This week: Horror History Edited by: Angus  
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'The monster was the best friend I ever had.'
~ Boris Karloff ~
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The word 'horror' comes from a Latin verb meaning "to bristle" or "to shudder"—the idea being that a horrified person's hair stands on end. Horror came into English through the French, spoken in Britain in the 13th and 14th centuries, and ultimately comes from Latin.
Even the earliest recorded tales have elements of horror, fear, and despair, and the archetypes of horror have likely lasted much longer. The vampire archetype, for example, can be traced all the way back to the ancient civilization of Sumer, the earliest known civilization in southern Mesopotamia dating back to 3,500 B.C., where the vampire-like being Emikku would inhabit the bodies of people who had died violently or who were buried improperly.
But the roots of today's horror literature can be found first in the Inquisition. In 1235, the Vatican issued an order to reestablish the orthodoxy of the faith. Almost immediately, charges of heresy were inextricably tangled with allegations of witchcraft. The resulting obsession with witchcraft would endure until the seventeenth century.
Throughout the 13th century, horror was also closely tied to religion. Two Inquisitors, Henry Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, published Mealleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) in 1486. It was reprinted 14 times throughout Europe by 1520. And not too long after that, gruesome plays began to emerge, such as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594) and Macbeth (1605), and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1613).
Jump to 1714, when Thomas Parnell published A Night-Piece on Death.. This was the beginning of so-called Graveyard Poets (also called Churchyard Poets), which were known for their preoccupation with mortality and death.
In 1731, the Austrian government ordered an investigation into a mass hysteria that gripped the village of Medvegja. Local citizen Arnold Paole had died in 1726 after falling off a hay wagon. Prior to his death, Paole had intimated that he'd been bitten by a vampire when he lived near Gossawa, in Turkish Serbia. To reverse the curse, Paole said he'd smeared himself with mud from the vampire's grave and with the vampire's blood.
About a month after Paole's death, villagers said that the deceased man had risen from his grave and killed four people. Believing Paole to be a vampire, they'd disinterred his body forty days after his death. It was relatively undecayed, lending further "credibility" to their theory. They drove a stake through the heart of Paole's corpse and burned it. His four supposed victims' bodies were treated the same way. Despite these precautions, ten more people died of mysterious circumstances in 1731, and the village blamed Paole.
In the 1800s, Edgar Allen Poe brought the Gothic archetype to America. His very first story, MS Found in a Bottle, appeared in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor in 1833. Edgar would go on to produce some of the world's most outstanding macabre tales, and has also been called the father of the detective novel.
~ TO BE CONTINUED NEXT MONTH ~
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My question for this week is: Where do you MOST OFTEN get your ideas for your stories?
In my last Newsletter I asked: Why do people like reading horror?
And the answers were...
QPdoll is Grateful 
I'm not sure what endorphins kick in when you're reading horror, but something inside us likes to be afraid, if only for a little bit. I don't like the gory stuff, but I've slowly begun to read some horror here on WDC. I used to read it a lot when I was younger. Then I had kids and for whatever reason, I couldn't bring myself to read it anymore. I have no idea why. But now I can slip in a little as long as it's not too psychological. So, I think we like reading horror because of the fear factor. It's kind of fun to be scared for a minute.
Great newsletter, by the way.
BIG BAD WOLF is Howling 
There's a lot of craziness out there.
Quick-Quill 
My thought after reading your definition is: Terror is the act of inflicting fear on to another. Terrorists aren't horrors. They are the perpetrators of fear. Horror is the recipients reaction to terrorists acts. We're horrified at what we saw or heard and the emotion is called fear. I thought your NL provoked a lot of thought. I'm keeping this as reference.
s
Why do people like reading horror?
Because reading about things that are terrible and can't be real - vampires, monsters, zombies, etc. - or are just over the edge of plausibility, is a safe kind of fear, as opposed to the world around us with its genuine fears, with the way we might see some of our own society collapsing. It is much better to be afraid of some-one's imagination than reality.
For that reason, the scariest book I have read in the past 20 years, even though it's not classified 'horror', and the first book tpo give me nightmares since I was a kid, was Lionel Shriver's 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'. Why? Because that is real. that could happen. That has happened. It is maybe too real, and that's why it scared the absolute sh*t out of me. There are no monsters, just a kid, doing something too many kids have done already. But explained. And what he did to his sister... and the ending... I'm almost 50 yrs old, with 40-odd horror stories published, and it's giving me the creeps writing about it.
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Horror/Scary: August 28, 2019 Issue [#9726]
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