The Heart of Horror
Artist Interview with Heather Montgomery
Ready for the thrill of a good scare? Let’s dig up the bones of our collective longing to love our whole selves and face our fears.
You might not know it to look at me, but I have a glorious blood-curdling scream, infamous in my family, and more formidable than the cockroaches, roller coasters, and jump scares that have been known to trigger it. I can’t muster the scream on command, it has to be sprung from me, like a prisoner. But I take a secret pleasure in releasing it. I mean who wouldn’t enjoy unleashing that kind of power? As a child I sought ways of provoking it: my brother and I once built a haunted house in our basement for neighborhood kids to run through, complete with chainsaw-wielding serial killers. For weeks we spent every day after school flicking fake blood onto the basement walls and eating Doritos. When the chips ran out, I gobbled up Stephen King novels and scary movies before it was age-appropriate. Even my first elementary school attempts at creative writing were heavily influenced by Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, three years ago, when ghosts started showing up in the novel I had conceived of as a perfectly respectable piece of realist fiction…but I was surprised…then delighted.
I was similarly captivated when Heather Montgomery introduced me to her three-dimensional mixed-media work known as “Art from Hell.” Her hand-made creatures are at once whimsical and spine-tingling, featuring the discarded carcasses of soft, cuddly toys reanimated with flecks of blood, gore, enamel teeth and red-rimmed button eyes. They are the zombified versions of the Velveteen Rabbit—if scarlet fever had killed the rabbit’s child and the toy had chosen to follow his beloved friend into the underworld. When I saw Heather’s work I thought, this is an artist with a fearless imagination, willing to “go there” in her creative process without holding back.
Of course, I was inspired—and thrilled when she agreed to meet with me to talk about her creative work, the process of making and then releasing it into the world, and how this amounts to a moving spiritual practice of self-expression and community-building. I mean…sigh.
We met for coffee at Quacks on Manchaca — treating ourselves to Halloween themed-treats like Goth-tarts and witch’s fingers (finger-shaped cookies with sliced almond fingernails). As we sought out a diner-style table, the sparkly formica and chrome gave me Stranger Things Snow Ball vibes…I just hoped that the booths wouldn’t start flaking into ash. Heather tells me that she has vended here before and they may still have one of her pieces behind the bar in the back. We craned or necks looking for the little creeper among bottles of tequila and rum, but he must have scampered off with a new playmate, for he had strangely disappeared…
We found seats before the curtained stage, Don’t Fear the Reaper playing softly overhead, and Heather showed me instagram shots of her newest creations. “My babies,” she calls them. I’m particularly taken with an ensanguined bunny clutching his bruised and bleary-eyed “emotional support banana,” the pair of them imbued with pathos despite the feral gape of the banana’s blood-soaked maw. Heather also shares a mounted (still bleeding) head of Rudolf-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer and a teddy bear with a Valentine’s heart being eaten by rats. These last two point toward Heather’s devilish (and delightful) sense of humor, the kind that fuels the best of campy horror flicks, Rocky Horror, Gremlins, Shawn of the Dead.
Some of her pieces will sell before she shows them, but most will find homes through her robust vending schedule at local drag shows and horror art festivals, like Gothess Jasmine’s weekly Dragula viewing party and open mic nights at Cheer Up Charlie’s on 10/29 and 11/5, the Nosferatu Festival’s Vampire Art Gallery at Bloody Rose Boutique on 11/9, and Krampus Kegger at the Far Out Lounge on 11/30. To me, it sounds like a lot to manage in addition to working full-time and having one kid still at home, but, Heather says, “it doesn’t feel like work.” She chooses events and settings that mean something to her in terms of community and give her energy rather than leave her feeling depleted. The drag shows in particular have become a significant source of inspiration and belonging for herself and her art.
“I consider myself drag-adjacent,” Heather explains. “It’s a place where I feel that these are people who really understand me, and who are expressing something that feels really vital to me, and [that] I think that a lot of people need to hear, and I want to be a part of it.”
Heather’s art gives her a way to participate in the show with her own form of self-expression, and side-step the introversion she says she normally feels in community settings. “I have something that I’m doing and I’m being social at the same time.” Also, she says that having her art there with her allows for conversation to start off at a different level. She explains: “I’m there. I’m an artist. I have my art with me. All these drag performers are artists. They’re expressing themselves through that medium. And it’s a way that I relate with them.”
It may seem that drag and horror form an unexpected pairing, but in fact, as Heather explains, the intersection between queer identity and the horror genre has a long history, dating back (at least) to early film experiments like F. W. Murnau’s seminal Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)—an absolute favorite of mine. Drag and horror, both lean into expressions of what, culturally, we’ve been taught to repress.
“There’s a way that the monsters and the bad guys and the killers and, you know, all of these horror characters exist on the outside, and aren’t part of the normal society—which could be seen as the heteronormative society. And so they, in a sense, want to be understood. There’s the feeling of the monster who’s misunderstood and so becomes the evil thing that people think it is.”
Heather is soft-spoken, but her eyes light up as she reflects on the academic work that explores this empathic link between the monster and the cultural “other.” Her own art embodies this connection, she explains, by taking the mass-produced, intentionally generic children’s toy and infusing it with something wholly unique that then vivifies it.
“I know I’m projecting like a lot of my own self and my queerness and my struggles onto them, but I look at them and I see: this could be this beautiful, beautiful thing—which is how I feel about them—and, you know, it’s a monster…and maybe [it’s] sad, and maybe misunderstood, but it wants love. And then somebody buys it, and they can love it.”
“It sounds like you’re talking about embracing the shadow,” I respond and explain about my recent explorations in Jungian psychology. “It seems like there’s a clear link between the horror genre and the nightmare landscape. How these things that scare us are parts of our own psyche asking to be integrated.” I’m thinking of Candis Green’s insightful podcast Mental Health is Horrifying, which unpacks the themes of the collective unconscious as they show up in popular horror films. Her recent interview with Shannon Knight on The Tarot Diagnosis includes a spread on how to identify your “movie monster soul mate,” the terrifying villain that most closely represents your repressed needs and desires.
Horror invites us to integrate those elements of our psyche that we routinely disavow, allowing us to develop a more grounded sense of our own identities and to avoid the complexes that can take hold when the shadow carries too much unresolved emotion. This doesn’t mean that everyone has to be into horror. We all, as Green explains, have our unique profiles of response to the themes that show up in scary stories. It’s perfectly ok to opt out of a genre that is too activating. I don’t do true crime, for example; it leaves me feeling suspicious of people in a way that I don’t like. I prefer supernatural horror and psychic intrusions from parallel realms. Heather says: “I can’t do haunted houses.”
“Really?” I’m shocked.
“I’m always scared I’m gonna be touched. I don’t wanna be touched.” Fair enough! And also, Heather, laughs, “I do it wrong!” She tells me how at a Renaissance fair she went through a haunted house that featured a display of live rats to represent the plague, and because Heather loves rats she went over and picked one up.“It just wants loved!”
I tell Heather about my adolescent obsession with screaming while running from chainsaws. How I would let myself think—just for a minute—might he actually kill me? My brother in that monster mask?
“It has vitality!” She confers. “We are anxious humans living in our capitalist society. And we all have this low-level cortisol and adrenaline, just constantly trying to get through life, and when somebody pops out of you with a chain saw and you get that adrenaline rush it’s more vital and it’s like: this is what these chemicals were made for! Not for this low-level stuff. And it kind of takes you out of that and puts you in a more primitive [state], which is very in your body, that is experiencing your own mortality rather than just dragging on with the way life normally is.”
And confronting our own mortality, it seems to me, is a key element of Heather’s art as well as horror in general.
Often children’s toys are created to represent an idealized, immortal form of perfection—an ageless, eternal expression of ‘cute.’ But when they are paired with elements of rot, decay, and gore—the transitoriness of the ideal is drawn into the spotlight. After all, even the most ‘adorable’ expressions of youth will go out of style and become creepy over time, as anyone who’s seen an antique doll can tell you. But Heather’s animals amplify this effect: their marred, decomposable flesh reminds us—not just of the dissonance between ideal and material reality—but of the physical frailty of our own bodies.
It doesn’t take a psychologist to identify the many ways mainstream culture in the U.S. attempts to deny or repress the reality of death. From our truncated grief “stages” (just seven steps and you’re done!) to our obsession with anti-aging, we aren’t very good at accepting this very real and universal aspect of our lived experience.
“There’s a way that maybe because it’s down deep inside it maybe feels more real or vital,” Heather explains. And I think she’s on to something there. It’s like there is a creative energy housed in all of that repressed anxiety about death. Coupled with the complete unknown for what exists (or doesn’t exist) in the afterlife, it is a veritable playground for the imagination. If you’re willing to go there.
I feel our conversation bumping up against the numinous and ask Heather if she relates her art practice to spiritual practice in any way. She cocks her head for a moment, then leans over her iced coffee as she tells me:
“In the last few years, I’ve thought a lot about what church means…something that I didn’t realize….people go to church…because it feeds them. Because when they go, they are energized. I realized when I go to drag shows…it would feed me. And I would experience what all of these artists were expressing. And I would feel uplifted. I would feel that spiritual feeling, that: oh I’m seeing something behind the curtain, like a little bit of the divine. This is something that’s helping me discover more about myself. Something that makes me feel like I relate to the universe. And I would feel fed by that and energized by that. So even though they all happen in the middle of the goddamn night and I’d be completely exhausted, the next day I’d be exhausted but fulfilled…drag is where I go to have spiritual practice.
“And sometimes art does that and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s just this like tortured idea that just has to get out into the world and you just express it because you have to. But sometimes it’s also something that you know that you’re creating that you’re going to share with other people to help feed them. And so in a way it’s like spiritual connecting to make the art. And so…I think that’s how spirituality is for me. It’s experiencing that—that feeling.”
Heather warned earlier that she has a hard time articulating how she feels about her art, but her words activate aspects of my own experience, and I tell her I feel something like that too: experiencing art like it’s a kind of communion. When I’m writing, I tell her, it’s like trying to get closer to the mystery.
“Yeah,” she says. “Experiencing [art] it’s like transcendence, right?” But making it, she explains, is different. There’s always a gap between the “pure golden idea” and what you can “transmit into physical form.”
I hear echoes of the Justice card and that frustrating process of willing something imaginary into form. But Heather reminds me that we don’t need to craft our work to perfection in order for it to touch on the divine.
“When people experience it, [your art,] they might get that seed of what you were putting in it because…like when I experience art…and it’s transcendent, those people are doing the same thing, right? They’re trying to convey something and they’re probably doing it imperfectly, but you can get it. You can get the seed of what they’re doing.”
These seeds, these apparitions of the divine, even the darkly divine (those aspects of the unconscious that might scare us), come from a shared space inside our collective history. So we can understand what’s being communicated even if it doesn’t completely match our artist’s vision. Horror validates that space where collective fear and desire meet and gives us an outlet in which we might even be compelled, like drag performers, to dance, to sing, (or in my case to scream) our hearts out.
May you flourish in this season, when death’s shadow looms above us all.
In the darkness, may you find expression of the fullest, most authentic version of yourself.
Come back in November to unearth the power of the Death card and unlock the next phase of your creative evolution—become a free subscriber.
Be sure to check out Heather’s upcoming shows and follow her on instagram @artfrom.hell for more spooky delights.
10/29 & 11/5 Gothess Jasmine’s weekly Dragula viewing party and open mic nights at Cheer Up Charlie’s
11/9 Nosferatu Festival’s Vampire Art Gallery at Bloody Rose Boutique
And hit the heart below to help other horror-lovers find us!