What scares you? Discussing types of horror in fiction

[DustyTome]

Hi, let's have a chat. I've been thinking for a while about what horror is and how its best expressed in fiction. This has fascinated me since I read Salem's Lot as a young-ish girl. The fascination has grown exponentially since I discovered Lovecraft.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about three categories of horror: the Gross-Out, the Horror and the Terror. Here's the quote. "The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there..."

I'll get the ball rolling by talking a bit about my least-favourite type of horror, the Gross-Out.

I think this type of horror has its place. Used properly, it can be quite effective and open the door to incidents of Horror and Terror. I'm thinking here of Carpenter's original Halloween and The Thing, Romero's Night of the Living Dead and some of King's work. Desperation in particular has some dashes of Gross-Out horror that are quite effective. Romero uses a few instances of Gross-Out horror to introduce and heighten the Horror in the film. You know what's going to happen if the living dead get into the house. Gross-Out can also be a good payoff at the end of a sequence of Horror, as when the reanimated little girl kills and eats her mum. I would hypothosize that Gross-Out, if handled properly, can approach and morph into Horror.

For the most part though, Gross-Out horror leaves me cold. I'm looking at you here, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie. Unless its used by a master of horror, Gross-Out is a tool used for cheap fright. There's no subtlety, no flair, no je ne sais quois. It violates one of the cardinal rules of horror, showing you the monster too soon. Plus, once you've established that Gross-Out is the only route you're taking to scaring people, there is no alternative to further instances of horror but ramping up the gross-quotient. Any hack can do that.

It takes talent to create an air of dread, fear, the cold hand that grips you and makes you check behind you even though you know you're the only one in the house. Gross-Out, my friends, simply doesn't do that in most of the cases.

[starblazie]

Dusty,
I am not a huge fan of the gross-out, either.  Gothic horror tends to be my favorite genre, I am not a fan of most modern horror.   I would even suggest a fourth category, the horror of which we ordinary humans are capable of (maybe this is really a variation of SK's terror category).  Misery and Pan's Labyrinth comes to mind, although I think PL had the additional elements of horror and terror as described by King.

[Inner Prop]

I think there is something else as well. 

The gross-out as described is the kind of Ick feeling of touching something icky.  There is also the empathic gross-out.  Most slasher films should make you feel this way, not just that you touched something icky, or that the character touched something icky, but FEELING the pain and the mental anguish.

Also, how would you categorize the feeling you get thinking about the long term ramifications?  That's the way I think most of the time, like in Holy Grail when the Black Night fights Arthur I see no humor at all.  I can only think about how horrible his life would have been unitl he died.  How he certainly would get infections if he didn't die of loss of blood.  How could he stop the bleeding?  Brrrrr, a chill just ran up my spine again.

That's not a gross-out, it's something more, and it's not fun, not at all.

[T. Kelly Lee]

Gross-outs and horror don't scare me.  I'm not a fan of slashers or films from, say, the modern "zombie" genre.  My problem with slashers is that there's nothing really horrible about them other than the act of being surprised and then being killed.  For me, there's not much difference between watching a slasher film and just watching videos like "Faces of Death" with people getting killed.  It reduces the human condition to just a piece of meat waiting to die. 

What really scares me is existential terror - the notion that there is a fate WORSE than death awaiting you.  That's why the whole Haitian zombie thing is much scarier to me than the medical zombies.  In the former scenario you're not dead - but your humanity has been taken away making you a spiritual slave.  Twilight Zone-type terror scares the piss out of me.  You're the last man on earth - but you've broken your glasses.  Everything you thought was real turned out to be a simulation or an illusion.  Your life is a lie and the bigger picture is horrible. 

Kierkegaard drew upon this kind of existential anxiety from the Bible - "fear and trembling."  It's the notions that your whole consciousness is seriously effed up and the world doesn't work the way you think it does.  And your outlying options are pretty dismal.  That's why Sartre's Nausea is one of the scariest books I've ever read and why Lovecraft and the writers in his tradition are so appealing to me.   

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

 
Usually horror stories don `t really scare me. Mostly that kind of literature is just a nice way to experience some darkness in the safety of my own living-room. Moments of actual scare are seldom but I cherish them.
In my teens however I had some experiences of intense fright induced by horror literature. One was pet Semetary and an other William Wilson. For several weeks I was almsot scizo. There was that feeling of a presence... some twin always right behind me. I could almost feel the presence and  I knew, if I would turn round real quick... Now that was awful. Maybe all of my horror reading is just another vain dreamquest for those lost feelings. 

Lovecraft succeeded in giving me some serious creeps but it `s hard to tie that to anything specific. For example Whisperer really creeps and crawls through my shuddering brain, but I surely am not afraid a bunch of crabs from outer space would lure me to a farmhouse where they set up a puppet on a string to... to... (some of you complained about Wilmarth, bit if he is stupid, the Mi-Go are retarded) well whatever. That existential thing seems to come closest. Sometimes there `s that feeling of the world being a not necessarily hostile, but an alien place. Totally different from what weak humans whish to make themselves comfortable.

My favourites however are always stories that hold a more suggestive horror. It `s hard to pin it down to specific features or writing techniques or whatever but there are these things, that
get stuck in your brain. Tales where you have to fill in details for yourself, those fancy triggers.  Everybody `s mind will always come up with their own individual most terrible things. Lovecraft was good at that. Like you can not stop thinking what `s happening behind closed doors in Innsmouth or on Tempest Mountain.

Many stories I read merely for aesthetic  reasons. Like most of the Poe stuff. Or Machen `s stories which i discovered only lately. There `s really nothing frightful about Metzengerstein or The Novel of the Black Seal. But they `re so well written and enjoyable. I just like their dark charm. 

And then there are some stories that make me actually feel sick because of their sheer negativity. For example King `s Survivor Type. Or The Rats in Walls. I know there `s no actual reason for that and it `s just a feeling (that `s what it is all about, isn `t it?) but to me this is like a foreshadow of the Holocaust. I can not read about Exam Priory without thinking of Auschwitz. I truly dislike that story and that `s why think it `s so good.
Twisted. And still, that is what it `s all about.

Seems we all agree about that gross-out thing. Although I have to admit I `m a fan of oldschool splatter movies. But usually that `s by no means scary. As for horror films I like most the athmosphere of the black and white classics or the Hammer movies with Vincent Price and the like.  Gory stuff is mostly bothersome rather than frightening. The Evil Dead would still be a great horror movie (even a better one) without all of that chopping. Or just think what a decent thriller Hostel COULD have been. The idea was great. But painting it all in blood... just cheap. In literature however it doesn `t work for me at all

[Genus Unknown]

a bunch of crabs from outer space would lure me to a farmhouse where they set up a puppet on a string to... to...  well whatever.

They were trying to get back the evidence that Akeley had sent to Wilmarth, and then make sure Wilmarth didn't talk. Simplest way to do that is to lure Wilmarth in and have him bring the evidence with him.

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

A somewhat simpler way would be just to put a bullet (or six bullets since it `s a Lovecraft story) in his head as soon as he gets in that car and make it look like simple hold-up in the backwoods.

[Genus Unknown]

Touché.

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

Yeah, but one shouldn `t be too critical about that. I mean, those James Bond villains do stuff like that all the time. Like tying him to some fancy killing machine wich leaves him enough time to unpack all of his gadgets instead of... the bullet thing basically. So the spacecrabs are in good company. And with that bullet thing we wouldn `t get all the awsome details about Yuggoth. And the doles...

[T. Kelly Lee]

A somewhat simpler way would be just to put a bullet (or six bullets since it `s a Lovecraft story) in his head as soon as he gets in that car and make it look like simple hold-up in the backwoods.

I think there was more to it.  The aliens were clearly willing to recruit humans to help in their project.  It seems that they had a man on their hands who'd been fed a lot of information about their secret and who didn't run to the cops are come up to Vermont with guns blazing.  I always thought they were in a position to possibly test him to see if they could turn him towards partnering with them.  I mean hell, I probably would. 

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Slasher stuff does scare me, but not in a pleasant way. More like in a "Ruth has trouble walking to her parents' mailbox because the neighborhood is dark even though it's a driveway that can barely fit two cars nose-to-nose" way. Some things just gross me out. I have an empathetic stomach, so I've always had a hard time with the Monty Python scene referenced above, even though it's supposed to be funny.

But what really scares me is:

1) The horror that people do. And that's not like slasher stuff (although that too) but the subtler, twisted stuff. Joe Hill's Horns is coming to mind right now. Also "Picture in the House." It's the subtle corruption...the atmosphere...

2) The horror that comes from not knowing our own world and being caught up in something beyond it. Cosmic horror was a perfect fit for my imagination. I use to spend time as a kid imagining what lay beyond what we knew, mostly good stuff but...not all. "From Beyond" is one of the best examples of what I find horrifying. I love it.

[T. Kelly Lee]

But what really scares me is:

1) The horror that people do. And that's not like slasher stuff (although that too) but the subtler, twisted stuff. Joe Hill's Horns is coming to mind right now. Also "Picture in the House." It's the subtle corruption...the atmosphere...

Yes, Picture in the House remains one of my all-time favorite stories - and I think it's the best of the Podcrafts as well.  I'm not a soldier (but I've got soul) - so I've never personally seen the true face of terror.  But I grew up on a street that had a 1912-era cemetery at the far end, tucked up near the woods.  As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time there.  When I was fifth grade my buddies and I were allowed out on our own with a midnight curfew on Halloween.  Awesome.  After the trick or treating was done we went down to the cemetery and found a grave that had just been dug that day for a service the next morning.  It was covered over with that green tarp stuff and had a kind of vault down in it.  (I can't imagine this being legal today.)  So of course we pulled that stuff off and got down in there. 

The plan was to kind of leap out at any other kids that came by - or anyone for that matter.  It wasn't long before we heard someone muttering outside the gate and I, being the tallest, managed to climb up so I could see out.  It appeared two kids were daring this third kid to go across the cemetery.  I ducked down and we made a plan.  As soon as that kid got close to us, I had my budies sort of hoist/throw me out of the grave.  I had a stupid costume which basically was nothing more than a Goodwill suit and a long black coat (a character from an 80's tv show, which I shall not name).  When the kid got close by I shot out of that grave with a mighty roar.  And the look on that kid's face was the closest I've ever seen to pure terror.  I swear, you could smell the fear that came off of him.  He didn't turn an run at first, he was frozen for a second and his face was contorted into something animal-like and sub-human.  His buddies were already running up the street.  When he did turn and run it was without any kind of plan or intellectual process...he just tore off across the cemetery in the general direction of the closest bright light.  For a while we thought it was hilarious but with time I started to feel guilty.  Look, I've led an adventurous life and I have NEVER had that look on my face. 

[Bob Lovecraft]

I tend to gravitate towards the "Terror" realm of fiction when thinking of things that actually scare me. To say that anything Lovecraft ever wrote actually accomplishes that, however, would be a lie. I love reading HPL for the concepts and the history, but his lexicon is too inaccessible for me to ever be really scared; I spend too much time mentally translating what has been said to suspend my disbelief for the scare. Now, that having been said, if I really want a scare, a book or movie has to grab me and submerge me into the story. Then never really reveal a "monster" or lame Deus ex Machina like "6th Sense" or "Jeepers Creepers".

Case in point: "The Blair Witch Project" drew me in completely. Yes I know it was all a viral advertising gimmick (though in my defense it was arguably the first viral advertising campaign and was unknown to me at the time, thus giving it credence) and before I saw the movie, that had already been getting press. But I also watched a documentary about it detailing all of the Blair Witch "folklore" and the people of the area. They showed Coffin Rock and told a detailed history of it. They interviewed people who knew some of the victims of disappearances in the area. And so forth. Then I watched the movie directly after that. Also keep in mind that I was watching this in a single-wide trailer at the end of a cal-d-sac in the country at midnight. Oh, and as the A/C was busted, we had all of the doors and windows opened for the breeze. Within that setting, the movie came to life and scared the ever-living shit out of me. The desperation, the unknown stalker, the suggested mutilations and abduction, all of it built up to a climax that would have been COMPLETELY ruined by seeing a monster. As such, I loved the ending.

Another case in point: "Paranormal Activity" was fantastically done, even though there is an invisible monster at one point, and the ending is ruined in the last 2 seconds. But the build up was great. The scenes that really got to me were when the couple would be sleeping and all of a sudden a light would come on on the first floor, some noises would be heard, and the light would be turned off again. The idea of someone or something in the house with you when you are asleep and "safe" and just doing what it wants really got to me. And then there is a scene, and it only takes a second, when the couple are in bed, the lights are out, and everything is normal. Then one of the shadows (which you never pay attention to since it was always in the room, and not really shaped like anything) just leave the room. The thought that "it" was there all the time and watching you, again in your safe place, chilled me.

That is what a story or movie has to do to actually scare me. And this from a guy who had nightmares after weeing the "Thriller" video when he was a kid. Isn't it amazing what you can grow out of?

Bob

[T. Kelly Lee]

I agree totally with Bob above.  Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch are the kinds of things that scare the hell out of me - in the moment.  Of course, once I've seen them they're done.  I think mostly because they're right on the border of the possible. 

HPL's writing isn't that scary - with one exception.  As a kid, Innsmouth scared the HELL out of me.  I think the idea of being trapped in that room with god-know-what outside is so primal it can't help but be scary. 

Interestingly, when I go back and re-read Blackwood's the Wendigo, that thing still freaks me out.  I guess because I've been to those remote places. 

[Genus Unknown]

You know the book that freaked me out the most? Whitley Strieber's Communion, the "true" alien-abduction story that launched the whole thing into the all-seeing eye of pop culture, anal probing and all. I never even finished it because it just got under my skin somehow. Part of the early chapters is a transcript from Strieber's hypnosis session in which he first "remembered" his contact with the creatures, and for some reason, that transcript literally had me sleeping with the light on for weeks. The way the beings (I put it down before he identified them with extraterrestrials, and have never picked it back up) appear in his memories and make themselves known in his life is really... I don't know, realistic somehow. Like they work on the kind of nightmare logic that hits you deep down in the reptile center of your brain, weird fragments of childhood memory and deep-seated neuroses slowly resolving themselves into a vision of contact with a terrifyingly inscrutable non-human intelligence. One such memory is of a family outing in Strieber's childhood, interrupted by what he remembered as "a skeleton on a motorbike" -- a thin, unnatural figure approaching from a distance on a mechanical device with a light on the front that everyone in the family remembers but nobody talks about. That sort of thing. It sounds silly, and my rational brain never believed a word of it, but the rest of me was scared shitless. It just hit those irrational "creatures in the closet" parts of my psyche.

It's worth pointing out that Whitley Strieber was a horror novelist before he was an alien contactee. Evidently a skilled one -- if it weren't sold as a true story, I'd call Communion one of the great horror novels of the 20th century.