In the beginning of 2024, the school’s program of studies came out. There were a few new classes, but one caught the eyes of many excited students: Contemporary Literature: Studies in Science Fiction and Horror.
So what makes horror scare people? According to Meredith Pileggi, who teaches the class, when your primal brain and your modern brain clash, that is horror. It’s a battle between the two complete opposites, and when you’re frightened, your older, more instinctive brain wins and takes over. This is what causes fight or flight.
“Real horror will get your oldest part of your brain to override your cognitive thinking to where your brain can no longer tell whether or not the thing you’re experiencing is an actual threat,” said Pileggi.
Ever since Pileggi was a little girl, she has always loved horror. She described herself as “that girl into the weird stuff, into the witches, into all the things that bump in the night.” She bought an Edgar Allen Poe book at a bookstore when she was in elementary school, which caused her to fall in love with the genre.
“I bought it only because the book looked sorta gothic and weathered and macabre, and so I bought it thinking this was something I would really like to look at. Once I opened it and read it, that was the end of that,” Pileggi said.
So creating a horror-lit class was a no-brainer for Pileggi. She knew that teenagers loved horror, much of which is often directly targeting them. Horror deals with themes such as self-exploration, overcoming obstacles, battling society and social norms, being misconstrued and misunderstood, and just wanting that human connectedness. Pileggi understood that many teenagers can feel that pull on a deep level.
“You’re in a time of transition where you can often feel misunderstood and feel like the monster in your own story,” said Pileggi.
So with her love of horror, she created this class.
The class filled up four whole sections, making no room for traditional English classes in Pileggi’s schedule. Some of the activities that they do in the class are watching, reading, and analyzing horror.
According to Pileggi, her students explore many types of horror such as body horror, religious horror, modern contemporary horror, realistic horror, creature feature horror, trouped horror, and aesthetic horror.
“I try and grab a little bit of everything,” said Pileggi.
While they do explore horror, they also explore science fiction. Many people believe that science fiction and horror are the same, but really they aren’t. Science fiction seeks to understand the world and time around you, while horror seeks to understand the unknown. Both genres can go hand in hand, but they aren’t the same type of literature.
“So when we look at science fiction we look at utopias, dystopian societies, alien involvement, and things like that,” says Pileggi.
When analyzing horror, Pileggi puts horror into nine pillars or tenets: blood and gore, plot twist, and paranoia just to name a few. Her class then dissects a work of literature by looking at how an author uses those pillars.
“We talk about how the author is using those elements to induce fear because what horror does that no other genre does, is that it’s supposed to elicit a feeling, and horror is only successful if it can produce the desired emotion,” Pileggi said. “Romance is romance because it has boy meets whoever, they fall in love, and then the end is history. Horror is different in the sense that it’s so subjective and person-to-person based on your sensory overload threshold. That if I can get you to feel that feeling that is truly successful terror.”
Pileggi believes horror is a formula and that just because something has something that is traditionally scary, doesnt make it horror.
“If we look at the Twilight series, that’s not scary but it has creatures in it.”
But just because she doesnt find the creatures from Twilight scary doesnt mean she doesnt find other movies horrifying, such as “The Exorcist” and “Paranormal Activity,” scary.
Pileggi mentions, “Paranormal Activity” made me sleep with the lights on for a month because I was waiting for something to come pull me out my bed.”
Pileggi spoke about how horror has changed in the past 50 years. What people used to be scared of, is pretty normalized in society nowadays. Since we experience so much horror in our lives to begin with, like war and bloodshed, humans are becoming more desensitized to it in fiction. So movies like “Terrifier” take horror to the extreme without crossing the line of morality. This movement is called Splatterpunk. Splatterpunk took off in the 80s, it started as a literary genre, which took horror to the extreme. It’s graphic and gorey and usually is a retaliation against mainstream horror. We are starting to see this in movies more such as the aforementioned Terrifier franchise and Saw franchise.
“I am not one for blood and guts. It can be really intense and I would only recommend it for the most seasoned horror vets. That kind of thing can stay with you, especially if you are reading it. Reading is a different experience because the imagination has to concoct the image on its own and once it lives in your head,” Pileggi warns.
Now, students may not be reading any splatterpunk in class, but to scare people, horror writers have to keep the material fresh. People aren’t as scared of things as they used to be and that just means trying to keep up with the fears of modern people.
Pileggi can treat her class like a regular English class, it is just more relevant topics to teenagers. It’s more engaging and high interest. Pileggi believes you can replace a traditional English class with any literary genre, and it would still be an English class.
“If you like dark psychology, If you like exploring the less talked about or the more taboo side of humanity and the things that motivate us and drive us, I think that the class would be a great choice for you,” said Pileggi. “So if you can read something and try and deduce what the author was trying to make freighting and how they went about it and put that into words, then I think it is a beautiful opportunity to hone your reading skills and your writing skills that will move to any other class that I would argue in the building.”