The Horror Amidst the Light of the World

THE HORROR AMIDST THE LIGHT OF OUR WORLD By Terrance Lindall, Curator “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself.” — William Blake “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…” Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost It is a fate that sweeps like a storm in the night. It is the Jungian collective unconscious of our species that has simmered as a dormant volcano of the multitudes and explodes periodically with a force that can astound and shake humanity. We awaken from our humdrum every day existence to a world of horror and find another more intense reality behind the superficial mask of everyday life…in our nightmares or captured by our artists for the public to share! Halloween is perhaps one of the oldest holidays on record, dating back more than 2,000 years to the days of the Celts and their high priests, the Druids. While associated with Ireland, the Celtic people lived across a wide region that included Great Britain and northern France, and marked their new year on November 1st. This was the end of summer and a time of harvest, as the Celts began to prepare for the cold, dark winter. For many, this time of year was marked by a period of death. For a moment in October at the WAH Center we can all escape from the accepted ways of behaving – toppling our obedience to the commonplace, our slavery to doing meekly what does not offend others, the “go along, get along” mentality. In the past many artists and writers have turned inward, such as William Blake or Felicien Rops and today even our own Bienvenido Bones Banez, to decadence and the darker side. Such are the two sides of the human spirit struggling within the subconscious wherein lies the “creature” Freud envisioned as the “ID,” and from which ejaculates our secret desires as well as our greatest fears, the fountain of horror in the arts. Gothic horror drew on these sources with the seminal The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. Many found it in poor taste — but it proved to be immediately popular. A significant amount of horror fiction of this era was written by women and marketed at a female audience, a typical scenario being a resourceful female protagonist menaced in a gloomy castle. Influential works and characters that continue resonating with film and cinema today saw their genesis in such works as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The proliferation of cheap periodicals, as early as the turn of the 20th century, led to a boom in horror writing. Later, specialist publications emerged to give horror writers an outlet, including Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds. Some of these comics can be seen in