Horror As a Service

Sometimes when I tell people I write horror, I get the response of: Life is too scary as it is, why would I go out of my way to scare myself on purpose.

Which, fair. Life is terrifying and these days it's even more so. But you don't need me to tell you that.

However, there's a thing I think some folks don't get about the horror genre. There's a point to it beyond the blood and gore and existential dread. Well several points, actually.

Let's Practice Running from the Undead

First off, horror helps us practice being afraid and surviving anyway. At the end of the day, reading a horror novel or watching a scary movie isn't going to affect us in our real lives. We can turn off the television, leave the movie theater, close the book. We can go outside, blink in the brightness of a clear sunny day and touch grass that probably doesn't have zombie hands springing forth from it. 

So what's the point? Why read books that bring us soul-shuddering dread? Why watch movies that make our throats clench with the horror of sympathy?

They're a safe place where we can practice being afraid. We know at the end of the story that there is a conclusion. We know how stories work and what to expect from them. Authors do a great job of using these expectations to great effect. I hope that I do the same with my writing.

Nietzsche said "We have art in order not to die of the truth" and that absolutely resonates with me. We need these small microdoses of horror, of the poison of life, to survive. 

Otherwise to quote Ray Bradbury, "we know only real [and] fall dead." [1]

Scream into the Void and Sometimes It Screams Back

When I read Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" as a kid, it saved my life.

I was 10 years old and crippled by depression. My family and the church told me that my problems were because I just wasn't praying hard enough. Clearly it was my fault I wanted to kill myself. 

There's a very dark night of the soul one goes into in these situations. I pleaded with God to help me. My family and the church told me we were never given a burden we couldn't bear. But what loving deity would give a kid this dark of a depression?

I had no answers to these questions and no one I could ask. I was entirely alone. 

There was no one to hold me and tell me things were going to be ok. 

There was no one to save my life.

So I read a lot to escape the despair. And by a lot I mean every book in the science fiction/fantasy section of the library, from the good, the bad, to the ugly but sorted by author. I had a lot of time to read in middle school and high school. I was homeschooled and got through the curriculum for a semester in a month, leaving me months to my own devices. I didn't have any friends and the only hobbies I had were praying and going to mass.

So I read.

I remember the exact moment I finished reading that short story. It was in the afternoon and I had been sitting in the living room in an armchair, a pile of books at my side. The sunlight had streamed through the clerestory windows with the burning intensity of a desert summer. It was before we did our pre-dinner rosary and the rest of my family was off doing something else. There was no one in the room with me, no one who could interrupt this moment of revelation.

The revelation was this: I wasn't alone.

I'm not kidding when I said it saved my life. I can't understate how much hope this gave me. I wasn't alone. 

Other people felt these emotions. Other people had this despair in God. And maybe if we didn't have the answers or a solution, at least there was someone else out there who could sympathize.

I doubt Elison had intended his story to feel like the hug I needed, to console a 10 year old. But it did.

I had no mouth and I had to scream. And somewhere in the dark, someone else screamed back. 

I'm Afraid of Americans

Finally, I feel that horror helps us explore what makes us afraid. And if we're paying attention, we can have a dialogue around it. 

At the end of the day, Dracula isn't a novel about vampires. It's about our fear of immigrants. People who bring their foreign soil with them so they don't have to integrate. People who we are afraid will take our women. People who are different from us. 

To use some movie examples: Night of the Living Dead is about the senseless cruelty of capitalism. Long Legs is about the satanic panic and how religion can be used to hurt people. Get Out is about racism and the way people of color are treated in America. If you didn't notice that, please go watch it again (and watch everything Jordan Peel has done because he is an absolute master at the genre).

I have a book that I will always recommend as a seminal book on this topic: The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless by Richard V. Greene and K. Silem Mohammad [2]. In this collection of essays, the authors discuss this very idea. We tell stories of the things that scare us for a couple reasons:

• To reinforce the norms of what we should be afraid of
• To discuss why we are afraid of such things
• To explore what we are afraid of and maybe see how senseless that fear can be.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote horror because he was terrified of black people. Maybe he didn't realize this outright but everyone around him was like, "Yeah that dude is exceptionally racist." But there's something important about his writing even though it comes from this place. 

We can talk about how the other scares us. We can have the hard discussions about our senseless fears and we can talk to each other about those fears. We can use the metaphors of the zombie, the vampire, the shoggoth, the unnameable evil as substitutes for what scares us in real life.

Because sometimes our fears aren't politically correct. Sometimes our fears are cruel. Sometimes our fears are harmful and hateful.

It's hard to have these conversations outright when our fear can interfere. But we can tell horror stories. We can sneak up on these conversations and talk about them through metaphor. 

If we have these conversations, maybe we can realize that the monster under the bed is just a pile of old sandwich wrappers and the monster in our closet is just moonlight on an old coat. 

There's more to all of this. Like how we can use horror to explore what it means to react humanely to an inhumane situation. Or how  I write horror to lance the boils of my trauma and maybe help someone else feel like they aren't alone.

But at the end of the day, horror has an important role in our storytelling experience. Science fiction helps us explore the questions of "what if we made a future like this?". Fantasy asks "what would magic do to our society and our humanity?". Horror has a what if too: "what if we were afraid and survived despite it all?"

So to quote Bradbury again, horror is how we "with Yorick’s mouth cry, “Thanks!” to Art."

[1] This sentiment and the Bradbury quotes in this post come from Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing (Goodreads link). I will recommend every single person who reads this to go find a copy and read it. This is another book that changed my life. It's out of print, but definitely worth getting a used copy.

[2] I don't know if this book is in print, but here's the Goodreads link

Also, yes "I'm Afraid of Americans" is the name of a David Bowie song with a really good music video.