Dressed for the theme of our interview in his custom Scream T-Shirt, Justin Phillip Reed met me at the door to Kaibur, a tiny coffee shop on Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill. For a long time prior to this, I had been interested in Justin’s writing, but also in how his life had nearly grazed against mine in several odd ways. In 2021, he was a visiting speaker at Bennington College – where I had just graduated the year before – and he presented his lecture “Labor, Leisure, Reticence, Violence”. Around the same time, he moved to my hometown, offering the perfect opportunity for us to talk horror films and how they intersect with issues of race, gender, and sexuality in America.

Justin has written two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), for which he won the National Book Award. Last Halloween, he published the hybrid text With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood: A Horror Miscellany (2023) with Coffee House Press. In his own words: “I have written a couple of books of poetry. I like to write about horror films now – essays, lectures, poems, things in between. I play bass guitar. And I work mostly in the service industry.”



Caldwell Holden (CH): How did you first become interested in horror?



Justin Phillip Reed (JPR): (Laughing) I’m still trying to figure that out. I’m trying to write about my first encounters with horror films or just things that I found both horrific and engaging, captivating even. And most of the time those tend to be scenes from movies that aren’t classified horror. So these were particular scenes in which there would be a kind of group violence against a black person.



I remember I used to live next door to these boys, Brandon and Quentin. They had a ditch that ran behind their house and behind the ditch was a large woods. And they would always tell me that the KKK was in the woods. So they would jump the ditch to go play in the woods and I would be stuck in this position of not wanting to be alone but not wanting to go in the woods because I was pretty sure the KKK was back there. 



I was in general very timid as a child, mostly because I didn’t want to do what a lot of boys were doing at the time. And so in order to kind of get my own excitement and not have to hang out with them, I seemed to go in the direction of horror and enjoying ghost stories.



CH: So it sounds like beyond the genre of horror it’s also the feeling of horror and being afraid that interests you.



JPR: Yes. Which is, I think, why I’m still interested in horror: It’s a process of self discovery. I’m finding that I’m mildly entertained by things that didn’t used to entertain me and I’m becoming less and less interested in a kind of classic slasher that I used to have a lot of investment in.



CH: Are you moving away from the investigation of a grotesque horror to something else? Or do you not know yet?



JPR: Yeah, I don’t think I know yet. I think imagined brutality, I’m starting to lose a taste for it. Things that didn’t used to shake me, shake me now. And what I’m noticing is that the more substantial black characters that end up in contemporary horror, the more we have to contend with this rule in horror that everyone is fair game. The thing about it is that, you put a black person on the screen, immediately they are a stand in for a historical lineage of bad shit happening. So that is compounded when you have a black character subjected to continual brutality. And horror, I think, as a genre is made for a particular social group that cannot facilitate all of the conversations that are happening in that small moment of a black character being subjected to violence as a synecdochical representation of people who are subjected to violence on screen in the real world. And so, while all of that’s happening and I’m having to think about brutality in that way, I’m still seeking around that for things in horror films that I can just enjoy. And I think ambience is one of them.



CH: Can you think of a horror film that accomplishes incorporating black people into the narrative effectively?



JPR: That’s complex… Robin Means Coleman in Horror Noire (2022), has a thesis that’s essentially about this line she draws between horror that has black people in it and black horror, which are two different things. And for her, black horror is one that involves black creative teams making essentially a quote-on-quote “black film.” 



One of my favorite films is Ganja & Hess (1973) by Bill Gunn. And one of the things about Ganja & Hess is that it’s so hard for people to read it as horror, because it does not do a lot of these things that we expect horror to do – one of them is being irreverent about people. The characters in Ganja & Hess are fully realized, they’re complicated, they do things that often don’t make sense. Their relationships with one another are really fraught. Which is why answering this question is complicated, because when I point to a film that can do this, that has fully realized black characters, it might be difficult to call it horror.



We mostly have a running kind of monolith of horror that is built by and maintained by white people who essentially have no adequate understanding of black character. And when we get a black creator who shows up and kind of throws the game, it’s like “Look at how well black people can make horror.” But we understand this, I dare say, better and that’s why it seems like the genre shifts, because a black vision of horror is more distinctly panoramic. Knows how complicated the genre is. 



CH: A lot of this relates to ideas that you laid out in your essay, “Labor, Leisure, Reticence Violence.” Through that essay, you make a comparison of horror to a lot of things – pornography, the process of writing poetry, the very act of existing in a capitalist society. Is that why you’re drawn to horror in part? Because of the relation it has to the real world?



JPR: I feel like when I started that lecture, I never intended for it to be what it is. I never intended to have this sudden and extreme break away from my life as a professional poet. But what I was obsessed with or at least preoccupied with when I started it, were relations that I was noticing between what it is like to negotiate a life as an artist while having to tether oneself to essentially oppressive institutions in order to do that work. Which a lot of people are doing. I was interested in this overlap between someone trying to survive a horror movie by running and hiding or by fighting. And I think that I looked at the running and hiding as a kind of going along with the conditions of the horror narrative in a way that working as a paid academic who has no time to do original creative work is a kind of “going along with.” I think that the distinction between those two modes is the distinction between a character who runs and hides and gets killed as opposed to a final girl who can no longer run and hide and has to fight back and either destroy the nemesis or be destroyed.



CH: How do you determine where form and repetition and archetypes – as you see in poetry and in a lot of horror movies – is useful (if it is at all) as opposed to more natural, organic form?



JPR: So one of the things that I try to make clear early on (maybe not early enough) in that lecture is that I’m possibly thinking of violence in an atypical way. That I’m thinking of it mostly attached to an eruption of social or structural awareness – but, yes, I mean that socially. Because I’m talking about horror, the easy way to think about it is gore and carnage. That’s in there, but I’m mostly interested – when it comes to the films themselves – in the way that the cinema starts to revolt, the way that the scenes start looking a little different once shit starts to kick off basically. We might have much longer scenes earlier on in the movie. We might have much quieter audio. We might have very stable shots of looking at characters, not from such extreme angles. Colors start to become a lot more vibrant or violent, later on in the film. 



And so when I was thinking about that violence as related to poetry and when you ask about form, I think that kind of violence starts to happen once the text becomes aware of the form and possibly finds it lacking. Or suppressing. Or just too incapacitating for what the text wants to become. And I think that this is – to me, from my vantage – an issue that a lot of contemporary poetry has. And maybe it doesn’t even have to be contemporary, but I think that one of the ways that poetry and especially poetry institutions – and I mean institutions of writing on a macro level – reify themselves is insinuating that something is recognizable as poetry, that poetry requires these certain acts. 



CH: I wonder if there’s some similarity to be drawn between the spectacle of violence within the films and the spectacle of watching them succeed or fail. You mention it in some of your essays. I think it was in “Killing Like They Do in the Movies” that you wrote this. There’s a spectacle of horror and violence that can be viewed from a safe distance, that we’ve sought out for a few generations, and that the horror genre embodies. I wonder if there’s also some aspect of that sadistic enjoyment to watching a horror movie that fails and falls victim to stereotypes and tropes.



JPR: Yeah. People love that. I do think people enjoy seeing films quote-on-quote “fail”. It’s probably the films that fail that are the most interesting. But I don’t think failure necessarily is inherent to them all the time. We have our expectations that are imposed by the genre. And we impose them by making the genre.



You know, I came of age in a very specific time. Like right after the crystallization of the MPAA rating system. The parental advisory. The kind of hangover of the Reagan/Bush years. The kind of violence, the kind of brutality that was permitted to be in the mainstream had to be very state, very jingoist, very ordered. I remember Columbine was such a dramatic cultural shift. The conversation was endless. And even the scandals that used to take up the news during that time. Those being these family scandals like OJ and JonBenét Ramsey. But now it’s like every fucking day a mass shooting. We are still living in a pandemic which in itself is a kind of daily horror. So now that we have these very state brutalities but in a very chaotic way – like having all this discourse around the January 6th hearings – I feel like there is a reaction in horror and in myself as an audience of horror in which there are things that I am now receiving that I maybe no longer have an appetite for because it’s being sated. Although when I postulated that in that essay I was feeling much younger than I am now. And I know that was only seven years ago. But I as a spectator – and not even as a willing one, just as someone who’s existing – I am feeling saturated and a little beat down by a certain kind of brutality.



And one thing we have to acknowledge too is that I’m talking about a very Western, basic horror. When I look at our very favorite kind of imported horror genre, Korean horror, none of those films that have come to fore feel as generically stifling as American horror. That body of work feels very willing to be a family genre, a comedy. 



Because, yeah, as we’re looking ahead at the crystallization of a new American fascism, it’s like, “How is horror going to react to that? Is it too going to solidify its own fascia, its rigidity?” And in some ways, it does. But what are the reactions to that and as such, what are going to be the reactions in people to the solidification of fascism?

Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, ideological failure, and uses of the grotesque. He is author of the hybrid text, With Bloom Upon Them and Also With Blood: A Horror Miscellany, released on Halloween 2023, as well as two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018)—all published by Coffee House Press. Born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, he participates in alternative rock music cultures, ogles Toyota Tacomas, and enjoys smelling like outside. He writes for the Nu Metal Agenda, and his favorite band is Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile.