The Horror Project is an ongoing challenge where I try to learn about horror fiction (beyond just being a fan) and teach myself to write horror fiction.
The first challenge I set in the Horror Project was one of the biggest – Define Horror. Not in the academic sense. There are more papers out there on horror and literature than I can count. But, in a personal sense.
What terrifies me in a horror story? How does it get under my skin?
But I also wanted to detail out what doesn’t terrify me, and what attracts me to horror. So, let’s get one thing off this list right away:
What Doesn’t Scare Me –
INT. SUBURBAN HOME – NIGHT
DEVON, a 30 something BLACK MALE, walks through the darkened hallways of his house. Only his cell phone illuminates the surroundings.
DEVON
Hello? Is anyone there. Listen, my biracial husband and I were just having pre-marital gay sex in the medical marijuana garden. (Silence)
If you’ve come for the LGBTQIA+ protest organization meeting, that’s tomorrow.
SFX – a CHAINSAW ROARS to life. OFF CAMERA.
Devon drops his phone. The light goes wild. We hear Devon SCREAM as a CHAINSAW tears into him. Blood falls on the phone. Lights go red…
….
This could be a scene from any number of horror movies and/or books. There is probably a following scene showing if they’d only followed good, White Christian values they would have been spared this terrifying manifestation.
This does not scare me beyond its knee-jerk conservative beliefs. I don’t mind having a moral center to my horror stories. But this isn’t about morality. It’s about enforcing the conservative orthodoxy in modern horror. It punches down, targeting already vulnerable people and using them as cheap props to get your gory ya-yas off.
When you literally demonize sex, non-conformism, gender identities and protest against injustice, you may get a raft of fanboys (usually boys) behind you. But you won’t get me.
What does scare me?
Powerlessness – Growing up, I had recurring nightmares about a dark portrait in my living room coming to life. He’d crawl from the frame on all fours. His broom bristle mustache felt like a wire brush against the skin. He’d chase me, and I’d freeze. When he loomed over me, breath hot, mustache scratching me until I bled, I could not move. Or run.
The mustache man rotated with ants, wasps, soiled cigarette butts from the toilet, but the result was the same. I could not move. I could not breathe. I dared not breathe because it was waiting to get me.
In the day, this translated to the times my dad would yell at me, and I knew a beating was coming. I couldn’t run. I froze. And he loomed large over me, eyes wide, massive hands reaching for me… Compound that with larger powerlessness (bullies at school never got punished, but if I even thought of getting a rock or a stick to defend myself, suddenly I was in trouble) and understand this fear.
Abuse & Secrets – I’ll use an example everyone knows. The scariest moment for me in Poltergeist wasn’t the clown toy, or the demon in the dimensional rift, or even the pit of skeletons and graves. It was the father grabbing the unscrupulous land developer and screaming “You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery but you didn’t move the bodies!”
Every house in that idyllic neighborhood lived atop the unmoored dead. Every nightmare suffered by that family was due to one man and his greed. And my bet? No one prosecuted him. The family were dismissed as nuts, they blamed the incident on someone else, and he got a fat bonus for the shareholders.
Abuse – in all its forms – terrifies me. Why we abuse others, and how we react to it, and if we can ever escape being the abusers once again. One time, I reacted to abuse with near homicidal rage. I was able to dole out the abuse, not just take it, and it had me wondering what would have happened if my Baba Jelka wasn’t there.
Secrets are tied to abuse in many ways. Not just lies, but things hidden away. Landmines for others to discover. Like the kids in the first Nightmare on Elm Street films, we’re being punished for the choices our parents made and kept silent. And look at Peter Straub’s underrated classic, Mystery or his well-deserved classic, Koko. It is all about things hidden and suppressed coming back to haunt us.
Disgust & Body Horror – My father is a lifelong smoker. Two pacemakers haven’t changed his habit. He still goes to ‘check the weather.’ Growing up, he would smoke in the bathroom and put out his cigarettes in the toilet. He wouldn’t flush. Our bathroom stank of mildewed tobacco. You opened the toilet to pee. Burned chunks of paper and broken brown weed covered the surface like pond scum.
In my paralysis dreams, or in my drowning dreams, I’d find myself covered in oily residue with flecks of tobacco embedded in my skin. Or wasps would drill into me and leave behind larvae wriggling through my body.
But the one dream, while not horrific, reminded me how my body horrified me. I dreamed I was on an operating table. A doctor peeled the skin away from my bloated stomach. He reached into the great lump of sickly yellow fat there and pulled free beetles, isopods, and centipedes the size of his arm. All swam inside my blubber like fish in a tank.
For John Mayer, the body is a wonderland. For me, it’s a source of horror and fascination.
What do I love about horror?
Wonder and Terror – For me, a good horror story (or dark fiction, or weird fiction) is like being in the middle of the ocean at night, under a silver moon, with only hints of the shore on the horizon. There are moments when you swim along. And then a wave hits you. You’re pushed under. Water fills your nostrils. It burns. When you ascend, gasping as you breach the surface… you’re lost. The normal landmarks are gone. Where’s the beach?
But in that terror – in the moment before, or between, when you are trying to get control of yourself and you rest on your back, you embrace your situation. You realize how small you are – just another bird on the water, under the full moon, carried by the waves. There’s wonder there as well. You’re one note in a bigger symphony, yes, but you can hear the music for the first time. Anyone else you encounter may never realize the music exists.
Terror and Wonder are cousins. Horror, at its best, lets you glimpse into another world. As the man said, “We have such sights to show you.”
Understanding is Survival – How do characters survive a horror story? Grit and determination? Yes, there’s that. What about a chainsaw? Helpful, yes, but not a tool for every occasion. No, the real tool is understanding. That’s what marks a survivor. Characters in any story should come out changed in some way. They can’t be the exact same person on the final page as they are on the first page. How they change varies on the story itself. But there is a key to that change and I call it understanding.
Think of a simple slasher plot – the characters who die first are the ones who don’t understand (or refuse to understand) their situation. “What killer? Look, she fell on that ritualistically carved hockey stick thirteen times by accident!” Realization gives the characters a fighting chance. Understanding lets them survive. It may not be pretty (just ask Thomas Jane at the end of the film version of The Mist) but they’re on the last page, one way or another.
The best kind of understanding is the reader’s own – when it dawns on them, they’re reading something which won’t leave them when they put down the book, or close their eyes.
Let’s Get Nasty – Horror fiction, by its nature, is willing to ‘go there’ when necessary. And I don’t just mean getting explicit. I mean looking into ugly topics and bringing them to light in surprisingly honest ways. Drugs. Abuse. Crime. Racism. Sexism. Much like good crime fiction, good horror lets us delve into areas considered out-of-bounds by more mainstream fiction.
You know where, as a kid, I discovered how sex actually worked? Where I learned about the clitoris? Wasn’t sex ed. Wasn’t mainstream fiction. SF and Fantasy? They were more prudish than the mainstream folks. Nope, it was in horror books. Occasionally, a writer would sneak in tender, honest moments between lovers before the terrors found them.
Could most horror be just as intelligent and perceptive as a twelve-year-old who discovered a copy of Hustler hidden in the woods? Yes. Bad sex is sui generis. Stereotypes are the Wonder Bread of literature. But for every pulp artist having women scream “RIGHT IN THE BANK!” there are people who want to ground their terrors in reality.
UPDATE: Video is now LIVE. Happy October, all!
Biomechanoid Blues 