Blood and Explanations

Does horror fiction have to have blood in it? That is not a difficult question and I’m sure readers will be able to offer multiple examples of notable works of horror (canonical works perhaps) in which there is no blood or gore. Blood is not a necessary feature of horror.

And yet…it really is not unreasonable to associate the gory and bloody with horror as a genre. Thrillers, war stories, science fiction or fantasy may have blood and dismemberment or horrible surgeries without being horror but even so, there is a sense of horror, as a genre, owning that which is red and dripping.

If you engage with horror as a genre then you are likely to encounter blood somewhere in your reading unless you make some effort to avoid it. I am not saying there are no genuine fans of horror who avoid books with blood and gore — the world is vast and tastes vary — but any survey of horror literature in general is going to include arterial fluids spilling out or maybe seeping slowly from the walls somewhere.

I was considering a similar candidate for science fiction. There isn’t a shortage of them: spaceships, robots, aliens, time machines. However, they lack that same pervasive sense. Partly this is because many obvious examples can just fade out of science fiction. Rockets were once a standard feature, as were Martians. We can define bigger categories but they don’t have that visceral aspect that blood has with horror. Robots and spaceships in science fiction are more like vampires and werewolves in horror. They have a definite association with them but they don’t have that same connection as blood does with horror.

I’d like to suggest an alternate candidate for science fiction. It lacks that instinctual connection that blood does with horror but on relfection I think that is a feature. Blood has an instictual connection with horror becuase horror as a genre should be about instincts, gut reactions, warnings, fears, a sense of something not being right. When you see blood, your body knows something is wrong even when your mind has reasonable context for it.

So for science fiction, the parallel with blood/horror should be something cognitive and I think the best candidate is explanations. Now, plenty of science fiction doesn’t have lengthy explanations or didactic accounts of how things work, indeed some science fiction precisely avoids such things to great effect. Yet the explanatory mode runs through the genre in a way that makes it very difficult to avoid. Science fiction runs counterfactual to our world in ways that provoke explanation to the point that when an explanation is avoided or postponed that itself becomes an interesting feature of the text. Like blood for horror, this is not a unique feature of science fiction, mysteries and detective fiction have this mode and so can horror but primarily to address a puzzle or mystery in the plot. Science fiction provokes explanations more generally, from how a spacecraft might work to why the world is like how it is.

As I’ve already stated, plenty of excellent science fiction avoids giving explanations either by use of familiar contrivances (faster-than-light travel or transporter beams) or via the opposite approach of making us confront the alien and the unfamiliar. Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker does not provide any clear answer to the nature of the Zone and Jeff Vandermeer provides no clear answers to the nature of Area X in his Southern Reach novels. Yet the very lack of explanation is a tension in these works for that very reason that science fictional settings excite our curiosity just as blood provokes our sense of fear and caution.

I think this is why science fiction horror works so well. Whether you are exploring the inside of the Event Horizon or being stalked by a xenomorph on the Nostromo, that need for explanation drives you deeper while the visceral warning signs (literal bodily fluids in both cases) tell you to flee.

You don’t have to have explanatory elements in your science fiction any more than you need to have blood in your horror but even when they don’t appear they are both hiding in the wings.