Let’s say Paco goes to the dentist and gets a root canal.
Did your skin crawl in goosebumps? Perhaps you don’t know Paco enough to care. Or (lucky you!) dentists and root canals don’t whip up particular horrors. Maybe, you did feel a nasty prickling. Something visceral, your body conjuring up a whirr, a metallic taste, a prick, a pull, a crack, your watery eyes in a tight grimace praying pain won’t come, your jaw exhausted. Even if you didn’t feel anything before, I imagine you now sense something in your body tighten, a sort of bracing.
Now. Let’s say a light blinds Paco. Two shadow figures hover above him, their words muffled by a sucking machine sucking right by his ear, so loud it seems it will slurp him, bit by bit, into nothingness. Someone tugs the left side of his mouth so far back he’s lost any sensation on his cheeks, except a concentrated pinch right at the seam, where top and bottom lips meet, threatening to tear his mouth wide open. He imagines blood. The ripping of muscle, fibers pulling apart. A long, sharp needle punctures the meaty part between his gums and cheek. He smells his insides, wet brass and marrow. The needles dives deep, searching for bone, the very root of his tooth where the pain has fused, pulsating red and howling, the nerve that will make Paco scream, beg for it all to stop, tears and spit oozing down the side of his face, wet hands clasped so tight he can’t tell left from right.
Reading the first line versus the second paragraph, I would hope you (awesome reader) had a viscerally different experience. In the first instance, the writer (me) had to rely on the hope that you would connect whatever memories or imaginings you had to a dentist visit and the trial of getting a root canal. I hoped you might understand Paco’s harrowing experience, relate to it somehow. But, what if I didn’t want to leave it to hope and chance? What if the story I was telling needed you to feel Paco’s pain, his fraught nerves, his tightening body? What if the story needed you to feel for him, connect with him from your very gut?
I find that horror can do just that: connect. Strange, isn’t it, that something gruesome, violent, often disgusting, something that compels us to look away, is the very thing that can also drive us to connection. Sure, horror can be schlocky at times, a thrill meant to scare, to make you scream out of your seat and then laugh, relieved you’re not dead. Nothing wrong with that! In fact, it is that exact same visceral response that can be harnessed to empathize with characters and situations past rational understanding, beneath morals and lessons, deep into the gooey, meaty tissues that make us human.
We all have a body. At times we may hate it, want to tear at it, rip it, shed it like a cocoon that wasn’t meant for us. Other times we might love it, feel ourselves a happy inextricable union, the way breath calms us or a caress electrifies us with joy. Each relationship to a body varies, changes over time, it is fragile, messy, flaky, loopy. But what is true is that it is always there, our body, even if we try to ignore it, it will continue to pump blood, deliver oxygen, and digest food. I would venture that it is in the hazy space of how we relate to our bodies that most horror lives. In the horror of being bitten and turned into a monster; of monsters themselves, their bodies so different from what we may think is normal that we scream “Monster!” and burn them; of being mind-controlled; of dead bodies rising; of our bodies transforming, growing lumps, aging; of bleeding and decomposing; of desiring, hungering, losing control. Our bodies are often so detached to ourselves that we mistake mild pain for doom, a headache for the grave.
I write about what lights my curiosity, and so, I find myself constantly writing about bodies. My own body intrigued me from the get-go. I’ve had all dental procedures: root canals (where they scraped and vacuumed nerves), post & core (where a post was driven into my tooth’s root canal), extractions (pulling several teeth out), braces, bridges, dentures, crowns, implants (where they drilled holes into my jaw). I was born with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) which makes my bones brittle. Fortunately it is a mild case, meaning I only broke my legs seven times growing up, meaning I made it into adulthood. It has been three decades since I have broken a bone. Except my teeth. Together with OI, I also got dentinogenesis imperfecta—it doesn’t always come with OI, but I must be special. Dentinogenesis imperfecta makes my teeth translucent blue and brittle. Only four of my original teeth remain on the lower part of my mouth (now a removable denture) and about half on the top, though they are all supported and covered in a variety of metal alloys and ceramics.
Because of the broken legs, and later, broken teeth, I’ve been tremendously conscious of my body. Curious. Terrified. My body is often a foe to endure. At other times, like when having sex or swimming, a gorgeous ally. I’ve learned to comfort my broken body and also to allow it to comfort me when my spirit is the one wrecked. My body’s resilience to heal no matter how many times it breaks encourages me to lift myself up and try again. My body, tiny and hairy, has carried me across forty-two years. And though I’ve grown to accept and love it, it still annoys me. Frightens me too. And it will continue to do so, I suspect.
My novel Monstrilio—where a grieving mother takes a piece of lung from her dead child, feeds it and then becomes a monster—is about love. I needed this love to be felt viscerally and I didn’t know how else to convey it without embodying it. Horror understands the space between our selves and our bodies, that detachment, gruesome and addictive, disgusting, beautiful, loving and oh-so-human. I wanted to explore this space as it relates to love, love for others and the self, as odd and scary as we might be. I understood that the book would be unbearable if readers weren’t able to empathize instinctually with my characters. Grief could not only be a spark to unleash a monster, it had to be a burden, an ache, a fire carried throughout—felt more than understood. Love, particularly loving something (or someone) strange, possibly dangerous, had to be an act of bravery, of raw connection. Horror was perfect for this. For the abominable intricacies of a lung coming alive, growing hair, teeth, eating pets. For the hunger for human touch if only to be able to sleep and, maybe, eventually, believe in one’s own humanity. For grief gnarling bones, bending cartilage, stiffening joints. For the all too real vicissitudes of modifying one’s body: fangs caged under dentures, shaving unwanted forehead hair, a stump hidden under baggy sweatshirts. The novel revels in these moments: the pulling of hair, the throwing of legs, the saltiness of sweat, the jumps, falls, scratches, bites, snarls, moans, groans, hugs, kisses, caresses. I strove for my characters to be terrifyingly present. They needed to have bodies.
Not long ago, I read that horror is a kind of melodrama, and like melodrama it is a genre geared toward making audiences feel. Makes sense! Horror, like melodrama, is often maligned for being manipulative, valuing thrill over substance, emotion over thought. But what if that thrill and emotion is what makes these genres valuable? What if we can build on top and around these gut-deep sensations to tug at the nerves gorgeously? What if we can conjure up bodily horrors to unravel those very human tendrils that thrill, enchant and scare us, and allow them to reach across to others, joining in an experience that values connection over rational thought, tendrils out, touching, electric, like roots, like fungi, like humans.
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