Horror at Play

As a kid growing up in Milwaukee, Kristen Leer would go to her grandparents’ house every Saturday for three things: pizza, her cousins, and Svengoolie. 

The Chicagoland show, which airs on MeTV, featured the title character spoofing and commentating a classic horror or science fiction movie. Svengoolie, a larger-than-life spooky clown in a top hat, would parodize classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein—acknowledging the long histories of horror in their stories while poking fun at them. 

This was how Leer got hooked on horror. When she was a middle and high school student, American Horror Story premiered on FX. It was rife with more references to classic horror, but with special twists that captivated 21st-century audiences. Leer delved more deeply into the canon, learning more about classics like The Blob and Night of the Living Dead, while also thinking about how modern horror expanded more psychological elements. To her, the genre seemed to evolve constantly while referring back to itself, leaving plenty of room to push the envelope.

“Horror has always had a playful element,” she explains. The 1930s, the so-called golden age of horror, saw classics like the aforementioned monsters emerge. But shortly thereafter, Albert and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) hit theaters. The cycle of classic horror films to parodies continues to this day—for example, movies like Saw and The Evil Dead inspired musical versions. 

Humor and horror, though seemingly unlikely partners, are strangely compatible. Think the slapstick conclusion of A Nightmare on Elm Street, or the witty dialogue and meta-humor of the Scream franchise. Audience members might find themselves having a chuckle between cringing and cowering. 

“Horror responds to real-life horrific things and social issues happening,” Leer says. “But there’s also comedy. It’s two sides of the same coin.”

Whose Horror Stories?

As an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Leer studied psychology, classical civilization, and religious studies: all subjects that unknowningly fed into her personal interest in horror. But as she read more and more about the genre, she was “struck by this undertone of seriousness” in the academic texts she studied, as well as the focus on negativity within the genre itself. “I wanted more people to talk to the audiences because they put a different light into this,” she explains. So she started conducting interviews with horror podcasters, particularly people of color.

Leer (back row, center) was regaled with tales of La Llorona by her host family. 

“There’s joy, there’s passion, there’s pleasure—especially with marginalized communities reinventing the horror classics,” Leer says. 

Her own joy and passion brought her to the University of Michigan, where she met Robin Means Coleman, media scholar and then associate dean of Rackham Graduate School. Though focused on Black horror, Coleman’s book Horror Noire (Routledge 2011) gave Leer “the language that I felt but didn’t have, especially towards other representations that I was noticing internationally.”

The representations in question originated in Latin America. As a Latina horror enthusiast, Leer had noticed certain caricatures emerging in the traditional canon. She wrote and published a paper about the butch Latina stereotype in Aliens (1986), Resident Evil (2002), and Annihilation (2018)—arguing that these roles served as expendable, undesirable foils to white female characters.

In 2019, Leer went to the movie theater to see The Curse of La Llorona, directed by Michael Chaves. The folkloric character, a scorned woman taking revenge on her unfaithful husband by drowning their children, was a perfect candidate for the genre’s mutability. But Leer was gravely disappointed.

“A white family is targeted by an international entity, who turns out to be La Llorona,” Leer says. “It’s a kind of white fright.”

After writing a book chapter about La Llorona for the Oxford Handbook of Black Horror, Leer then felt a strong sense of responsibility to do right by La Llorona and the people represented in film adaptations of the story. In 2024, she traveled to Guatemala to volunteer in a Kaqchikel community, an Indigenous Maya population. Her host family, especially the grandmother, told her all about their Llorona.

“There’s this blending of Indigenous folklore with La Llorona and how they really believe that she is true,” Leer reflects. “But they were also really Catholic.” The family was so eager to share their regional folklore with Leer that they stayed up past midnight to tell her spooky stories, mimicking the howls of La Llorona.

“I got spooked out,” Leer remembers, laughing.

Playfulness, too, can refer to the way that horror challenges the boundaries of what a film can represent. Leer points to the local success of the 2019 Guatemalan film La Llorona, directed by Jayro Bustamante, who reinterpreted the Llorona myth—rather than sticking to old, prejudiced tropes like the Chaves film, he readapted the story and incorporated themes from Indigenous Guatemala, like its history of native Maya genocide. For the Kaqchikel community, “this was their Get Out. It was their movie, their staple.

“I think this is where horror is really important,” Leer says. “Because without that playfulness, we wouldn’t be able to dive into certain topics.” Bustamante’s application of the traditional folktale allowed him to explore a regional history that had been overlooked by past storytellers. La Llorona lives on in the hands of responsible raconteurs.

On the Horror-izon

When she looks to the future, Leer knows that she will continue to push the envelope on horror. “People still think that horror isn’t a viable genre,” she says. “They say it’s just a way to put crazy stuff on a screen and call it a day.”

But Leer wants horror audiences to engage with the genre critically, but in an accessible way. With the help of U-M’s libraries, she is working on a digital archive of horror podcasters, collecting oral histories in order to blend an academic training with tales from popular culture. She is also a contestant on the upcoming horror game show Better Luck Than Chuck, where she gets to flex her deep knowledge of the genre.

And, she says, if Jordan Peele wants to hire her as a consultant, she’s available.

Illustration by Matt Vierling