If you actually do something on Halloween night—if school isn’t crushing your soul at the moment—you might decide to do something topical. And topical on Halloween means something scary.
Halloween is supposed to be the scariest time of the year. As it stands it’s usually the sugariest (for kids) and/or soused (for collegiates). But scary is third on that list. It’s when all the haunted houses crop up, and it’s when everyone breaks out their favorite horror movies.
I was never much of a horror fan. I remember, in middle school, when movies like “The Grudge” came out. I also remember having “The Ring” spoiled for me. And, as it stood, I never wanted much of anything to do with horror movies. That distaste extended to horror books as well, and I found them even more paling in prospect. They didn’t do anything for me.
Horror, I think, is one of those genres of literature people really attach themselves to. It’s like romance or murder mystery. People probably remember reading a lot of “Goosebumps” when they were kids (though to call that horror is an insult to the genre) and maybe moving up to the likes of Stephen King eventually. Even strident “literary fiction” fans would concede at enjoying the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and H.P. Lovecraft.
I’m not dissing those authors. I’m fain to dismiss Poe or “Dracula.” But since horror, or straight horror, isn’t my forte, I’d rather look at the genre as a whole, and more specifically, what exactly it’s supposed to do.
Warning—there be some gosh darn semantics below, a presage for you linguistically maladroit.
What exactly horror fiction is supposed to do is up for debate. Does it terrorize you or elicit horror? A useful metric is something Ann Radcliffe—a late 16th century, 17th century writer of spooky Gothic tales—said to this effect: terror is the feeling which comes before something scary, horror is the feeling which comes after something scary.
“Terror” and “horror” are synonymous in the most basic sense possible: they both have to do with fear. Fear is, perhaps, one of the deepest emotions we can feel. It’s one of the most intrinsically glandular ones, and glands are really where body chemistry starts getting fun. In general, horror fiction is meant to scare you.
If we take it like that, horror fiction works best when we remember all the nasty things that happened in it. It’s not enough to scare us—we have to recoil, to continually recoil perhaps.
How to best achieve this is also up for debate. The most common tactic seems to be inundating the audience with as many scary things as possible. In horror movies, protagonists are thrown into an infinite throng of zombies or pitted against some nigh invulnerable alien/supernatural entity who happens to enjoy bloodily eviscerating everyone.
It’s the same in books. Bram Stoker strove to make Dracula’s lingering corruption permeate the text as much as possible. H.P. Lovecraft filled his story to the brink with cosmic entities that, neither living nor dead, outlive even death, entities whose mere names could drive people insane. Poe is grim Gothic sparkle.
Of course, this approach sends a few mixed messages. Chiefly, it sends the message that horror is unavoidable. You think you can run away from Jason? Please. He’ll keep coming back. There’s always another zombie around the corner, another Cthulhu waiting to rise from the ocean depths. The message is you could spend your whole life horrified by things.
But remember that “horror” is synonymous with “terror.” And it is very possible to misconstrue the fear you’re feeling at a given moment. Our recoil from horror is limited. There’s only 360 degrees in a circle and, recoiling, we have to fulfill it eventually.
It would be better to look at horror fiction not as something to leave you horrified afterwards, but something, which can elicit terror in the moment. Of the two, terror should come first, horror should come last, if at all, and each function differently. To paraphrase Ann Radcliffe again, terror heightens your senses, horror degrades them.
Fear is intractable to the human condition and its shades are myriad. There’s no getting over that. But if you can differentiate the fear you’re getting out of media, you could unlock whole other ways of understanding, and appreciating, that media.
