Horror On The Paneled Page & Occupy Wallstreet – NYCC Reflections

By far, my favorite experience of the New York Comic Con was attending a panel called “AICN Comics: Horror On The Paneled Page”.  To be honest, I came across this golden nugget purely by chance.  It was late on Friday night and I needed to make sure I didn’t the leave the Comic Con without getting my proper fill.  I really hoped to attend a Naruto Shippuden screening but unfortuantely, I got locked out.  As fate would have it, I thumbed through the program and saw this panel and it piqued my interest immediately.  Mark L. Miller from “Ain’t It Cool News” hosted the discussion with a who’s who of mainstream Horror comic artists including Ben Templesmith and Menton John Matthews III who are both working on Monocyte, Alan Robert of Crawl To Me and Wire Hangers fame, Brandon Seifert the creator/writer of Witch Doctor, David Quinn of Faust and Tim Seeley of Witchblade.
Although the panel included some heavy hitters, the attendance in the audience was sparse.  Regrettably, 8:45 pm on a Friday night is not a good time slot to park a discussion with fans, geeks or not.  Nonetheless, since the crowd was compact, the discussion came across with a unique intimacy, one which added to my enjoyment of the experience.  It felt like we were getting straight to the meat.  There were no promotions, no powerpoint presentations, no teaser images.  The host kicked off by going straight to the panel with questions and each of the members was nothing but forthcoming with their answers.
The most enlightening exchanges circled around the state of Horror today.  As we all know, mainstream Horror is ruled by zombies and vampires.  They’re everywhere and it doesn’t seem like this train is ever gonna stop!  Without a doubt, pop culture seems to have sunken its teeth, pun intended, into the mythos around the zombie/vampire genre.  But why?  Why now, why today?  How can we make sense of the phenomenon?  The answers coming from the panel were nothing short of fascinating.  I mean Joseph Campbell kind of fascinating.  As one may guess, what’s popular in Horror is a reflection of how we, as a culture, are feeling.  We decide what scares us and we decide what to focus on when we’re afraid.  As we all know, the last decade of America has been identified as the post-9/11 era and the fears which arose out of that trauma are intricately linked to what we see in horror today.  With vampires, you have the idea of an unseen, unknown but sophisticated enemy and with zombies, you have the unbelievable pressure to conform, to become mindless and unquestioning in an effort to obey and follow.  In many respects, they parallel the fears of the cold war era where the zombie cult classic “Night of the Living Dead” first became popular.
One point which I found particularly interesting came from Tim Seeley who noted that if you look at Horror monsters, you basically have three main characters: vampires, zombies and werewolves.  Why do these monsters keep coming up again and again?  Seeley pointed out that these monsters are essentially infection metaphors.  Vampires, werewolves and zombies don’t wait for you to come to them.  Oh nooooo!  They come looking for you!  They hunt you down and relentlessly chase you until they either viciously kill you OR they turn you into them OR both.  That observation is what I loved about this panel.  We were not dealing with comics and with the horror genre on the surface.  We were looking behind the curtain.  We were digging and poking around into the subconscious.  We were unearthing what horror was saying about us as human beings and our behavior and the environment we live in and our reaction to that environment.  Some members of the panel were also tying in the vampire phenomenon with the current Occupy Wall Street movement.  One panelist commented how, in Chinese vampire mythology, it’s actually the wealthy who are parasitic off the people.  A very few, powerful members of society sustain a relationship where they derive their power by sucking the energy out of the less fortunate.  They need to do this in order to perpetuate their vigor.  This exactly mirrors how some people in the Occupy Wall St movement feel.  It mirrors their fear and their indignation about being exploited and robbed and metaphorically sucked dry so that big time executives in large, multi-national corporations can smoke expensive cigars and receive fat, year-end bonus checks.  At least, this is a pervasive perception which gets reflected in the news media and news channels.
Although the past 10 years has been described as a time of escapist or survivalist horror, some members on the panel feel this is starting to change.  The zombie/vampire mega wave is about to subside and in its place, we may see more stories about demons taking center stage.  There are some twists however.  Panelists noted that writers today may take a more secular stance on presenting the stories since the subject of demons can have religious connotations.  Many of the panelists expressed their reluctance to dabble on the religious side of things as it’s a sure way to piss a lot of people off.  This actually evoked another observation of our current society in that we are no longer as much God-Fearing as we used to be.  During the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s, which saw a heyday of demonic depictions including The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Prince of Darkness and The Omen, American society was far more wound up as far as religious rigidity is concerned.  While stories of demons may have been more upsetting to people in the past, it created a far greater tension than it does today and that tension is the key ingredient to drama.  So in bringing back demon horror, writers may have a different challenge to face.  They may need to find other ways of creating that tension and drama to evoke the same kind of fear as was done in the past.
Throughout the rest of the discussion, members of the panel explored and shared their thoughts and opinions about Horror and where they see it going.  The topics ran the gamut from their collective disdain for French Horror to their thoughts on the fundamental components of a good Horror story to their own admission of subject matter they feel is taboo to write or depict artistically.  The beauty of the whole experience was how open and honest everyone was, including the audience.  It was exactly the kind of thirst quencher I was looking for at the Comic Con and without a doubt, it left me very satisfied.  At least, that is, until the Comic Con rolls around next year!