Horror, Trauma, and George A. Romero’s Martin (1978)

This essay analyzes how George A. Romero, in his underrated psychological vampire film Martin, translates individual trauma (slow, process-based, unrecognized) into collective trauma (sudden, event-based, recognized) through a vocabulary of horror. The language of trauma spoken by Martin is not the one we expect from the horror film, with its traditional investments in fantastic spectacle. Instead, it is a language that combines horror’s fantastic vocabulary and documentary’s realist vocabulary in ways that undermine our attempts to distinguish between the two modes. Romero’s vision urges us to see catastrophe where we are accustomed to seeing only the mundane, and collective trauma where we routinely see only individual trauma. In Martin’s version of horror, the economic decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is paired with trauma connected to the Vietnam War and immigration. The film moves between these coordinates to revisualize the distinctions that divide the fantastic from the real as well as the individual from the collective.

Ghost Meat

The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder’s 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror’s appeal and also—by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response—opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption.

Spanish Civil War Horror and Regional Trauma

This article unpacks the cultural work that Juan Carlos Medina’s Insensibles, released in English as Painless, carries out in relation to Spain’s modern history and argues that the film’s painless children are an allegory of the country’s postdictatorship generations. The rendering of fascism as monstrous is less interesting than the connection of insensitivity to the Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and its suppression of painful memory. The fact that the children speak Catalan is a significant overlooked aspect, because Catalonia was the last region to succumb to Nationalist military forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and is known for its independentist fervor. A regionalist reading of the film does not simply connect the present and the past; it proposes that the children of the war mediate Spain’s current troubled relationship with historical trauma and act as an artistic response to centralist ideas of a unified and stable nation-state. Such a rethinking demonstrates that the horror genre continues to offer a language of anxiety capable of negotiating and contributing to debates around the importance of national accountability, war reparations, and the condemnation of genocide.​

The War That Never Happened

This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel’s intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text’s telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel’s slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness.

Ecology without Civilization

While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.

Sweet-and-Sour Soup for the Psyche

Excess signals uncontrolled natural agency and thus provides a key ingredient in horror and ecohorror. Because excess ultimately threatens our agency over matter and meaning, nature comes to threaten the fall and dissolution of humanity, offer an erasure of what it means to be human, and exert a muffling of the very agency that defines our sense of our exceptionalism. Yet horror and ecohorror also enthrall. They do so precisely because they provide a perversely traumatophilic/traumatophobic sensation, a paradoxical presence of opposites that somehow, like sweet-and-sour soup for the psyche, tastes good. We watch or read ecohorror for the attraction and repulsion its various traumas offer. Horror and the disgusting captivate us, reminding us at the same time of our corporeality and its fragility. Slime is central here. Slime is the horror of boundary transgressions, of indefinability, of unstoppability, of corporeal and natural agency. Reactions to slime reveal not only a fear of nature but a fear of women, and understanding theoretical connections between sexism and ecophobia is a critical step toward ending both. Central here is understanding how the balancing between attraction and repulsion, traumatophilia and traumatophobia, produces compelling spectacle that is entertaining but stimulates no activist engagement.