Horror stories

I have been a Stephen King fan since I was a teenager. I think, at his best, he is one of the all-time masters of story and character. He understands how the smallest moment or seemingly unimportant choice can utterly change a life. He can tell a hell of a story. And no one does a particular kind of American voice better. Stephen King books can scare the shit out of me every time, to the point that I get spooked reading them by myself at night.

Other horror books I love: Ghost Story and Shadowland by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Stoker’s Dracula, most all of Poe…

And every once in a while I’ll watch a horror movie. I like Alien, Aliens, Jaws, The Haunting (the 1963 Robert Wise film, not the cringe-inducing Jan de Bont 1999 remake).

All in all, a very short list from a very large field. I stopped appreciating horror when the splatterpunks came along in the 80’s. I’ve read the Books of Blood and the rest of the splattercanon, and you know what? Just don’t like it.

Today I watched 30 Days of Night. Well, I watched about 70% and fast-forwarded through the rest. It wasn’t offensive. It was a smart premise. And the violence was as much suggested as shown — it certainly earns the R rating, but it’s not the linger-lovingly-on-the-violence-in-slow-motion approach that made me turn off Robocop (and please, can someone please help Verhoeven with his issues? It’s getting so I won’t watch a movie with his name on it…).

But in other ways it was too routine to elevate it above the formulaic. A bunch of demographically-varied people get picked off one by one, some because they are stupid and some because they are noble. The nice touch was the ending….

SPOILER ALERT
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… in which the hero realizes that he has to become a monster in order to be able to fight them (they are really strong), so he injects himself with the tainted blood of a victim in order to induce a transformation. He saves his ex-girlfriend and the obligatory orphaned child (yep, same old instant-family routine), and then dies in her arms as the sun finally comes up. No last-minute reprieve.

I wouldn’t watch this movie again, but because it bored me, not because it offended me. And I can certainly be offended. I won’t ever watch the Saw movies or Hostel or Funny Games any of the other torture-porn/let’s-get-sadistic-on-someone’s-ass films that seem to be the new splatterpunk.

If it’s true that horror films help us cathartize (is that a word?) deep cultural fears, allow us to bleed energy out of some personal demons, then maybe it makes some kind of sense that so many of these movies are about random, sadistic violence. The kind of thing any of us are helpless to prevent or to control, that we can only try to survive. Maybe that’s how we’re all feeling about our world and our lives right now. There’s a line I heard that to me is a perfect example, from the new movie The Strangers, in which the heroine asks one of the random masked-into-facelessness strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?” and the stranger says, “Because you were home.” It doesn’t get any more pointed than that.

But I fucking hate those movies. In the worst moments (mine or theirs), I leave them feeling both compartmentalized and complicit in something nasty. I feel flattened. Reduced. I hate the whole story ethic that trivializes human violence by making it “just because” and then making that the center of a story. To me, that’s a rotton core. To me, it’s the same nihilism as the root of splatterpunk — let’s just think of worse and worse things to describe, to witness, to be on some level engaged with, and the first one to blink and turn away is a wuss.

That particular kind of human violence is too frightening and too real to treat that way. I don’t want to see it turned into entertainment, any more than I want to see rape turned into entertainment. But clearly a lot of people do want to see it. And I’m curious why. Anyone who has theories to share (actual theories as opposed to judgment of the audience), I’d really like to hear them. As a storyteller, it’s something I’d like to understand even if I don’t ever want to do it.

I am interested in writing a horror novel someday — but it’ll be more King than Saw. I’d like to explore the kind of scare that seems to be out of vogue right now (typical Eskridge timing) — the fear of the unknown and unknowable, the unexplained, the monsters that scare us because they come from deep within us, or because we are tempted to let them that far in. I hope there will still be a place for that when I get around to it.

What horror films or books have you liked? Can you tell me why? I’m interested in refining my own notions about these things.