horror and the fractured self
#31daysofhalloween
day 21
horror and the fractured self
When it comes to other mediums and genres that get spooky, poetry is perhaps the one that is both the shortest and the perhaps the most concentrated form horror can come in outside of an image. There isn't a lot of room for jump scares and gore, or for stablishing creeping dread over hundreds of pages. Horror and other kinds of speculative poetry do something different, get under the skin in new ways and quickly. This demands precision, even when the overall feeling is one of fragmentation or fracture. As I've been finishing up the CLOVEN series, which, while it takes its inspo from mythology, revels in horror and dark elements, particularly when it comes to the body, the female one specifically, and transformation. The folds of the story, the various veins and alternative endings, can create a sense of fracture and breaking that I am loving for that project.
The fracture of self could be be where a lot horror poetry lives and draws juice from. These sorts of movies are sometimes the most fun to watch. The Substance, for example and its divide between the older and younger version of self. Or any transformation horror--vampires, werewolves, zombies. Demonic possession or uncontrolled impulses. All focus on the changing and sometimes unrecognizeable (or unrecognized) self. Some of my favorite horror movies, like Jennifer's Body and Hatching work with these ideas very well. I always think of the scene with the mirrors in Black Swan, or recent parts with Taissa in Yellowjackets and the idea of the reflected other. Or Plaths' "Mirror," with older and younger selves caught in a reflection.
It can be slight or dramatic. That split. The versions of yourself that you present to your family. The version you present to friends or lovers. the self you envision yourself as and the one that surfaces only occasionally or stares back at you from the mirror. In a digital world, this sense can become fractured even more across multiple platforms and outlets.
Somewhere, there is a quote from Lyn Hejinian about the fracturing of self when it comes to narrative structure. How the self is never fixed and therefore, perhaps, point-of-view is not really either. This could probably also be applied to form, like how a poems falls apart on a page, or rich multi- and hybrid genre work that changes throughout. Poetry is perhaps the perfect medium for exploring this particular stance. The form itself can fracture and splinter—broken lines, enjambment, white space that swallows words, stanzas that don't quite connect. The structure can mirror the content in ways that prose just can't match. When a poem about a disintegrating identity literally falls apart on the page, you're not just reading about horror, you're experiencing it. Poetry can also wander away from logic and make startling juxtapositions in a single line. Or introduce unreliable narrators in a much smaller area. It can also break apart, like Poe's "The Raven" as the poem continues. The compression only serves to make it more horrific.
There's something almost beautiful about it too, in a strange way. The fractured self in horror poetry isn't just about destruction. It can also be about the possibility of multiplicity, of containing contradictions, of being more than one thing at once. The horror comes from losing control of that process, from fragmenting unwillingly. But the imagery itself, the language of splitting and shattering and reforming. There's an awful beauty in it. Horror poetry lets us see ourselves reflected in a cracked mirror and find something true in the broken glass. It acknowledges that maybe we've always been fragments pretending to be whole, and maybe that's okay, and maybe that's terrifying, and maybe both things can be true at once.
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