I teach a course titled Horror Fiction and Film, and it seems silly if I don’t at least attempt to describe what horror is.

First, some non-examples:

A very intelligent, horror-loving student, requested that we study The Phantom of the Opera (2004). “It has phantom right in the name!” she insisted. Sadly, I had to disagree. Phantom is a (nearly 2.5 hour long!) romantic drama. Therefore, we can say that having a common horror archetype or trope in the title does not automatically qualify the work as horror.

Similarly, J.R.R. Tolkien’s works have plenty of ghosts and monsters, and also werewolves (if you count Beorn and his race), and vampires (if you count Worm Tongue, and maybe Sauron/the ring itself). Still, I doubt anyone would call his fantasy epic a work of horror. Therefore, the presence of ghosties and ghoulies does not automatically qualify the work as horror.

I’m tempted to make a rule, such as: If it scares you, it’s horror. By that definition, the Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time is horror (at least, to me). It was one of the few books that I read (along with Pet Semetary) that literally kept me up at night. Similarly, the song Oh where can my baby be by the Cavaliers on the oldies station sent me downstairs to see my mother when I was ten or so.

Even the film The Notebook has an element of this. Stereotypically, women love this movie, but from a man’s perspective, even if you’re Lon Hammond – wealthy, kind, patient, and loving – your fiance will always have a charming, abusive hobo from her past, who she loves more than you, and if he shows back up, she’s going to leave you. Even if he doesn’t show up, he’s also there, living rent-free in her head and heart. You are never secure in your relationship, there is always an ex that she would leave you for if she could, and women all over the world will water your mutilated heart with their tears of vicarious joy, is a terrifying lesson. That said, horrifying or not, none of these are typically thought of as being in the horror genre.

The opposite is also true. There are films that were meant to horrify, but generally didn’t. Some are in the it’s so bad it’s good category – films that can give us a good, mean-spirited laugh. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Horror of Party Beach (1964) are two of my personal favorite examples. These are monster movies that were meant to scare, didn’t, but didn’t exactly flop, either. Nor were they parodies, or if they were, they were unintentionally so. These do belong in the genre of horror (subgenre, goofy horror?), but they don’t follow the if it scares you, it’s horror rule.

Sometimes, horror isn’t horrifying, exactly. For example, humiliation is the phobic pressure point that drives the film Carrie (1976), but humiliation also drives American Pie (1999). Is they’re all going to laugh at you really any more humiliating than your dad walking in on you, in your mother’s kitchen, fornicating with a warm apple pie? Is there anything we could do to that unfortunate scene to shoehorn it into the horror genre?

The bad news is, it needs to be horrifying doesn’t exactly work as a rule (although, emotional response has something to do with horror fiction…doesn’t it?!). The good news is, we are getting closer to something resembling a rule, although it’s still too squishy to be of great practical use. This might be a good time to transition from non-examples to examples:

Most people would agree that Alien (1979) belongs in the genre. Science Fiction also has a claim to it, but I think it’s an uphill battle to argue Alien is more science fiction than horror. That said, if you think about it, Alien is more gross than it is scary. To paraphrase Stephen King from Danse Macabre, the audience is more likely to groan in disgust than they are to scream in fear.

A Quiet Place (2018) was terrifying, if you could imagine yourself actually in the Abbotts’ situation, but as a movie, I’d rate it more suspenseful than scary. Psycho (1960) might be more disturbing than horrifying. The Conjuring (2013) might be the most horrifying film – I mean, actually scary – that we study in class (although, I have no respect for the rest of the franchise). Pet Sematary (1989) could have Conjuring beat, if you consider Sematary did what it did within the bounds of a PG-13 rating. The Blair Witch Project (1999) was very scary back when we thought it might be real. Via student feedback, the most upsetting horror fiction was not a movie, but Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” (1843) – kitty torture shocks the conscience of the modern teen. You’d think that would mean there’s hope for the future of society, until you consider that the narrator also murders his wife with an axe and hides her body in the cellar…a detail that not a single student expressed discomfort with.

My definition for horror fiction is not likely to be very satisfying, although it’s the best I can do:

Horror Fiction is a work of fiction that shares substantial DNA with other works of Horror Fiction.

Still, I admit, the definition is logically circular, and requires some kumbaya in order to work. What’s your definition of horror fiction?

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

But if I were to choose one thing alone from Oddity to study, it would be the relationship between seeing, sight, and knowledge, not because it’s what makes Oddity effective as a horror film, but because it’s what makes it unique among most of the films we’ve studied.

Eyes themselves are not unique to our film study, but usually, they are used as phobic pressure points. They are sensitive and important, and so eye-gouges, eye-explosions, and eye-removals are great (if cheap) ways to elicit groans and look-aways from the audience. Oddity is doing something somewhat different.

Let’s step away from the film for a moment and very briefly discuss a few other, older, literary characters:

Tiresias is a mythic character in Greek works such as Antigone and The Odyssey. Tiresias was blinded, but in return, was given the gift of prophecy. He can’t see with his eyes, but he can see the future.

(The “Blind Seer” from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, 2000 - a modern retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey)

Oedipus is another Greek character, and the one you might be most familiar with. He unknowingly kills his father, marries his mother, and has children with her. When he eventually discovers what he had done (Tiresias tells him), he removes his own eyes with a brooch. Blinding himself doesn’t make him clairvoyant like Tiresias, or give him any other gifts, but it does symbolically signify the transition from seeing-unknowing to unseeing-knowing.

Odin is the chief god in Norse mythology. He voluntarily sacrificed an eye in exchange for wisdom. Some of you might be familiar with him from the Marvel movies.

Of all of our senses we rely the most on sight to make it through this world. At the same time, the magical, spiritual, or religious world is not of this world. So, according to this mythological pattern, in order to fully understand the metaphysical it is necessary to pull the blinds down on the physical.

In addition, there is the concept of sacrifice that is often found in western faith traditions. You are expected to show restraint and to give up even that which is most important to you while you are alive, so that you may be rewarded paradise when you die. This concept is found in the book of Job, but a better example might be in the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham was told by God to kill his own son, and Abraham was prepared to obey. Eyesight and sons are deep worldly sacrifices today, in service of some greater other-worldly gift tomorrow.

In Oddity, there are three characters who are blind physically, and one character who is blind spiritually.

Olin Boole had a creepy glass eye because his abusive mother had gouged out his real one. Olin eventually murdered his mother, and for that was sent to the asylum, where he overheard Ted and Ivan conspiring to kill Ted’s wife Dani, and he used that information to try and warn her. Olin is likely a nod to Odin, who sacrifices an eye for knowledge. Olin doesn’t voluntarily give up his eye like Odin does, but it was that act that resulted in the eventual knowledge of the plan to murder Dani.

A quick, but important, distinction. Olin isn’t Odin, literally. Olin is an Odin-figure in the way that Thomas Foster argues that the protagonist from The Old Man and The Sea is a Christ-figure. If Olin were exactly like Odin, then he’d be Odin. He’s not – but he’s close enough to recognize.

Dani, Ted’s wife, has her sight. However, after she is murdered she haunts the castle, and the few times we see her, she appears blind. In life she does not know her husband’s secrets – his extramarital affair and his plan to have her killed – but having given up her life, and her sight, she now knows everything.

(Oddity, 2024, 01:03:54)

Darcy, Dani’s twin sister, is completely blind, but has extrasensory powers. She is able to, among other things, read spiritual imprints off of inanimate objects, and acquire the knowledge of the owner of those objects. Because Olin had gone to warn Dani before her murder, it placed him at the scene, and since he was there and also had been an inmate at a psych ward for killing his own mother, he was convicted of Dani’s killing. Darcy in turn murdered Olin and stole his glass eye, however, in reading the eye he learned the truth about Dani’s real killers. In this way, Olin continues his role as an Odin-figure, the man who trades an eye for knowledge.

Oddity also has the inverse. Ted is the head psychiatrist at the asylum who murders his wife instead of divorcing her because (in his words), “She loves me. She’ll never get over me. And when she finds out about Yana, there’s no way we’ll get to keep the house.” He is a pragmatic atheist who thinks Darcy is a lunatic. Ted eventually (and I’ll add, completely unnecessarily) ushers in his own demise at the hands of a demonic porter that he himself summons. Ted is blind to the realities of spirituality, religion, or the supernatural, but has 20-20 terrestrial sight. After all, he “knows science” and doesn’t wear glasses.

(Oddity, 2024, 01:34:38)

Oddity was fun for quite a few reasons. It isn’t the scariest, or the grossest, horror film we’ll study in class, but it was one of the more interesting.

(Talk to Me, 2023, 00:33:21)

The Historical Cycle of Horror

A concept that I teach in class is the historical cycle of horror. The basic pattern is: societal unease → horror → familiarity and desensitization → parody.

For example: the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 lead to a mass societal unease, i.e., we aren’t safe; terrorists are among us; we could have our bodies torn to pieces at any moment. For those of us who were around, and who spoke to people who had responded to the attacks, those fears were real and literal (in the words of a National Guard soldier I spoke to a week after the attacks: there weren’t any bodies…only body parts).

What followed was House of 1,000 Corpses (2003), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), and Wolf Creek (2005), and parodies of over-the-top slashers that came out soon after those: the Scary Movie franchise (2001-2006), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and Thankskilling (2008).

Similarly, during the 1950s, Cold War paranoia gave way to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and three years later Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959); during the 1960s we had the sexual revolution concurrent with Psycho (1960) and then The Horror of Party Beach (1964); during the 2010s we had economic anxiety and obsession with identity which perhaps set the stage for Get Out (2017) and a few years later Ready or Not (2019), etc. etc. Could this be a coincidence?

It’s not a rhetorical question. It might be a coincidence that some, or all, of these films and their parodies had a proximal relationship with corresponding societal unease (e.g. did Psycho capture unease around changing norms in sex and relationships, or predict it? Is Plan 9 a parody, or just a campy, low budget movie? etc.). The historical cycle of horror is, in the immortal words of that great Pirate Philosopher Captain Barbossa, more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

That said, societal unease exists, and art can act as a mirror; sometimes, a strange mirror that even the artist doesn’t realize they’re peering into. Talk to Me is, according to mainstream analysis, a film whose subtext is grief, peer pressure, and substance abuse. I don’t disagree. I also claim that it makes sense to think about Talk to Me as a cautionary tale of the Faustian bargain that young people make with their cell phones – which is a very terminally online-peri/post-pandemic-early 2020s vibe.

(If you haven’t seen the movie, I suggest either watching it, or reading the wikipedia plot summary, so this claim makes sense).

Talk to Me as Contemporary Societal Unease

The hand channels outside voices directly to the recipient; the user sees, and reacts to, these people, although nobody else in the room can. These outsiders can influence the actions of the recipient, not all of them are benevolent – most seem to have the intent to cause harm. This feels a lot like a young person in a room, surrounded by real in-flesh people, yet consumed by apps and algorithms.

The mantras talk to me and I let you in function in two ways. For the sake of argument, accept that the “hand” represents, literally, a smartphone, and figuratively, the capturing of cognition and spirituality, by hijacking the user’s physiological systems. If you accept that, then the ironic weight of talk to me and I let you in is that the young people are eschewing real world human contact in favor of an emotional connection with a device. Also, they are consensually – while under intense social pressure – inviting “darkness” into their lives. They are picking up the “phone”, aware of the dangers (or are they? Is it just “fun”?), and opening themselves up to whatever it is the “spirits” want them to hear. It’s dopamine addiction, algorithmic confirmation bias, attention and energy capture, pleasure-loneliness feedback loops, and humiliation. “Only 90 seconds, or you’re captured forever” – nobody scrolls for only 90 seconds.

Like smartphone/internet-on-demand use in the early 2020s, adults do nothing to regulate the use in young adults and children. Jade is the only one to say no to Riley, but she storms out of the room instead of holding her ground against Riley’s nasty temper tantrum and the pressure of the peer-group. She fails to be the adult in the moment, and the rest of the group, including Mia (who supposedly cares for Riley) encourages and downplays the behavior.

Similarly, the grown adults can’t, or won’t, restrict the young adults. Mia’s father is emotionally distant; Jade & Riley’s mother is overwhelmed and overcompensates, but doesn’t actually do anything to stop them; Mia’s mom (in the video on Mia’s phone) is just as immature as the kids themselves. In fact, Mia’s mother seems to revel in the spectacle of online performance in the same type of way as her daughter and her friends – she’s unlikely to restrict access, but rather, participates right alongside.

There is also the smartphone-era social anxiety of humiliation at scale. If you did something embarrassing in 1998, your friends would laugh at you; the most nightmarish scenario is “the whole school” would laugh at you. Still, you could go home, go to your room, bury your head in your pillow, and detach from it. Likely, given a relatively short amount of time, the incident would pass from peer-group memory. If you do something embarrassing in 2023, it is memorialized on the internet forever, the entire world can laugh at you, and there is no “going to your room” to escape, because you are tied to your phone. In both of the most notable humiliation at scale scenes (Daniel making out with the dog and Mia sucking Daniel’s toes while he slept), the person doing the creepy thing couldn’t control what they were doing.

The excessive emphasis on self-harm, e.g. Duckett stabbing himself, Mia slapping herself, Riley beating himself almost to death (twice), etc., parallels the self-harm done by excessive on-demand, portable, limitless internet exposure (i.e. “talking to” and “letting in” cell phone content). I don’t suggest literal self-harm, e.g. cutting, but rather, the harm one does to themselves when addicted to their phone. After “ninety seconds”, the user is trapped forever, oblivious to the real world, untethered from reality, disoriented, emotionally disconnected, angry, scared, wounded, and rotting.

(Talk to Me, 2023, 00:19:21)

Finally, and to me the most damning evidence, is the aggregate contraction of the peer group’s empathetic circle – the generational sociopathy that is a feature of young people raised on their devices. Consider the above screenshot. Mia is obviously distressed, having just interacted with the hand. She has not yet let the spirit (demon?) in, i.e. allowed it to possess her, but she has made contact for the first time, i.e. talk to me. We can see her peer group (largely represented by Hayley and Joss) laughing uncontrollably, their phones up and recording. The only character who seems to care at all for Mia’s well-being is Riley, sitting apart, looking concerned. He is physically and socially an outsider at this moment, but soon, he will be caught in the gravitational pull of the peer-group, with Mia herself the biggest and most important cheerleader. We see something similar when Jade’s boyfriend Daniel, while possessed, tongue-kisses dog. He begs Hayley to delete the video, but she just laughs and posts it without even an attempt at an explanation or justification, and, perhaps even more telling, without a single objection from the peer-group. These characters see each other as content. They are cattle to be slaughtered for likes and shares.

We can juxtapose this with Cole’s biting words (Cole, whose brother Duckett kills himself in the opening scene after excessive use of recreational demonic possession):

Do you know what the shit thing is? He actually thought he had friends. You guys always inviting him to shit, acting like you cared. But you were using him. A real friend would’ve seen it was fucking him up. But you didn’t.

Conclusion

Duckett’s friends failed him by rejecting his shared humanity in favor of vapid, fleeting, sociopathic attention. The same goes for Riley, and Mia before him. The same goes for every high school student who runs up to a fistfight with their devices raised high above their heads, pushing and shoving past all the other students with phones open and glowing, posting the clip of somebody getting beat up before that person even makes it to the principal’s office. How would I feel if my already-public humiliation was amplified for the world to see and comment on? is a question that, in my experience, young people never ask. In fact, if you do ask them, they are likely to pause, furrow their brow, and act as though the thought never once dawned on them. This is the specific contemporary societal unease that Talk to Me channels.

The more I read and watch, however, the more I’m inclined to think of monsters in terms of their resonance with the audience. In this sense, there are three different types of archetypal monsters: simply monsters, such as giant flies and swamp things; sympathetic monsters, such as villains with tragic origin-stories; and inconvenient monsters – this last category is the rarest of the three. These are the monsters from Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks or Humbert from the novel Lolita. It is also Frankenstein’s monster from the novel, and the reason why movie-makers are so reluctant to stay true to Shelley’s form.

I’m most interested in this last category – that of the inconvenient monster – because it’s not immediately obvious what makes those monsters so unpalatable compared to any other monster.

First, some guidelines. What separates “monsters” from, say, werewolves, vampires, and ghosts? What defines an “archetypal” monster?

Here are the literal questions that I use in class. Monsters don’t need to fit all of these categories, but they should fit most of them:

• Are they monstrous, ugly, unnatural, or gross?

• Are they alien, a foreigner, or an outsider?

• Are they cursed or infected? Did that curse or infection cause a one-way metamorphosis?

• Did they commit some indiscretion, or actively participate in a sinful society?

• Do they have no name?

• Are they dangerous, mindless, violent, and difficult to kill?

If they are most of these things, then they are likely a monster, at least in an archetypal sense.

What separates the monsters from the other two categories is, at the least, the word “mindless”. These are creatures who feed and fornicate, but don’t write poetry. This is Frankenstein’s monster in the classic 1931 version. It’s also the aliens from Alien, the sons from “The Monkey’s Paw” and Pet Semetary, and the slimy fish-men from The Horror of Party Beach. They are all, simply, monsters. We know them and accept their existence in the same way we know and accept rabid bats.

Sympathetic monsters aren’t mindless. They were abused, their family was killed, their face was burned off in an unjust war, they couldn’t get a date, etc. Something horrible happened to them, and now, they will do something horrible to all of us. We might think that the vengence in “Foul Play” went a bit too far, but we can also understand the logic. Same goes for Pamela Voorhees in the original Friday the 13th and Frankenstein’s monster in the 2025 netflix version.

Inconvenient monsters are also not mindless, however, they are also not necessarily sympathetic. He is exactly you and me, except he’s monstrous. Frankenstein’s monster from the novel is an aristocrat; he happens to live in the wilderness, murder children, and, oh yeah, is a living corpse. Humbert falls in love just like all of us fall in love, and we can hear ourselves in his thoughts, except he’s a middle aged man in love with an 12-year-old girl (who, just in case the novel wasn’t uncomfortable enough already, is a bit of a monster herself). Tod Browning’s Freaks is a community that is as normal as normal can be – they work together, fall in love with one another, have children together, gossip, socialize, fight – it’s a PG-13 Leave it to Beaver, except most of the characters are missing limbs, if they’re lucky, and half their body if they’re not. They are us, exactly, except monstrously deformed.

(Freaks, 1932)

I don’t think most of us love that feeling. We like being scared. We like feeling pity. We like living vicariously through a good story, but there’s an empathetic line that is inconvenient to cross. Sun Tzu in The Art of War writes, Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across. The audience is trapped with no bridge, no excuse, no rationalization, to give them permission to live through the inconvenient monster.

(Psycho, 1960, 00:44:44)

There is an old Indian proverb: Chess is a sea where a gnat may drink from and an elephant may bathe in. In other words, the game takes most people less than an hour to learn, but a lifetime to master.

I view teaching Horror Fiction and Film similarly, although “elephant” might be taking it too far. Shelley and Poe aren’t Dostoevsky, but they are accessible to beginners and fun for advanced-intermediate students of literature. Let’s say that Horror fiction is a decent-sized lake where a gnat may sip and a St. Bernard can splash around a bit.

Point being, horror as a genre makes for a great high school ELA elective because it naturally lends itself to study across a range of student academic abilities. But that’s not the only reason I’d argue for offering a Horror Fiction & Film elective to high school students.

Two points of order before I make my case.

First, an attribution: Stephen King’s 2010 edition of Danse Macabre is my guide, syllabus, and tome of immutable law for teaching this course. If I write anything about horror fiction that sounds smart, it’s likely from King’s book.

Second, a proposition: studying art, including literature and film, is largely an exercise in pattern recognition. This might be the most basic building block of studying…well, anything.

The benefit of a genre study (of any sort) is that the patterns stay in-house. Sure, horror doesn’t have a monopoly on dark and stormy nights – murder mystery and high fantasy authors may attest – but if it’s a horror story then nine times out of ten there’s going to be some foul weather. These types of patterns – motifs, tropes, themes, archetypes, etc. – repeat in broad strokes. In class, we call these patterns phobic pressure points (Chapter One of Danse Macabre).

I’ll walk through how I approach this idea in class. This is not a lesson plan, and there will be no test at the end. Simply, this is how I think of horror as a genre study in a 12th grade class, beginning with the gnat and ending with the St. Bernard.

Consider the “phobic pressure point” of “someone is in the house”. There are literally dozens of stories and films that pinch this nerve: Friday the 13th, Pet Sematary, Dawn of the Dead, A Quiet Place, The Blair Witch Project, The Shining, The Sixth Sense, and so on.

Let’s focus on four: the films Psycho (1960) and Alien (1979), Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, through the lens of someone is in the house.

Someone is in the house.

In all four, someone is in the house.

In Psycho, hotel proprietor Norman Bates has full access to the cabins, including Marion Crane’s room, and he uses this access to peep on her changing clothes, and ultimately murder her while she’s showering.

In Alien, mindless, violent, parasitic monsters (“aliens”) are inadvertently brought onto the spaceship, and could be hiding anywhere (including literally inside their shipmates).

In Frankenstein (specifically chapter 23), Victor’s monstrous creation enters Elizabeth’s bedroom, where she is all alone, and murders her.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” puts a slight twist on the trope: the narrator is the old man’s caretaker, and belongs in the house. However, he does not belong in the old man’s bedroom, watching him sleep. Maybe we can call this one: there’s someone in the room.

Physical exposure

At least two out of the four stories, and I would argue all four, have our victim literally exposed. They shed their clothing as if they were stripping themselves of their armor.

Marion Crane is completely naked and in the shower of her rented room when she is stabbed to death by a man in a dress. Besides the obvious - an attractive lady in the shower plays well to a certain demographic - being naked in the shower also means that she also doesn’t have a single stitch of cotton between Bates’s blade and her vascular system.

At the end of Alien, Ripley also strips down, not fully naked, but in her corporate-issued-ill-fitting-cryogenic-sleep-skivvies, which is exactly the moment she realizes she has company. There’s nothing between her and the monster’s mucusy mouth than a thin sheet of epidermis.

We don’t actually know the state of dress of Elizabeth Frankenstein when she is killed by the monster, but consider this: it’s her wedding night; she’s in her bedroom, waiting for Victor; we are playing by Victorian rules. Is it such a stretch to think that Elizabeth is waiting with bated breath to finally consummate this marriage? After literally years of waiting for Victor to stop dilly-dallying around Europe to come home and make a life for them? Even if she’s not in a nightie surrounded by rose pedals, at the very least she’s not in sweatpants and running shoes. She’s definitely physically exposed – just how exposed is left to the Victorian reader’s imagination.

The definitely-not-crazy narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” assures us: I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. The old man is no Marion-Crane-in-the-shower, however, it was while lying down, half asleep in his jammies, that the kind, old, harmless man was suffocated, hacked into pieces, and stuffed under the floorboards of the living room. Definitely a twist on the trope, but not altogether separate – a sleepy, trusting old man wearing a nightcap is approximately as vulnerable as a young woman trapped in the shower, escape capsule, or bedroom.

Isolation

I’ve argued that in all four stories, our victim is physically exposed (i.e. naked-ish). Taken a step further, I’d argue that they are naked in the wilderness, i.e., desperately alone and cut off from any possibility of help. And what’s more horrifying than waking up naked and alone, lost in some great expanse? Add a dark and stormy night with something going bump in the dark, and it doesn’t get much scarier than that.

Marion Crane is on the lam and nobody knows where she is. She didn’t even give Bates her real name. And since the highway was built, the Bates Hotel is withering on the vine – there isn’t another guest at the hotel, nor does it look like there’s going to be. Marion Crane might as well be a bird (a crane?) locked in a room with a deranged, crossdressing fox with mommy issues. She’s all alone and nobody is coming (at least, not in time).

At the end of Alien, Ripley is literally trapped in a single room surrounded by lightyears of empty space. All of her colleagues are dead, the main ship is destroyed, and she’s a ten month sleep away from getting back to earth. She’s alone and nobody is coming to save her.

Victor Frankenstein assumes that the monster’s threat, I will be with you on your wedding night, means that the monster intends to fight Victor directly. Victor, not wanting his new wife to bear witness to the carnage, leaves her in her bedchambers. Victor has separated himself from his bride, presumably shadowboxing in preparation, waiting for the monster to come to him. The result is, Elizabeth dies alone, screaming, trapped in her own room.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the old man lived all alone (with his murderer). In this case, he did have neighbors, and they were able to hear the commotion and call the police, but much too late for the poor, kind, gentle old man.

Unease

Psycho comes out in 1960, and exploits society’s unease around financial insecurity and sexual deviance. Marion and Sam are shacking up but are too broke to get married, which leads to Marion robbing her boss’s wealthy client in the hopes of financing Sam’s promise of making her an honest woman. Norman is also broke, alone, and suffering from a bad case of Peter Pan Syndrome; unable to break free from his dead mother’s dominance, he tries to “follow her rules” by suppressing his sexuality, but fails, and in turn punishes the object of his desire with a knife. Society is changing – we aren’t yet in the “LSD and free love” 60s, but strict social expectations around sex, money, and the role of women in the workforce is, for better or for worse, giving way to a more egalitarian-minded generation. That societal conflict is the social milieu from which springs Psycho. Financial insecurity and norms around sex and marriage are what drive Marion into the wilderness, and fiscal insolvency is what allows for isolation and predation from a man-child who, in turn, is failing to negotiate shifting social norms.

Alien comes out in 1979 and also exploits financial insecurity. The seven-member crew are all shackled by golden handcuffs – they have little choice but to work for The Company as blue-collar space miners on a quasi-military mission. The semi-consensual, abusive employee-employer relationship all but screams: your job doesn’t care about you. You could work for a company for 35 years and the 28-year-old manager with his fancy business degree will still lay you off on Tuesday morning and have you replaced by lunch. The entire scenario is sociopathic. There’s someone in the house is taken to the next level when we discover that the house is not just the spaceship, but also human bodies – the intruder is not in your living room, they’re in your intestines. Some have interpreted this as being sexual in nature; that the implication is metaphorical violent rape. This is a perfectly valid interpretation, but to me, it always felt more like The Company burrowing inside its employees and exploding them from the inside out. If it is rape, it’s the big corporations doing it. I would imagine that the 60-year-old who dedicated his whole life to The Company, only to be unceremoniously laid off by a man half his age and finding himself unemployable, might feel similarly violated. In fact, that hypothetical man would find himself alone and naked in the wilderness, with the somebody in the house being the “monster” of his own thoughts, fears, and feelings, invading his body, ready to destroy him.

Frankenstein has nothing to do with financial insecurity. In fact, the Frankensteins are financially comfortable and socially affluent. The novel is, arguably, the most uncomfortable of the four, and the best evidence of this is in how rarely film adaptations come anywhere close to Shelley’s original intent. The question is, what are the implications of rapidly developing technology in a morally laissez-faire society? The novel was published in 1818. In 1803, an Italian scientist sent an electrical current through the body of a recently executed criminal in London, causing the man’s jaw to quiver, his eyes to open, and his fists to clench. The spectacle sparked public imagination: could the dead actually be brought back to life? Victor never ponders the question, Just because we can, does that mean we should? It was more like, If we can, we will. Up to this point, the implication of there’s someone in the house was that the main character is in danger. This is the first story where the main character’s loved one – the one he is tasked with protecting – is the one attacked in their safe space. The message seems to be, science devoid of morality results in isolation and suffering. And of course, the story ends with Victor literally lost in the arctic wilderness, alone, chasing his own demise.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is not about financial insecurity or technological advancement. Once more, Poe is the odd-man-out. While the horror in the other three stories can be traced to some societal zeitgeist, Poe’s story is more readily traced back to himself. Not that the narrator is Poe (he’s not) – just that the largely destitute, melancholy, alcoholic orphan, addicted to laudanum, who lost everyone he ever loved to consumption, and who himself died deranged, definitely knew a thing or two about existing in the space between reality and insanity (and of not necessarily knowing, at a given time, which side he’s on). After being imprisoned in Philadelphia for public drunkenness, Poe wrote, “For more than ten days I was totally deranged, although I was not drinking one drop, and during this interval I imagined the most horrible calamities. All was hallucination, arising from an attack which I had never before experienced, an attack of mania-a-potu. May heaven grant that it prove a warning to me for the rest of my days. If so I shall not regret even the horrible unspeakable torments I have endured.” Soon after writing this, on a train bound for NY, Poe becomes convinced that everyone on the train is trying to kill him, and shaves his moustache to disguise himself. In the other stories, we are Marion, Ripley, and Victor, vicariously experiencing existential danger. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, we identify with the narrator, who spends a considerable amount of time explaining how he’s not crazy. So then: do crazy people know they’re crazy? If not, then how can the reader, who is experiencing the narrator’s madness, know for certain that they aren’t crazy? We can’t. The wilderness in which we find ourselves naked and alone is our own ambiguous sanity.

If I were to spiral one more step

If I were to push these texts to a fifth level of complexity, it might be the philosophical notion that safety is an illusion. We all feel safe in our own home, in the shower, in our bed, but the fact is, none of us live in a castle with a moat and armed guards. With $50 worth of tools from your local home improvement center, any reasonably muscled man could burst through your door at any moment, and have you in pieces long before help could arrive. Will said man be caught? In this modern world, probably. Will that be any consolation to your parents, friends, widow, or children? Not at all. The only thing preventing this from happening is our collective faith that the world isn’t full of psychos. Hey…I have some bad news.

And of course, the “psycho” isn’t necessarily the literal man bursting into your bedroom at 3am. It’s also layoffs, loneliness, societal expectations, and descent into madness. Which is worse? Don’t answer too quickly. To the 55-year-old, unmarried, childless middle-manager about to be replaced by AI, a murderous intruder is at least company.

Back to the students

I understand and accept that this essay has veered from pedagogical justification for horror fiction in high school, into literary analysis of four texts through a single trope. It is, in my opinion, the necessary groundwork for teaching fiction at the high school level. But at some point, we have to bring our attention back to the students, and why all of this analysis might be appropriate and desirable for them.

I’ve been teaching for nearly 20 years, and my first year of teaching Horror Fiction and Film was my first year with a single-genre curriculum. I’m now a proponent of this structure, particularly at the secondary level. Honestly, embarrassingly, it’s not something I thought about prior to teaching this elective. I’m shocked at how much sense it makes. It sets teachers and students up for success in a way that teaching disparate texts doesn’t. For example, our current 9th grade curriculum has students reading Of Mice and Men and A Raisin in the Sun, back-to-back. I love both of those stories, but they are different enough where literary patterns aren’t obvious to the average 9th grader. Using them to teach abstractions like characterization, tone, mood, conflict, etc., is a self-inflicted wound, because while those elements are important for students to learn, the stories have little to do with one another, and so the pattern is lost with many 9th graders.

I’ll admit that horror is not my favorite genre, personally, however, it does have broad appeal. Most students like it and a significant minority love it. I can count half a dozen students from this past school year who are much more well read in the genre than I am – by quite a margin. In big-E-Education circles, teachers and administrators have placed a premium on student interest and student engagement. I think we probably value it too much, but on the other hand, student interest is not nothing. I believe Horror Fiction and Film as a 12th grade elective with other options available – AP, IB, other genre studies, or whatever else your school can support – makes perfect sense.

I also believe, and hopefully have demonstrated, that horror fiction tends to spiral in a way that’s accessible from gnat-to-St. Bernard levels of complexity, and that most students can reach the level of societal unease, if they actually read and watch the stories (they usually do), and if the teacher guides them, beginning with simple patterns. I don’t think we should shy away from so-called “DoK-1” teaching. This is the foundation on which deeper analysis can be reached.

Finally, as is with most genres, there is the problem of text selection. I like horror as a teachable genre is not the same thing as all horror is of equal literary value. The Curse of La Llorona (2019) is a horrible film, unless you are studying what makes a movie bad. On the other hand, there is also horror that might be too ambitious (for both teachers and students). We studied the film The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) this year, and it wasn’t long before I realized that we were all in over our heads. There’s also some films that, sadly, don’t hold student attention, even if I think they’re worth it: Freaks (1932) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) are good examples of these.

As a footnote: the story that I got the strongest pushback on, from students, was Poe’s “The Black Cat”. Students universally hated the idea of animal abuse, more so than any of the other bodies we stacked throughout the year.

Conclusion

Consider the opening scene of The Sixth Sense. Someone is in the house, but this time, it’s the “monster” who is naked and the victims who are clothed. What is the significance of this decision?

You don’t have to answer. As promised, there is no quiz; only gratitude that you made it to the end. The point I’m making is that horror has a uniquely visible ladder of sophistication that makes student movement from simple pattern recognition to high-level literary analysis possible. Horror is valuable, not because of werewolves and jumpscares, but because it makes the pattern of literary thinking visible. The fact that horror also tends to be high interest is a bonus.

Don’t scrap the AP class. Horror takes us from gnat to St. Bernard, but probably not to elephant. That said, Horror Fiction and Film makes a solid 12th grade ELA elective.

Works Cited

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Gallery Books, 2010.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Vintage Books, 1975, pp. 223–232.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Vintage Books, 1975, pp. 231–234.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. “Poe and Alcohol.” The Enigma of Edgar Allan Poe, 1921. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Accessed 1 June 2026.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by Marilyn Butler, Oxford UP, 2008.

Yorston, Graeme. Edgar Allan Poe – Tormented Genius? | Documentary. YouTube, uploaded by Professor Graeme Yorston, 18 June 2023, YouTube video. Accessed 1 June 2026.

Zarzar, Tiago Rocha, et al. “Mania-a-Potu: A Review of the Literature.” Lisbon Addictions Conference, 2024. Lisbon Addictions Conference presentation. Accessed 1 June 2026.

Films

Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott, performances by Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and John Hurt, 20th Century Fox, 1979.

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, performances by Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, Paramount Pictures, 1960.