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I like a good horror story just as much as the next pervert. Unfortunately I’m not really sure what I mean by the phrase “horror story” (though genre publishers don’t seem to have any trouble with the concept. I’m not sure if that is a reliable guide, though).
Is a horror story a tale of the supernatural or the occult? Well it might be—many good horror stories are; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance or Stephen King’s Christine. However equally as many good supernatural and occult tales are not horror stories. Consider Kipling’s Puck of Pooks Hill and Rewards and Fairies for example, or what about J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan or Thorne Smith’s Topper stories? Also many commonly accepted horror stories have nothing to do with the occult at all. What about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or if that is too science fictionish to be considered horror, what about Stephen King’s Cujo?
All right—is a horror story supposed to frighten or upset you? By that definition Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and John Harris’s Covenant with Death are both horror stories though you will always find them filed under War Fiction in the library because they are both about World War I. But they both of them frighten and upset me.
Is a horror story supposed to gross you out and make you feel ill? Try reading the very graphic description of crucifixion in Nicholas Monserrat’s The White Rajah or the vivid and detailed episodes of human sacrifice in Gary Jenning’s Aztec. And yet both these books are classified as historical fiction.
Generally a horror story tries to invoke fear in the audience (if it can’t manage fear, it will settle for loathing instead). It often uses greeblies of one sort or another as props, hence the preponderance of white-sheeted people manifesting themselves behind the arras. But the stage props do not define the appeal of the genre. The effectiveness of a horror story depends more than most on what is behind the scenes because horror is in the eyes of the beholder.
To illustrate it from a literary example, in George Orwell’s science fiction novel 1984 Winston Smith is taken to room 101, there to be confronted with his worst fear. In room 101 rats are set free to gnaw at his face, his spirit is broken and the system takes him over. That is pretty horrifying but what is more horrifying is the idea of room 101 itself. What is found in that room varies from person to person. I think I could stand rats, just. But I would be reduced to screaming helplessness in an instant if there were wasps in that room. I have an unreasoning dread, a phobia about wasps. I cannot bear to remain in the same room as one—if one flies in, I have to leave. If I am not able to leave; if for example the wasp is between me and the door thereby effectively blocking the exit, I break out into a sweat and my heartbeat goes off the scale and I start to feel faint. Like the contents of room 101, the contents of a horror story vary greatly in their effectiveness on individuals. All you can really bring to bear is a personal point of view.
I read a story once which so scared and nauseated me that I have no memory of the title or author any more. If any of you recognise this plot outline please do not tell me the title or who wrote it. I don’t want to know, ok?
The story is set in a tropical country and some horrible centipede or other has crawled into the ear of one of the characters and is eating its way through his head. There are several quite graphic descriptions of the creature gnawing at various anatomical structures, and the feelings of the character as the centipede chews are vividly invoked. Eventually the centipede breaks through into the brain and begins to chew slowly across it. The character can feel it chomping slowly across the inside of his skull. After a long time, the centipede breaks out at the other side of his head (through his other ear) and he is very relieved that his terrible ordeal is now over. Then a colleague examines the centipede. It was a gravid female and it has laid hundreds of eggs in his brain. Soon they will hatch, and the hatchlings will begin to feed.
I think that is probably the most effective horror story I have ever read. I don’t care what criteria you use to measure horror, that one has it in spades and it gives me terminal willies. Yet there are none of the usual trappings, there are no Transylvanian Counts or white-sheeted gibbering hauntings.
There are no serial killers, homicidal maniacs or things rising from the grave. Just a man and a centipede.
As you may have gathered, I have a thing about creepy crawlies which is why this story is so effective for me. It will probably do nothing at all for you, unless our phobias overlap.
Last night my cat brought home a weta, an insect that looks and behaves like a cross between a cockroach and Tyranosaurus Rex. She ate it with every evidence of enjoyment. It waved its antennae frantically as she chewed on it, then it vanished into her mouth. She munched thoughtfully for a while and then spat out its legs. Legs obviously don’t taste nice.
Wetas look like something H. P. Lovecraft might have conjured up after some bad acid. A friend of mine was once chased by a weta. It had him bailed up in a corner of his garage and he couldn’t get past it. So he dropped a brick on it. He swears it shouldered the brick aside and continued to chase him. There you are—two real life horror stories and not a ghoulie, a ghostie or a long-legged beastie (apart from the weta) to be seen. Who needs special effects?
Definitions are difficult. Horror stories wander over the whole spectrum of literature and their effect depends on individual psychoses. The things that horrify me leave you cold and vice versa.
Currently the film of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is doing the rounds. I asked a friend what he thought of it. “It was a good film,” he said. “I enjoyed it.” He thought for a while. “But it wasn’t scary!”
That sounded like a complaint. “Would you have preferred it to be scary?”
“Oh no.” He was quite vehement. “If it was scary, I’d have had nightmares. It’s much better not scary.”
There are people who get very involved with the films they see and sometimes with the books they read. I know someone who refuses ever to read books by Stephen King or Dean Koontz because they frighten him too much. I know someone else who will not watch any films or TV programmes because she identifies so closely with whatever is on the screen that she goes into deep depressions at their tragedies and has bad dreams about their sorrows and their fears.
Admittedly these are extreme cases, but they do exist. Personally I have never been frightened into nightmares by a film. I can watch any amount of gore and guts and horror and pain. I don’t have nightmares and I don’t throw up because, in the final analysis, it is only a film. It isn’t real and no matter how skilful the film maker I will always know it isn’t real. I’m not sure if this makes me abnormal. I have seen real life injury and death and it sickens me as much as it sickens anybody else.
I am trained in first aid, and I had to use that training once on a man who had walked through a plate glass window. He was quite cut up about it. I won’t apologise for the pun—sometimes the only way to cope with a situation like this is to joke about it. The doctor who taught me first aid gave me a very good lesson on how to treat someone who had fallen out of a tall building and impaled themselves on a fence. “Don’t try and remove the fencepost,” he said. “Leave it for the ambulance men to saw it off. They always leave a fair length projecting out of the body. After all the poor person has to have something to hang on to when the ambulance goes round a corner too hard.”
In some ways that is another real life horror story. . .
But I digress. For me there is always a distancing effect with a film. The knowledge of its unreality is always present, probably because I don’t have to work at it. All I have to do is sit there comfortably and absorb another person’s vision. It’s easy, perhaps too easy. There is too little work involved on my part.
Books are different. I can get bad dreams from a story. Words on paper move me more powerfully than images on a screen and with a horror story they are so much more effective. The pictures the words paint in my mind are so much more vivid, more horrible than anything the film maker can do because they are personal pictures, creatures scrabbling up from the id, my very own nightmares.
I have to work harder with words than I do with pictures because I am more involved, and the end result is always more frightening, and moving as a result. If they filmed the story of the centipede it would leave me unmoved—but the story itself still scared me.
However that does not mean that I dislike films or that they always leave me cold. Sometimes if the film maker is skilled enough it is possible to approach the same frisson of fear engendered by a story. Usually this happens with images that leave a lot unstated. Film tends not to be a subtle medium and often leaves little to the imagination. That is where the medium falls down. The monster you see is always less fearful than the monster you imagine. But sometimes they get it right. I remember vividly the closing scene from one of Roger Corman’s films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories (I think it was The Pit and the Pendulum) where a woman is bound and gagged and hidden inside an iron maiden in a torture chamber. The other characters do not know she is there. As the film closes, they leave the torture chamber, remarking that the room will be sealed and nobody will ever enter it again. The film closes with a close up shot of the terrified eyes of the woman. Then the credits roll. That is a most effective and frightening scene and it made my imagination work overtime. It isn’t easy to capture me with a visual image, but that one managed it.
Paradoxically, I think you can also make a reasonable case for censorship to tighten up a film and make it more effective. When I first saw Conan the Barbarian in the cinema, the scene where the young Conan’s mother is beheaded by the invader was shown in full graphic detail. You saw the head fly from the body and blood spurt from the neck before the body collapses. I’ve seen it a few times on television since, and the scene has invariably been cut. Now you just hear a meaty thunk as the sword connects, and there is a vague impression of a body falling (and I think a brief blur as something that might be a head falls to the ground). The horror and impact of the scene now comes just from the expression on the face of the young boy. It is much more powerful as a result. Horror sometimes lies more in what you don’t say than in what you do.
All of this is a very personal point of view. I’ve tried to share with you my impression of what horror fiction might be about. It is vague because the concept itself is vague. It’s facile to say that horror is in the eye of the beholder—but I don’t think I have any other choice than to be facile. The concept is slippery and every time I try to sneak up on it and take it by surprise, it still notices me and runs away. I find myself in the position of the person who doesn’t know what art is, but knows what he likes.
I“d like to ask you some questions. What swamp-things crawl up from your nightmares? Share them with a friend. How much common ground have you both? Now you each know how to write a horror story to gross out the other. But what will it do for me? What will it do for Mr Brown, a commuter on the Johnsonville line? If you really know the answer to that one, you could be the next Stephen King.
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