No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real world. Suburban haunted houses of poltergeists and conjurings, complete with a jumpscare-per-minute metric, would surely find an audience, as would a Gothic romance in some fantastical Narnia-esque universe run through DALL-E and divorced from the world of taxes and teenage ruthlessness. But these are the wisps and conjectures of the imagination, happy to remain within its confines once the credits roll and the appropriate emotions are duly expounded. What about horror that stubbornly sticks, like gum to soles, inside the imagination’s recesses, permeating its thin membrane with reality or — at the very least — clarifying the existence of such a membrane distinguishing the comforts of fiction from the clutches of truth?
Published as part of InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 5.
