The Horror of Romance

The American Horror Genre comes directly from English Romanticism (lie #1). There is always an ethical barb to a horror story. Often, horror stories depict what happens when we have distorted ethics that cause degeneration over time. The impact of such distortions are very creepy in Lovecraft when worlds under the ground are opened up, and we can see the centuries of decrepitation and the weird outcome of generations of moral and ethical decay.

Horror is in essence philosophical. Horror creeps up from the cracks in the rationalists' ethical thinking. Rationalism becomes the apologetics of human exploitation and money motivation.  The apologetics of usury. The smutty table conversation of a blighted English aristocrat with his mildewed lady--rotten people that they were. Devotion to the wrong ethic can cause grotesque distortions in a single lifetime. Extrapolate these distortions across several generations and the outcome can be monstrous. The musty inbreeding of monied interests. The weird appetites of the habitual and professional exploiters of the people. The stale cadaver of John Stuart Mill breaking free from its grave and limping perpetually from library to library over the earth.

    The Horror genre sailed like Dracula across the Atlantic transplanting it’s dank soil to a burgeoning American audience (lie #2). Edgar Allen Poe was a big fan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they had similar habits concerning opium use. It was common then to smoke opium on one’s tobacco. I imagine the reading experience of those days as by firelight through a blue haze of opium and tobacco smoke.  The smoldering of herbs and the power of the snuff has never been equaled to what it was in London’s late 18th century. The Apothecary’s entire cabinet was open to the paying public. Tinctures of cannabis were common. Laudanum was a popular and heavily addictive tincture of opium and Absinthe was already adding a trippy edge to the first psychedelic generation. The late 18th century was a time of tremendous experimentalism.  A fascination with spontaneous combustion and hypnotism were in vogue. The infusion of Jewish and Indian ideas into the cultural milieux made for a stew richer and older with vampires and witches.  Weird deities in Tantric sex positions. Entities older than the English language itself and older even than our ugly Roman letters.

    What are the works of English Romanticism that form the root of the horror genre? Henri Fuseli’s Nightmare. Fuseli was pal and partner of William Blake, the most violent and horrific of all Romantic poets.  Readers should research what Blake meant by what he called the Vintage of the Nations: The Goddess Enitharmon gulping down her cup of ambrosia. Pure adrenalized human blood. All of humanity pressed like grapes for our juice at the pleasure of the Gods.