1.
I write and read between and across genres, but horror has always been my first love. Much has been written about the appeal and utility of horror, often combining, as sociologist and film critic Andrew Tudor attests, analysis of the texts themselves as well as the genre’s consumers.

That is: if you like horror, there is something in the genre that fulfills your darkest desires.

Or, to offer a less charitable reading: there must be something wrong with you.

2.
Modern horror has ancient roots. You can see its beats in folklore and in Greek tragedy, where the noble hero experiences death or a downfall, a change in fortune. The word empathy (from pathos) derives from this ancient theatrical genre. To be human is to confront suffering, to witness the pain of others and our own. Horror, much like the open-air theatre honouring Dionysus or the seats around our ancestral fire, offers a safe space for this confrontation, a sanctuary to experience the worst consequences of careless action, but without being harmed. As it was nearly 3,000 years ago, horror in modern times is an invitation to face the traumatic truth. What if – What would you do if – Would you save someone’s life even if –

In one of the manuscript comments on my poetry collection What Comes After, shared with me by my publisher the University of the Philippines Press, the anonymous evaluator wrote, “Overall, one might wonder why there is so much death and destruction in Victoria’s poetry as there is in her fiction.”

I wondered about the wondering. As a person born and raised in the Philippines, isn’t death and destruction our status quo?

3.
While analysis of the horror genre (and its consumers) often turns to psychoanalytic theory, I would not want to offer a reading of my state of mind when I tell you that I believe we learn to fear before we learn to love. Babies scream in terror and distress when they leave the womb. Born in a crime-riddled country that continues to vote myopic, self-interested people to power, my first instinct is always suspicion, a prey animal living in constant vigilance, a people-pleaser performing my way out of certain danger.

I didn’t think it was possible to live life without anxiety. I was raised Catholic around people who spoke more about hellfire and punishment rather than mercy. Every New Year there are news of numerous deaths from ligaw na bala (stray bullet) fired by indiscriminate gun owners – some even men in uniform – as part of their celebrations. In the 1990s there was a spate of massacres, entire families stabbed to death in their own homes. The Reproductive Health Law, eventually enacted in 2012 after making its way through Congress across 11 years, entered public debate around the same time popular media were glamorising eating disorders to achieve the perfect (female) body, around the same time I was going through my teenage years. I knew that my mere existence as a woman with ‘unpopular’ opinions about the church, the government, or my own bodily agency, could be construed as an act of defiance, and could very well lead to incarceration, injury, or murder. The escalation of the drug war under the Duterte presidency that claimed over 12,000 lives (Human Rights) felt surreal and horrific, but was also, horrifically, an unsurprising continuation of the violence that has come before. Nowhere felt safe. No one can be trusted. For the persona in my poem ‘Topography’, erasure means safety.

[The] midnight news becomes a warning. I hide my cell phone in the train, I
wear simple clothes, my jewelry is cheap. Every long walk is a study in
erasure: I blend in until I am no longer there. (24) 

4.
In my novel Ascension, a character gets hit with a truncheon by police during a university protest march against extrajudicial killings, a head injury that leads to her death, a death that leads her sister to seek justice from a supernatural being. An act of despair, because her sister can’t find justice anywhere else. The otherworldly aspect of the novel ends with resolution, an escape, even good fortune for some, but there is no resolution to the earthly, mundane issues faced by the characters – poverty, family violence and abuse, state-sanctioned murder.

The novel ends before the start of the drug war and the gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cosmic evil momentarily vanquished as the evil of men continues.

Ascension was published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia in 2024, but it was conceived concurrently with the poems in What Comes After, published two years prior. They share the same themes and are an examination of the same grief.

But the demands of the novel form and the horror genre, and my own predilections when it comes to prose, require a conventional structure and an ending. Not so with poetry. I tend to be traditional with my fiction, but poetry allows me to be freed from structure.

If my prose fiction is the making sense of and the search for an answer, poetry is the sitting with. The witnessing.

5.
As a young girl still learning to read and write English, I gravitated towards the reproduced images of Rene Magritte’s and Yves Tanguy’s art in encyclopedia volumes before I could understand the words in the articles that accompanied them. I loved the desolation and silence, the surprising juxtaposition of images, the dreams brought to life. Later I would learn that Surrealism came from Dada, an art movement that formed in neutral Switzerland as a response to the cruelty and senselessness of the First World War.

How else can one react to political and personal turmoil? If rational thought has led to war, then the dehumanised must turn to the absurd. Societal collapse collapsing language itself.

In my poetry, I lean on surreal imagery to discuss tragedy.

I have left myself in the/bedroom, folded neatly on top of the pillows (‘Crime Scenes’, 5)

or

You follow the example of the young woman sitting beside you, the minutes
contained within her hands. The minutes plucked like petals in that old game. (‘Crime Scenes’, 6)

I fold time and events as if they were the many rooms we move through in dreams, an omniscient witness who sees the shape of what’s coming but is powerless to stop it.

From ‘Crime Scenes’:

He screams in that field where they left him
and the field, briefly stirring to life,
allows something to escape, something rustles
and the blind widow falls to her knees on the floor,
touches that place where the bullet hit, that word
she cannot spell. (4)

From ‘News about the End of the World’:

                                                  We must tell her that no one will survive,
but she thinks of the child she is supposed to have at her age, and the child
welcomes her as she throws open the door, drowning our voices. She walks
across the room and it is five years ago, she is walking down
an unfamiliar street to a job interview, how did this happen, she asks
as she turns on the light, as her living room comes into being. (21)

From ‘Notes’:

− The Christian God brought ten plagues. Just imagine the headlines,
a colleague says, and you laugh as you make your way through the
workstations, the crowd, you throw away your coffee and watch the
water turn red. He was my firstborn, you write carefully in your notebook,
wanting to get the quote right this time. (16)

From ‘Tiny Tragedies’:

A woman with a torn dress scampers up to the main road and waves her arms. In
theater class, participants are taught that the stage requires huge gestures for the benefit
of the people sitting in the back row. Pass me the sugar, he says, and she pushes it in
front of her as she would a boulder, she gives his friends a small smile as she passes
through the living room, her nods imperceptible, years and years of small movements
that leave the neighbors squinting their eyes, wondering if what is happening is really
happening. (14)

From ‘Maps’:

The child who will die that morning puts on a tulle dress and twirls.
She is impressed with the effect—the whisper of fabric,
the silken movements. On the glass, an elegant disappearance. Step, point,
turn in this corner. One never gets lost in these streets, this city that grows
new landmarks each day. (27)

Why write this? Why sit with this? Why witness this? As Faisal al-Assad writes, “To bear witness to spectacles of pain and suffering is to do precisely that: to strive to bear that pain and give it place in the testimony, and to create through that testimony the very voice and speech destroyed by pain.” The best outcome in one’s life is for suffering to not have happened. In a country filled with death and enforced disappearances, the next best thing is to have a witness and a testimony to make it harder to dismiss the pain, to verify that the suffering indeed occurred.