Now, unlike most people I know, I didn't have a love for Horror growing up. For one, I was never allowed to watch it growing up, and other than a passing curiosity, I never cared enough to explore it. Instead, my love of the genre came in around the time I turned 20.
At first my approach was very slow. I'd read Frankenstein and Dracula growing up, and those were a very different kind of Horror than I was about to dive into. Those books were more social commentaries than straight Horror, I think. Yes, I still consider them Horror, but those elements seems to only be a backdrop for the issues the authors wanted to explore. But I digress.
Anyway, after Frankenstein and Dracula (both wonderful books, by the way) I decided that Horror was maybe more than I'd been told all my life. If these books were any indication, the genre wasn't all mindless smut used as an excuse to show as much gore as possible. The Horror genre could be used as a vehicle to explore things that no other genre readily allows you to. As a writer, that idea fascinated me, and I couldn't wait to see what else I could dig up.
Stephen King was the next logical step for me. Again, this was a writer that my family had convinced me was not only a, most likely, devil-worshiping, goat-sacrificing, "spiritually disturbed" mess of a human being, but also just another drone in the Horror machine that perpetrated the smut I referred to earlier. First of all, not only is Stephen King a Horror writer, (even though that's how he's generally labeled) but also a brilliant Fantasy writer ... and a Pulp writer ... and Drama.... You see my point? The man writes a little bit of everything, and even though not all of it's to my taste, I admire his ability to jump from genre to genre like that. It's something a lot of writers today can't do. But, a constant theme in his work is the everyman overcoming the unspeakable evil. He likes to play with hard good and evil contrasts, whereas a lot of writers today tend to place their villains in a moral gray area. There's nothing wrong with that, but it gets a little tiresome when that's ALL you see. King's evil is the sort that makes those gray area-dwellers piss themselves, and I find that entertaining.
But, to keep things moving, I'll go ahead and move on to the main point of this post. You see, once I moved on to Clive Barker, then into Wes Craven and John Carpenter films, then the horrendous slasher cliche's like Friday the 13th, I realized that Horror was arguably the most primal, personal form of storytelling in existence. The horrific parts of the stories weren't always the blood-soaked killings, but rather the personal issues the characters were forced to face. The Silent Hill series of video games (specifically the second one) excels at this, and I'll say until the day I die that Silent Hill 2 is the single most terrifying fictional story I've ever been exposed to. Had that been a first person shooter series, the story Silent Hill tried to tell would have been impossible. You weren't a one man army slaughtering hoards of demons on mars, you were just some guy with a dark past unlucky enough to step into the fog. From there, you couldn't escape until you, literally, faced your personal demons (both literal and figurative) and overcame them.
So, for me at least, Horror is one of the most essential form of fiction we have. And yes, it gets a bad rap because of your Friday the 13th ripoffs (which were bad ripoffs themselves) but I maintain that those aren't even really Horror. Seriously, when was the last time you watched a Friday the 13th film without laughing hysterically at the repeatedly dumb decisions made by the protagonists, or the over-the-top deaths, like when Jason caught someone completely zipped up in their sleeping bag and beat them against a tree while they were stuck in it? Even Freddy vs. Jason, which is a guilty pleasure of mine, is much more comedy than Horror. With the Scream films, at least Wes Craven and company were aware of those stereotypes and poked fun at them in-film while still crafting a well done story that kept you guessing and gave you chills.
When you dissect some of the truly great Horror stories, you find things you might not expect. The easiest example would be Freddy Krueger, who represents loss and neglect, and according to Robert Englund himself in reference to the second Nightmare film, homosexual repression. And that's just the monster; try really taking a look at Nancy in Nightmare 1, 3 and New Nightmare. And so we've come full circle with that. Just like Dracula and Frankenstein, the best Horror has something to say. It can be much more subversive than those novels, but the thrills and chills, and the very nature of the Horror structure allow so much freedom for writers. Fear and Love are two of humanity's strongest drives, both of which Horror can handle like no other genre could ever hope to.
And there you have it. That's what Horror is to me. I hope I covered all my bases well enough and didn't make any of that too confusing. I'd also like to hear from everyone else about what Horror means to them.
Until then, it's Halloween guys. Read some Clive Barker, watch some Wes Craven, and have fun. It'll be a real scream!
Anyway, after Frankenstein and Dracula (both wonderful books, by the way) I decided that Horror was maybe more than I'd been told all my life. If these books were any indication, the genre wasn't all mindless smut used as an excuse to show as much gore as possible. The Horror genre could be used as a vehicle to explore things that no other genre readily allows you to. As a writer, that idea fascinated me, and I couldn't wait to see what else I could dig up.
Stephen King was the next logical step for me. Again, this was a writer that my family had convinced me was not only a, most likely, devil-worshiping, goat-sacrificing, "spiritually disturbed" mess of a human being, but also just another drone in the Horror machine that perpetrated the smut I referred to earlier. First of all, not only is Stephen King a Horror writer, (even though that's how he's generally labeled) but also a brilliant Fantasy writer ... and a Pulp writer ... and Drama.... You see my point? The man writes a little bit of everything, and even though not all of it's to my taste, I admire his ability to jump from genre to genre like that. It's something a lot of writers today can't do. But, a constant theme in his work is the everyman overcoming the unspeakable evil. He likes to play with hard good and evil contrasts, whereas a lot of writers today tend to place their villains in a moral gray area. There's nothing wrong with that, but it gets a little tiresome when that's ALL you see. King's evil is the sort that makes those gray area-dwellers piss themselves, and I find that entertaining.
But, to keep things moving, I'll go ahead and move on to the main point of this post. You see, once I moved on to Clive Barker, then into Wes Craven and John Carpenter films, then the horrendous slasher cliche's like Friday the 13th, I realized that Horror was arguably the most primal, personal form of storytelling in existence. The horrific parts of the stories weren't always the blood-soaked killings, but rather the personal issues the characters were forced to face. The Silent Hill series of video games (specifically the second one) excels at this, and I'll say until the day I die that Silent Hill 2 is the single most terrifying fictional story I've ever been exposed to. Had that been a first person shooter series, the story Silent Hill tried to tell would have been impossible. You weren't a one man army slaughtering hoards of demons on mars, you were just some guy with a dark past unlucky enough to step into the fog. From there, you couldn't escape until you, literally, faced your personal demons (both literal and figurative) and overcame them.
So, for me at least, Horror is one of the most essential form of fiction we have. And yes, it gets a bad rap because of your Friday the 13th ripoffs (which were bad ripoffs themselves) but I maintain that those aren't even really Horror. Seriously, when was the last time you watched a Friday the 13th film without laughing hysterically at the repeatedly dumb decisions made by the protagonists, or the over-the-top deaths, like when Jason caught someone completely zipped up in their sleeping bag and beat them against a tree while they were stuck in it? Even Freddy vs. Jason, which is a guilty pleasure of mine, is much more comedy than Horror. With the Scream films, at least Wes Craven and company were aware of those stereotypes and poked fun at them in-film while still crafting a well done story that kept you guessing and gave you chills.
When you dissect some of the truly great Horror stories, you find things you might not expect. The easiest example would be Freddy Krueger, who represents loss and neglect, and according to Robert Englund himself in reference to the second Nightmare film, homosexual repression. And that's just the monster; try really taking a look at Nancy in Nightmare 1, 3 and New Nightmare. And so we've come full circle with that. Just like Dracula and Frankenstein, the best Horror has something to say. It can be much more subversive than those novels, but the thrills and chills, and the very nature of the Horror structure allow so much freedom for writers. Fear and Love are two of humanity's strongest drives, both of which Horror can handle like no other genre could ever hope to.
And there you have it. That's what Horror is to me. I hope I covered all my bases well enough and didn't make any of that too confusing. I'd also like to hear from everyone else about what Horror means to them.
Until then, it's Halloween guys. Read some Clive Barker, watch some Wes Craven, and have fun. It'll be a real scream!
No comments:
Post a Comment