Feeding the Monster: Why horror has a hold on us? Anna Bogutskaya (Faber & Faber, 2024), £12.99, ISBN: 9780571385775
In her 2024 book, Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya begins her foray into contemporary horror by asking, like a genre therapist, ‘How do these films make us feel?’ (p. 17). What unfolds in the following pages is an emotional take on post-2014 horror cinema that is organised around different psychological states or feelings that the genre typically attempts to engage: fear, hunger, anxiety, pain and power. Though for Bogutskaya, the enjoyment of horror has always been tied up with another affect, shame. Bristling at the question frequently levied at horror fans – ‘what’s wrong with you?’ (p.7) – she unpicks the emotional resonances of the genre’s recent offerings arguing that, ‘[h]orror, more than any other, is a genre of empathy’ (p. 10).
Written in a conversational and pleasingly meandering style, Feeding the Monster covers an impressive range of recent films, offering a broad and sensitive picture of the genre from 2014-2024. This period’s horror, Bogutskaya explains, is characterised by a shift away from the endless franchise sequels and remakes that typified the genre in the 2000s. Dominated by directors such as Mike Flanagan, Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele and Julia Ducournau, the second two decades of the twentieth century have seen horror find a mainstream cultural prominence that has been dubbed ‘elevated horror’ or ‘post-horror’.[1] Though much-maligned by genre enthusiasts, these terms point to horror’s increased introspection in the 2010s and 2020s. Instead of finding ever more inventive ways of killing and torturing on screen, recent horror focusses on family dynamics, generational angst, and personal pain, in doing so reflecting and contributing to the wide-scale social and cultural fixation on the concept of trauma.
Perhaps then, this is the answer as to why horror has found such a foothold in recent times. According to Bogutskaya, as the genre of empathy, horror is the best medium for the exploration of our inner worlds. Thus, it appeals to a generation saturated in the language of therapy and diagnosis.[2] One of the most interesting ideas in the book is the suggestion that there are particular resonances between trauma and nostalgia, another key term and dominating aesthetic of twenty-first century culture. While, at first, the two concepts seem somewhat antithetical, both imply a pathological fixation on the past. The idea that the inclination to revisit the past as a form of comfort might be tied up with recurring historical pain provides fertile ground for reading the interplay between psychologization, aesthetics and politics in the contemporary.
Elsewhere Bogutskaya offers insight into how the genre developed over the decade. In her final chapter, ‘Power’, she expands on the subject of monstrosity, after asserting earlier that ‘Trauma is the maker of monsters’ (p. 57). In the present, she tells us, monsters are everyday people rather than supernatural creatures, fear comes from the world we inhabit and our relationships with those around us rather than being an external threatening force. While this has been true of much of horror media since the 1960s,[3] as Feeding the Monster points out, the everyday monsters of the present are more likely to be born from power than personal trauma. Indeed, with reference to Vecna from Netflix’s wildly popular series Stranger Things (2022-2025), Bogutskaya argues that the, now somewhat predictable, revelation of past trauma defangs the monsters of contemporary horror. Instead, the source of terror is now more likely to be class and power dynamics. Citing one of the defining horror movies of the period, Peele’s Get Out (2017), she argues that those who cling to power are the most frightening monsters of our time (p. 212).
In her conclusion, Bogutskaya heaps scorn on the Science of Scare project (2020-) which aims to determine the scariest film of all time by measuring viewers’ heartrates. This attempt to quantify fear is in stark contrast to her own sensitivity to the ways in which broadscale cultural change as well as individual experience shape what frightens us. Though there are some tensions between Bogutskaya’s own emotionally inflected approach to genre and her suggestion that the language of therapy has dampened horror, her focus was always on the way both personal and collective feelings are channelled in the genre, something she remains true to throughout. She ends by saying that her main aim throughout the book has been to ‘bully’ her reader into ‘thinking about horror more openly’ and ‘more feelingly’ (p. 220). In this, she delivers on the therapized language of her opening question, ‘how does horror make us feel?’ Instead of reaching for specific answers or readings of films, Feeding the Monster provides a site for the exploration of contemporary horror that leaves space for personal discovery and interpretation. Filled with sincere reflection and insightful comments on the state of moviemaking in the present, Feeding the Monster provides a compelling portrait of a decade’s worth of horror. At the same time, it serves as a fascinating example of how far psychologised ideas have penetrated both the genre and its wider reception.
[1] Steve Rose, ‘How Post-Horror Movies Are Taking over Cinema’, The Guardian, 6 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/06/post-horror-films-scary-movies-ghost-story-it-comes-at-night>.
[2] Lexi Pandell, ‘How Trauma Became the Word of the Decade’, Vox, 25 January 2022 <https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22876522/trauma-covid-word-origin-mental-health>.
[3] Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Basil Blackwell, 1989).