Random Thoughts on Horror

Recently I was casting about for something to write next, and it struck me that I've never written a horror story. Some of my work has elements of horror -- I wrote a Hellboy story about a vampire -- but usually my goal is something other than scaring the reader. (The Hellboy story was a comedy.)

So I applied my usual over-thinking approach to the topic. What is a horror story? Well, it's one in which scary things happen. What are scary things? Depictions or threats of death, painful injury, loss of freedom, mutilation, madness, and bodily violation.

Stephen King, who knows a few things about horror stories, once pointed out that horror can be internal or external -- in other words, it can either be brought about (knowingly or unknowingly) by the characters, or it can be an external menace. Internal horror tends to be a literalization of whatever character flaw brought it about. This is the familiar Twilight Zone/EC Comics trope of the kid who shoots birds with a BB gun getting carried off by a giant bird, or some such. If you think about it, and squint, internal horror is a sprig off the main trunk of tragedy. A hero is destroyed by his tragic flaw, only in the horror story the flaw is often made literal and the focus is on the process of the destruction.

External horror is less tied to character. People are inexplicably afflicted by evil, even if all they did was move into the wrong house or stop at the wrong motel. In H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, the heroes are just looking for fossils in Antarctica. It's never even suggested that their pursuit of knowledge is a flaw; they're decent fellows in a praiseworthy, constructive endeavor who wind up running afoul of ancient monsters. 

King suggests (and I agree) that external horror is actually scarier. With internal horror, the reader can always console herself with the thought "I would never do that!" If the heroes' downfall comes from their own flaws, then we can congratulate ourselves on not having those flaws (or at least on controlling them better). With external horror there's no such refuge. You might be the one whose car breaks down at the remote gas station run by cannibals. You might be the real-estate agent hired by Count Dracula.

Well and good. BUT: there's a stinger, which caught me rather painfully when I began trying to plot out a horror story. External horror doesn't allow for much realistic character development. Think about it: if the evil doesn't come about from a personal flaw of the hero, then there's no reason for the hero to change or gain self-knowledge. All he has to do is get away from the scary monster.

One can make various noises about "finding your inner strength" in such a situation, but when you look at how people in the real world react to terrifying experiences, there's a name for how they change: it's called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That's right, a realistic horror story would leave the heroes severely messed up. But if they don't show those effects, then it stops being a horror story and instead becomes an adventure story -- which is a fine thing, but not what we're after.

There: I've proved logically that horror stories are impossible. Stephen King, Bram Stoker, and H.P. Lovecraft may now vanish in a puff of brimstone. Actually, it occurs to me that Lovecraft himself may have followed a similar course of reasoning, because several of his stories ("The Haunter of the Dark," and "The Color Out of Space" come to mind) are presented as cases where the horror wins, and the narrative is either a fragment left behind as the hero succumbs to his doom, or is pieced together by investigators after the fact.

So how can things realistically go bump in the night?

Comments

[Katano42]

Maybe that's the really scary part...that we can't change who we are...maybe the horror story is really our way of reassuring ourselves that the Universe DOESN'T care about us...because it did care, then why do we get cancer, lose our job and can't find a new one, have our children turn out to be egotistical actors who get high and act like Charlie Sheen...."You think you've got it bad? Well, at least you don't have a car that's come to life and likes to kill people coming after you."
Things don't realistically go bump in the night...99.999999% of the time, you hear a bump in the night and it's the dog walking into the coffee table. Ahhh, but that 0.000001% is what makes getting out of bed and investigating so scary. We like to scare ourselves....helps us put our lives in perspective.

It's like romance novels...the Hot person never talks to the Average person, has Hot Sex (every single time), falls in love with them and gets married...even the commitment-phobes get married...and usually in under 150 pages...

[Nick Howe]

I would say that the essence of horror is a sense of safety violated. The character must feel safe and begin to relax, whereupon the perceived safety then proves false. The key is that if done right, this makes the reader doubt his or her own sense of safety.

[Winchell Chung]

In his introduction to THE MIND PARASITES, Colin Wilson speaks at length about the problem of writing a horror story. You start your story in a creepy setting. The narrator goes to investigate. Then Something Awful Happens - a rotting corpse knocks on the front door, a monster with tentacles on its belly tears down the wall, etc.
The problem is that it is really hard to think up something that really terrifies you (the writer) enough to make you terrify the reader.