THE FUTURE OF HORROR

(Originally published at 2 Book Lovers Reviews October Month of Horror)

When I was a kid, my mom sewed red and black cloaks for me and my little brother so we could be vampires for Halloween. I wore mine to school with a pair of vampire teeth, the kind that glowed in the dark and filled with spit in about five seconds.

The teeth were already bothering me by the time I got to school, so I shoved them into my knapsack, slicked back my hair, and for the rest of the day I told people I was the Devil. My second grade teacher raised an eyebrow at that. “How appropriate,” he chortled. I was already a bit of a hellraiser, I guess.

When we’re young, vampires, demons and ghosts are easy to understand. They’re substitutes for our real fears. The monster under the bed. Werewolves in the woods. They’re easier to understand than the very real, complex horrors they represent.

Early stories of demonic possession were likely cases of mental illness. Vampires have been seen as the fear of the Other, of homosexuality (and often sexuality in general, particularly in the nineteenth century), of addiction and disease; more recently, they have become symbols of our fascination with and repulsion towards life after death and immortality. Ghosts are our fear of death, and what comes after. Evil ghosts show us a pitiful existence beyond this life; “good” ghosts, that we can come back to visit our loved ones when they’re in need, and be visited by the deceased.

Stories of demonic possession can be traced back at least as far as the Old Testament. The vampire myth had been around for centuries before Stoker’s Dracula made it a household term, and the first example of a ghost story is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, from 2100 B.C. Ghosts, or spirits, are literally as old as storytelling itself. And yet, thousands of years later, writers are still making these ancient tropes dance like Halloween aisle skeletons. No matter how often we cry out, “Not another [insert archetype here] movie!” so long as the world continues to spin, I doubt we will stop writing about them and enjoying them.

With every advance in technology and scientific discovery, there is something new for spirits to haunt or “curse,” with every new drug or communicable disease there’s something new to equate with vampirism, and every year brings us another “based on a true story” possession the Holy See allegedly didn’t want the public to know about.The Ring used outdated video technology to tell a new twist on the ghost story; more recently, the massiveParanormal Activity franchise has done the same, and Unfriended just brought ghosts into social media. Twilight dropped vampires into the drab world of the self-obsessed teenager, and brought fear of sex back to the genre; The Strain used our very real fear of infectious diseases like ebola and H1N1, and gave the classic vampire tale a modern twist. The Exorcism of Emily Rose revived a genre that had peaked with The Evil Dead series in the ‘80s, though some successful attempts had been released over the years between: Denzel Washington inFallen, and Matthew McConaughey’s Frailty are two excellent examples of films featuring demonic possession.

So much fiction revolves around these three central horror archetypes that they could almost be considered their own genres. So why vampires, demons and ghosts?

I don’t write about vampires often. Nor demonic possession. At some point, when I’ve got something to add to the conversation, I’ll dive in with abandon. But I have written about ghosts (in my upcoming novel, Salvage, and in the short story “Artifact” from Gristle & Bone), and I plan to do so again. I understand the desire to go back to those near-exhausted wells. We write about them because they are stand-ins for the same things that scared us as children: violence, death, war, crime, disease, strangers, the unknown things that lurk in the dark. We write them because they are familiar to our readers, our audiences. They are the premade framework with which to hang more complex stories on; a skeleton to dress with flesh. We write about them because they scared us as children. Because they scare us still.

Of course these aren’t the only tropes we’ve grown familiar with over the years. Zombies have become extremely important to the horror genre since George Romero’s seminal 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead--though some might say they’ve taken over the genre, in an explosion of fiction and films that has multiplied like a zombie plague. Cthulhu mythos is also coming back into fashion, with True Detective’s “Yellow King” and pitch-black nihilism making Robert W. Chambers’s somewhat dainty cosmic horror shorts from 1895, The King in Yellow, into a modern bestseller. (Chambers’s work was said to be the inspiration for Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, for those who aren’t aware.) Werewolves and “shifters,” whose spiritual ancestor, Robert Louis Stevenson’s fever dream novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, grew to define the werewolf/shifter sub-genre, have seen dips in popularity throughout the years since Lon Chaney’s The Wolfman, but have never been as big as they are now. Serial killers, slasher films and torture porn will be around as long as there is murder. I would add stories about sentient robots (which take their cue from Shelley’s Frankenstein) and aliens (from H.G. Wells) to the mix as two other essential horror archetypes, though they aren’t seen quite so frequently.

What will the future hold for horror? What new archetypes will we invent? What will be the next big thing?

Cannibalism has seen a bit of a resurgence since the Miami Zombie took “bath salts” and ate a man’s face in the middle of the day (turned out it was marijuana), and Hannibal recently burned too brightly our television sets. With the amount of horror in politics and the corporate world, I suspect “bodysnatchers” will see a rise in popularity.

But will there ever be a truly new monster? Or was Ecclesiastes right when he wrote “There is nothing new under the sun”? Will we continue mashing together genres and styles and pretend it’s not just an old product in shiny new packaging (Dreadpunk, I’m looking in your direction), or will we invent the next Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, Mr. Hyde, zombie, xenomorph, Hannibal Lecter?

I, for one, hope the horror genre continues to innovate. I hope we never stop seeking new ways to thrill and terrify. And I hope we never stop wanting to be afraid.

IN DEFENSE OF HORROR

(Originally posted on The Ginger Nuts of Horror)

I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, defending horror on a website devoted to it, but stick with me for a minute.

A while back, I found myself in a heated debate with someone who claimed to dislike horror. "What did you think of Silence of the Lambs?" I said, having heard this claim a dozen times before.

"That's not horror," the supposed horror hater said.

"Okay. Well, did you like Misery?"

Same answer. Misery. Not horror.

A book/film written by the most famous horror writer in the world, Stephen King, in which a maniacal nurse kidnaps her favorite author and psychologically and physically tortures him into resurrecting her favorite literary character. Not horror. Annie Wilkes and Thomas Harris’s Dr. Hannibal Lecter, two the most frightening characters of all time—clearly monsters, right? But they're not quite horror enough for our horror hater.

And neither, it seems, for today’s rabid horror fan.

Somehow in the past ten years or so, with the addition of countless sub-genres of horror (eg. Apocalyptic, new weird, bizarro, dark fiction, extreme, gothic, magic realism—to name a few), we horror fans got the idea that for something to be truly considered "horror" it has to contain bizarre creatures, ghosts, telekenisis, extended torture scenes and/or buckets of gore.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good jump scare. But don't throw a cat in front of me and expect me to wet myself in terror, and those loud music "stings" aren't gonna cut it.

I love a spooky atmosphere. I love a good cheesy monster movie, so long as it’s got something more than CGI/makeup effects to offer (see: Pumpkinhead, Child’s Play, and yes, even Clive Barker’s Nightbreed). I love vampires and zombies and werewolves and aliens and kids who can blow shit up with their minds. But why should we limit what horror can be to these same old tropes used in the same old tired ways?

Is Se7en's John Doe any less frightening a monster than Freddy Kreuger, Chucky or Pinhead? What makes Bram Stoker's Dracula an exemplar of horror and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho not?

Why do we, as horror fans, feel the need to pigeon-hole horror and our tastes for it? Are we scared to let it spread its wings, to grow into something larger and more meaningful?

Are we truly so afraid of allowing metaphor and theme and subtle menace creep into our horror that we have to recycle the same old chainsaw maniacs and possessed children and mindless zombies?

There are countless articles posing these same questions. And why? Because we fans won’t let horror branch out, like the limbs of Deadite-possessed trees. There seems to be an anti-intellectual snobbery among some horror “purists” who believe it shouldn’t or can't have any aspirations other than to scare the balls off the viewer. As if any “pretension” to art will somehow sully (or in this case, gussy up) its grisly reputation.

Fortunately this prejudice only seems to apply to movies and TV. Horror novels and short stories seem to be mostly immune, likely because reading is an inherently intellectual exercise. Even if you're reading the Twilight saga, you still have to fill in visual details with your imagination, while also, likely, thinking ahead to figure out what's going to happen next (if whatsername will end up with the werewolf or the vampire, say). Watching is predominantly passive. Reading is active. Reading requires you to use your brain to interpret ideas, to wear the skin of its characters (a bit like Buffalo Bill), while movies and television, with the exception of mysteries and thrillers, ask you to turn off your brain and let the images and sounds happen to you. The protagonist is your surrogate.

Stephen King is quoted as having said he writes horror to exorcise his own fears and demons. I write it (and read/watch it) for a similar reason: to understand the things that terrify me, that horrify and shake me, to deconstruct them, to diminish and contain them, while also hoping to tell/read/see an entertaining story. (Please don’t think I’m in any way comparing my efforts to the Master of Horror’s. I can only hope my stories could be as good as his most mediocre ones.)

I do enjoy horror for the sake of horror. I want to be scared, shocked, titillated, mortified. But if that's the only thing a movie or book has to offer, why bother? Why not just go bungee-jumping? Or pick a fight? Or sit in on a murder trial?

The best horror, in my opinion, attempts to tell an oft-told tale in a fresh, interesting and often gruesome way. The best horror doesn't just frighten, it challenges. It illuminates the darkened corners in the minds of others, of ourselves. Think of Stephen King's The Shining. It's as much a tale of a haunted house and a boy with powers as it is the real life terror of alcoholism and child abuse. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is as much about a man possessed by his own vices as it is the world's first "werewolf" story. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the true horror is unchecked scientific advancement, not Dr. Frankenstein’s curiously verbose monster. Compare the film versions to the books, and their themes are virtually unidentifiable. Is that because we don't want meaning in our horror movies, or because Hollywood thinks so little of us they don't think we'll get it? 

I realize I'm going to be accused of snobbery myself, but stick with me a minute longer. I've always loved horror. But lately, at least as far as the movies go, it can be really difficult to defend. I feel like Chris Rock struggling to find reasons to endorse post-‘90s hip-hop despite its rampant misogyny. Modern horror movies tend to have a similar problem: the “final girl” trope, in which the female lead has to be the only character surviving the events of the film, forcing what used to be thought of as a predominantly male audience to identify with a female protagonist, has become so prevalent that it’s accomplishing the opposite. We root for the girl to die, if only to subvert our expectations. We revel in her various tortures.

Something like Haute Tension comes out, or You're Next, or The Purge, and we praise them for their originality, perhaps rightly, even though they're hitting all the same markers as every other slasher flick before them. These are probably the freshest examples of the slasher/home invasion sub-genre (I'll include It Follows and Funny Games, though the former is pretty laughable, and the latter plays games with the audience as much as its characters); there are plenty more that don't even bother to tweak the formula.

There's an even bigger evil facing horror movies these days: it's dirt-cheap to make, and too many wannabe auteurs believe it's an easy first step into the industry. So, for every Halloween and Evil Dead and The Last Exorcism there are two Hostel movies, two Human Centipedes, and a half a dozen Paranormal Activity sequels. For every first season of The Walking Dead there's a season two of The Walking Dead. (Survivors/The Hoarde: please send your hate mail to @userbits.)

Because it’s so cheap to make and the profits can be (relatively) enormous, there’s very little innovation—let alone a decent script—required. We get warmed-over anthologies like most of the V/H/S trilogy, and both The ABCs of Death, with maybe five decent shorts out of each twenty-six. We get infinitely more found footage—which can, and has, been done well, but hasn’t since Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield. Even Bobcat Goldthwait’s eagerly anticipated found footage Bigfoot movie, Willow Creek, was a bit of a well-acted disappointment.

We get another slasher/rape/torture porn movie with characters so blatantly stupid or vile it's impossible to care. Another teen vampire melodrama/abstinence PSA. Another zombie franchise.

In spite of all the bad horror flooding the market, taking advantage of our undying love for the genre like a rock star humping and dumping his groupies, there are still gems to be found. Scouring Netflix you can easily discover a lost classic from the ‘70s or ‘80s, like Richard Matheson’s The Legend of Hell House, Burnt Offerings, or Dreamscape. And occasionally something new surprises us with unexpected twists on the genre--Let the Right One In, for instance (either version is subtly creepy and well-acted), Cabin in the Woods (a spectacularly underrated horror flick, in my opinion, from its wild concept to its flawless execution and balls-to-the-wall ending), and the intimately horrifying Sinister (Insidious’s far more interesting cousin). It’s movies like these I’ll point to when someone asks me why I love horror.

So why do you love horror? Let me know on Twitter @userbits.

THE SHORT HORROR THAT INFLUENCED ME MOST

(Originally posted at Thomas S. Flowers's MachineMean.org)

When someone asks “What’s your favorite (book, movie, TV series, song)?” I find the answer about as difficult as choosing what to order when everything on the menu looks good and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. For the sake of Thomas’s request, I’ve narrowed it down to the two books that influenced me to start writing.

Stephen King’s Night Shift, and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood were my first journeys into their terrifying minds, and still resonate with me long after reading. They aren’t necessarily my all-time “favorites,” but they’ve inspired me to achieve similar heights in my own writing.

Night Shift was on the shelf at the old cottage, and its creepy cover called to me… You may know the one: the hand covered in eyeballs and wrapped in gauze (this was the double cover, with the eyes peeking out from holes in the flap). It refers to the story “I Am the Doorway,” where an astronaut brings home an alien stowaway that uses him to peek into our world. Night Shift effectively blends science fiction, horror, terror (if you don’t know the difference, pick up his seminal non-fiction book, Danse Macabre), and gross-outs. Most may not be the best King shorts, nor the most chilling, but they are memorable for the far-outness of their concepts, and the sheer amount of adaptations they produced.

“Jerusalem’s Lot” and “One for the Road” serve as a sort of prologue and epilogue to the novel, ‘Salem’s Lot. “Children of the Corn,” about a couple who stumble into a creepy religious town where there are no adults, was made into more sequels than it deserved. “Trucks” became King’s directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive, with Emilio Estevez and an AC/DC soundtrack King probably listened to while he wrote the abysmal script.

My favorite of the bunch when I was a kid, “Battleground” (which I copied from memory for a school assignment on my dad’s Tandy laptop), was adapted well in the Nightmares & Dreamscapes miniseries, with John Hurt as the hitman besieged by the toymaker’s box of animated soldiers.

In a recent reread, I found two decidedly non-horror stories work very well for their surprising level of emotion and honesty. “The Last Rung on the Ladder” is a haunting story about siblings, trust, and suicide. “The Woman in the Room,” the first short film by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Walking Dead), is a sad tale of a man’s inner demons and remorse as he prepares to pull the plug on his dying mother. I have a feeling King, whose mother had recently passed, wrote the story to purge his own demons, and those feelings shine through (darkly) on the page.

The book also stands out in my mind for two quotes about writing that have stuck with me, one from John D. MacDonald, and the other from King himself. In the Introduction, MacDonald wrote that when he met people at parties, someone would always said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to write,” to which he began gleefully replying, “You know, I’ve always wanted to be a brain surgeon.”

In the Foreword, Stephen King answers a question in a similar fashion: when asked “Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?” King responds, “Why do you think I have a choice?” I think he was on to something.

***

“I have seen the future of horror… and his name is Clive Barker.” This quote by Stephen King was splashed across the covers of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood omnibuses that I happened across at my local library. (For a small town, the Millbrook Public Library seemed to have just about everything a young horror fan required to keep himself sane.) Barker’s short stories are still some of the most visceral and imaginative I’ve ever read. His prose is often spare, but always vivid.

It was Barker’s work that inspired me to try my hand at writing fiction outside of school assignments. My first few short stories as a teen were very Barker-esque, featuring sado-masochism and love-starved demons.The omnibuses open with the eponymous frame story, in which we learn the Books have been carved into the flesh of a phony psychic by the ghosts of a haunted house. From there we take a ride on “The Midnight Meat Train,” following serial killer Mahogany into the depths of depravity. “In the Hills, the Cities” contains some incredible imagery and heavy metaphor, and introduced me to openly gay protagonists, which is significant mostly because I almost chose Barker’s 1996 novel, Sacrament, as my favorite, a book often criticized by cretins for a handful of explicit gay sex scenes

There are other stories that return to my imagination like the animated dead from time to time: “The Body Politic,” in which our hands revolt, lopping each other from the oppressive shackles of our bodies and skittering off to conquer the world. In “Down, Satan!” a man seeks the attention of God by building a Hell on Earth. “The Age of Desire” is a chemical aphrodisiac experiment gone wrong. “The Forbidden,” a story about the power of legends, became the basis for one of my favorite horror movies, Candyman. It was Barker’s collection, filled with gruesome imagery, insane twists, poetic style, and in-your-face sex and violence, that made me decide to publish a short story collection of my own.

Stephen King once wrote that short stories are becoming a dying art. Everybody wants longer novels, series, sequels. I believe there will always be a place for them.

Anthologies are becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the horror genre. Short stories have the benefit of being read in one sitting. For a writer, there is no better spark for the imagination. Both Barker’s and King’s short stories have been and continue to be a huge inspiration for me and my writing.

What's your favorite horror collection or anthology? Let me know @userbits!