 Horror/Scary: February 23, 2011 Issue [#4253] |
  Horror/Scary
This week: The Stuff of Nightmares Edited by: Fyn  
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Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.~Alfred Hitchcock
“When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's blood, one's life, one's intelligence, and one's reason, without ever satisfying them”~Eliphas Levi
“The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, / Who thicks man's blood with cold.”~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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So. What really scares you? What sends the blood to pool in your feet or your heart to pump and jack-hammer itself from your chest? What knots your stomach, raises the hair at the back of your nect and turns your hands and feet to ice? I'm not talking those 'real life' moments of terror or tragedy, but those moments where you scare yourself silly-for the fun of it. Why else does one read stories of horror and terror? Personally, I think it is for the same reason that many people enjoy being on a roller-coaster ride. Remember that nightmare that had you bolting up in bed, shaking like the proverbial leaf? Remember how when you tried to tell someone about it, how important it was to convey what you felt and why it was so frightening?
When writing horror, be it the escaped convict roaming around your cabin in the middle of nowhere, the sound of footsteps when you know you are alone or the ticking of a clock that begins to mimic your heartbeat, it is essential to communicate that abject fear in a way that is visceral and mind-numbingly real.
Too often, when I am asked to read a tale of horror, a genre of which I, admittedly, am not fond of (Basically, I am a wimp!) it seems to me that rather than finding it scary, rather than it evoking a sense of terror, I find it absurd, or almost laughable. And, when I ask myself why, the reason I come up with the most often is that either the scenario was not presented in such a fashion that allowed me to accept the parameters of the tale as plausible or was trying too hard to feel scary. Neither works.
We, as writers, do not have the visual plane of a movie screen in front of our readers where the action can appear from behind wielding the axe or the sounds of the footsteps creeping ever closer to aid us in this endeavor, so it becomes increasingly important to use descriptive phrasings, tempo and word choice to bring the story into a visual playing out in the mind's eye of the reader. If the writing doesn't jump and surround the reader with the hot, metallic smell of the blood, with the precise sound of the arterial blood splattering on the wall, with the squeal of the axe against the grinding stone or the fetid smell of his hot breath redolent with the decayed remnants of his last meal clinging to his teeth like gory medals of valor, then it becomes nothing more than a cartoon-like imitation.
In this genre, as well as every other, one of the things that can make it or break it is the use of description. If the environment of the character cannot be made to feel real to the reader, then that place where most of our reading truly takes place (our imaginations) will not react or envision what the writer intends.
Back to roller coasters. Ever been in one? There is one called 'The Rebel Yell' in Virginia. No over the shoulder harness here, simply a bar across your lap. For some unknown reason which to this day escapes all logic, a friend and I chose to ride in the first car after he guilt-tripped me into riding on it in the first place. A mental visual of the ride is that it was one of those that proceeds ever so slowly UP for several minutes--not quite vertical accent, maybe a sixty degree climb. You are acutely aware of the sounds, that rickety clicking of sprockets or what ever it is that moves you ever higher. You look out at the view and you are so high above the crowds below that you can see the ocean in the far distance. Sounds vanish and it is quiet, almost peaceful. At the top is almost pauses, then, it drops.
DOWN.
In a spiral. At the bottom you climb again. Slowly, you climb until once again you reach the top, drop over the abyss to go down and rapidly up into a 360 degree over the top spiral.
Then you do it all again.
Remember that lap bar, that miserable, thin piece of metal holding you in your seat? Go back to the first drop. The force as you fly over the top to plummet is more than the bar can take and suddenly, the two of you are grabbing to hold on to anything you can, to forcefully squeeze two humans under a seat roughly a yard wide and half that deep and roughly eighteen inches off the floor of the cart. You don't care (or even notice) that the edges under the seat are sharp metal, that despite the fact that there is no room, you are determined that you (at least) will fit and wedge yourself in all the while screaming and praying you won't fall from some unimaginable height even as you are loosing what's left of breakfast. Time screeches to a stop even as you feel as if every movement is in slow motion, that you can't move far enough, fast enough. It is almost as if you are underwater or trying to move through a thick sludge. Somehow (perhaps like those people who lift cars off pinned children) you both manage to hold on until the brain-dead kid running this torturous machine realizes there is a problem and brings it to a stop. We were so literally entangled under the seat that they had to cut the seat apart to get us out. Miraculously aside from numerous deeply purple bruises, a few copiously bleeding cuts and a badly sprained wrist, we were fine. Somehow, I managed to hold on to my glasses. My friend still had chunks of my hair loose in his hand. Our clothes were actually entangled between us and varying body parts. Somewhere along the way I lost a sneaker and he lost a shoe and a sock.
Me get on a roller-coaster again? Not in this or any other life time. And people do this for fun? Granted, most don't actually have to do it without restraints, and it is merely the illusion that they might fall out that (apparently) adds to the 'fun.'
In trying to describe this event, and now, reading it over, it certainly doesn't come close to describing what it 'felt' like, nor does it even begin to convey the mind-numbing horror. In fact is 'sounds' almost humorous, which, please believe me, it wasn't.
Horror is a very difficult genre to write in. To do it well, you really have to be able to grab your reader by the throat, build the threat and the fear and make it palpable. You have to have the ability to put them wide awake into the middle of a nightmare. Do I truly 'like' horror? NO. But I appreciate the skill that goes into one immensely.
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My one attempt at horror.
*~~~*
NOT HORROR, but some of the excellent entries of the almost fifty entries for the Dear Me Contest. Perhaps you find some inspiration in these, a reminder of your resolutions or, in some cases, just a darned good read!
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