Creativity, Horror, and the Worlds Beyond the Ego
The beyond without and the beyond within, in my new interview for Sean Hood’s Undercraft
I recently had one of those conversations that seems to gather several long-running strands of thought into a single place.
Screenwriter and USC screenwriting professor Sean Hood—whose credits include Halloween: Resurrection, Cube 2: Hypercube, and Conan the Barbarian (2011)—has launched a new Substack called Undercraft. It’s devoted to what he calls “the creative practice of the waking dream,” referring to the cultivation of states in which the imagination takes on a life and agency of its own.
Sean is also writing a book on the subject, and as part of that project he invited me to talk with him about the daemon muse, horror as a mode of metaphysical disclosure, writing into the dark, imaginal figures, Resistance, nonduality, and the strange collaboration that can unfold between the conscious mind and whatever seems to speak from beyond it.
In other words, the conversation led directly into some of the central territory of The Living Dark.
We began with horror, considering it not simply as what frightens us, but as something that might uncover a deeper truth. Part of my answer turned on the strange sense that horror happens when our bounded picture of reality is ruptured by something it can’t accommodate:
At the deepest level, in my view, all horror is cosmic horror.
Horror happens when our personal cosmos is invaded by something from beyond it.
From there, the conversation moved into such things as the apparent otherness of imaginal figures and the daemon muse, and the value of withholding final judgment about their ontological status.
At one point, while talking about the limitations of the conscious ego as a source of creativity, I put the matter this way:
The egoic mind, on its own, is condemned to recreate the past in some form. . . . Novelty has to come from beyond the ego, either from the world outside or from the beyond within.
That “beyond within”—the place from which images, ideas, voices, and entire creative worlds sometimes seem to arrive—is the central concern of Sean’s project. It’s also, under various names, one of the abiding concerns of my own work.
Sean’s questions were unusually perceptive and searching, and the resulting conversation moved through some deep territory. I’m grateful to him for the invitation and delighted to be part of the beginning of Undercraft.
Read the full conversation:
Interview with Matt Cardin of The Living Dark:
Creativity, Daemonology, and Horror
On the deeper forces in the creative life:
“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)
“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow
“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.” — Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets
READER REACTIONS:
“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”
“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”
“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”
“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”
“There is potential here to change your life.”