Day Terrors: A Note on Unheimlich
Kfir and I have started reading through the submissions to Day Terrors, and I’ve noticed a number of stories that feature murder without the benefit of anything supernatural or uncanny. Mortal murderers, no matter how frightening or unusual they may be, are not in themselves chilling, supernatural, grotesque, creepy, and unheimlich. They’re just people who kill.
I’m looking for something stranger than that. Something so bizarre and discomfiting that it sends chills down the reader’s spine in the light of day. Maybe especially because it takes place in the light of day. Because, as our call for stories notes, anything can be scary at night.
The unheimlich, on the other hand, requires sight.
Allow me to wax professorial a moment.
Although heimlich can mean “homey” or “familiar,” in which case the unheimlich is the unfamiliar, Freud usefully points out in his essay “The Uncanny” that heimlich can also mean the “concealed” or “obscure,” in which case the unheimlich is the revealed. In other words, that moment we experience as being uncanny is akin to that moment in which the repressed is revealed — it is that moment in which we see that which should not be seen or we realize that which should not be realized. It is that moment in which our reality turns upside-down and we’re forced to reinterpret everything we thought we understood in light of our new knowledge. Freud comments that a sense of the unheimlich is “often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on.”
How does this relate to horror? Think of the typical, everyday horror story. Doesn’t it almost always revolve around that-which-should-not-be-revealed? The ancient tomb that shouldn’t be opened? The old house that shouldn’t be entered? The forbidden tome that shouldn’t be read? The evil rite that shouldn’t be performed? The eldritch artefact that shouldn’t be touched? The mysterious noise that shouldn’t be investigated? The seductive stranger who shouldn’t be approached? We see this same theme drawn out even more clearly in psychological horror (naturally enough) in terms of the dark family secret that shouldn’t be spoken or the childhood buried memory that shouldn’t be recalled….
Absit nomen, absit omen. If you don’t use its name, it won’t appear. Because to name, to know, to realize, to look, is to open yourself to danger. If you don’t see the monster, it can’t hurt you. Right? Isn’t that why we close our eyes during the scary parts of the movie or pull our covers over our head when we hear strange noises in the dead of night? Because even though those noises might mean a monster is out there, we’re safe from it if we curl up and hide and don’t look out. At least, we’re safe up until that final, dreadful moment in which we finally peek, and there it is, right in front of our eyes —
— at which point our world changes forever.
Horror is a single story told and over and over: something that should remain concealed becomes revealed.
Horror is also a tragedy — it is usually the protagonist’s own character flaw (curiosity, pride, stupidity, stubbornness) that leads to the horrific revelation and his or her consequent downfall, whether s/he is cursed, damned, transformed, driven insane, or slaughtered outright. Which isn’t to say that some protagonists don’t survive horror stories, of course; however, when they do, they are left scarred by their experience. When Oedipus’s blindness to the gods’ warnings ends and he sees the terrible truth at last, he has no recourse but to rip out his own eyes in horror and remorse, even though he can never rip the knowledge of what he’s done out of his head. Similarly, the survivors of a horror story may want to forget what they’ve seen or learned … but they can’t, not even if they rip out their own eyes.
Unless they manage to safely repress the knowledge deep down in their subconscious. But that will just start the horror cycle all over again, won’t it? Monsters never stay buried.
As I said above, sight — or knowledge, if you prefer — is the key to the unheimlich. Because that sensation of unheimlich is what you feel in the split second in which you see the impossible, comprehend the unthinkable, and nothing in your life will ever be the same again.
Which is why horror is so much scarier during the day. During the day you can’t write off what you’re seeing as a nightmare or a trick of the shadows. No, it’s right there in front of you, maybe in front of everybody — something that shouldn’t be, but is.
That’s the kind of thing we’re looking for in Day Terrors. The horrible, the unheimlich, revealed in broad daylight. However, we also want it to be linked to something beyond the everyday, mundane boundaries of this world; something paranormal, supernatural, or magical. Classic horror, slipstream, magical realism, bizarro … in-your-face monster mayhem or eerily subtle patterns of dissonance … we welcome any type of story, as long as it describes the borders of reality breaking down in the relentless light of day. And we do mean reality — stories in which the breakdown is really a hallucination, artificial reality, dream, symptom of madness, or anything else of that sort don’t interest us. We want to read stories that are bolder than that.
So … c’mon. Email us your submissions and do your best to make us see the world in a chilling new light!
References:
Sigmund Freud: The Uncanny