Abstract
Transgressive horror shatters cultural norms with prolonged representations of desecration, agony, and abjection. Such fictions, along with their authors and fans, are often accused of deviance, if not sheer tastelessness. Through its very excesses, transgressive horror subverts the cultural distinctions governing taste itself by calling into question what is and is not acceptable to show. In raising this question, transgressive horror can powerfully expose and unsettle the normativity of dominant institutions and systems, thereby functioning as a form of oppositional politics. This chapter discusses the emergence of splatterpunk fiction and its most iconic figure, the zombie, in the 1980s, shadowing the rise of Ronald Reagan and the neoconservative religious right in the United States with politically subversive attacks on authoritarians, moral majoritarians, and religious hypocrites.
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- 1.
Distinctions between the highbrow and lowbrow that outline what forms of horror are culturally acceptable are also necessarily contingent upon the state of the art and the conditions of reception. Horror in all forms of media has become much more graphic due to changes in taste culture and in technologies of special effects. It must be noted that “horror,” as a label, conceals the creep of gory violence into more mainstream and nongeneric productions, including primetime television.
- 2.
A “splatter-feminism,” which deserves a much fuller discussion, can be discerned in the nineties-era work of writers, such as Kathe Koja, Christa Faust, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Billy Martin (formerly Poppy Z. Brite), to name a few. Splatterpunk feminism foregrounds gender transgressions, subcultural styles, deviant sexualities, and strong, sometimes terrifying, women/genderqueer characters.
- 3.
Dick Hebdige theorizes “subculture” as that which simultaneously opposes and operates within the mainstream, insistently calling attention to the ideological underpinnings of “normal” facades, thereby contradicting the “naturalness” of dominant discourses. Style is therefore the vehicle of a subtle “challenge to hegemony”: “expressed obliquely,” style operates “at the level of signs”; “pregnant with significance,” and connotation, style is the bearer of “hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces” (Hebdige 1979, pp. 12–18).
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Ahmad, A. (2018). Transgressive Horror and Politics: The Splatterpunks and Extreme Horror. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_28
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