A very interesting subject that ties existentialism and art-horror together and is a good beginner for the analysis is monster symbolism.  “Embedded in a graphic narrative and with their very particular form of grotesque threat, horror monsters engage us emotionally, but in a way that serves as a symbol. Like Sartre’s slime, they represent the division between major ontological categories, and eventually the anxious nature of the for-itself,” as Hanscomb puts it (Hanscomb, pg 18, paragraph 4).  Especially monsters derived from normal humans like the cave-dwelling cannibalistic people in Neil Marshall’s movie The Descent (2006), put our being into perspective.  We can all become cannibals given a tough enough situation.  The only thing separating us from the subterranean humanoid throat-eaters is our will.  Hanscomb (and H.P. Lovecraft in The Outsider) explains monsters are in the eye of the beholder, we determine what is scary and what is not.  The monsters that scare us aren’t foreign enough, they aren’t an omnipotent gas that destroys all humanity. The monsters he talks about here represent blood and organs (“The Blob”), humans, and emotions.  Monsters have qualities we can relate to.  But these qualities don’t have to be things we can actually touch.  In David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), the monster is in incarnation of STDs, transmitted between people having intercourse and haunts the current possessor of the curse.  This monster symbolizes our fear of sexually transmitted diseases and how no matter how hard you try, you can’t really lose it. The disease will haunt you.  It’s a fear everyone has, but turned into a physical being.  Hanscomb goes even further into monster-creating and symbolism as he talks about the impurity of monsters and abominations this paper will summarize next.

The art-horror genre is filled with monsters stuck between two worlds.  Zombies are both dead and alive, wolf, fly, and goat people are stuck between the animal world and the human one ,and sewer-dwelling mutants are outcasts by our standards, so they banish themselves to a world where nobody will see them.  “…[c]reatures which hang around borders, and disrespect their integrity are traditionally described as monsters. They comprise a species of sinister miscreants exiled from the normative categories of the established system. A species of non-species, as it were. Alien monsters represent the ‘unthought’ of any given point of knowledge and representation, the unfamiliar spectre which returns to haunt the secure citadel of consciousness,” quotes Timothy Beal (whom Hanscomb cites on page 3, paragraph 2). H.P. Lovecraft demonstrates this remarkably in The Thing on the Doorstep (1937).  Derby, a friend of the protagonist, has had his body taken over by a mind-controlling succubus-like demon and desperately tries to stop her once he realizes her true power.  He comes to the door of his friend as an oozing, deformed mess.  He is impure.  The possession and imagery also contribute to another point Hanscomb talks about regarding existentialism, so make sure to keep this story in the back of your mind for later. Another interstitial idea is bringing a dead body back to life.  If the person was revived correctly, it’s a happy ending, but horror stories don’t take too kindly to happy endings.  In H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West-Reanimator (1922) the people brought back to life aren’t themselves, the serum Dr. West uses isn’t perfected, and we get sub-humans who scream and run into houses and kill people.  “It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance” (Lovecraft).  Even just losing part of humanity, like what many real diseases do today, is chilling.  We expect a person or animal to act a certain way, but when they diverge from the norm, we’re uncomfortable.  In fact, if you don’t mind me taking a little detour, I was watching an episode of Axe Cop just last night and there was a rabbit who broke all the rabbit rules.  Instead of hopping and eating carrots, it walked around and ate a coconut. Now, that doesn’t seem scary, but for it being interstitial, I felt uneasy seeing it walk around on screen.  It still acted like a rabbit, it didn’t start talking or pull out a watch or anything. It was just a strange rabbit.  Now, this rabbit isn’t as scary as reanimated corpses eating people, but fear works on many different levels of severity, even if it’s not something that haunts us.  The interstitial creatures fall into the “Uncanny Valley” where they aren’t one thing or another.  Uncanny Valley residents just make us feel uneasy, even if they are good-hearted like the walking rabbit or evil like mutated man-eating outcasts.  We view ourselves in one category, animals in another, and dead bodies in a third category.  There are more categories than these three, but when the categories start getting fuzzy and we don’t know where something belongs, that’s when interstitial fear starts to kick in.  But in order to create a terrifying monster, there needs to be elements of mystery to it.  The more information we have about a subject, the easier it is to accept it into our lives and deal with it sensibly.  But when we don’t know how to kill a monster, what an alien wants, or why the ghosts haunt us, the harder it is to feel safe around them.  This element of unpleasant mystery can lead to curiosity, which can begin to lead us into solving the paradox of horror.  This sense of mystery and fear leads us to Hanscomb’s third point, emotional reactions to horror.