This week: Horror History (Part Deux) Edited by: Angus  
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“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
~André Gide, Prometheus Illbound~
“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
~Chuck Palahniuk~
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Horror Even for Children
During this time with Poe's first publication of MS In A Bottle, horror would make its way into many other art forms. In 1819, Francesco Goya painted a series of eighteen frescoes, known as the Black Paintings, in response to the French invasion of Spain. And the following year Hector Berlioz made waves with Symphonie Fantastique. The symphony shocked its audiences with its shocking sounds and grotesque imagery; Berlioz had named the movements "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witch's Sabbath."
Also during this time, people had to face the sad reality that life was still often violent and short. People of all ages were often intimately acquainted with the realities of mortality. This fact extended to children. Readers were and still are shocked by the gruesomeness of Jakob and Willhelm Grimm's Kinder und Hausmarchen (1832) and the grisly details in Hans Christian Andersen's Tales Told for Children (1835). Today all these stories have been sanitized (for lack of a better word), but the gory details and lessons learned through violence were not at all unheard of at the time.
And although they certainly don't qualify as horror in their own right, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) would influence horror writers over a century later. In the 1980s. Lewis Carroll's poem "The Jabberwocky" weaves the ridiculous with the horrifying, and twentieth-century authors would play with that juxtaposition, as well as with imaginary worlds and parallel universes.
Transition to Modern Horror
Ambrose Bierce published Can Such Things Be? in 1893. The collection of ghost stories followed his gritty war stories, bringing ghosts into modernity. H.G. Wells would go a step further in 1898; War of the Worlds, usually classified as blend of science fiction and horror, took horror into the future—presenting a whole new source of fear and anxiety for modern readers.
The turn of the century also saw the first experiments with horror on the big screen, which tended toward the gruesome and fantastic. The first true horror movie was William N. Selig's sixteen-minute adaptation of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. The first movie adaptation would appear later, in 1910.
By this time, the short story had definitively replaced the novel as the main style for most horror writers. In 1907, Algernon Blackwood published The Listener, containing his most highly regarded short story, "The Willows." Blackwood was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society created by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in 1888. The organization was home to many popular writers, from the infamous Aleister Crowley to William Butler Yeats, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Sax Rhomer (who has faded into obscurity now but was wildly popular with his contemporaries). Members of the Order were responsible for the majority of weird and horror fiction produced in the UK at the time. Their work also marked the end of an era for horror, because not long after that, the genre's popularity started to fade. Still, Dennis Wheatley was a hugely popular English writer between the 1930s and 1960s. He focused on the occult, and his thrillers served as some of the inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond series. James Herbert and Clive Barker began publishing horror in Britain the 1970s and 1980s.
In America, horror was flourishing. In 1923, the first issue of Weird Tales appeared. The magazine never turned a profit in its 32 years  , but it did feature a number of still-famous authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. Four years later, Lovecraft published The Call of Cthulhu, earning him critical acclaim and recognition as one of the preeminent horror writers of the era.
Modern History's Impact on Horror
The Great Depression only enhanced Americans' interest in the supernatural and horror. A number of horror-themed radio shows sprung up, including "The Shadow" (1930) and "The Spider" (1933). Both spawned successful spinoffs in the form of novels and even comic books. Yet the 1930s also marked the last decade of the pulps.
The very real horrors of World War II overshadowed fictional ones. Though Bradbury and a few other significant authors continued publishing horror stories and science fiction, it wasn't until the 1950s that horror again hit a stride. Richard Matheson's 1954 I Am Legend was the first modern vampire novel, and Shirley Jackson's 1959 The House on Haunted Hill remains one of the most critically acclaimed genre novels of the past sixty years.
Also in 1957 was another influential event in the modern history of the horror. Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer, was arrested for the murder of Bernice Worden. When authorities searched Gein's home, they discovered the remains of at least fifteen different women—in small pieces. Gein admitted to exhuming bodies and committing acts of cannibalism. The story shocked—and fascinated—the nation. Much earlier Fritz Lang's 1931 movie, M, marked the first serious film about a serial killer and was based on the real-life serial killer Peter Kürten, the "Vampire of Dusseldorf." But the serial killer hadn't found its way into fiction yet. The Gein story would inspire Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959) and pave the way for works like Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series. The serial killer has since become an indispensable example for the genre.
The Cold War had ushered in a new age of paranoia and fear of invasion. These fears were realized in works like Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby (1967). This was the first prominent work of speculative fiction. It also marked a shift back towards the novel as the preferred form for horror writers. The 1970s saw a deluge of horror novels, starting with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) and perhaps epitomized by Stephen King's Carrie (1974). Stephen King fairly burst into not only the American horror scene, but the larger world of literature. Peter Benchley published Jaws in 1975, which was a true coming of age for the modern monster tale. And Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire in 1976, bringing new life and direction to vampire fiction.
Yes, horror has certainly come a long way in the last 5,500 years, and I can't wait to see what the next 5,500 years will bring!
Oh. I probably won't be around then, huh?
Or will I?  |
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Books have inspired many movies. Which do you think is better, the movie or the book?
My last question was: Why do people like reading horror? (I know I got this question in late, so some of you might not have seen it. My apologies!)
BIG BAD WOLF Feeling Thankful
Someone does Tim Carry's laugh.
Pennywise will always be my favorite clown!
Quick-Quill
Today we read about mass murderers and wonder what we'd do in the same situation. This wave of killings in public places have caused people to become agoraphobic. Others turn that fear into action and point their finger at the tool and not the perpetrator. Then things calm down and we all go about our lives, until it happens again. Fear of death, pain or loss enters our lives. How do we deal with it? In a book or on screen, we can look away, close the book. In reality we are no longer in control. That's real FEAR.
So very true, and so very sad!
The Dark Faery
Wonderful newsletter. I look forward to reading your next one.
Thank you!
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Horror/Scary: October 23, 2019 Issue [#9821]
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