Engineered Criticism

The family sits at the center of much of human society as one of its most fundamental social institutions. The form and shape of families varies from culture to culture and over time – from the traditional large, multigenerational family, to the “nuclear family” which bonds much of the modern social fabric, to our current plethora of vaguely defined and diverse types of families that can include distant relatives, partners, or others that live and care for each other. All of these family types come with a shared experience, a shared life, and, more often than not, shared trauma, trauma that runs down the family tree. Alcoholics beget alcoholics. Abusers beget abusers. Each person carries the weight of decades and centuries of damage from people they may never have known. Horror and the fantastic reflect this trauma in different ways. Things horrifying, fantastical, or abject can either be the product of, or an escape from, families that are oppressive. As we see in movies like Raw...