The horror

King Lear? Fine. A haunted car? Hard no.

I’m not naming any names, but I’m being peer-pressured by several people to watch Widow’s Bay, a new Apple TV show about a New England town afflicted by a centuries-old curse. One of them said that she doesn’t love horror but made an exception for Widow’s Bay and has no regrets. Another told me that she is going to insist (insist was the actual word she used) that I watch it. Both of them assured me that although it’s a little scary, it’s so hilarious and well-written and well-acted that I’ll be too busy laughing to notice the scary parts. Y’all, I am a delicate flower who is easily spooked but I don’t want to miss a cultural moment and I also don’t want to have nightmares so what am I supposed to do???

ME [minding own business] PEOPLE WHO LIKE SCARY SHOWS: Come check it out, it’s so cool inside! Photo by Yaroslav Zotov on Unsplash

Many years ago, a high school boyfriend handed me his copy of Stephen King’s Christine and said, “Read this, it’s really good.” I still shudder when I think about the 1958 Plymouth Fury parking itself (sorry, herself) in front of Leigh’s house. The pure menace of it. The horror of a faceless, nameless evil that wants you dead. (The high school boyfriend and I broke up shortly after that because I’m sorry, what kind of psychopath gives you a book like that with no warning?)

I am not a fan of the horror genre, whether on the page or on the screen. I am what you might call horror-adjacent, in that I am fascinated by horror but prefer to experience it secondhand, like Alison Leiby on the podcast Ruined!. Every week, Alison and her friend Halle Kiefer unpack a different scary movie, complete with the twist and comprehensive commentary. Halle, who is all in on the horror genre and whose job it is to recount the plots to Alison, watches the movie under discussion, sometimes multiple times. Alison watches the trailer, probably through her fingers, because like me, she is horror-adjacent. She wants to know every single thing that happens without actually watching, and Halle fills her in on every beat of the plot, frequently deploying two of my favorite phrases: “Unfortunately, Alison…” and “You hate to see it.” Five out of five stars, much better than reading Wikipedia entries.

Thanks to Ruined! as well as to my friend Jeff, who writes about how and why horror movies speak to him, I’m fairly caught up on major cultural moments in horror, going all the way back to Psycho and The Thing. I love that horror films engage fearlessly with the darkest, most taboo topics—fear of pregnancy, unresolved grief, suppressed trauma, suppressed sexuality, forbidden want, the mutability of the human body—and I can geek out about that all day. But put me in front of a screen where there’s lurking menace or someone is in peril and I am OUT. I don’t care how cinematically brilliant it is. I don’t care how good the dialogue is. Girl, bye.

It’s not like I can’t handle gore. I raised three children, one of whom rode his bike full-tilt into a bike barrier EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS A SIGN RIGHT THERE THAT SAID WALK YOUR BIKE and put his upper teeth through his lower lip. I’m a huge fan of ER (or was, until Anthony Edwards’ character was beaten to within an inch of his life in a hospital bathroom by a faceless assailant, after which I quit the show cold turkey). David and I love The Pitt. But I absolutely cannot with torture, kidnapping, or relentless menace—something, or someone, that keeps coming, something you can’t understand, or reason with, or outrun, or outwit.

The scariest dream I ever had* was when I was pregnant with the same child who put his upper teeth through his lower lip in the pedestrian underpass near our house. David and I were staying with my parents, and our cat Gaby was in our room because my father, who is not a friend of animals and also allergic to cats, didn’t want Gaby traipsing around the house unsupervised. Gaby did not enjoy being confined to a small bedroom, and I did not enjoy being six months pregnant, so between the agitated cat and my unwieldy belly, I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. When I finally did, I dreamt that David and I were in the same room, but instead of Gaby, there was an enormous black snake with Gaby’s face writhing slowly by our door. In the dream, there was a phone on the bedside table and I grabbed it and dialed 911 but the call went to my mother, who somehow knew I was calling 911 and asked me why, and I told her that I must have dialed 911 by accident, ha ha, and then I hung up and tried again, and once again, there was my mother asking if anything was wrong, and I said, nope, nothing at all, and all the while, the snake continued its muscular undulations by the door and there was no way to get out. (David was asleep during all this, by the way, both in the dream and in real life, and I’m still a little bit mad about that.)

My point is, I can do dark. I can do death and tension and suspense. I watched Bad Sisters and Deadloch and loved them both. I’ll read Antigone and The Oresteia and Macbeth and King Lear and Frankenstein all day. What I can’t do is the violation of ordinary reality, because human beings may be ridiculous, selfish, and frequently destructive, but they’re understandable. A snake with a cat’s face writhing by the bedroom door of a woman pregnant with her first child is a symbolic gold mine but it’s also really fucking scary and I hope with all my heart never to watch that movie again.

A haunted car falls into the “really fucking scary” category. So does a malevolent curse. I think what bothers me most is when something (or someone) irrational and menacing invades ordinary reality and refuses to obey the rules. The familiar becomes strange and the world becomes fundamentally unreliable and I do not like that. I want to know how people make sense of the lives they’ve actually lived—no matter how dire, or dark, the circumstances. I want to know how they got themselves into whatever mess they’re in. I’m far less interested in exploring a world that might be stranger and more threatening than I thought. I mean, we have doomscrolling for that.

I don’t mind dark stories, is what I think I’m trying to say. But I want the darkness to originate within human beings. I do not want the fabric of reality to unravel. Which is why King Lear is fine, but a parked Plymouth Fury still haunts me. King Lear invites understanding. The Fury just sits there, waiting.

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*This dream appears in my newly released second book, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip. This link goes to Nan Tepper’s Amazon store, and purchasing the book through the link helps both me and Nan. Don’t know who Nan is? Only one of the funniest, most generous human beings in Substacklandia and the founder an online feminist storytelling community called Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! Nan, incidentally, will be hosting the June slam this Saturday and you should totally go.

Back to my question: should I give Widow’s Bay a try?

The poll does not allow for clarifying comments but I would love to hear the reasons for your response. Also, if you want to tell me about books and movies that scared the crap out of you, please do, but no video, I beg you.