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Monday
In my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at the benefits of meta-horror, invented (so he claims) by Mary Shelley. Meta-horror is a horror story that is self-conscious of itself as a horror story.
I believe that my first encounter with meta-horror was Scream, a slasher film in which the characters reflect on who, given the conventions of the horror genre, is the most likely to be slashed first. As I recall, someone observes the promiscuous girl will get it before the others. And so she does.
Fletcher sets up the psychological risks and rewards of horror by looking at two different versions of the adrenaline rush we get when we are scared. A good cortisol boost “charges our mind, powering us to get more out of life,” while a bad boost can damage our health. As he elaborates,
The same elevated cortisol that benefits us in the short term can damage our health in the long. It can cause insomnia and exhaustion, contribute to anxiety and depression, and increase our odds of diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.
Hungarian doctor Hans Selye in the mid-twentieth century discovered that we can get sick and even die from stress. But he also discovered that there is good stress, which “gives us all the benefits of extra cortisol—increased energy and focus—without the drawbacks.”
The one exception, apparently, is exhaustion, which even good stress can cause. He says that we don’t get additional brain activity for free.
Selye called bad stress “distress” and good stress “eustress.” The difference between the two is whether the stress is perceived as voluntary or not. While involuntary stress (fight or flight responses to being stalked by a predator, bullied by a boss, or getting sick) is bad, voluntary stress (“embarking on a new career, venturing on a first date, or banking everything on a dream”) is good. So if we want to turn distress into eustress, we just have to choose to embrace our stress, perhaps by finding the opportunity or silver lining in a crisis.
Now to literature. What sets Frankenstein apart from earlier gothics, Fletcher says, is that it creates distance from the horror through its story within a story (and sometimes story within a story within a story). He provides the following example, where the monster is recounting one of his most horrific acts, the murder of a child:
My rage returned; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow… I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.
Fletcher writes,
Here the monster is absorbed in a profound feeling of horror until suddenly he gains a reflective distance: “I only wonder.” And moments later, the narrative provides us with the reflective distance too. The monster’s Story in the Story ends, and we’re extracted to the outside story of Dr. Frankenstein: “The [monster] finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me.”
By pulling us out of the story in which we have been immersed, Fletcher says, the novel activates our brain’s “self zone”:
Undoing the neural effect of the Story in the Story stretch, and replacing our lost-in-a-book flow with an abrupt consciousness of our own separate existence.
This happens again at the end of the novel where we exit from Dr. Frankenstein’s tale to the perspective of the sea captain who has picked him up. “You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret,” Walton writes to his sister, “and do you not feel your blood congeal with horror, like that which even now curdles mine?” Fletcher points out,
Once again, our immersion is doubly broken. First, we’re made aware that Frankenstein’s narrative is a “story.” And second, we’re called upon to self-consciously analyze our feeling of “horror,” prompting renewed activation in the fiction distance of our neural self zone.
In other words, our brain becomes conscious “that the horror is a fiction that we’ve chosen to consume—and can keep choosing to consume if we wish.” Mary Shelley’s meta-narrative, Fletcher writes, “keeps our adrenaline pulse elevated and our cortisol eye full open—transforming our stress from bad monster to good.”
He adds that, in the novel, Dr. Frankenstein gives the mutinous sailors who want to return home this same choice. Before dying he tells them that they can
decide to abandon the expedition, calming their minds back to normal. Or they can decide to feel more alive by embracing danger again.
When we sit down with a horror novel, we can best move from distress to eustress by choosing those works that follow Mary Shelley’s meta-horror blueprint, giving our brain a self-aware distance. The films Fletcher mentions (which other than Scream I haven’t seen) are the epilogue of the 1983 film Twilight Zone, The Cabin and the Woods, and Funny Games.
I realize that one reason I’m not a horror fan is that I have difficulty separating myself from the story. I become so immersed that I experience acute distress. But I remember a story a student told the class when I was team-teaching “Adolescence and Film” with Dr. Barbara Bershon, a psychologist with expertise in adolescence. Because horror is so popular with teens, we had watched the slasher film Nightmare on Elm Street, which is driven by teen anxieties about rape and sexual assault. (Underlying the popularity of the film with teams is partly the reasoning, “If my parents are scared of whatever they won’t talk to me about, then I’m really scared! But maybe I’ll be less scared if I actually see whatever it is.”) One member of the class said that, for Saturday night entertainment, she and her friends used to check out the clunkiest slasher film they could find and have fun laughing at it.
We realized, as we analyzed her account, that this was a healthy way of processing their fears. Even if the films weren’t instances of meta-horror, their very badness meant that viewers could maintain a distance. Or put another way, they transformed the viewing into a meta-experience. Potential distress was transformed into eustress.
My main question is what to make of the major figures in the genre, starting with Stephen King, who do not engage in meta-horror. By instead attempting to immerse us in the full horror of the story, would these authors (by Fletcher’s reasoning) be bad for us?
But perhaps the very act of picking up a book—“I want to spend a few hours boosting my cortisol”—gives one the sense of choice that provides an out. For that matter, telling yourself, in the midst of terrified immersion, “it’s only a movie” (or book) might also work. While not a literary invention in the Angus Fletcher sense, it might achieve the same end.
Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt this to be cheating. When I engage with a work, I feel committed to having the full immersive experience. If it calls for ironic distance, then I’ll maintain that distance, but if it doesn’t, I am captured hook, line, and sinker. My Adolescence and Film students had fun laughing at how much I was frightened by Nightmare on Elm Street, with which they were well familiar but which I was watching for the first time. They had to scrape me from the ceiling.
Full immersion, I’ve always felt, allows me to get the most out of a work of art, a point made by Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep. But since to fully immerse myself in a work of horrors causes me acute distress, I tend to avoid it altogether rather than opt for coping strategies.