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Where Words Meet

Horror Isn’t Nice, Is It?

Gerard Houarner

I’m going to flail around a bit doing this because this is another part of the “writer’s vision” thing I don’t have down.

Sometimes I feel guilty about writing horror and dark fantasy. It’s not like I have a choice. My imagination goes that way. If I concentrate hard, or have a good editor, I can lighten the load a bit. But I can tell from the reactions from “normal” readers and even the occasional horror fan/creator that sometimes merely the concepts – like a wise-cracking dead cat or a pathological, supernaturally empowered and mythically connected assassin – are a little hard to take.

A recent discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on Shocklines was partly to blame for a resurgence of this guilt. Some folks thought it was too dark and bleak. I thought it was a pretty realistic depiction of an apocalypse, not overly explicit though emotionally brutal, and I even appreciated the dash of hope at the end. It wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, but given the state of that world, it fit.

Halloween helps me feel normal, even though its become a kind of Autumnal American commercial carnival celebrating candy and partying in costume. It’s the one day of the year where certain realities of life and death are at least brought up. The days of the druids are definitely over and the carnival aspects of the holiday have completely taken over – it’s become our chance to laugh at death. But I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing, though I understand Wiccan irritation over this turn of events. At least there’s a greater tolerance for the morbid, an acceptance of the threat inherent horror movies and haunted houses, and a momentary suspension of cultural judgements of “abnormal” toward body modifications, gender and species bending, and general grossness. We can laugh at what we fear, at even being afraid.

Halloween is like Mother’s Day for horror – no one talks about the grim reality of death on Halloween any more than kids and fathers speak of the blood and pain of childbirth. Things are kept on a positive note. For all the weirdness, Halloween is nice.

By association, horror also becomes nice. It becomes fun. And we all love fun.

But I don’t think horror is nice.

I think the job of at least a substantial, if not necessarily the commercial, part of horror is to commit acts of transgression. To ask questions and point out realities of human behavior, or project psychological and emotional realities into darkly fantastic metaphors and actions. I believe horror should challenge our assumptions about our capacity to cope, and at the very least should charge a substantial price for survival.

But then, horror becomes “dark.”

Now, I’m not talking about the torture garden variety of horror, the body shock school Elizabeth Massie spoke of earlier. I understand there’s a certain fascination with reading about/watching terrible things happening to the human body. I suspect it’s the same instinct that slows traffic at road accidents, draws people to boxing or ultimate fighting, and all of that. Some of us are more in touch with that aspect of our humanity than others, and therein lies the hardcore audience. Not everybody’s cup of tea, but this school of horror certainly camps out at the far end of the transgression spectrum and people can see it coming and avoid it or laugh at it or get some rather creepy kicks out of it. Whatever. Samuel Jackson said it best recently:

”Snakes on a Plane doesn’t speak volumes about shit. I just hope people go to this film and have a good time. Laugh, scream, freak each other out.” And, “I respect the people who are going to see this film, because they know what they like to see. ‘They like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Hostel. Saw. They’re not afraid to say they like it. I like those films too. I like seeing people getting fucked up in strange and funny situations. There’s a lot of us out there!”

Okay.

What I’m struggling with is the kind of horror that doesn’t offer emotional hope or salvation, that doesn’t “flinch” as “Jack Ketchum” would say, but looks into the darkness and doesn’t offer a light to show the way out. With or without physical violence, the horror I’m talking about is one that acknowledges the inescapable certainty of death. Readers must make their own light, or grope around in the dark. They must react against the threat they experience through the work with their own resources.

Well, I suppose, who wants to go through all of that? Life’s hard enough, I guess. We’re only entertainers, after all. Halloween revelers play-acting as monsters and fantastic characters, winking and saying in the end it was all a joke, don’t worry, it’s just entertainment.

For Halloween I wore a mask I picked up in New Orleans –admittedly not a gentle mask. I put on a pair of blinking eyeball antennae and carried a Mars Attack ray gun, but it was still a bit harsh, especially with a black-out mask underneath that took away any humanity to my face. And walking the West Side Manhattan streets, I found one kid who looked up at me, frowned and said, “You’re an ugly demon.”

He was a little freaked, but he wasn’t backing down. And I thought,That’s the spirit. I loved that. Because he looked at something not nice, something possibly quite shocking to his young mind, and dug into himself and fired back. Made a stand. Didn’t back down. (Of course, mommy was laughing right behind him, but I still liked the kid.)

I suppose in my head he was a hero – he looked up at this floating red demon face coming at him from out of the night and called it for what it was, even if for that instant he thought he was going to die.

I know. That’s a lot to ask for from a Halloween experience. Still, that’s what it meant to me. I don’t know what it meant to that poor kid. But I didn’t get the feeling he thought the experience was “nice.” I got the feeling if he’d been older he would have kicked me ass.

But there’s a lot of people who prefer their horror, like their dramas and comedies and philosophical/theological beliefs, to be nice. Non-threatening. There’s people who like rules, and a definite end to play-time, and safe-words to make the transgression stop.

I’m sure many of the writers contributing to this blog have had the experience of loved ones, or even casual acquaintances, furrowing their brows at the thought of writing horror and said, “but why don’t you write something nice?”

Normal.

You know, boy meets and gets girl, hero saves the day.

The expected norm.

There isn’t a day, an hour, a minute, when there isn’t some atrocity being committed by someone and somebody else somewhere in the world. And I’m being conservative. All the ground we walk on is blood ground. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. There’s certainly no need to dwell constantly on unpleasant facts, but it should certainly be in the tool box of perceptual ihnstruments an aware, grounded adult human being carries around. It shouldn’t be denied. If for no other reason than you need to see the big bad coming so you can stop it from happening to you.

That is an aspect of reality. Hold on to that thought, even if you disagree.

Horror is an act of transgression. The culture tames those transgressions, turns what was once shocking into jokes and camp. Universal Monsters used to be scary. Now they’re brand symbols.

But horror is an act of transgression in relation to what? Naivete? Stupidity?

Is what is depicted in any horror fiction or movie any worse than what some soldiers come back having experienced, or crisis/rescue first-responders, ER workers, or child-care workers, cops, beat reporters?

So perhaps what is not particularly nice about horror isn’t the images or psychological states (except on the superficial level that the stuff isn’t normall seen), but the portrayal of an emotional reality people would rather deny.

Let me flail from another direction: the heart of horror isn’t in fantasy. The point of horror isn’t in showing outrageous acts of violence, or offering escape routes from the certainty of doom. Horror is about reality – the reality of how people perceive the world around them, and themselves, and how they interact guided by those perceptions.

I know, I know, critics and the New Yorker intellengentsia and accepted practice say horror is fantasy, it’s a genre and so ultimately irrelevant to the human condition, but I believe a horror story, if it’s going to be great, is at heart a realistic work. Horror’s success as a realistic (“mimetic”) art depends completely on the depiction of character, emotional states, interaction. It isn’t necessarily about orchestrating setting and character details in such a way that an epiphany will be achieved, no matter how small, in the character and/or reader. This isn’t necessarily the construction of emotional miniatures, precise and intricate and exact. It is about the larger realities in and around us, the tidal forces of our animal hearts and minds,

Horror, when it isn’t being nice, is truly subversive, tearing down the comforts of illusion to reveal truth. “Life is grand and wonderful for all the pain” is the truth of heroic fiction; “and then it ends” is horror’s truth. Horror is as much a part of the “realistic” canon of fiction as anything else.

And I don’t think horror, when it’s real and true, is nice. I think it costs the reader something to experience. The price is the illusion of safety and comfort, a glimpse of another layer of reality. It’s supposed to change the way you look at people, the world, existence.

But I may be wrong. Maybe horror is supposed to cathartic, and once the masks are off and the book is put away and the movie over, once the protagonist’s journey is over, there’s supposed to be a return to the baseline emotional state necessary to get through the day without committing suicide. Maybe horror isn’t supposed to be subversive, but conservative, reassuring us that no matter how bad it gets, it’ll all work out in the end.

Well, now that I’ve made a compelte idiot of myself, I’ll go back to thinking about this vision thing, which I keep wanting to write about but can’t quite grasp, and something else always seems to come up to save from having to make a fool out of myself over that.

Related posts:

1. THE FIRST “WHAT’S THE POINT OF VICARIOUS HORROR?” HARD WAY QUESTIONNAIRE
2. The Hanging Tree & The New American Dream / Maybe Someday I’ll Write A Nice Western
3. DEFINING HORROR: Nine Musings on The Nature of Horror
4. THE HORROR WRITER AS MUSHROOM HUNTER: A LITERARY PISS-TRIP
5. horror bad

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