The Monster Function
Chapter 5 begins the second part of the book, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).” Whereas the first part focused on the sensational address and direct stimulation of the horror viewer, gamer, and browser, the second half focuses on monsters. This chapter argues for understanding monsters as figures that embody and limit anxieties, and which therefore offer reassuring locations onto which those anxieties can be placed. This argument places the monster-centric “philosophy of horror” of Noel Carroll in dialogue with the explicitly unembodied theory of abjection of Julia Kristeva to understand the importance of this embodiment and limitation to traditional horror: horror is a vehicle for working through anxieties that otherwise are not, or cannot, be articulated. The chapter first establishes the extent to which monstrosity is an essentially formal category—decided by stylistic presentation as much as by biological make-up. It then performs close readings of three recent works that engage with this tradition of monstrous forms to minimize visualization and embodiment and, therefore, the monster function: It Follows (2014), the Paranormal Activity series of films (2007–2015), and the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010).