Horror is armed conflict, which leaves more dead bodies than
resolutions. It is rape and murder, which happens every night in far too
many cities. Horror is an explosion in a public place, or a mother
holding her dead child's body in her arms. I think we all know what real
horror is, even if we have only experienced it vicariously. So I guess
the pertinent question is what is horror fiction.
The dissection of an idea can be treacherous. A concept could mean something completely different
to different people with differing standards.
For instance, right now I think many people would say a television show
like The Walking Dead is horror, but
I disagree. I think horror should move
us on a deeper level, not just shock us or make us jump in surprise. There is a place for those things, but it’s
not horror.
In just two sentences at the very beginning of his novel Ghost Story, Peter Straub asks us to
examine the worst things we have ever done, as well as the worst that have
happened to us. It is an authorial
sleight of hand, but that is what has happened without the reader consciously
knowing. The text that makes up the book
that follows is thereby informed by our own dark experiences.
Horror done well will make us squirm and feel genuine
unease, at the best of times due to its subconscious messages rather than its
explicit ones. If I were to write a book
about Achluophobia, or fear of darkness, in which the characters
constantly thought about and analyzed their fear, would it be scary? What if, instead, I constantly put the
characters into situations where darkness was an unnamed coconspirator wordlessly
oppressing our protagonists, and thus the audience? Wouldn’t the latter have the greater impact
on a reader’s fear of the dark? The best
writers, in any medium, will build an atmosphere of unease, not simply point
out things people commonly fear.
When Dan Simmons writes of his “mind
vampires” in his novel Carrion Comfort,
it is the idea of losing our will that we fear more than any of the overt acts
described by the author. We imagine our
loss of mental control, or how each day we are stalked by those in the real
world who would manipulate us, or have done in the past. The audience should be made to imbue the work
with their own fears, and they must be allowed to scare themselves, for we know
best what scares us. I think horror is
an art. It is most effective when using the
roller-coaster mentality. People fear the
chance of something happening far
more than the result. We have reality
for that second kind of horror.
Some would say if you throw enough blood on it, then it becomes
horror. To some, I suppose it does, but
I think true horror fiction has a psychology. In a movie
like Alien, the real fear comes from
the feeling of claustrophobia, the characters trapped in a small space with no
escape. The Aliens are simply the
catalyst for the real fear, the fear of the subconscious.
I feel the best way to gauge horror is by
asking people what they fear. Try it for
yourself. Ask someone what he or she
fears most, and then analyze the answer to reveal the real fear hidden beneath
their words. That’s where horror
lives. For example, if someone professes
a fear of flying, does that really mean the dread springs from being up in the
sky in a giant tube? Most times, it does
not. The real fear is death and
destruction. As a writer, you must create
that airplane in order to plumb the depths of an audience’s unspoken
fears. If someone is not scared of
clowns, Stephen King’s It would fall
flat without the darker, seedier psychology beneath the surface.
Horror comes wrapped in all manner of packaging,
but it is the underlying causes of our fears, and our own personal experiences with
them that are of utmost importance. Whether
through allegory or metaphor, horror challenges us to inspect our fears,
societal and personal. It can be release
and catharsis, as well as warning. Horror,
at its best, expresses themes and concepts that make us investigate ourselves
in ways we commonly do not, sometimes realizing the truly horrific that resides
inside each of us. That is where true
horror lies.
What is horror to you?
-gj
My new novel Dark Waters is available now from Amazon. A purchase of the
print version comes with a free digital copy for Kindle readers and apps via the
Amazon MatchBook program.
