On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.
— Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection
I am drawn to horror not because I lack fear in my daily life. The sheer ignorance or privilege to live in these times and not feel scared is unimaginable. But when you are a woman who loves horror, people—primarily those who do not watch horror— feel compelled to ask you why. As Kier-La Janisse explains in the foreword of her 2012 book House of Psychotic Women, there are easy answers one can give—catharsis, empowerment—but are these my god-honest truth? I commiserate with Janisse when she writes, “Less easy to explain is the fact that I gravitate toward films that devastate and unravel me completely—a good horror film will more often make me cry than make me shudder.”[01]
Horror alone speaks to feelings and fears that exist beyond reason but aren’t unreal. Only a good horror can offer the particular brand of devastation I desire: one that is inflected with the knowledge that the source is artificial, which, rather than disallowing devastation, allows me to get closer to the edge than I ever would in real life, to touch the wound without risk of a scar. Let me attempt to explain through an example.
In Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), Anna (played by a haunted Isabelle Adjani) stumbles through a Berlin subway station, dark hair hanging loose around a manic face, eyes bulging, laughing and panting, twirling and falling against the tiled walls before her laughter turns to howling, her dizzy spinning turns to violently flinging her head and shoulders against the walls, her woven shopping bag eventually hitting the concrete with force, exploding eggs and milk to drip down the walls, down her violet dress. She performs as though some demon is choreographing her movements, pushing her round like a ragged marionette. She falls to the floor, rolls in the milk, her dress turned dark and sopping. She sits up on her knees, fists clasping at her crotch, pale and groaning as though trying to expel something, and she does; dark blood and something white and viscous like semen leaks from her mouth and vagina, pooling on the wet concrete as her eyes turn heavenwards and she screams.
Even in context, it is hard to say what is happening in this scene. Anna may be giving birth, miscarrying, possessed, sick. Her mania feels like the worst-case scenario, a person come completely unravelled. Not only has she lost control of herself, but her body has come undone, is leaking blood and goo, liquids both plausible and perverted. She has become abject, an unpredictable body with no respect for borders or rationality, no clarity as to whether her pain and ooze constitute birth, death or both. Where else but in the horror genre do we encounter such depictions of despair and excess? Where else do we come so close to the edges of humanity, or grapple with such dire ambiguity?
She who coined the term herself, semiotician Julia Kristeva, describes the way the abject “draws [her] to a place where meaning collapses.”[02] Like Rosemary peering into the crib, Helen entering the Candyman’s lair, Sara searching the catacombs below Markos Dance Academy, I too am drawn to this place. And there are artists who are drawn there, too; women, non-binary and queer artists especially, those who understand the fluidity of the line between monster and mother, victim and vengeance, fear and fantasy.
From the other side is an exhibition of twenty such artists from Australia and abroad, brought together by curators Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark. Informed by the writings of Kristeva, Janisse and feminist film theorist Barbara Creed, From the other side swirls around the fear of the monstrous-feminine, a term devised by Creed to express the specific ways in which the feminine is cast as monstrous. She writes:
The reasons why the monstrous-feminine horrifies her audience are quite different from the reasons why a male monster horrifies his audience … As with other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality. The phrase ‘monstrous-feminine’ emphasises the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity.[03]
Creed is concerned not merely with debunking the notion that there have been no great female monsters (although her book achieves this), but with describing the aesthetics of female monstrosity, such as her desirability, her fecundity, how she can fold objects and parts of you into her body, how she leaks fluids that act as visual signifiers of her abjection, that suggest an uncontrollable body with no respect for borders or rationality.[04] Artworks included in From the other side employ and question these aesthetics, as well as other horror tropes, not only to complexify our understanding of witches, possessed bodies and castrators, but to have us question what really makes a monster.
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Projected at a large scale, Tracey Moffatt’s A Haunting (2021–23) serves as an unnerving backdrop to the wider exhibition. A Haunting is a work that draws us to a specific place: an abandoned farmhouse on the Castlereagh Highway, just outside Armatree, New South Wales, within Wailwan Country. Since late 2021, every night between 6pm and 6am, the house glows red, hinting at some malevolence lurking within its walls. I think of Carrie’s mother, surrounded by candles; of floorboards sucking up blood; of non-human footsteps in baby powder. While the work is displayed as a video in From the other side, A Haunting is also a site-specific installation intended to be viewed alone, at night, from the side of a rural highway.[05] Under such circumstances, I can imagine feeling more frightened of what might be lurking in the shadows than whatever is happening inside the house—but were it not for the house emanating its strange glow, why would a person come here? Moffatt explains that “the 1920s-built house sits on confiscated lands of the Wailwan peoples and other nearby language groups and radiates as if like a dark bloody history that speaks of Colonial settlement and of Indigenous skirmishes with pastoralists.”[06] Were it not for the red glow, drawing us like moths to a flame, there would be no there there. But we are drawn, and as our eyes adjust to the dark, we might remember that all colonised land could be haunted by those who have good reason to seek revenge.
Like Moffatt’s, Adelaide-based artist Julia Robinson’s work speaks to the horror that so often underpins the so-called pastoral idyll. Taking the scythe and the humble smock—both objects associated with agricultural serfdom; or, in contemporary times, a return to ‘simple living’—as her subjects, Robinson’s sculptural works speak to the particular tension between the bucolic and sinister that is a hallmark of the folk horror subgenre. In Tatterdemalion (2022), a scythe takes the place of a body, its blade protruding from the sleeve of an intricately constructed, undyed linen smock with coloured flowers embroidered around the skirt. In stark contrast to the prettiness of the garment, the scythe appears brutal and claw-like, a threat to the fabric draped across it, its precise placement almost vulgar in the way it seems to pry the garment open, emphasising the lack of a body within. Meanwhile, The Pledge (2021–22) employs the handles of two scythes but no blades; instead, the yellow-gold dress has already been slashed neatly in two and attached to the curved wooden forms, which have been hung symmetrically to form a shape that recalls antlers. There is something unsettling in how deliberate this formation is, as though the arrangement holds some greater significance that we viewers are not privy to, like the hare that is ritualistically released during Sunday service in The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973), or the bright yellow pyramid that sits, seemingly unused, at the edge of the village in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).
Moffatt’s and Robinson’s works remind me that fear does not face the monster. Fear comes from the suggestion of the monster, the knowledge that something evil exists and could show itself at any moment. We dread it even as we long for it. For some, this tension creates something like pleasure. For others, the sensation is too much to bear.
Often, when the monster does appear, it isn’t what we thought. Cybele Cox’s life-size ceramic The Hag (2023) is red like blood and clay, with wide hips and pendulous breasts. She is crouched on hands and knees, a snake wrapped around one muscular arm that she holds up to her face, upon which there is a look of wide-eyed wonder. In a sense, she is what one might picture when the word hag is uttered: a naked woman, cursed red, with breasts that have clearly nourished life in their time but now hang low and useless, communing with a snake; Eve’s downfall. Yet there is nothing frightening nor abject about Cox’s hag, perhaps because she is so clearly cast from clay, her flesh hard and cold, her orifices sealed. Or perhaps it is the definition of her muscles, her obvious strength and the openness of her expression. Cox’s hag reminds me of the monsters we come face to face with only to learn they aren’t monsters at all, or if they are, it’s only because something made them that way. Can I imagine this hag taking a child, spiriting them away into the forest? Perhaps, but I’d wonder if she might have a good reason.
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In a recent essay for Guernica, author Alexander Chee contemplates how writers who want to portray evil often forget about horror as a tool they might use to do so. Those who aren’t drawn to the place often forget the place exists at all. But horror is a tool writers, artists, filmmakers and viewers can use to think about evil, to give form to something that we are increasingly encouraged to forget exists in the real world, in ourselves, even though it is enacted every day. There is so much evil to be written about, to make art and films about, and so many ways to do it, but, as Chee signals, “Horror is here to say, ‘Oh hey, the monster’, when no one else seems prepared to say ‘monster’. Horror becomes the truth-teller.”[07] Perhaps this is because horror occupies such a low rung on the cultural ladder. As such an apparently unserious genre, and one that operates so much at the level of affect (depicting and provoking so-called ‘excessive’ bodily responses), horror is uniquely placed to blend that which is rational and ‘real’ with that which is nightmarish and depraved. Like a red glow glimpsed from the highway at night, good horror may draw you to a place where monsters walk among us. And in this place, at the edge of non-existence and hallucination, you may encounter a reality that feels more true than the one you left, even if to acknowledge this might annihilate you completely.
Header image: Tracey Moffatt, A Haunting (still), 2021–23, single-channel video, 01 minute 37 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
[01] Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (Surrey: FAB Press Ltd, 2012), 17–18.
[02] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,1980), 2.
[03] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.
[04] Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4, quoted in The Monstrous-Feminine, 9.
[05] Moffatt’s artist statement reads: “A Haunting is an art installation to be visited alone at night … from a near distance, from the property fence beside the highway.”
[06] Moffatt’s artist statement
[07] Alexander Chee, ‘When Horror Is the Truth-teller,’ Guernica, 2 October 2023.
