Alien Horror
Words cannot impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality - Edgar Allen Poe
Horror! The ghostly white orb that keeps appearing behind you in photographs. The shadow behind the dresser that remains untouched by light. The cat’s glowing gaze from outside the window. The realisation that no one will ever see you the way you see yourself. And that sweetness might taste sour in someone else’s body.
My first memory of horror, that first chill up my spine was formed during a blackout. Power cuts were common in suburban India, but my childlike mind, only just establishing a sense of self, was particularly marked by that evening’s sudden absence of light. Mum lit candles around the house, and their flickering light cast playful, elusive shadows. The world came alive, as if reality could finally reveal itself in the darkness. We stepped outside and looked up at the stars, their brilliance no longer veiled by man-made light. They swooped across the night sky in a veritable milky foam. And bathed in that cosmic light, I felt all of it—our suffocating smallness charged by an electric, sensual thrill – the horror of the expanse.
Horror is a subtle frequency, much like melancholy. It’s a deeply embodied emotion that needs no cause. It is timeless and hardcoded into our DNA. And like an elusive spectre, it is the set of all sets, a paradox, just beyond reach of all knowledge, power and control.
A pale, flattened face appeared and then disappeared as soon as they pointed their flashlights. The alien presence was no longer a matter of conjecture. They could feel it everywhere. [1]
Horror reverses that outward yearning we take for granted. It’s as if a copy of your face peels away from your skull and turns around; your own visage now a grimacing mask that probes you as much as you probe the world.
With a dreadful smack the creature was rolled over on its side. Everyone jumped back. Someone shouted. The thing was no bigger than a child’s head… with multijointed arms, a veined torso, a flat eyeless face with gaping nostrils and something jagged where a man’s mouth might be. [1]
Horror is a secret lover. It’s the revelation of its hidden, alien passion for you. An uncontrollable, unreasonable power whose crosshairs once centred on you begs the question, why, and why me? It can’t be a coincidence that prey rhymes with pray.
A pearl, bulbous thing hung from the stalks. The Doctor felt its gaze even though he could not locate the monster’s eyes. [1]
It’s the sudden unfamiliarity of the familiar.
From a hundred feet, the forms still looked like scrub, like a bluish thicket full of bird’s nests – not so much because of any true resemblance as because of the eye’s endeavor to find the familiar in the alien.
“Are they spiders?”, the Physicist asked. And everyone saw spiders with small spindle-shaped bodies covered with thick bristles, standing motionless on extraordinarily long legs tucked under them. [1]
I was about to speak further, when I observed the wild oats near the place of the disturbance moving in the most inexplicable way. We so rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety. [2]
And most horrifying of all, horror brings with it an intimacy I have yet to name. Perhaps it’s an intimacy of the Self. Or of a presence, both monstrous and divine. A void which, when questioned, “Who are you?” replies with a subtly shifting echo of one’s own distorted voice, “Who are YOU?”
Horror is the reversal of power and dominance, which take spectral form and find succour in our red-blooded human consciousness—the petulant I AM that dares to awaken in the acrid pea soup of physical reality, with only soft flesh and brittle bone to contain it. The spectres sink their fangs into us, consuming us, transforming us.
The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose, like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings. [3]
Horror turns grown men into children, relentlessly peek-a-booing their blades of reason and poisoning the roots of earthly wisdom. It frees us from the prison of knowledge and gives us the gift of innocence and the permission to stop what we are doing, draw nearer to each other, and look up for the first time.
And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh – but smile no more. [4]
Refs:
Eden, Stanislaw Lem
The Spook House, Ambrose Bierce
Royal Jelly, Roald Dahl
The Haunted Palace, Edgar Allen Poe