When the Nostalgic Looks: Goodbye to All Those Horrors
Saying it makes it real. Bloody Mary Bloody Mary. Candyman Candyman Candyman Candyman. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. If you hold back that final utterance to make it real, you can stopper the feeling. You can approach the edge and swerve back to safety. Dare close and, at the last, withhold. Enjoy the illusion of control.
It’s same feeling as watching scary movies. You can absorb the terrors through the buffer of your television screen. You can watch the characters stumble onscreen and say the monster’s name one last time.
Candyman.
Beetlejuice.
And when they do—lights out, curtains, chaos.
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I’ve never been good at goodbyes. When I read Call Me by Your Name the first time, I saw animated on the page my own feelings of anticipation, rehearsing emotions in advance to prepare for their impact. In Elio, I found somebody else who couldn’t imagine facing down an ending, who, unable to imagine another tomorrow, imagined instead a million of them so as to dull the force of any single eventuality, one of which must come to pass.
I’m an overthinker. I can get hemmed in by the twin forces of fantasy and nostalgia, which has the effect at once of making everything seem possible—the future and past extending out in endless possibilities alongside me—and mucking up the experience of the present because it’s commingled with all this worry and anticipation. Forevers give me vertigo.
For months, I’ve considered what I would write about for this final column. Body Heat, which isn’t really horror, made me consider lust, deception, the stickiness of a summer heat wave. Maybe I’d revisit a favorite, Candyman or The Silence of the Lambs. I watched Watcher and thought I could say something meta about voyeurism, horror film, and this column, bringing up Linda Williams’ seminal essay, “When the Woman Looks.”
Instead, I thought I’d look the fear in the throat and give it its name. For years, No Contact, has been such a meaningful community to me. I’ve wanted to avoid saying goodbye.
I was thrilled when in October 2020 Elliot and Gauraa invited me to contribute a series of four horror film columns leading up to Halloween. After filing the final installment, I texted with some friends, asking if I should bring up staying on more permanently. With their encouragement, I did, and the editors shared they’d wanted to ask me the same. I was brought into the fold and every month discussed my favorite horror movies and the memories they evoked. I wrote about my pandemic puppy and Ginger Snaps, how in middle school The Ring convinced me my days were numbered, and monuments to memory with House of Wax.
Every month, I felt unbelievably lucky that I could interrogate my horror film curiosities for the magazine, yet it was never just about publishing my essays. No Contact provided me with a community through the pandemic, heartbreaks, and mucking into that great, ever-promising and lucrative beyond of post-MFA life. Watching the magazine grow, change, and build an audience was thrilling, and I began rooting for the editors, columnists, and contributors from our community. For years, the MFA had been something to aspire towards in my career. Now that I’d completed it, what was next?
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When I’ve imagined saying goodbye to Cinemacabre and the magazine, I’ve seen two questions I want to answer. What does this community mean to me? And what does horror film mean to me?
I’ve ruminated on the latter for years, ever since, home from school one snow day, my mom, sisters, and I watched Poltergeist 2 and, terrified, I bolted from the room and watched Aladdin, the TV series, to put an old man’s crumbling face out of my mind. My whole family likes scary movies. After the Aladdin incident, I grew up accustomed to the fear, so when I took a horror film class in college and multiple students said they’d enrolled because they wanted to overcome their aversion, I found it funny. These were obviously fake. Why get so scared?
But in our film screenings and class readings, I came to understand so much more about fear. I became obsessed with uncanny aesthetics. Reading Julia Kristeva’s essay on the abject, I felt something within me which would take years to crystallize. Having grown up Catholic and deeply closeted, I felt something horrific within me which was seductive in how it wanted to break free. Watching, studying, and celebrating a retinue of horror icons—Candyman, Megan Fox’s Jennifer, the shapeshifting creature in It Follows—I could name all the horrors I felt and provide them with space to wreak havoc and dream for a while.
Still today, I love how the genre plays with its messaging: how slasher franchises can telegraph conservative agendas but also be wildly sexual, or how iconic the bad ones can be (for a long time, I’d wanted to write this column about M3gan, but alas). Confronting the horrors, finally looking at them and giving them a name, can be a playful exercise, can yield imaginative, campy results, which intermix our fears and joys. The genre remains innovative, and it’s somewhere I’ll always return, looking for a friend who on a Saturday night wants to approach the terror together.
As for the former, I felt fraudulent in my feelings of grief for some time. After Gauraa passed away and the magazine went on pause, I was devastated for Elliot and all those who loved and cared for Gauraa. I’d never met anyone from No Contact in person and felt I didn’t have a place to grieve the loss as well.
No Contact was a source of stability through a massive question mark in my life, and it was a community I had imagined being part of for years to come. In the publishing world, magazines go away. Funding is cut. Outlets merge. Billionaires decide they’re bored of personal essays. No Contact always felt so much more personal to me, a mission of people who really gave a fuck about it. For me, it’s always been this, and I can say what an honor it’s been to explore matters truly personal and compelling to me these past few years.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that in the literary community, we do develop deep, meaningful, indelible bonds. If horror film has taught me anything, it’s not to leave the fear innominate. So instead of getting trapped somewhere in my head and wondering what all this means, I feel it’s best to pull back the covers and look what I feel in the face. To say how much all of this has meant to me, to say thank you and say goodbye.
