#31 days of halloween | day 15
ON HORROR AND FRAGMENTATION
I often joke that I owe my poetic sense of purpose and my literary understandings solely to horror movies and novels. While I've been writing poetry since I was 14, I've been reading and enjoying spooky forms of entertainment much longer. I've also been thinking about why some of the scariest stuff I've ever read wasn't in horror novels at all, but in poetry. And not even horror poetry specifically. Just regular poems that happen to use fragmentation in ways that make your skin crawl. There's something deeply unsettling about fragmented text. When a poem breaks apart on the page, when syntax splinters, when meaning refuses to cohere. That's when things get genuinely creepy. It's like your brain is trying to complete a puzzle but someone keeps hiding the pieces, and you start to suspect maybe there never was a complete picture to begin with.
A lot of horror works by withholding. The monster is scariest before you see it clearly. The threat is most terrifying when it's implied, partial, fragmented. Poetry does this naturally. A poem doesn't have to explain itself. It can give you three images, two sentence fragments, and a white space that screams louder than words ever could. Obviously T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" isn't technically horror, but tell me that pile of broken images, those abrupt shifts, those voices cutting in and out like a radio losing signal ,is not the structure of a nightmare. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" might be one of the most horrifying lines in modern poetry precisely because it acknowledges that fragmentation isn't a technique, it's a condition. Everything's already broken; we're just picking through the wreckage.
Fragmented poetry mirrors the horror of disintegration—of minds, of reality, of meaning itself. When poets strategically use white space, when they let sentences trail off into nothing, when they juxtapose images without clear connection, they're not being difficult for the sake of it. They're showing us how consciousness actually fractures under pressure. And isn't that what horror is about? The breakdown of the normal, the reliable, the coherent? I keep thinking about those found-footage horror movies, how they're all jump cuts and static and missing scenes. That's fragmentation as horror technique. When you skip lines, break syntax, scatter words across a page—you're creating the same effect. The reader's eye has to hunt for meaning, has to work to construct something whole from pieces that might not even fit together.
Where things really get interesting is inside and around the gaps. In fragmented poetry, what's not there is as important as what is. Those blank spaces, those ellipses, those lines that stop mid-thought... That's where the horror lives. Your imagination fills in those blanks, and your imagination is always going to conjure something worse than what the poet might have written. It's like those old stories where they never quite describe the monster. The reader's mind does the work. Fragmented poetry weaponizes that. Every break in the text is a place where something could be lurking.
A lot of fragmented poetry deals with trauma—which is itself a kind of horror. Trauma fragments memory, splinters narrative, makes the past feel both too close and unreachable at the same time. When poets write in fragments about painful experiences, they're not being indirect. They're being accurate. That's how trauma feels: disjointed, recursive, full of gaps you can't bridge. And there's something deeply horrifying about reading poetry where you can feel the poet's consciousness coming apart on the page. It's intimate in this uncomfortable way. You're watching someone's coherence dissolve in real-time, preserved in text.
I guess what I'm saying is: if you want to scare people, fragment something. Take what should be whole and break it. Let the pieces sit wrong next to each other. Trust the gaps to do their work. Poetry's been doing this forever--creating meaning through breakage, finding power in incompleteness, making the fragmented form itself carry the message. Horror writers could learn a thing or two from poets who know that sometimes the most terrifying thing you can do is stop mid-sentence and let the white space do all the talking.
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