The incomprehensible past: horror in pre- and post-ceasefire Troubles fiction and film

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates how horror, as evoked in literature and films representing the Troubles, offers a productive analytical lens for challenging atavistic representations of historical violence and enhancing comprehension of horrific history. While the Troubles are often described using horrific language and imagery, no academic study has yet analysed how literature and film employ horror aesthetics to represent the conflict and to what ends.

Horror, defined by its evocation of fear in conjunction with the unknown and the incomprehensible, is frequently used to depoliticise political violence, rendering its perpetrators as monstrous and its specifics unknowable. Yet, since the beginning of the Troubles to the present day, there has been a growing use of horror to directly reckon with horrific historical events and counter depoliticising readings of horrific violence.

The first part of the thesis focuses on pre-1994 ceasefire novels and films, demonstrating how Brechtian critical distancing and historiographic metafiction enable horror to resist depoliticising representations of horrific violence during the Troubles.

In the second part of the thesis, I show how horror developed in the post-1994 period as a method of counter-memory, influenced by Ricoeurian triple mimesis, and how contemporary novels and films increasingly blur the line between fact and fiction or adopt fantastical and supernatural horror, such as the Weird, to reckon with the horrific past and its continuing effects in the post-Good Friday Agreement status quo.

As horror slowly grows in popularity in Northern Ireland, this thesis offers an instructive framework for reading its employment not as a reiteration of simplistic atavism, but as an incisive interpretative tool which directly confronts recent history that defies memory and comprehension.

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Northern Ireland Department for the Economy
Supervisor	Andrew Pepper (Supervisor) & Stefanie Lehner (Supervisor)