Black Treacle Magazine (Issue 3) by Black Treacle Publications

Author:Black Treacle Publications
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, short stories, short story, canada, speculative fiction, dark fantasy, canadian, magazine, bimonthly, david annandale, lauramarie steele, michelle ann king

At the precise moment where Mike refers to “traumatic events in your life,” Gordon is staring at the word “HOME” on his cell. The true meaning of this moment only becomes clear in retrospect. At the end of the film, we learn that, the evening of landing the job, Gordon returned home to celebrate. There was an accident, and a pot of boiling pasta spilled onto his leg. Gordon lost control, and killed his wife and baby daughter. At this point in the film, we do not know that Gordon has done anything. But even more importantly, Gordon himself does not know. He has repressed the memory, just as he similarly represses the memories, as the film progresses, of killing everyone else. And these murders, in turn, occur at moments where the original memory threatens to surface. One repression leads to another, until the destruction of Gordon and everyone he holds dear is complete.

In this scene, then, the film is playing a complicated game of memory, horror, and authentication. Mike’s narrative is horrific, and the montage of shattered found objects and predatory insects that accompanies his deadpan narration builds that horror to a crescendo, until Gordon (the man who has committed an act of horrific domestic violence) cries “Enough!” But then we have the debunking moment, where Mike exposes his horror tale as a tissue of lies. The memories were false. We are horrified by the story, then relieved that these terrible events never occurred. Only they have. A memory is being repressed even as Mike speaks, but it is the memory of the killer, rather than of the victims. The other crucial distinction, it seems to me, is one of kind. Domestic abuse itself is not being debunked by Session 9, but the addition of gothic trappings is. The point seems to be that the banal murders human beings commit every day are bad enough. Casting the events as Satanic rituals trivializes the abuse itself, as if it were somehow not adequately evil without the further motivation of devil worship. There is also an ironically comforting construction here: devil worshippers are less disturbing than a man who killed because of an everyday kitchen mishap.

In his seminal studies of the horror film, Robin Wood writes,

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