5/23/2024
Airports, Horror, and the Love that Bleeds
I told myself that I would take the month of May off from writing to focus on editing my existing 36 Views poems and do more reading, but here we are. I have been reading, and am currently halfway through the Letters to Eugene, a correspondence between writers Herve Guibert and Eugene Savitzkaya that starts as hopeless romance and ends as something richer, deeper, and rooted in their craft.
It is perhaps because of this work that I need to write again. Something about the book’s longing, the book’s persistent howling for company has calcified into an irresistible need to express myself. And trust me, no one is more disappointed in my breaking my fast early than I, but allow me this: a small plea in my defense.
After a week-long visit, I dropped off my girlfriend at the airport to resume our long- distance relationship this past Friday. Watching her shrink in my rearview as I injected my borrowed car into the infected, clogged arteries of airport-to-highway traffic broke me. I felt immediately like a wandering tumor of pathetic lovesickness metastasizing across my city to bloom in my apartment. Since it's still considered rude to rend my clothes and carve the sky outside my building with scythes of my shrieking melodrama, I am writing. And I'm writing about horror.
My mother likes to embarrass me with stories of how fearful I was as a child. She will recount with a sly smile how, when I was very little she took me to the symphony and how, during a bombastic rendition of In The Hall of the Mountain King, I got so worked up and screamed so loud that we eventually had to go home. The sounds and the impending doom of the piece fell on my small ears like hard rain. The panic I felt in my body like a current likely still has a home in my veins.
A glass of wine and my mom might also tell you how when my sister was in a production of The Christmas Carol and when we went to pick her up from rehearsal a Jacob Marley was in the room in plainclothes reading his lines with maybe twenty percent of his regular fervor. Again, the red cheeks, the wailing, and the quiet request to be removed. Fear was a constant companion who kept a cold hand on my shoulder, leading me away from the pastel innocence of the children's section of my local video store and into the narrow caves of the horror section.
The infamous poster for Child’s Play 2
I can still perfectly recall the imperiled Jack-in-the-Box nestled in the V of Chucky's massive scissors, the rest of the frame disappearing past the killer doll and into a dark, inevitable void. Everything scared me. Until it saved me.
More specifically until Vincent Price saved me, sneering over a trembling theatre critic in Theatre of Blood. I was a small child in a brand new house, most of my toys and distractions were still packed up in cardboard when I saw him on TV in my parents' room. It was the start of an obsession that still seizes me twenty-two years later. I instantly got over my fears and became obsessed with finding more horror, more Vincent, more of this day-glo blood red fantasyworld with its neon skies made of organ music.
While that lifelong passion for horror has expanded to everything from early 2000s Japanese cinema to the grungy 1970s world of Italian giallo, the movie star, gourmet chef, art historian, and amateur demonologist still has a picture in my wallet, a tattoo on my forearm, a cookbook on my shelf, and roughly twenty seconds of every minute I'm awake. Through him I unlocked my love of art, my love of horror, and my love of Old Time Radio. I used to listen to his Colorslide Tours of art museums and his how-to-cook tapes of The Beverly Hills Cookbook to fall asleep. Something about his reedy, operatic voice worked on my heart like the nimble hands of a master thief.
It wasn’t until later that I learned about Vincent Price’s bisexuality. I didn’t have the language then, just felt the brocade tendrils of queerness wrap around my confused, frightened boy body until the cold went away and the fear turned into something like belonging. I was being called home. Queerness and horror are such ubiquitous bedfellows that I’m hardly breaking any new ground here, but I’m still surprised at how often it comes up. When I write, when I text, when I flirt, and when I try to explain myself, I keep reaching back for horror films.
Ever since I met Vincent all those years ago, horror has served as the constant elevated dialect of emotions larger than my body. It reminds me of how people talk about opera. The wide open mouths, the vowels, the language that transcends language and becomes pure feeling that reaches across time like a gorgeous doom. As the protagonist says in Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo after ordering his men not to shoot a charging army of Amazonian tribespeople and instead decides to play an opera record to soothe them, “This god doesn't come with cannons. He comes with the voice of Caruso.”
My god came to me on the velvet wings of Vincent Price, the murky liquid latex flourishes of David Cronenberg, the elegant blood and desperate romance of Takashi Miike’s Audition. The extremity of these aesthetics, the meringue-stiff peaks of their emotions gave me a place to hide when I was hiding, and a place to exalt myself now.
When I want a metaphor for a love I can’t seem to healthily hold inside myself, I reach for the cannibalistic overtures and opulent gore of Hannibal. I reach for torture, because like in Hellraiser the feelings are so visceral as to be found only in the further reaches of experience. The same flame that moths me towards kink applies here. There is a pleasure so rich within me as to be mistaken for pain.
The tagline for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre asks “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
To be in love is to ask the same question and admit, with a rueful smile, that the only way to know is to keep watching, and suffer in delight.
I miss my girlfriend, and so I turn to Theatre of Blood and remember that to love is as to bleed. To sigh is as to scream. To hurt with the want of someone who wants you back is to be alive, and in a horror movie, being alive at the end is all that matters.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
