Forgive me for retreating to a more academic mood. On Friday, I was watching the Ed Gein story, and as I did, these thoughts formed.
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t invent horror; he revealed it. Beneath the shadows, the blood, and the sudden screams, he exposed something far older—the mimetic violence that René Girard wrote of, that deep instinct to imitate both desire and destruction. In Psycho, he didn’t simply film violence; he unleashed it. The violence was already there, buried beneath the manicured lawns and polite smiles of postwar America. Hitchcock just gave it screen time.
By 1960, America was standing in a hall of mirrors. The world had just witnessed the Holocaust, and the evidence of what humanity was capable of had shaken the global psyche. Yet, in the United States, television glowed with pristine illusions: Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy. A nation desperate to believe in its own purity turned its gaze toward sitcoms that promised innocence still existed. But as I’ve come to see it, innocence is a kind of quantum state—it collapses the moment you try to observe it.
That’s what Hitchcock did. He made us look. He turned the camera inward. In Psycho, the audience’s eyes became Norman Bates’s eyes. We didn’t just watch his voyeurism; we shared it. We became complicit in his desire to see what should not be seen, to touch what should not be touched. Girard would have called this a perfect act of mimetic contagion: the film invited the audience to imitate the very transgression it portrayed. Hitchcock didn’t expose the monster; he exposed our longing to see the monster.
And yet, for all its darkness, Psycho was not nihilistic. It was Aristotelian. Aristotle believed that tragedy offers catharsis—a purging that allows us to confront our inner violence without being destroyed by it. The historical accounts of Psycho’s first audiences confirm this: people fainted, screamed, left theaters shaken but cleansed. For the first time, Americans saw their own repressed violence, and in that recognition, they found release. Hitchcock didn’t kill innocence; he proved it had never existed, and by doing so, he allowed the culture to begin healing.
In that sense, Hitchcock was less a director than a kind of secular priest, performing the ritual of revelation. His films functioned as mass confessions in a new cathedral—the movie theater. The grotesque was no longer unmentionable; it could be discussed, analyzed, even understood. Horror became therapy. It was the artistic catharsis of a repressed culture.
This is the lineage I hope to continue in my own work. Like Hitchcock, I don’t write to indulge the grotesque, but to give it shape—to make meaning from fragmentation. My fiction isn’t about monsters that hide under beds; it’s about the ones that hide behind faces. The Red Thirst andThe Body Forfeit all share this impulse. Each asks the reader to see themselves reflected in the darkness, to recognize that violence, grief, and desire are not foreign—they are profoundly human.
As I edit and reedit The Body Forfeit, in particular, I want it to be cathartic. It explores a world where consciousness can be swapped, where identity itself becomes a form of mimetic violence. We no longer envy another’s possessions; we envy their being. In an era of digital intimacy, social imitation, and algorithmic desire, the film’s old peephole has become our screens.
Aristotle promised catharsis through recognition. Girard warned that desire leads to rivalry and destruction. Hitchcock showed us both—and so must we. To look away is to remain a child; to look closely is to grow.
Direct statements rarely change us. Humanity, for all its intellect, remains a toddler at heart. We do not listen when we are told; we listen when we are shown. That is why stories still matter—because they allow us to face what we deny, to name the shadows without being consumed by them.
I’ve come to believe that story, at its best, is an act of revelation. It doesn’t shield us from the dark—it leads us into it, lantern in hand, and reminds us that even shadow has texture. Horror, grief, desire—these are not poisons to be purged, but truths to be named. If we’re lucky, a story leaves us changed: stripped of false innocence, steadied by recognition, and a little closer to wholeness. That’s the work I hope to do. To disturb, to awaken, and, in the end, to heal.
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