"Wytches" During the Plague Times

**Some small spoilers for Scott Snyder's Wytches**

Like many people, I’m currently adapting to new patterns of life in the wake of the pandemic. Things that seemed routine at the beginning of the year have required new and strange behavioral changes for all of us. Going for a walk? Grab your mask and avoid people. Wanting to buy groceries? Avoid going in if possible, and even if they’re delivered, wipe down packaging with soap and water to keep yourself safe. These rapid anxiety producing changes and the sickness that we hope they will keep at bay, have me thinking about the types of tactics that good horror uses to scare us.

A recent episode of my podcast (Common Creatives) focused on Scott Snyder, who is one of the most successful comics writers of the last decade. The episode necessitated a deep dive into Snyder’s body of work and prompted me to re-read some of his original creator-owned titles. Even when he’s writing superhero fare, Snyder’s work always has an air of horror to it. However, his stories that unambiguously belong to the horror genre are bone-chilling. In order to evoke horror, Snyder often focuses on the importance of familiarity. He taps into the horrorific by undermining the familiarity of places, things, and relationships we think we know, especially those in which we would normally find comfort. He employs these tactics highly effectively in Wytches, a six-issue series released by Image Comics in 2014, with art by Jock and colors by Matt Hollingsworth. And the ways that Wytches articulates horror can provide a lens through which we might narrativize some of the terrors of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.

I won’t provide a full plot summary in this post, as I highly recommend this book and don’t want to detract from the experience of reading it, for those who haven’t. That said, there will be some spoilers ahead. Snyder’s wytches don’t adhere to standard witch tropes. They are massive inhuman creatures with spindly limbs and disgustingly stringy hair. They are god-like and will strike Faustian bargains with those humans who will “pledge” someone to them to be eaten. These creatures live in the woods and can grant you what you need to be happy, if you feed them. As Snyder puts it: “They’re huge and ancient and primal and deeply evil […] They can give you almost anything you want. And they’re out there, waiting for you to come ask. But first, you have to give them what they want… They have to eat, after all. So who would you give to them to get what you want?” (“Who Would You Pledge,” Wytches #1).

I believe one thing that makes Snyder’s perspective on horror so resonant in this historical moment is his focus on making the familiar unfamiliar, and thereby making it threatening. As we see empty city streets, vacant restaurants, and filled hospitals, familiar places are showing themselves as horrific. The woods may seem peaceful and serene, but if you turn your back for a moment, something evil and decaying is coming for you and those that you love. Going for a walk in your neighborhood is a nice way to clear your head, but it could also be the occasion for contracting a pathogen that will have you or a loved one fighting for your life in an overcrowded hospital. 

 Additionally, this historical moment is forcing us to face the fact that pathogens and threats and ultimately decay are a primary condition of being alive in this world. While the virus to which we’re reacting is novel, death has always been present, just like Snyder’s wytches. He writes, “I found myself haunted by the image of the witch, peeking out from behind the tree. I knew what had really frightened me wasn’t the ‘witch’ in the trees ­­[…] but what had really gotten me spooked was the idea that this witch had ALWAYS been there” (“Who Would You Pledge,” Wytches #1). This Lovecraftian sentiment about rot and malevolence that consistently accompany us through life, or at least are never far enough away, is of a kind with the unsettling feeling of seeing our public spaces vacant and the abject tragic terror of seeing our hospitals overly full. Snyder’s Wytches, like all good horror, mythologizes the uncanny feeling that the things and places we have relied on, turned to for comfort, and often taken for granted, have turned ominous and dangerous. Even more than that, the idea that they were ever comforting was a childish illusion. The woods were never safe.

But many horror comics (and other forms of media) provide this emotional insight about the ever-presence of death. There is a more specific narrative element of Wytches that is particularly relevant during the early days of this pandemic. That is the notion that the wytches are at their most horrific and malevolent when members of a community pledge one another in exchange for the fulfillment of some personal desire. Those who are aware of the wytches (or more to the point, who worship and utilize them) are thoroughly devoted to the notion of pledging and a line that recurs several times in Wytches is “pledged is pledged.” The pledge that gives over a member of your own community to be eaten for personal gain supersedes all familial, relational, and empathic ties between human beings. When the deal is done, it can’t be undone. 

It strikes me that the recent protests against health and safety measures in the U.S., which are backed by conservative corporate organizers (https://nyti.ms/3eFiGRd), mirror this impulse in a truly terrifying way. Capital, it seems, is a cause for which many are ready and willing to pledge some of our most vulnerable citizens to the jaws of death. Religious studies scholar Stephen Young articulates this point astutely in a recent article on Religion Dispatches. He writes, “what people are willing to sacrifice for their god should likewise be a commentary on their deepest values […] The God of the Economy has long subsisted on human sacrifice in ways that reveal his character” (https://religiondispatches.org/restart-the-economy-is-a-prayer-to-a-conservative-god-who-demands-human-sacrifice). As the nefarious characters in Wytches would say, pledged is pledged.

            A dark and dangerous threat is lurking in the everyday world that we once took for granted as being familiar and safe. And now there are those members of our communities, who we have learned are willing to pledge us in order to get what they want. The most nefarious version of this intention comes from those who are fomenting these protests from afar, rather than to the credulous and choleric crowds. But make no mistake, they are culpable, as well. There is an inhuman and destructive force that is showing us how terrifyingly unfamiliar our world can feel and some people have let us know that they are willing to strike a deal and give us over to this force in order to bring their own desires to fruition. Much like Snyder’s wytches, who “wait for us to do something terrible to get what we want. They’re scary when we’re scary” (“Who Would You Pledge,” Wytches #2). In the early days of this pandemic, we are pretty damn scary.

The Occult Aesthetic in Hellboy

I’ve been reading Mike Mignola’s original Hellboy run straight through recently. The following are some off-the-cuff thoughts that I’ve had regarding potential reader experiences of Hellboy and the cultural positioning of those potential experiences. These ideas are half-baked and potentially incoherent. But hopefully the speculative and open-ended tone of this post will be fitting, given its content.

The mythology referenced and invented in the original Hellboy series is so all encompassing and intricate that there is no obviously clear dogmatic or narrative foundation. It draws on everything from Aleister Crowley to the European Witch Craze to traditional Irish and English folklore to Dante’s Divine Comedy to the tropes of 1940’s pulps in order to fill out the storyworld and expound the exploits of the reluctant Beast of the Apocalypse. It’s dizzying.

            The narrative qua plot is complex enough, but can be summarized clearly, if not succinctly. I will not do so here. Go read Hellboy. However, it is the nature of the underlying mythology that I find most interesting because is so broad, and to my eye, potentially vague. I don’t mean this as a criticism in any way. Hellboy is one of my favorite comics titles to date and I love the feeling of reading stories that take place in such a deep, dense, and lived-in storyworld. The narratives take place in a world that (rendered in Mignola’s minimalist noir-infused art style) feels ancient and expansive.

Still, the mythological world, the expectations built by the implied rules of this fantasy world are unclear and this allows for a fair amount of genre bending (e.g., hard-boiled pulp, horror, high fantasy, science fiction). This strategy for dealing with the core mythological structures of narratives reminds me of the tactic of Grant Morrison and (to a lesser extent) Alan Moore. Moore’s uses of occult and religious systems are intensely intricate, but do have an air of coherence. It may be that a more astute or determined reader than myself could understand, for example, the Hermetic system of magic that Moore puts forth in Promethea to a workable degree. To be honest, I never thought that the return would be worth the investment to attempt to understand Moore’s esoteric cosmology in more than a superficial way. Morrison seems to import any religious or cultural references at his disposal into his comics, coherence be damned. His narratives recklessly swerve from referencing Britpop bands to engaging with the ideas of chaos magicians.

            Mike Mignola’s Hellboy functions in much the same way to these two examples. Mignola draws from highly disparate sources, which rely on potentially mutually exclusive cosmological systems. And rather than confusing the reader, this potpourri of mythology serves to create a general emotional tone, a feeling, an aesthetic. The world of Hellboy is ill-defined, fantastical, and amorphous. Many cultural artifacts that are influenced by Western esotericism and occultism seem to follow this method. To some extent, this seems to be a response to and rejection of the highly propositional, dogmatic, and belief-focused mainstream religions in the U.S. (namely, Western-style Christianities). The Protestant Christianities that have always been highly influential in the United States are focused on adherents accepting propositional beliefs, which are (or often purport to be) part of a coherent theological system of beliefs.

            The occultisms of Crowley, Blavatsky, and Mignola’s Hellboy storyworld, seem to purposefully buck this expectation for metaphysical and mythological coherence and instead, weave an occultist aesthetic, which can permeate the mood and emotions of practitioners and/or readers.

Sabrina and Scary References

I've finally gotten around to reading the first volume of Archie Comics' The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which was adapted into the recently successful Netflix show. I'll get this out of the way, the show is great fun and is visually gorgeous. If you haven't watched it, do. 

I have never been deep into the Archie Comics books, but was intrigued when I saw their rebranding toward a horror aesthetic–including the development of their Archie Horror imprint for their horror themed books. In addition to Sabrina, these include Afterlife with Archie, Jughead: The Hunger, and Vampironica. 

The first volume of Sabrina, entitled "The Crucible," was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, with artwork by Robert Hack. It engages with the world of the young half-witch Sabrina Spellman, who lives with her two witch aunts and a cat familiar named "Salem." This post won't include a plot summary or detailed review of the book, as I take that information to be largely peripheral to the (admittedly exploratory and non-definitive) thoughts I'm working through here. Suffice it to say, overall I enjoyed the book and would recommend it. 

This post was inspired by the fact that Sabrina left me thinking about the place of references in horror comics, as well as horror narratives more generally. Specifically, how do elements of horror stories hope to inspire fear (which presumably involves some level of surprise, uncertainty, or a disruption of expectations), in cases where those elements are tropes or references to other well-known narratives (which presumably involves a level of familiarity)? The reason Sabrina (particularly) left me thinking about references is that it is chock-full of them.

The first volume of Sabrina includes numerous references to external media, including Edgar Allan Poe, "The Monkey's Paw," the musicals Grease and Bye Bye Birdie, Ray Bradbury, and (if this can be considered a reference to external media) Archie Comics characters. Additionally, Sabrina's cousin Ambrose has familiars named Nag and Nagaina, who are referenced as children of Glycon. Glycon is a puppet snake god most prominently associated (in comics circles at least) with Alan Moore, who claims to have had numinous religious experiences involving Glycon. 

Glycon looking confident and stylish as hell.

The references to occultist traditions and practices don't end with a gesturing toward the apostle of esoteric comics, however. During scenes in which Sabrina is put on trial by the Church of Night, the priest overseeing the ceremony is Aleister Crowley, the prominent British occultist and ceremonial magician. While he is never called by his full name, he is referred to as "High Priest Crowley" and the depiction is unmistakable.

A comprehensive list of references in the first volume of The Chilling Adventures is beyond the scope of this post, but needless to say there are plenty. Additional references include: the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft, Satanist symbology, the fiction of Shirley Jackson, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, the 1922 silent film Häxan, Carrie, and Creepshow.

High Priest Crowley

So, with all these references flying around, how do they function in the context of horror comics? Like any interesting question, there likely is no single comprehensive answer. Therefore, this post will be exploratory in nature, rather than an attempt to assert a particular position.

References are one element of what scholars have come to refer to as "intertextuality." Intertextuality is the interrelation of cultural artifacts to one another. This tends to be explored mostly in terms of literature, but intertextuality also occurs in the visual arts and film, as well as across artistic mediums. The view that intertextuality is an important aspect of understanding a work is built on the understanding that:

There are always other words in a word, other texts in a text. The concept of intertextuality requires, therefore, that we understand texts not as self-contained systems but as differential and historical, as traces and tracings of otherness, since they are shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structures. Rejecting [the] principle of textual autonomy, the theory of intertextuality insists that a text cannot exist as a self-sufficient whole, and so, that it does not function as a closed system (Alfaro, 268).

Rosemary's Baby-style variant cover

The references in this book, being a part of intertextuality, locate Sabrina in a tradition of horror media tracking back hundreds of years. In part, these references serve to separate this comic from the widely known light-hearted television show called Sabrina the Teenage Witch, starring Melissa Joan Hart. With all of the references to occultism, Satanism, and horror, Aguirre-Sacasa and company position their Sabrina title as being firmly within the horror genre. This story, the creators are suggesting, has more in common with Stephen King than with the popular ABC sit-com. 

However, might this method of positioning the comics title also undermine the potential for Sabrina to be scary? While referencing popular horror movies, novels, and concepts works to intertextually relate Sabrina to pieces of media that are horrifying, such a clearly referential strategy may also have the effect of taking the reader's attention out of the storyworld of the comic. Or, to put it another way, intertextual references may remind readers that they are reading a comic, it's only a piece of media, and therefore there's nothing to be afraid of. Familiarity with concepts and narrative tropes may make readers respond with excited or nostalgic recognition, rather than the uncertainty or surprise typically associated with fear responses.

Now, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is highly playful when referencing the tradition of horror and occultism and it might be argued that Sabrina isn't intended to be scary. It may be that Sabrina is a comic with a horror aesthetic, rather than properly being a horror comic. This is a definitional point about authorial intent and I'm not concerned with engaging this angle here, as I don't see it having much of an effect on my line of thinking. The point still stands that this seems to be a philosophical quandary more broadly in horror comics and media. How do horror narratives draw on (and even highlight) intertextual references and simultaneously aim to engender fear in their audience (sometimes) using those very elements. Surely, audience members who recognize the references will have their attention drawn away from their engagement with the storyworld and will instead think of the fact that they are engaging with a cultural artifact (comic, novel, movie, etc.),  which is a decidedly unscary prospect.

This post-modern intertextual strategy and use of metatextual narratives (that is stories about stories) shows up in horror media more broadly. Obvious examples include Scream (the film), Hellboy (Mignola's comic), From Hell (Alan Moore's comic influenced heavily by Stephen Knight's theories on the identity of Jack the Ripper), Cabin in the Woods (the film), Shaun of the Dead (the film), and Creepshow (a film that clearly references 1950's E.C. horror comics).

Crowley, the occultist symbol of the pentagram/pentacle,
and a Lovecraftian tentacle in one panel... oh my!

There are theories of horror that can potentially offer a way to resolve this issue. For example, philosopher Nöel Carroll argues that our experiences of horror in artistic contexts comes from our fear responses to representations of monsters that are "physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening in the ways portrayed in the fiction" (Carroll, 27). For Carroll, the reason that these monsters are so threatening is that they are "interstitial," meaning they cross the boundaries of "the deep categories of a culture's conceptual scheme" (31-32). Zombies and vampires, for example, are both living and dead. Bodily fluids which cause disgust (feces, blood, etc.) conflate categories of "me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead" (32). "Horrific monsters often involve the mixture of what is normally distinct" (33). Possessed characters involve a confusion of appearance and essence, and werewolves and other shape-shifters blur the boundaries between human and animal forms.

If our aversion and fear when engaging with horror comics often comes from the upsetting of our deeply engrained cultural boundaries, then it may be the case that intertextual referencing of well-known horror narratives and concepts can work in favor of inciting fear in the reader. Insofar as Sabrina draws on concepts from other horror media that are "categorically transgressive" (33), it may give readers a fright precisely because of those intertextual references. Sabrina can (to some extent) presume its readers' familiarity with the history of horror narratives in order to suggest horrifying interstitial concepts in ways that are more culturally resonant than they would be if they were not grounded in intertextual referencing. So, when a character in Sabrina mentions the "Necronomicon," the weight and dread of Lovecraftian cosmic horror mythology may come to mind for readers who are familiar with Lovecraft's works. This may serve to make Sabrina more horrific, as opposed to less.

As I said above, this post is exploratory and doesn't constitute a complete argument or definitive viewpoint on these issues. I am not completely convinced by this potential application of Carroll to the question of how references (read as references) can be scary. It seems to me that including so many clear intertextual references in a horror comic, at least potentially, serves to pull the reader out of an immersive reading experience of the storyworld of the comic, and thereby, makes the comic less threatening or scary. Being someone who loves the aesthetics of horror far more than I enjoy being actually scared, I am perfectly fine with a book like Sabrina that is steeped in intertextual references to the history of horror. But it seems that the heavy reliance on intertextuality may dampen the potential for reader emersion and scares.

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Works Cited

Alfaro, María Jesús Martínez. “Intertextuality: Origins and Development of the Concept.” Atlantis, 18, no. 1/2 (1996): 268-285. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41054827.

Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto and Robert Hack. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: The Crucible. New York: Archie Horror, 2015.

Carroll, Nöel. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990.