The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Lovecraft’s well-known short story “The Call of Cthulhu”: (Fisher is likely known to readers through his blog K-punk, which had been running for almost two decades before his untimely death.) What Fisher’s study shares with other like-minded books is an interest in expanding our understanding of the horror genre beyond the genre itself, and he does this by focusing on one of the deepest threads in the horror genre: the limits of human beings living in a human-centric world.Īs a case study, consider the opening passage from H.P.

One book that takes up this challenge is Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, published this year. However, recent writing on the horror genre takes a different approach, eschewing the poles of either the popular or the academic for a perhaps yet-to-be-named third space.

While such books can be informative and helpful, reading them can be akin to the slightly woozy feeling one has after having gone down a combined Google/Wikipedia/YouTube rabbit-hole, emerging with bewildered eyes and terabytes of regurgitated data. Key Terms in Cultural Studies: Splatterpunk), and opaque academic monographs of Lacanian psychoanalytic semiotic readings of horror film that themselves seem to be part of some kind of academic cult.

These are rounded out by a plethora of introductory textbooks and surveys, usually aimed at film studies undergraduates (e.g. Even today, writing on genre horror often tends towards “list” books (of the type The Top 100 Italian Horror Films From 1977, Volume IV), or books that are basically print-on-demand databases ( The Encyclopedia of Asian Ghost Stories from the Beginning of Time, and Before That). These are sentiments that have preoccupied recent writing on the horror genre, much of which borrows from developments in contemporary philosophy, and is attempting to expand the confines of horror beyond the usual fixation on gore, violence, and shock tactics. Much of this has changed in the ensuing years, as a robust and diverse critical literature has emerged around the horror genre, much of which not only considers the horror genre as a reflection of society, but as an autonomous platform for posing far-reaching questions concerning the fate of the humans species, the species that has named itself.

Review of Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater, 2017)įor a long time, the horror genre was not generally considered worthy of critical, let alone philosophical, reflection it was the stuff of cheap thrills, pulp magazines, B-movies.

The weird and the eerie by mark fisher