriz Plácido San Martín, whose practice centers upon the ongoing horrors of colonialism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, and the Catholic church. Their dialogue explores the rituals and communions of worshipping los muertos—imperfectly translated as “the dead”—as a mode of resisting colonial paradigms that separate the living from their ancestors.

Frances Cathryn’s “Plantation Horror” examines the enduring legacies of violence, terror, and suppressed memory embedded within the landscape of the postbellum plantation. Focusing on the work of contemporary lens-based artists Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Cathryn examines visual strategies of countermemory of the plantation as a site inextricably linked to white violence and the reparations it necessitates.

In his essay “The Horror,” Charles Mudede addresses Joseph Conrad’s nightmarish allegory of capitalist violence Heart of Darkness, Achile Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics to interpret ghosts with a purpose in Mati Diop’s film Atlantics, and vampires trapped within an economy of death in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.

In “Idol Horrors: The Thrills and Chills of Obsession,” Brandy Monk-Payton explores the culture of pop stardom and the darker side of the fraught celebrity-fandom dynamic. Surveying recent films including Lurker, Trap, and Opus, Monk-Payton analyzes the cult of the celebrity within parasocial relationships while unpacking the fluid boundaries between fascination, fixation, desire, love, and hate.

Scholar Natasha Marie Llorens joins artist Anna Dasović in conversation in “Resisting the Affective Economy of Genocide.” Together, the two unpack the entanglements of visual representation and hellish violence—from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Palestine—by using Dasović’s phrase affective economies of genocide to describe cycles of witnessing that elicit horror, silence, and complicity.

In this issue’s glossary entry, co-editor and contributor Re’al Christian delves Revolt (n.) (v.) to follow the word’s etymological lineage from an act of turning away to one of riotous rebellion, and she makes a call for us to find agency in the revolting.

Finally, we want to acknowledge that this online issue, which was thematically conceived in the summer of 2023, will be the last regular issue in ART PAPERS’ nearly 50-year history. So much has happened in the time since this issue was proposed in an application for NEA funding—a longstanding source of support for our publishing program, which we consistently received for decades. In that time, we confronted a funding shortfall that made impossible our operating as usual; we made the difficult decision to embark on a project to give ART PAPERS a controlled and meaningful conclusion. We adopted the Fire Ecology plan, a “death with dignity” model for institutional ending. Now, in the second year of that three-year project, we conclude our regular periodical publication to focus upon two final projects: a final, special-edition print issue of ART PAPERS that encapsulates and reports on the Fire Ecology project; and a retrospective book, 50 YEARS of ART PAPERS, which will trace the history of the publication through some of our most timely, and timeless, texts.

We will continue to publish archival features and occasional reviews on ARTPAPERS.org, and we have a few exciting events planned to further celebrate the organization’s legacy. In the meantime, we invite you to enjoy this issue and perhaps stop by our online shop to pick up a particularly compelling back issue—while you still can—and stay tuned to our newsletter and social media for news of the Fire Ecology project’s final elements.