I Am a Cartographer of Fear

I do not like horror movies. When a friend is describing to me a movie they’ve seen, if it smacks even remotely of horror, I ask that pathetic question: “Is it scary?” 

That’s not to say that I don’t respect horror as a genre—I can recognize the brilliance of The Shining or Midsommar—it’s just that for me the experience of watching a horror film is a miserable two-ish hours of dread that is more akin to running a low-grade fever than anything approaching enjoyment. 

So this makes it very difficult for me as a high school creative writing teacher because my students love horror. 

I have experience with horror movies. I’ve watched Rec and The Descent back-to-back and had a miserable time. I got way too high and watched The Shining, which caused permanent psychic damage. I don’t like horror. I’m not wired for it. But, like I said, my students love horror, so I adapt. The challenge here is that to truly teach, to create those classroom moments where your students will sit forward in attention and hopefully have your lesson permanently etched into their long term memory, you need to teach things you enjoy. I don’t enjoy horror. So what do I do?

I told my surly student that what we were reading would be extremely difficult and a challenge. I also warned him it would be pretty gross and scary. His eyes lit up.

My first experience with the scholastic benefits of horror came before I was a writer, when I was a recent college graduate working as a tutor, too afraid to share my work with anyone. I worked with a surly middle schooler who read way below grade level. While he should have been digging into young adult books, he was stuck on The Dork Diaries, elementary-level books that use ample pictures to guide readers. My surly student was a jock, had some behavioral issues, and in general found reading to be a frustrating experience. When I tried to ease him into slightly higher level books, he’d get restless and resentful. 

So I tried a different approach. He was a jock. He liked challenges. If he wanted one, I’d give it to him. I brought in my copy of Dante’s Inferno and opened up to the third circle of hell, the one where gluttons sit in a “Great Storm of Putrefaction.” I told my surly student that what we were reading would be extremely difficult and a challenge. I also warned him it would be pretty gross and scary. His eyes lit up. I had found a way to unite my love of classical literature with a middle schooler’s love of the gross and scary.

We began to read. To my middle schooler’s credit, he was able to work through Dante’s lyrics, and when I asked him what he thought the storm was made out of, he gave me a confused look. “Basically rotting corpses and shit,” I answered. 

His eyes got wide. At first he was just comprehending that his teacher had cursed, but then he started to imagine the storm that Dante’s sick mind had conjured. We kept reading Dante together, going through all of the circles and their punishments. We looked at the Botticelli illustrations. We watched clips from the ill-conceived Dante’s Inferno video game. We decided it was stupid. 

My student loved Dante, not just because it was a challenge, but because it was in its own way subversive. Inferno is about as sick and twisted as anything can get. And middle schoolers love the sick and twisted. 

When I think about teaching, I am reminded of that wonderful and ridiculous scene in War and Peace, when just before getting trounced by Napoleon at Austerlitz, the coalition commanders all discuss the upcoming battle as though it is a chess match. The Russian general, Kutuzov, a national hero, lies on a couch laughing at them, telling them that battle is not like chess at all and that a general must be able to react in the moment. They ignore Kutuzov and Napoleon crushes them. 

Teaching can sometimes feel like the battle of Austerlitz. I come in with my lesson plan written out to the minute, only to find that the classroom does not operate with the calm structure of a chess match. It is chaotic. Children are irrational, so therefore you must meet their irrationality, learn to channel it, and above all, make it fun for everyone involved. When I embraced horror for the first time, I channeled my inner Kutuzov. It didn’t matter that I didn’t like horror. I had to find a way to adapt and create those wonderful teaching moments for which I strive.

Just as teachers are at their best when they are teaching material they enjoy, students learn best when they are having fun.

My experience with Dante taught me an important lesson, one that would define me as a teacher. Just as teachers are at their best when they are teaching material they enjoy, students learn best when they are having fun. To motivate students, I had to engage them with what they loved and to do that, I built a bridge between my love, the classics, and my student’s love, the deranged and gross.

But that was teaching reading, not writing. A few years later, I got my MFA and started teaching creative writing. I specifically wanted to work on the middle and high school levels. I had dreams of helping my students explore themselves through their writing. I expected stories about their own life and epic fantasies. Then one of my first students wrote one of the most disturbing things I had ever read, and once again I was at Austerlitz. It was called “The Grocery List,” and it was about a woman who receives a list in the mail of ordinary household goods like rope, soil, a shovel, things you’d find at a hardware store. Then, one by one, someone kills her family members with the items on the list. The woman then tracks down the killer and tortures him to death with those very same items. 

When I read it, I was disturbed and impressed. It could have been the plot of a pretty solid horror movie. My initial reaction was to tamp down on her writing for being too disturbing, but then I interrogated that instinct. Isn’t the point of art, at least to an extent, to be a vehicle for thoughts and emotions so powerfully complex we must express them? When a tortured genius transmutes their inner struggles into a work of disturbing horror, they are lauded for it. Who was I to deny that to my own students? My student had something to get out. She got it out, brilliantly. 

So as my writing and teaching career blossomed, I embraced my inner Kutuzov, and I embraced horror. I learned the genre, I learned how to teach it, and I learned how to bridge my loves with my students’ loves. Did I start to enjoy horror movies? Absolutely not. As I said, I’m not wired for them. But I did learn to appreciate the artistry of them. I learned to find aspects of horror in the books and movies I enjoyed. Maybe I did learn to love horror movies, just at a distance.

To teach writing about horror, I begin with the rules. Horror as a genre is multifaceted, but I strip it down for my students. I tell them that horror is often an anxiety or emotion, sometimes personal, sometimes cultural, amplified via the supernatural. The Shining is about Stephen King’s own fears that his alcoholism was turning him into a man possessed. Midsommar is about how grief is not the pure emotion we often assume it is and anxieties about how it can often turn into anger and revenge. This is what I then challenge my students to do: pick an anxiety and expand it to something horrifying. 

I use Dante as the bridge between my enjoyment and my students’ enjoyment. I love Dante, and it’s hard to get gorier than Dante. He was also totally petty. After being exiled, he created an entire imaginary hell so that he could describe his enemies being tortured in literally excruciating detail. Teens and preteens can relate to that level of pettiness. Dante’s Inferno also takes an anxiety and makes it horrifying. The entire Divine Comedy is about Dante’s fears during a midlife crisis. It begins, “Midway through life’s journey I found myself in a forest dark.” This is a story by a man dealing with the political and spiritual fallout of his exile. 

As they list out their fears, I write them on the board, a map. I am a cartographer of fear.

After we read Dante and appreciate his petty, disturbed, and brilliant mind, I ask my students what they are scared of. Hands shoot up. They are scared of everything: ghosts, demons, public speaking, getting pantsed, getting cheated on, getting jumped, getting trapped in an elevator, having someone follow them home, having their parents catch them in the act, having their teeth fall out, having their limbs fall off. They’re scared of cockroaches, of mice, of barking dogs. They’re scared of failing a class, of not getting into college, of disappointing their parents, of failing in life, of dying. As they list out their fears, I write them on the board, a map. I am a cartographer of fear. Sometimes when a student names a fear there are murmurs of agreement. Sometimes there is confusion. We can find solidarity in our fears, or we can find solitude. When my map of their fears stretches across the entire whiteboard, when I literally cannot fit in anymore fears, we’re done. I turn to my students with dramatic flourish—I am the conductor of a nightmare train, the captain of a ghost ship—and I tell them to pick a fear and turn it into something terrifying.

So what kinds of stories do my students tell? One of my favorites is a piece by a student who tells a story that begins with her sitting on a subway car. The conductor calls out the next stop, but there is something strange in his voice. Then right before the narrator is about to reach their destination, the conductor announces that they will never be arriving. The doors close and never open again. Another student, in a similar vein, writes about a self-driving car that rebels against its owner. The steering wheel takes control. The doors lock. The narrator is trapped. As the car accelerates towards a wall, they frantically smash at the window glass, breaking it open just as the car accelerates to breakneck speeds. They jump. They survive. The car crashes into a wall, self-immolating in a fiery burst.The narrator looks around, all of the self-driving cars have rebelled. In a third story, after the death of a friend, a girl’s friend group starts receiving strange text messages, quite possibly from their friend’s ghost, that force them to reveal their secrets to each other and the world. 

And what do their stories tell me about their anxieties? Well, they’re as varied and diverse as my students. My student with the story about the endless subway ride writes about the anxieties of the post-COVID commutes in New York, where the subways can be eerily empty and strange. My student who wrote about self driving cars is freaked out about technology but also worried about the apocalypse. The story about the ghostly text messages combines a classic ghost story with anxieties about mass communication, social groups, and the constant observation teens find themselves under. 

Being a teenager and a preteen is hard enough, but kids these days also have to deal with a chaotic and uncertain future. It freaks me out how much my students are freaked out.

My student’s stories reveal a troubling picture of modern teens and preteens. They’re anxious about societal disruption, both in the wake of COVID and looking towards an uncertain future of political and climatic upheaval. They’re anxious about their social lives, especially in the smartphone era. They’re anxious about technology. They’re anxious about themselves and their bodies. They’re anxious about all of the things that teens and preteens are anxious about, but they’re also anxious about things that they shouldn’t have to be anxious about, like racism, sexism, homophobia, the climate crisis. In short, they’re anxious about everything. 

We live in an age of anxiety. It’s no coincidence that we also happen to be living through a resurgence of horror movies. Being a teenager and a preteen is hard enough, but kids these days also have to deal with a chaotic and uncertain future. It freaks me out how much my students are freaked out. 

But in a weird way, I find comfort in the long history of horror as a genre, stretching all the way back to Dante and the chaos of an Italy at constant war with itself. This is not the first age of anxiety. It will not be the last. Maybe every age in its own way is an age of anxiety. When my students take their fears and turn them into monsters they are engaging with a literary tradition that has helped artists for centuries understand the chaos around them. 

There’s a principle in horror movies where the filmmaker doesn’t show the monster. Since, whatever you dream of in your mind is always worse than the real thing, when you do see the monster, it becomes understandable, less scary, a movie prop made of polyurethane, paint, and CGI. Perhaps writing horror is a way of seeing the monsters that are our anxieties, naming them, forcing it to exist, seeing that they are frightening, but also understandable. Perhaps this is the drive towards writing, reading, and watching horror: finding comfort out of fear. I’ll never enjoy horror—I will still ask that pathetic question, “Is that movie scary?”—but I’ve built a bridge between my enjoyment and my students’. As long as my students are anxious, and they’ll always be anxious, I’ll help them write the scariest stories possible.

Featured image: Inferno, from the Divine Comedy by Dante by Bartolomeo Di Fruosino.