This is a fascinating thread, on many levels. I’ve never much cared for Clive Barker, really, but I respect his talent for exposing the hidden. His story ‘Cabal’ is actually very good with this. He seems to have externalized the often ‘hidden’ aspects of homosexuality, the way it existed just under straight radar for centuries. His metaphors involving cemeteries filled with outcasts spring to mind.
But on a broader note, sex and death are somehow inextricably entwined in the human psyche. Even in non-horror films and books, a life-theatening situation is often followed by a love scene, as though the threat of death inspires one’s sexuality, and death can only be pushed back by sex. Which works in a physical sense as well as a psychological one; the reproductive act is the polar opposite of dying, but like all extremes, they eventually meet.
Even in literary language the two are often juxtaposed and even blurred with one another; the word ecstasy is sometimes used to describe both orgasm and the moment of death. Keats’ poem Ode to A Nightingale, while ostensibly about death, is replete with sexual imagery, references to fertility, to psychological and physical surrender. Perhaps this is the key to the whole paradox: both death and sex consume. One is devoured by death, but also by orgasm; one’s personality is subsumed in death, but can also be subsumed in a sexual relationship with another being. But it is also about surrender, and maybe this is where Barker’s S&M stylings also play in? We surrender to death and orgasm; we lose ourselves in both, and in both we transcend our solitary conscious. Dying we join the great unknown; climaxing we join with another living being, another form of unknown.
Horror also likes to play with gore, and violence,and what could be both but death and sex? Both can be unusually fast and messy. Both deal with things inside, things hidden away. The exposure of intestines is disgusting and frightening, but in some ways comparable to the exposure of genitals. Hidden; essential for life, yet somehow always unknown or unspoken. Horror also likes to play with change and transformation- zombies, vampires, werewolves- these are scary because they represent ourselves changed. And puberty, sexual knowledge, and awakening are also ourselves changed. It’s significant that one is made a werewolf or vampire or zombie by another- just as one is awakened, or transformed by another with one’s first sexual experience.
It’s this sexual subtext that will always make horror so popular, I think. It combines the two most basic drives of all life, to survive and to reproduce. That’s what makes it so compelling for so many, the way it taps into our most basic emotions, and yet constructs elaborate and intellectually satisfying frameworks above the base instincts.
Hmmm…rambling again…but thank you for the inspring thoughts, everyone.