At the end of February, my favorite critic of horror cinema, Willow Catelyn Maclay, wrote a piece for her Patreon titled “The Aesthetic of Loneliness in Horror”. It’s subscribers-only, so I won’t quote much from it here, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first read it, and want to sketch out some ideas Maclay’s post inspired.
(I don’t make it a practice to link to paywalled writing here, but if I were to encourage you to support any one other Patreon, it would be Maclay’s, at least if the sorts of things she writes about are of any interest to you.)
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“‘It makes me sad,’ she says. ‘I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already.”
—Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
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In a review of my novella Changes in the Landfor the April issue of Locus, Ian Mond writes thoughtfully about a certain pattern of characters in my work, a pattern I never thought about in these terms, but which feels valid:
When I reviewed The Last Vanishing Man, I remarked that Cheney’s protagonists, predominantly gay men, often live a solitary existence – either by choice or an inability to connect with others. This recurring motif is a recognition that centuries of prejudice and, more recently, the trauma of the AIDS crisis (wilfully ignored by those in power) weren’t washed away by the growing visibility and acceptance of gay people. We see this with Steven Baird and Valeria Adams [in the novella], queer characters who find love but now live alone for reasons bound by prejudice, violence, and the ancient force at the centre of this novella. That joint sense of isolation undergirds the narrative.
This astute insight fascinates me because it points to something I of course know is present in the writing, but not something that I ever consciously thought of exploring on its own. If you asked me before I read this review why the characters of Valeria and Steven in Changes in the Land are single and lonely, I would have said it was because I didn’t know how to make the plot work otherwise. Their status was a byproduct of the structure I needed for the other things I was paying attention to in the story. Once that was established, then I began to explore the reasons for their solitude and to build up those elements of their personalities.
With many of the stories in The Last Vanishing Man, it was more deliberate. And there I had a specific influence: a 2017 essay by Michael Hobbes in Huffington Post titled “Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness”. Some of the stories had been written before I read that piece, but it influenced pretty much everything that came after.
Hobbes’s essay was something that gay men I knew sent to each other repeatedly, saying how hard it hit, how much it matched their (our) own experience. At least half the people I discussed it with were partnered at the time, some married. It didn’t matter, we all see and know at least some of the things Hobbes points out, whether we talk about them or not: the high rates of substance abuse, the chronic health issues, the perpetual body-image problems, the persistent depression, the suicides. It’s not something that feels like an epidemic because it never feels like it wasn’t there; it’s just life. That’s something especially we don’t want to talk about too loudly because there’s a political danger to it. After all, didn’t the homophobic adults tell us if we “went queer” we’d be condemning ourselves to a life of misery and loneliness?
The problems and experiences Hobbes points to in his essay are some of the primary reasons I write horror stories. Willow Maclay writes of horror films and loneliness: “what makes the theme timeless is the fear that loneliness is inevitable.” Horror is so often about isolation, separation, a sense of outsider-ness, as well as a fear of the erosion, contamination, or outright destruction of community.
Carol Clover’s ever-famous idea of the final girl in slasher movies is an image of community destroyed.
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Its hospitability to loneliness may be part of why horror feels like such a deeply queer genre, even at its most conservative and reactionary. (And gawd knows horror can tend toward the conservative and reactionary!) Are any stories as easy to détourn into queerness as horror stories? Loneliness and isolation are often entwined with trauma — caused by trauma, producing trauma — and horror is the genre of trauma. (I am wary of how over-used the concept of trauma is, how emptied of meaning it has become, how susceptible it is to hucksters and narcissists … but can’t deny that it is apt here.)
I recently failed to write a review for an academic journal of the book Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator by Heather O. Petrocelli (U. Wales Press, 2023), which is based on a survey of thousands of queer viewers of horror film from around the world. It’s a book that would have made an excellent journal article. I failed to write the review mostly for reasons of time and needing to cut some deadlines out of my life, but also because I realized that I have significant methodological, ideological, and aesthetic differences with the author that I could not explore at necessary depth in a review, so it would feel like a hit piece, which I don’t want to write.
What is valuable in Queer for Fear is the survey. (Though it’s frustrating how relatively little of the data is presented in the book overall. It’s there, certainly, but not much more than you’d get in an article.) The survey shows well that women and queer people are significant audiences for horror, something that has in the past sometimes been lost in condemnations of horror’s (perceived and actual) misogynistic and homophobic tendencies. The survey is useful, too, in showing how active the spectator of horror is. Too much film criticism has been based on the idea of a passive spectator receiving and uncritically absorbing films’ ideological content — with that content defined by what the film critic notices; it’s a handy move by which the critic asserts their own active stance while simultaneously constructing a disempowered audience.
One survey respondent said:
As queer viewers, I believe we identify more intimately with both victim and monster. In our lives we are so frequently victims, we have to be constantly vigilant, and a victim character who overcomes their monsters is intense and empowering. But we’re also characterised as monsters, and we feel their anger and loneliness too. Set against a cast of our oppressors, their slaughtering can be cathartic and gleeful too. (132)
Petrocelli likes this response because it supports her idea of queer supremacy (“we identify more intimately with both victim and monster” — as opposed to straight viewers whom the respondent interprets as monolithically unvictimized and unmonstrous), but I am more interested in the idea of identifying with the loneliness of monsters. (Okay, one more critique: Petrocelli likes this response because it also fits with her ideas of who gets to identify with monsters. The respondent’s idea is not evidence, it is just generalized speculation based on an idea of queer superiority. Because Petrocelli did not survey non-queer viewers, she has no data on how they see their own viewership and thus has no qualitative evidence for the popularity of monsters like Jason, Freddy, Michael Meyers, etc. with hetero male audiences. Petrocelli’s implied position is that queer viewers are better viewers of horror than nonqueer viewers, that horror is — she says directly — a queer genre, and she seems offended by the presence of nonqueer viewers. Even though horror has been perhaps the most consistently popular film genre among all audiences for more than a century now.)
Lonely monsters. Think of James Whale’s most famous films: Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man. Whale lived as open a gay life as was possible at the time. The monsters in the Frankenstein movies yearn for connection with humans, yearn to be understood, rage against the repulsion and disgust that greets them. The scene of the monster with the little girl in the first Frankenstein film could have been staged in such a way that it was either hilarious or completely horrifying, but Whale chose something else, making it indelible and powerful (so much so that it was censored): the monster wants to love, wants to share compassion, but does not know how, and his lack of knowledge leads to destruction. We, the viewers, are put in the position of understanding the monster’s yearning and being shocked by the result. These are the lonely feelings of the outsider: aching for love, seeking it out, and ending up with ruin.
Or consider The Invisible Man, one of my favorites of the Universal monster movies, a truly bleak vision of an aloneness that can only be cured by death. The invisible man is rewarded with the joy of extraordinary power, but he is so isolated from society that his joy soon rots into bitterness and pain.
With Whale’s Invisible Man, I can’t help but think of Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case” (a classic of queer tragedy). There, the queer-coded Paul builds a world for himself, a world he can live in and find joy in, a world of beauty. But it can only be a stolen fantasy in a real world where his pleasures are forbidden and punished. Like the invisible man, Paul has no way to find his way back into accepting society and community, and so his death is the only possible path. Without community, there is only extinction.
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The saddest song I know is The Mountain Goats’ “Deuteronomy 2:10”, told from the point of view of three animals who are the last of their soon-to-be-extinct species (the Tasmanian wolf, dodo, and golden toad). Each of the three verses ends with the words, “…and there’ll be no more after me.” I don’t know if I’ve ever made it through the whole song without collapsing into tears.
It’s also the loneliest song I know. Have more devastating lines than these ever been sung?
I’m all alone here as I try my tiny song
Claim my place beneath the sky but I won’t be here for long
I sang all night — the moon shone on me through the trees
No brothers left and there’ll be no more after me
In its own way, it’s a horror story, but the horror is done, over, complete. The process of extinction was the horror. Now all that’s left to do is mourn.
Extinction of any type produces a loneliness that mourns for the community and companionship that once existed, but now is no more.
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Films I’ve taken to calling works of “submerged horror”, and have identified as particularly appealing to queer filmmakers and audiences, are as often about solitude, isolation, and loneliness as they are about queerness — which is to say, they are often about both. Willow Maclay mentions one of them in her piece on the aesthetics of loneliness, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a film I cherish. But think of the others as well: Enys Men, Skinamarink, The Outwaters — these are stories suffused with sadness, loss, absence, yearning, abandonment. In each of them some of their creepiest, most unsettling effects derive from how they evoke isolation.
But here is something important to think about: Because those movies evoke isolation, they also conjure a deep desire for connection and community. For me, that is what matters most in such stories.
Horror stories are often about the fragility and importance of community and connection. No other genre is as structurally devoted to concepts of interbeing. This may be one reason why we are seeing such a desire for horror stories (or horror-adjacent stories) in recent years. It feels like the world’s communities are falling apart, that our connections to each other and to the natural world are snapping like frayed strings. Horror stories don’t simply depict the destruction of communities and connections, they remind us of what we hope for, of what we need to feel healthy and whole.
Recently, I read Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener” (the title story of his 1907 second collection), a haunted room story that gains most of its considerable effect from how it evokes a sense of isolation even amdist the rush and din of a big city. (As anyone who has lived in them knows, big cities can be profoundly isolatiing places. I’ve never felt more loneliness than I did my first term of college in Manhattan.) The last lines of “The Listener” are silly in their attempt at a gotcha effect, like bad O. Henry, but everything up to the end is quite effective in its careful unmooring of our sense of reality. (Blackwood was a master of this — the title story of his first collection, “The Empty House”, is marvelously creepy, a real model of a haunted house story. If it is not now quite so powerful as it probably was when first published, it’s only because its premise has become highly familiar through countless imitations and reiterations.) Blackwood’s masterpiece, “The Willows”, is complex in its evocation of solitude and its portrayal of companionship. (The first sentence begins: “After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation…”) Blackwood’s sexuality is unknown and unknowable in any meaningful way, given how much he guarded his privacy and how much documentation of his life has been lost, so it would be inaccurate to say that he was (or wasn’t) homosexual in his desires or behavior, but I see no reason not to say that there is a persistent strain of queerness in his work, a strain of queerness that often interweaves with his mystical approach to nature.
These sorts of stories that portray isolation and loneliness do not simply invoke negative feelings — they also summon from us a hunger for connection, companionship, and community. In this way, they open the possibility of the sublime. We are unsettled, terrified, even disgusted by the kinds of isolation and loneliness these stories portray, but the best of them do not leave us with only those feelings. Those feelings are necessary steps toward more expansive feelings, feelings that bring us out of the solipsistic loneliness of our selves.
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The profoundly strange Belgian film Calvaire (2004) links desire — or, mostly, lust — to art, loneliness, and violence. It suggests the double-edged power of art to create a sense of connection, but also, simultaneously, to entrance and delude. Superficially, the movie is something like Stephen King’s Misery as reimagined by the Dardenne brothers. More meaningfully, it is a painful and sometimes repulsive depiction of loneliness as a curse.
The film begins with the lead character, Marc Stevens (played by Laurent Lucas), on stage at a small community center. He’s a singer who travels around performing a glorified karaoke act. Right away, we see that his music charms and beguiles women who grow possessed with a fierce desire for him. He flees this, and ends up stuck in a remote forest, then boarding at a run-down inn outside a village the innkeeper warns him to keep away from. Of course, he doesn’t keep away. He has, he discovers, entered a world of men without women. (Where are the women? It’s never explained. They are spoken of as having left. Watching what the men do, it’s not a big surprise that they would flee!) Marc — at least partly because of his singing — becomes a placeholder for women. And so he is deceived and tortured.
Having barely escaped alive, Marc is chased through the woods by one remaining villager, a man consumed with both violent anger and an ultimately pathetic desire to know he has been loved. The film ends powerfully with Marc witnessing this while he and the doomed man are trapped out in the wilderness. It isn’t quite a moment of grace, but it is … something. The wilderness remains indifferent.
Aside from Marc, who seems generally well-balanced and innocent (if a bit naive), the men in Calvaire are both ridiculous and terrifying. The women in the beginning of the film who debase themselves for Marc are painfully deranged by loneliness and desperation, and the juxtaposition of their response to Marc with the innkeeper and then villagers’ responses to Marc suggests something about the ways that isolation ruins us all, regardless of whether we deserve punishment or not. But it’s not just isolation — it’s also desire. Marc’s singing inspires a sense of connection, but the sense of connection is not persistent. It lasts only the length of a song. And it is not deeply felt or meaningful for the singer, but rather simply a performance, a talent. Having had a taste (however illusive) of connection, people ache for more. Yet they live without any community that can provide such connection. Torture and ruin ensue.
“You did love me, didn’t you?” a doomed character asks at the end of Calvaire. Marc whispers out a few words, a final performance. The film cuts to flowing shots of the snowy, foggy forest and wilderness in morning light. A violin tune melds with the sound creaking trees and growing wind, a sound almost apocalyptic, but the music continues. We could be floating down the Danube in “The Willows”.
Is Marc alone in the woods now? Has he been saved from the lusts of humanity? Is he dead? We do not know. The wind continues to blow, the music to play, leaving us all alone.
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Aloneness and loneliness are different. Loneliness results from aloneness plus a sense of disconnection, often perceived as a disconnection from other people, but perhaps more metaphysically a disconnection from the web of the universe, a feeling of negative emptiness, of abandonment in a void.
The mountain hermit may be alone, may have long been alone, but may not feel lonely because of the connection to the mountain, the landscape, the animals, the sky, the rhythms of the seasons… Here’s a Red Pine translation of a Stonehouse poem:
My hut isn’t quite ten feet across
surrounded by pines bamboo and mountains
an old monk hardly has room for himself
much less for a visiting cloud
Loneliness insists that aloneness must be felt as lack and absence. This is the power of the aesthetic of loneliness in horror: it asks us to answer such questions as, “What is absent?” and “What would we want present?”
(A common source of fright in horror is a presence. It’s why haunted house stories are scary. What is present that ought [we think] to be absent? Something is there that should not be there, that should be elsewhere or should not be at all. Yet why is this frightening? Why aren’t ghosts good company? Why must we yearn for corporeal presence only?)
No animist is ever lonely. No spiritualist, either.
A great and terrifying story might be written of someone who loses touch with the spirits of the world. That’s loneliness. The hermit who no longer feels the presence of the mountain, the landscape, the animals, the sky, the seasons. In some ways, that is the story of us all in contemporary society. Our disconnection from the webs and flows of the world ought to be a source of true horror for us. Certainly, it is a source of true loneliness.
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“The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars.”
—Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows”
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images: Rene Magritte, “The Lovers II”; Calvaire; Isaac Levitan, “Silence”
