Apocalypse Nick
(Spoilers)
I deeply, genuinely love ‘90s teen horror. The movies in what Alex West calls the ‘90s teen horror cycle are widely derided — too soft, too sunny, too often written by the guy who did Dawson’s Creek— but some are all-time greats. The slasher would be nowhere without Scream. YA as we know it wouldn’t exist without Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still, though I love those movies, there’s a sadness to them now. Dark as they are, they come from a time when the world seemed brighter.
Apocalypse 1999 originated in a desire to go back to ‘90s teen horror and see what it looks like if you, the reader, know what’s coming: All of those pretty teens who just survived Ghostface are now headed for endless war, two recessions, multiple stolen elections, a global pandemic, and countless school shootings. Nick and Jenny, our leads, just learned about Columbine, but they don’t know that Columbine is going to be the norm for the rest of their lives. Bill Clinton is being impeached, which is the biggest presidential scandal of their lifetimes, but they don’t know who George W. Bush is, and if they’ve heard of Donald Trump, it’s only as a Letterman guest. Their world is about to end, and they have no idea.
Nick Casini is the book’s most ‘90s character, in many ways. He’s part of a subculture — suburban teen-witch mall Goths — that was already well on its way to being a punchline. Everything he’s wearing is going to be out of date in a year or two. All of his music is about to become uncool. He is profoundly tethered to this moment in time. Yet Nick is also someone we would never actually see in a ‘90s movie, because he’s trans. It’s not the defining facet of his character; he’s just a teenage boy who likes KoRn and can’t get a date and never cleans his room, but he’s a trans boy who does those things. Nick is someone who probably went to your high school — everyone’s high school experience had trans people in it, even if you didn’t know who they were — but was systematically erased from that era’s witty, pretty, high-gloss image of “teens.”
Going back to ‘90s horror was a way to celebrate it, but it was also a chance to right some wrongs. Every major character in Apocalypse is constructed with reference to horror archetypes; specifically, they’re all based off the monsters or villains of other horror stories. One of the major themes of my non-fiction has been that everyone looks like a monster when they’re portrayed in a hostile light by the dominant culture. I wanted to reverse the process: Flip the monsters inside out, and see the people they were hiding.
Horror almost never depicts trans men. Its trans characters are invariably femmes who happen to be knife-wielding serial killers, going all the way back to the originator of the type, Norman Bates in Psycho. Yet, as critic Sasha Geffen has pretty brilliantly pointed out, there is one place where you can reliably find coded trans boys: Demon possession movies, where an innocent “girl” is infected with a horrifyingly “male” spirit. Geffen makes a strong case for both Hereditary and The Exorcist as belonging to this canon, but there’s one character they leave out: Nancy, as played by Fairuza Balk in The Craft.
Nancy is noticeably butcher than their coven mates — wearing their hair slicked back into an approximation of a short cut, flirting with girls, dressing in androgynous Goth outfits that wouldn’t be out of place on Brandon Lee in The Crow — and they’re obsessed with figuring out how to make their body house the consciousness of a male deity, Manon (whose name, for the love of God, starts with “man”): “It's like he fills you. He takes everything that's gone wrong in your life and makes it all better again.” Once Nancy has taken the power of Manon — or taken the power of “man” on — they’re corrupted and ruined by it, which they demonstrate by picking fights with alpha jocks and being possessive and controlling toward women. If you tilt your head and squint, you can see a TERF parable; the assigned-female person who dares to take on a male identity instantly embodies the worst of toxic masculinity. And of course, since Nancy’s body is not “naturally” fit to hold all that male power, Nancy ends up locked in a mental institution.
It just does not seem that bonkers to read The Craft as a story about transmasculine longing — a story about one teenager’s overwhelming need to be and embody the “he.” Or, at least, you could easily write a story about a teen-witch mall Goth who did embody that need. And that person, unlike Norman or Nancy, didn’t need to be punished or demonized for basic human emotions like loving his mother or wanting to protect his best friend.
It was important to me, given the ugliness of these other portrayals, that Nick be a hero, full stop — a guy who drives the plot and saves the day and has big moments and multiple love interests. Maybe it’s cheesy, but I think trans kids deserve to hear that they are heroic, and I see something inherently heroic in standing by what you know when the world doubts you; for that reason, among others, trans people make pretty good role models for cis kids as well.
Nick contains elements of some of my favorite ‘90s heroes. He has the unhinged joie de vivre of Jack Skellington, a guy who proceeds straight from “Christmas seems fun” to “I will kidnap an old man and terrorize countless children so that I may participate in Christmas” without ever really meaning any harm, or even losing his basic good cheer; he has the reckless passion of Fox Mulder, another guy defined by his willingness to believe the impossible and his tendency to get in way over his head.
What I loved most about Nick, as I wrote him, was his refusal to be anyone’s tragedy. He is not just confident, but over-confident; he does not just love himself, he expects you to love him, too. Lots of stories about queer and trans existence center on bigotry and trauma, and those are very real elements of life in an unjust world, but what helped me come out was not hearing how bad things are; it was hearing how joyful life could be regardless. Nick has an innate buoyancy, a refusal to be defined by his surroundings or by other people’s expectations; he does, after all, spend every day studying magic in the world’s least magical location, the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He’s driven by some inborn faith that the world is and ought to be a miraculous place. That willingness to look for the miracle can create the miracle. At the very least, it makes the world’s darkness less overwhelming.
While I was writing, I put together playlists for each character; I wanted to know what each person’s 1999 sounded like. Nick’s playlist, predictably, has the most overlap with horror. Goth has always had a healthy back-and-forth with Hollywood; Nick’s namesake is a legend, but he is also “the guy who did the Scream song,” and the Cure track is something Nick would have heard on Jenny’s X-Files soundtrack. The inclusion of “Dragula” feels like a cheap gender joke, but it’s actually just the song that plays over The Matrix’s club scene, when Trinity meets Neo. (Whether that was a cheap gender joke, on the other hand…) It feels important not to edit out the ugly parts of the era. There’s no avoiding the fact that Nick would have listened to Marilyn Manson — he was the central, defining figure of this subculture, and a local Ohio act — but given what we’ve learned about Manson since the ‘90s, I’ll understand if you skip that song. I also expect you’ll skip “Freak on a Leash,” for different reasons. Yet there is beauty here, too. Trent Reznor, once merely a teen’s most reliable signifier of self-pity, is now one of the great artists of the age, and there is nothing more pure or innocent than his off-key scream on “We’re In This Together,” as he promises the person he loves that they can make it through the end of the world.
What ties all of these influences together is yearning. All of the characters — Mulder, Nancy, Jack — are defined by their longing for something they’ve been told does not exist. They all bend or break the rules of their society in their quest for that something, and very frequently, they are punished: Targeted by a government conspiracy, locked in a mental institution, blown out of the sky. That longing for the impossible, and the fear of blowing up my life by reaching for it, was something I felt and did not know how to talk about when I started Apocalypse 1999. What I learned from Nick was how to keep reaching; to trust, even when the entire world is burning down around you, that you are worthy of a future and capable of surviving.
This week, all Apocalypse 1999 proceeds will be donated to Casa Ruby, a Washington, DC-based organization founded and led by trans women of color to “create success life stories among transgender, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals.” The organization was selected by our editor, Maddox Pennington.