Why We’re Still Obsessed with Stories about Weddings Gone Wrong
Cormac McCarthy wrote: “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
Melodramatically — and see how I feel the need to caveat my own feelings, lest I seem like a bridezilla?! — I thought about this quote a lot while planning my own wedding. There was the dream: A courthouse. A fancy dinner. A gorgeous dress. Ten people MAXIMUM. Maybe a photographer or a makeup artist, but honestly, maybe not. And, finally, the way I would feel: totally present, totally light.
And then there was the reality. Between the two, the world lay waiting.¹
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There are whole hosts of books and movies about weddings gone wrong. Weddings are a favorite setting for thrillers and murder mysteries, probably because the cast and setting are practically built-in: You have hundred or more people who don’t know each other, dragged together from across the country or the world, trapped an idyllic, often secluded location.
But weddings are also supposed to be “perfect” — whatever that means — and we know they aren’t, because nothing is. Jordan Peele has said, “I view horror as catharsis through entertainment,” and that’s certainly true of wedding horror.² As a society, a culture, we are deeply committed to the notion of the perfect wedding — the idea that by tying your life to someone else’s, you can, for one day, transcend the flaws of the mortal plane. But as individuals, we know that’s not possible. We don’t want to look at the fact that it’s impossible, though, partly because the truth is less pleasant than the fiction — how beautiful, to believe we can approach perfection, if only for One Big Day! — and partly because the societal view around weddings is so rigid that to suggest the day might just be average, or even suck, feels taboo. A woman getting married becomes a “bride,” and for a bride to express anger or distress immediately makes everyone uncomfortable. It hearkens back, perhaps, to the fact that the standard American wedding — and indeed, American hetero marriage — is an extension of a very foundational ritual for society, a ritual wherein a woman is handed over to a man as chattel, and no one likes it when the chattel opens its mouth.
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Here’s a secret: I wrote my wedding-planning horror novel, Until Death, before I was even engaged, and long before I planned my own wedding. But I had witnessed enough friends getting married — and experienced enough crazy wedding-brain myself — to see how bizarre the wedding-planning process was, and to know that it was prime fodder for a horror novel. I had also seen enough to smugly believe all this expense and stress would never happen to me. I would have a small, easy wedding. I would not cave to the pressures of my loved ones and society.
At Until Death’s start, the protagonist, Ophelia, has a front-row seat to the planning of
her best friend’s wedding. She, too, is convinced she’ll never do any of this. (Spoiler: She is mistaken.) But over time, as she’s boxed into having her own wedding, she finds herself oppressed by the seemingly rock-solid demands of everyone around her. In the end, it’s not so difficult for her to crack. Hell, half the time, she’s even pressuring herself. After all, the people who want things from her are the people she loves. She wants them to be happy. Why should she get what she wants, anyway? Isn’t it more important for other people to get what they want?
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Look: I didn’t love my wedding. I knew I wouldn’t.
What I did love, though, to my surprise, was this:
After the wedding, I felt like garbage for weeks. And over time, I was forced by my own sick heart to tell some of the people closest to me how unhappy I felt, and how guilty for being unhappy.
And they heard me.
I have always found that when I am really vulnerable with people — when I am sure the awful thing I want to say is going to push them away, and I force myself to say it anyway, not with vindictiveness but out of a desire to be known — nine times out of ten, they meet it the way I want them to.
That’s what my and my husband’s wedding was supposed to be about in the first place, was love and closeness. That is what Until Death is ultimately about: the way your relationships can be there for you, even when you can’t be there for yourself. And that’s the real reason I think we love stories about weddings gone wrong so much — because in the end, despite the murder and the drama and the tears, the protagonist often discovers that the people who were always there for them are there for them still.
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¹ McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Vintage, 1993.
² Peele, Jordan, and John Joseph Adams, editors. Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. Random House, 2023.
