Happily Ever After

 

Should we embrace truth or positivity?

My little sister and I watched a lot of horror on VHS as latchkey kids. Often grabbing items recommended by our folks, we plowed through the classics. After watching the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (starring the magnificent Donald Sutherland), we developed a shorthand for horror stories that eschewed “happily ever after” in favor of deeply unsettling, profoundly bleak, or discouraging conclusions. We called the finales of such films – finales in which evil is victorious – “Body Snatcher endings.” While I think that my sister had an ambivalent relationship with such miscarriages of closure, I’ll admit to a grim, bird-in-the-snake’s-gaze fascination with them at the time.

This, along with my innate attraction to other morbid stimuli, formed the foundation atop which my appreciation of horror was built one bloody brick at a time. At first, Body Snatcher endings weren’t necessarily a selling point for me. Just like, I think, the majority of young people – for whom the future sprawls in luxury and for whom death seems distant – I liked my horror heavily leavened by assertions of normative valuation (“the monster is evil because it violates Universal Human Moral Law X”) and a sort of morally-balanced universe based on what I would later learn is called a dialectic.

By dialectic I mean this: the monster/peril, merely by appearing in most horror tales, renders a response inevitable. This might mean the intervention of a virtuous, opposing power (a heroic badass of some kind) or the empowerment of a previously unremarkable person (an ordinary soul must rise above their flaws to become a heroic badass of some kind). In the course of the hero’s journey, friends might be lost or precious things sacrificed, but the evil will be vanquished. The reality that reasserts itself is built on the same moral foundation as the original, pre-crisis scene, but changed by contact with the malign. The hero and their surviving loved ones may be scarred, but they have also been made wise by virtue of their brush with the unspeakable.

You probably don’t need a college diploma (hell, I don’t have one) to identify this arrangement as the famous Hegelian Dialectic; a thesis met by its antithesis, followed by a resulting synthesis. You definitely don’t need a college diploma to realize the following (in fact, it might hurt your chances): Georg Friedrich Hegel was woefully, disastrously wrong in nearly everything he wrote. I wouldn’t hold such a grudge were it not for those who were most influenced by Hegel: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, specifically. This is the side of Hegel you won’t hear about from philosophy or political science professors: two out of three of Hegel’s greatest students went on to provide the philosophical framework that undergirded the rise of Nazi Germany.

I recently completed writing a nonfiction book about 21^st century fascism, nihilism, and the occult (Black Sunrise on Piss Earth) that will be released in 2024. In it, I spend one full chapter on this subject. I needn’t reiterate my beef with continental philosophy here in full, but I will say this much; Hegel’s wildly ahistorical “logic of history” doesn’t help us understand social processes, but it does provide an insight into human psychology. The process of oppositional growth that Hegel lays out appeals to the least rational faculty in humans, a faculty that’s also our most powerful: our love of storytelling.

If you’re going to force reality’s unspeakable, sanity-shredding shape into the framework of a story, as I see it, it had better not have a goddamned happy ending. The entirety of human existence – from a single life to that of the species writ large – has always had and always will have only one ending: death. Some lives are overstuffed with pain while others only swim in the shallows of the ambient agony of organic life, an inescapable arrangement in which all participants must 1) suffer, 2) desire not to suffer, and 3) fleetingly fulfill that desire by feeding on the death of other life. As a friend of mine once said, even algae feeds on death: the entropy of our local star, which sheds life-and-death-giving radiation in its own slow, entropic throes.

Humanity’s fixation on “happy endings” isn’t just absurd; it is obscene. Every “happily ever after,” every heavenly reunion with one’s dead friends and family, and every “it will be all right” is, at its core, a wretched lie. And therein lies the subtly ideological importance of happy endings in horror fiction. Stephen King famously observed that horror is inherently conservative; that it relies on the violation of – and subsequent return to – normality. The harrowing journey from pre- to post-horror makes the humdrum hearth of home seem, well, homelier. That specific story framework in horror is conservative. One might even call it reactionary. It rests on a belief that a vigorous defense of the status quo can magically expel the interloper; the Other as messenger of chaos. People are afraid of chaos because of what it acknowledges and even celebrates. Isn’t every monster, every manic killer, every unbound beast from nature’s darker reaches a stand-in for the inevitable and irresistible? A mask which hides the ever-grinning face of death?

To end things on a slightly lighter note: there are as many ways to end a story as there are stories (more, even). There’s a middle path between the good, old-fashioned Body Snatcher ending and the Stephen King, reactionary school of thought. Ambiguous, ambitious, and (at times) amoral as the world itself, some stories artfully reframe horror’s very meaning. Rather than eliciting thrills through some perverse monstrosity that lurches through our beloved norms, these stories emphasize the horror of reality itself and in some cases (the stories of Thomas Ligotti or Laird Bannon, for example) offer no escape. In others (The Witch, Midsomnar) escape is not an option, but resolution is. No stale, Hegelian synthesis, but a reconciliation of the seemingly irreconcilable: the very things we fear.

As a nontheistic Satanist, I’m an advocate of the reconciliation of supposed opposites and the rejection of binary thinking. Ambitious horror offers us the same look at the unspeakable face of reality that reactionary horror does, and does so without lying to its readers. Normality is – and always has been – an illusion. Monsters are the truth.