Closing Thoughts

Horror is a huge industry and it’s growing by the day. From horror movies to horror music videos and performers to horror video games, horror is making inroads in contemporary popular culture at a steady rate. Folklore has long been a home for horror-filled stories, particularly those that are meant as cautionary tales. I grew up listening to the stories of La Llorona and the Devil at the Dance but rather than warning me off of going out by myself at night, these stories actually intrigued me. By whose definitions of acceptable behavior and thought was I expected to conduct and even constrain myself? That is what is interesting about horror—how horror is actually a teaching mechanism, a tool to instruct us on how we should act, think, and feel, frequently depending on multiple intersections like race, class, sex, and gender. Now such cautionary tales are making their presence known on the Internet. With fan-created sites and styles of writing like CreepyPasta and The SCP Foundation, people are gleefully crafting and sharing their horror-inspired stories, furthering the reach of expected behaviors.

We live in an age of surveillance, with ever increasing traffic cameras to social media sites “helpfully” tracking our every move. Americans are also growing more afraid of death, disease, and aging—things that are completely natural and part of being human. We spend billions of dollars on products designed to hide the truth of who we are and the reality of our age. This form of commodified and commercialized madness is horrific in itself but the fact that many of us willingly buy into the larger narrative of somebody else’s (big business, the government, friends, family, whatever) definition and classification of who we are and should be suggests its own form of disconnect. At the very least, yet incredibly problematic, we are becoming disconnected from ourselves, each other, and what it means to be human.

Thus, looking at the horrific, whether it’s self-induced bodily scarring or images of madness or, yes, stories of monsters that hover right outside our comfort zones or beneath our beds, waiting for their opportunity to gobble us up, is necessary. If we wish to maintain some kind of autonomy and some kind of connection with each other, we cannot flinch from the horrible, from the ugly, from horror. Horror is, after all, a part of daily life.

On the next page, I have posted the two videos, in the order I’ve written about them.

The Rhetoric of Rammstein by Lisette Blanco-Cerda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.