6. Urban Nightmares

When it comes to the function of space and the correlation between space and the horror genre, a common point of reference, as the cases addressed in previous chapters show, is a sense of intimacy and immediacy, whereby the proposed spaces directly condition the audience and protagonists, which in turn leads to an instantaneous and highly subjective horror experience. This subjective experience takes form and is fueled by a variety of different contexts and with different goals, which are for the most part closely related to the scale of the explored spaces. While the American frontier represents a physically and metaphorically different space than a suburban setting, in both cases, the spatially conditioned horrors are a product of a constructed Other which directly, and often violently, interacts with the protagonists. In turn, the produced horror becomes a direct indicator of a particular issue(s) whereby the portrayed violence often stands as a metaphor for larger social and cultural problems. As all of the studied examples show, the presented spatial narratives tend to operate, even on a theoretical level, around a binary system of opposition structured around what is presented as normal and everything else that is perceived as foreign, subversive, and therefore threatening. However, a departure and reinvention of the binarity within the genre does exist, and it thrives within the not-so-strict subgenre boundaries of urban gothic and urban horror. Developed as a somewhat natural diachronic and physical evolution of spatial context within the genre, urban gothic and later urban horror deconstruct the already discussed intimacy by positioning its narratives within the urban confines of a city. The narrative dynamics of this new space and the change in the level of intimacy between the professed protagonist(s) and the articulated Other can initially be observed through a very succinct, although often addressed idea, presented by Alexandra Warwick in The Handbook to Gothic Literature where she argues that “[t]he city is seen as uncanny, constructed by people yet unknowable by the individual” (1998, 288). Although this idea will be expanded and recontextualized in a larger theoretical framework of this chapter, it remains a key point of reference for understanding the basic functionality of the explored spaces.