{"id":3459,"date":"2025-01-20T14:23:58","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T19:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=3459"},"modified":"2025-08-21T10:15:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T14:15:20","slug":"you-wont-be-alone-horror-and-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=3459","title":{"rendered":"“You Won’t Be Alone”: Horror and the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If any film captures the importance of horror for imagining a path forward, it is Goran Stolevski\u2019s You Won\u2019t Be Alone<\/em> (2022). At first glance another elevated horror, Stolevski\u2019s film is something altogether different. That\u2019s not due to its Macedonian-Australian production or its Serbian dialogue as its avowed humanism. This humanism doesn\u2019t come to us in the form that Marxism often imagines, as a sort of \u201cromantic critique of capitalism in the name of a human essence,\u201d as S\u00f8ren Mau puts it.[i] <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s nothing natural or naturalizing in the humanism of You Won\u2019t Be Alone,<\/em> only a clear-eyed understanding that humans need one another and organize their social reproduction in historically specific ways. That specificity begins with the film\u2019s setting in nineteenth-century Macedonia. Nothing is natural or unchanging in the forms of social reproduction represented here: from the gendered division of labor to the different forms of different kinds of manual work, the social and economic hierarchy, the ways in which people prepare and enjoy food, their courtship rituals, and so on. The film represents all of these things, but always as historically distinct, if recognizable, activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film spends so much time documenting nineteenth-century social reproduction because its specifics are as alien to the film\u2019s protagonist, a young woman named Nevena, as they are to a twenty-first century audience. Her interest is a result of her isolated childhood. Nevena begins the film in a state much like Kasper Hauser, the German man whose socialization so fascinated the nineteenth century. Like Hauser, she was raised in near-total isolation. Instead of Hauser\u2019s dungeon, Nevena was left in a cave by her terrified mother after a shapeshifting vampiric witch, Old Maid Maria, demanded Nevena for her own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A figure for capitalism, Maria is inescapable, living on the blood of the workers and viewing all of humanity as her enemy. She finds Nevena, kills her mother, and takes the young woman as her apprentice. Although Maria gives Nevena her vampiric shapeshifting power, she quickly becomes fed up with the awkward young woman. Like Hauser, Nevena has difficulty speaking and walking. In fact, she never speaks to anyone in the world of the film, communicating when she must through actions and gestures. She describes her experiences in voice-over, but even her narration at first is broken and agrammatical, only gaining fluency over time. Maria tries to force Nevena into her path of violence and brutality. When Nevena refuses, the old woman casts her off. Doubly abandoned, Nevena must learn how to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critics have been quick to note the influence of Terence Malick on Stolevski, and it\u2019s easy to see why. Stolevski includes extended montages of the daily activities of peasant life set to Nevena\u2019s pensive voice-overs. Much like Malik, Stolevski is interested in the beauty and meaning found in this na\u00efve relation to the everyday. Work is a recurrent concern, whether the work of a woman, a man, or a child. Nevena takes each of these forms, and each time the value she finds in that form is premised on the time she shares with others to do or to be or to feel with them. There is no possibility of life beyond the realm of necessity here\u2014nor is there in our world or our lives\u2014but there is the growing understanding that what makes work meaningful is our ability to choose our endeavors and our partners, to make use of the time that is given to us for what matters to us. This is time in the realm of freedom, not in spite of necessity, but as choices made to navigate the dictates of necessity for maximal shared freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maria observes Nevena\u2019s experiments from a distance and with distaste. When possible, she kills those who Nevena cares for. They\u2019ll never accept you, Maria says. They\u2019ll put you in the fire. Maria\u2019s fire-scarred body tells the truth of that judgement. Yet it is not the whole truth, You Won\u2019t Be Alone insists. Human experience is capable of joy, pleasure, and beauty. These experiences are marred, to be sure, by patriarchal oppression, as Nevena learns as a woman, and by the bitter exploitation of work, as she learns as a man. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet humanity is also full of love, joy, and pleasure, as she learns as a child. Life teaches her to care for others deeply and to see death as something to be grieved, rather than inflicted. Of the three people she becomes, she only wittingly kills one, a man who tried to rape her. The woman she killed in unwitting self-defense and the child she found dead and grieved. She understands the child\u2019s death as a loss that she can make up, and she does, taking on the child\u2019s form for the parents\u2019 sake and her own. As she grows into adulthood, she falls in love, marries, and has a child. At last, Maria returns. In a fury, she kills Nevena\u2019s husband and tries to kill the infant, a scene that repeats the film\u2019s opening. Nevena saves her child by immediately imbuing her the witch\u2019s shapeshifting power. The decision stuns Maria. A witch can only do this once. \u201cWhy was it so easy for you?\u201d she asks, mournfully, meaning both the decision and life as such. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a fair question. The film shows Maria\u2019s origins in the horrors of patriarchal oppression and social oppression. These have left her incapable of seeing pleasure in human experience. For her, there is only fear and violence in the world, the fruits of trauma, anxiety and depression. Not so for Nevena. It is mere happenstance that joy is possible. Terrible things happen. To name just one, Nevena must kill Maria to protect herself, and she does. Yet the film concludes not with sadness but a repeated phrase: \u201cand yet\u2026\u201d It is not that life is easy or devoid of bad feelings, but that it can also be full of joy, pleasure, and love, however fleeting and quotidian those experiences may be. If we are to imagine a world beyond capitalism\u2019s bad feelings, we must find ways to see the terrors and difficulties of life and still be able to say \u201cand yet\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote this for the conclusion of <\/em>Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film, but it didn’t fit in the final draft. It seems apropos now, at least.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If any film captures the importance of horror for imagining a path forward, it is Goran Stolevski\u2019s You Won\u2019t Be Alone (2022). At first glance another elevated horror, Stolevski\u2019s film is something altogether different. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3465,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t