Horror Pedagogies: Lessons from Stephen King’s fiction
Susan Hopkins & Frey Parkes, UniSQ College (Pathways), University of Southern Queensland
Why Horror
In education, as in life, we need fiction, even and especially horror fiction, to shine light into the darker corners of our social and cultural lives.
We need horror to remind us of all the repressed realities and the power imbalances we must confront if we want to deal with the persistent injustices of our educational institutions.
Horror fictions can also show us how those who do not fit in with the dominant culture, those who are Othered, can be marked out as monstruous (and the horrible consequences of such Othering).
Lessons from Stephen King’s fiction
Psycho-social horror can be a portal to explore the pains and power relations that circulate through classrooms, especially when these erupt into real or symbolic forms of violence.
Stephen King is not only one of the most successful and well know authors of psychological horror fiction, he also started out teaching English in Hampden, southwestern Massachusetts, U.S.
It is perhaps not surprising then that much of Stephen King’s classic, early work contains monstruous teachers or monstruous students. However, it might be surprising to hear that we, as pathways educators, hail such psycho-social fictions of the classroom as illuminating and educational. Indeed, in these anxious times, with the neoliberal university in crisis, we would argue these “horror pedagogies” are more important and necessary than ever.
Education is violence: So it’s time to dig up conflict theories of education
It might be time to the dig up those classic conflict theories of education. Dominant in the 1970s and 80s, they are just as relevant in these neoliberal times of crisis and educational inequality.
The conflict theorists invited us to look beyond all the happy rhetoric about education’s potential, to examine more critically the unresolved tensions and inequalities that remain due to disadvantages of class (and later, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity).
As Louis Althusser saw it, classrooms are dangerous places where vulnerable people are subject to exploitation and ideological control and are taught to accept their pre-ordained place at the bottom of an unfair structure. Similarly, the critical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu saw schooling as rife with symbolic violence against the working class (often enacted through the hidden curriculum bias).
The atmosphere within educational institutions has always been frightening for marginalised people, although it is often difficult to acknowledge these fears (even today) in the real or ‘rational’ world. Horror fiction, ironically, provides a safe place to explore such unspeakable fears and fantasies.
Monsters in the classroom
Stephen King’s fiction revels in rupturing the moral-political order of the classroom. In Rage, a high school student, Charlie Decker, attacks his science teacher, abuses his school principal, shoots his maths teacher and holds his class-mates hostage. In Sometimes They Come Back, a high school teacher is haunted by the ghosts of the past in the form of three killers who return from the dead as students in his class. And in The Dark Half, King’s small-town teacher faces off with his own repressed desires.
In his most recent novel Holly (2023), King introduces us to semi-retired university professors Rodney and Emily Harris, a new kind of horror villain power couple who might seem strangely familiar to horror fans working in academia. Devoted and outwardly respectable, these professors are “harbouring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home”. Spoiler alert: these professors are serial killing cannibals who catch, confine, torment and ultimately eat their young victims in order to stay young and vital themselves.
The Harrises have zero sympathy for the (casualised?) young people they keep trapped in the (career?) basement. Rodney is also scathing of his colleagues, whom he feels fail to recognise the true genius of his projects and publications. King inverts our expectations here: the aging couple turn out to be ruthless killers; the respectable turn out to be abject; the rational turn out to be insane.
However, what we love most about Holly is that it also reverses some old stereotypes about the autistic. The hero of the novel is a neurodiverse woman, more than capable of taking down the cannibalistic professors. As the Washington Postput it, Holly is “a fully realized human being in ways that neurodivergent fictional characters seldom are”. Here, horror presents academia with another important lesson – students can see through the marketing mirage.
Zombies awake: And stop eating your young
The metaphor of academics as flesh eating monsters who “eat their own young” warns us that, in these competitive times of shrinking resources, academic zombies, as Suzanne Ryan writes, are the logical product of the agile university.
And when monsters materialize in the academic grinder, this needs to be understood as a cultural, rather than mere individual, problem. What is needed is an open dialogue about these cultural problems, instead of more toxic machinations of institutions that easily create their own monstruous production lines.
Conclusions: The dark side
Psychological horror narratives typically feature monsters who are not as they first appear. To acknowledge our own duplicities, complexities and contradictions is a challenge for us as educators. Drawing on conflict theory leads us to recognition of our own conflicting roles as educators; we are at once the critical marker and also the supportive advisor. Like the fictitious writer and teacher at the core of The Dark Half, we must first come to terms with our own darker Other or Shadow Self that rests in the realm of negative emotions, such an anxiety, anger, shame and guilt.
The universe of horror shows us that blood will out, in the sense that such emotions can only be repressed or regulated away for so long. More importantly, these darker emotions have much to teach us about what needs to change in educational settings.
Dr Susan Hopkins is a UniSQ College pathways educator from a working class background with over twenty years of experience working with students from low socio-economic, diverse and non-traditional backgrounds. Susan also has research expertise in gender, media and cultural studies.
Dr Frey Parkes is a neuroqueer academic at the University of Southern Queensland and co-convenor of the UniSQ Staff Disability Network. They are a pathways educator with almost fifteen years of teaching experience in higher education.
Image credit:
Title: Monsteronthecampus
Licence: Public Domain
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Monsteronthecampus.jpg
Alt text: A 1950s movie poster showing a hairy vampiric werewolf with sharp claws, a white male and female running, and a background of a university in chaos. The words Monster on the campus are in large yellow letters, with other subheadings including Campus terror and Students victims of terror-beast! in white.