Jawbone

by Mónica Ojeda

And here’s the interesting part, Miss Clara: white horror resembles cosmic horror in terms of that mystic sensation. White, as you said in class, represents purity and light, but also the absence of color, death, and indefinition. It represents that which merely by showing itself anticipates terrible things that cannot be known. It’s such a clean and luminous color that it seems to be on the verge of becoming cloudy, on the verge of reaching its perfect pallor. In other words, white is like silence in a horror movie: when it appears, you know that something awful is about to happen. This is because it can easily be perverted and contaminated. In fact, one of the disquieting aspects of the color white is that it is pure potential, always close to becoming anything else. Do you understand? The contrast between the best and the worst that white brings to the imagination is so great that it gives me chills. That’s why the experience of white horror is that of dazzling blindness—the fear not of what’s hiding in the shadows, but of what’s revealed in the brilliant and desaturated light and leaves us speechless.