Writing fiction is not easy; this is not news. For me specifically, writing horror offers another challenge that I must confront each time I enter again into the genre: I am never quite sure what, exactly, qualifies as scary. That is the point, after all, isn’t it? The thrill of the fright, the shock of the unexpected and often unimaginable? It must be hard—even so venerable a horror master as H.P. Lovecraft occasionally copped out with non-descriptions along the lines of, “it was too terrible to describe.” Jerk.
One might think the simplest solution for one seeking what constitutes “scary” would be to ask oneself, “What scares me?” Well, loads of things scare me, though I’m not too sure many of them can be classified as anything approaching “horror.” I’m scared of failure. I’m scared I’ll never overcome my addiction to nicotine. I’m scared of the far right. What I am not scared of includes monsters, serial killers, elder gods, or any of the other sundry trappings of that which traditionally classifies horror. But this was not always the case.
When I was kid, I adored the Universal horror pictures of the 1930s and 40s—in fact, I still do. I must have watched Dracula, The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man a dozen times each before I was ten. I even rewrote Lew Lander’s film of The Raven for a school play. (I rechristened the Karloff character “Lurch.”) Contemporary horror, however, was strictly verboten to me. My parents wouldn’t let me anywhere near the stuff, and for good reason. I transformed into a quivering mound of fear-jelly at the slightest hint of the hard stuff. Stephen Gammel’s marvelous illustrations to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark provided endless nightmare fodder for me, as did the ghost librarian at the beginning of Ghostbusters, the one-sheet poster for Creepshow (as seen outside a shopping mall movie theater at the age of 5 or 6), and even this 1980s anti-drug PSA induced a very critical case of the willies:
That snake-man ruined me! And a kid who could be practically reduced to tears over a “Just Say No” commercial certainly wasn’t going to plop down in front of Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street, much less read the considerably more descriptive horrors available in the popular genre paperbacks of the day. Consequently, I grew up without horror. Apart from the black and white classics, I steered clear of the lot. (I did read one Stephen King novel. It was Salem’s Lot, and I wanted to die about halfway through it, I was so terrified.)
Flash-forward to my 20s. I was living in Hollywood, California in a lovely neighborhood populated by junkies, dealers (none of them snake-men), streetwalkers of indeterminate gender, and a few million stumbling drunk hoboes. I was living the dream! My roommate at the time was, as many fans and perpetrators of horror are, a lifelong horror geek. This cat grew up on a steady diet of Hammer Horror and Italian gut-muncher flicks, none of which I had ever heard of. Aghast at my ignorance, he rounded up an armload of VHS tapes from the corner video store and instructed me to sit my ass down and feast my eyes on the likes of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Terence Fisher’s The Horror of Dracula, and a half dozen other genre films I would never have watched on my own. After that, I further disgusted peers by letting on that I’d never seen any of the American horror films from the 70s and 80s, either—this included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, and every slasher ever made. So I watched them. I watched all of them, every damn horror flick I was told to watch, I watched. And after I exhausted those, I branched out farther and farther, finding the most obscure stuff I could track down. Two tremendous changes in my life were brought about from this: I became an avid exploitation cinema fanatic, and I also became an incurable horror junkie.
The next logical step was read all the books I missed, too. I’m still catching up on that.
When at last I decided, in 2006, to seriously turn my endeavors toward writing fiction, horror was a no-brainer. As I have said elsewhere, Dan Simmons’ The Terror more or less paved the way for me in terms of getting real about writing, and since I began work on my first novel I’ve never stopped. The trouble—if indeed there is trouble—is that none of it actually scares me. Not what I read, nor write, nor watch on a screen. To me, horror can go a number of ways: it can illustrate real shortcomings or warnings with regard to the human experience, it can be just plain fun. I am sometimes quite disturbed by a horror novel or story, and sometimes horror fiction possesses the power to make me work out an issue I care about, or didn’t even know I faced. But there are no nightmares. No looking over the shoulder, making sure all the lights in the house are on, or apprehension at getting blinded by shampoo in the shower lest a killer chose that moment to come barreling in.
And to be entirely honest with you, I worry about that. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to call myself a horror author when I can’t grasp what about the genre is so damn horrible? Why can’t I tap back into whatever it was about that smack-dealing snake-man that unnerved me so badly 25 years ago? Probably the fact that it isn’t scary. It’s goofy. Perhaps there is a substantial portion of horror consumers who are scared by goofy shit like that, I don’t know. I think aspects of my novel Bleed are pretty goofy, and intentionally so. That book is a B-horror movie as best as I could make one, and it’s supposed to be a romp, but nevertheless some readers have told me it scared the crap out of them. To tell the truth, I am both mystified and more than a little envious. The last book I read that really, truly scared the crap out of me was The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, and that’s a non-fiction science book for chrissakes!
Maybe horror is just more complex than I am giving it credit, maybe it simply provides a multitude of different experiences that translate to fright for some and wicked delight for others. But until I can suss that out, I’ll just have to depend on the GOP presidential race for my nightmares. Zombies, elder gods, and ax-wielding psychopaths can’t compete with that kind of terror.
So…what? Am I too jaded at this point in time and history? Are we all a little bit too jaded? What became of the 7 year old kid who, in 1984, stayed awake all night after viewing this bit of silliness on NBC:
Last weekend I watched Ghostbusters for the zillionth time since that first viewing in the theater 28 years ago (!!!). Over the course of those years I learned to appreciate what a terrific, almost pitch-perfect comedy it really is, and it never fails to induce peals of laughter from me. Indeed, that scene in the library at the beginning of the film, wherein Ray cries “GET HER!” has me in tears every time. It’s not supposed to be scary, it’s supposed to be funny, and it’s about as funny as funny gets. I have also seen Creepshow many times, and this too I view as a comedy, which it is. I think it’s a marvelously fun movie, but in no way even remotely scary.
There is, however, one film in the horror genre that I have seen as an adult that really did unsettle me. It was made in 1963. And it’s rated G.
I saw The Haunting for the first time in a big, echoey old movie house in downtown Austin a few years ago for a revival series they were doing. I was surrounded by speakers that emitted every creak, moan, and whisper all around me for the entirety of the screening, and I knew about halfway through that I was viewing the first truly scary horror picture of my adult life. I never saw a ghost, but I heard them…or something…always just out of sight behind a door that wasn’t locked or lurking in the shadows of a long hallway at night.
1963. Rated G.
To me, that says something substantial about the nature of horror and what makes it work, at least on a serious level.
Perhaps I’m on to something here?
