First published in Rue Morgue #33, May/June 2003
A common question that seems to arise every now and then is whether there is anything that we won’t print in the magazine. I imagine this question must intrigue people because they’re under the impression that we deal with all sorts of taboo subject matter and they’re probably wondering whether we, in turn, have any taboos of our own. It’s a fair enough question since everyone has their boundaries, right?
So right up front: yes, there are boundaries that we do not cross here at Rue Morgue, but I think it’s worth pointing out that those boundaries have less to do with content and more to do with context. Being a magazine that deals with mutilation, murder, cannibalism and rape as regular feature items puts us in a situation where there is precious little that we could comfortably designate “off limits.” But everyone has a limit. Here’s ours: mutilation, murder, cannibalism and rape… for real.
Ever since its premiere issue, Rue Morgue has never been interested in showcasing real life killings or murders or rapes, not because we think they’re too morbid (around here, morbid is good) but because we’ve never found these things, in and of themselves, very entertaining. Rue Morgue is about horror in the contexts of entertainment and culture, and the simplest way to describe what we mean by that is to say that we are interested in a) the art of horror and b) the way people respond to that art.
Now here’s a point: although we would never run articles on the real Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, we’ll gladly run features on, say, a line of collectible trading cards based on these very people. Or a surf band who call themselves Gein and the Grave Robbers. Why? Because putting out a line of cards or starting a band are both artistic endeavours, not criminal acts. To some, this is a fine line – some may even say there is no line – but when it comes to the business of horror, the difference between what’s real and what’s not is, literally, worlds apart.
Serial killers have always fascinated people who have a penchant for the macabre. So have cannibals and – to a lesser extent, I think – rapists (although serial killers commonly list rape among their committed atrocities). How and why people come to murder other people is a fascinating topic, not only because it is hugely dramatic (think how many times murder is used as a dramatic device, from Law and Order to Hamlet) but because it is a perfectly horrifying concept.
But horror wasn’t always about murder. Although the horror genre can be traced to the rise of the Gothic novel in the 18th century, it’s no surprise that traces of it can be found in oral narratives and Greek tragedies. Despite the lurid vestiges of its modern emphasis in exploitation, in the past, horror served different purposes: it could be didactic (in fairy tales), spiritual (in the apocalyptic literature of the Bible) or political (in Dante’s Inferno) to name a few examples. These “horrors” may seem tame now, but it’s worth noting that they instilled a profound fear in their original audiences, a fear that is comparable to modern audiences hearing about what Ed Gein did to those poor people when they had no one to save them.
The reason Ed Gein has become so fascinating for us today is partly because modern horror has become infatuated with imbuing people with a sense of pure, unadulterated fright, and to do that properly it naturally looked to the atrocities of the modern world. Even so, it’s important to point out that horror is not those atrocities, rather, it is what comes out of contemplating them.
Of course, not all modern horror is about atrocity. A good ghost story can rattle the most jaded spines without shedding a drop of blood, and demonic possession is an idea that has its long, cold talons embedded in the genre. And yet it would be dishonest of me to say that many – if not most – horror movies and stories are steeped in violence and usually of a very extreme sort. But no matter how violent it gets (see our story on Takashi Miike on page 22), it’s never, ever real.
The word “horror” is derived from Latin and literally means “to bristle with fear”. In other words, it refers to an extreme physical reaction that comes from a mixture of revulsion and fright. It never ceases to amaze me that this reaction is possible by introducing someone to an idea so spectacularly macabre, that their hair will literally stand on end. And you don’t actually need to kill anyone to do that.