There’s something watching out for the places no one watches out for.”

“Elevated Horror” has become a watchword for critically acclaimed modern horror movies in the wake of filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers. The term is used to refer to horror movies that supposedly transcend their genre trappings and grapple with elevated themes, often of identity and trauma. The term, however, has been rightly criticized as historically ignorant, insofar as horror fiction has historically been a fertile venue for verdant themes. Almost forty years before Get Out or The VVitch made audiences scream and discuss in equal measure, and almost a decade before Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman brought literary attention to comics, a failing episodic horror comic became the venue for a young author named Alan Moore to explore what it means to be alive.

Today Moore is mostly known for his original works, Watchmen and V for Vendetta having been subjected to moderately successful film adaptations, but his 1984-1987 tenure on Swamp Thing provides a unique perspective on his oeuvre. First, unlike the troubled cast of Watchmen, the titular Thing is not an original creation of Moore’s. Second, Swamp Thing’s monthly episodic format required Moore to churn out stories rapidly for several years. Third, Swamp Thing was the possessor of a tragically generic origin story, in which science wiz Alec Holland falls victim to a sabotaged experiment in the Swamps Louisiana, thereby becoming Swamp Thing, whose chief motivation is to become human again. These limitations are unique to Moore’s early work. Yet in his hands, these seeming impediments present tantalizing narrative opportunities. 

In his first two issues in the series, Moore resolves all ongoing plotlines, mostly by murdering the previous supporting cast and shows Swamp Thing himself being gravely injured and taken to a lab for dissection. The next issue serves as a startling revision of the character’s origins: the mad scientist performing Swamp Thing’s autopsy discovers that underneath the layers of foliage he is not a human at all; rather he is a sentient plant who came to misunderstand himself as human by being infected by Alec Holland’s memories. When Swamp Thing wakes up to this discovery, he lashes out in a storm of violence. His central motivation, to have his humanity restored, is now revealed as an ontological impossibility. Without this narrative to guide him, Swamp Thing is thrust into a journey of self-exploration that runs through most subsequent storylines. 

Moore’s initial narrative choice of retconning Swamp Thing’s original origin story within the narrative rather than by sterile authorial mandate sets the thematic trajectory for the rest of the stories he would write for the character. Moore’s run on Swamp Thing is about the power of stories to conceal and reveal. With the loss of his origin story, Swamp Thing is forced to formulate a new one for himself; a later issue has him literally bury the body of Alec Holland as an act of self-acceptance. In burying his old story, a new one is allowed to bloom. With the help of John Constantine (who makes his first ever appearance in these issues), Swamp Thing discovers that he is the latest in a long line of earth elementals who are tasked with guarding the Green, the collective consciousness of all life on earth. There is a beautiful irony that in clinging to his humanity Swamp Thing isolated himself, but in letting go of that story he finds himself in communion with all life.

Swamp Thing’s various foes also exhibit this pattern of concealing and revealing. He faces demons that hide behind human faces, matriarchal rage in the form of a wolf, the vengeful souls of victims, and the concepts of light and dark themselves. Wherever the forces that hover on the fringes of life impinge upon lived experiences, conflict is inevitable. These conflicts rarely end in victory for any party; the resolution often takes the form of acceptance, tragedy, and sometimes even reconciliation. These stories of elemental conflict make it clear that while Moore presents the world as constituted by stories, this is not some facile aphorism meant to reduce the world to a cozy place of safety. Rather, the storied nature of the world is what makes true horror possible. The human ability to be terrified beyond the mere possibility of pain or death is bound up in stories. People dread the loss of cherished stories and the exposure of hidden ones. Loss and shame have no sting at all without these possibilities.