Rough Draft of Final Project: "What Are You Afraid Of?"

Horror. It is considered one of the oldest genres, and yet also one of the most underrated. Most likely this is due to the simple fact that horror, as a genre, tends to pop up the most in the exploitation scene of pictures, whether it be the sort of things Roger Corman put out or the sorts of things one sees on the SyFy channel while one is drunk at three in the morning, likely due to the fact that gore and terrible CGI monsters tend to procure more immediate returns than actually writing a decent script (Though this author would argue that some Corman-produced movies are actually pretty crackerjack, like Galaxy of Terror and Piranha). 

But it's also perhaps due in large part to society's vast lack of understanding as to what in the horror genre attracts people. There have been vast backlashes from society against horror, from the criticism of the 80s wave of slashers for being misogynistic (Some of which was accurate, some of which wasn't) to the British list of banned gore films known as the Video Nasties. The sort of voyeuristic desire to look upon the darkness in horror tends to be considered some sort of symptom of madness by The Very Serious People who run society, to the point where famed horror filmmaker David Cronenberg once said in disgust “Censors tend to do only what psychotics do; they confuse reality with illusion.”.

But, as a fan of horror, with a history with the history of the genre, this author has a personal hypothesis of the appeal of horror to the masses, and that appeal is threefold. 

First, he would say that the fear, the legitimate, deep terror, is only part of the appeal, and that there are two other parts one should consider in its appeal, specifically the appeal of creativity and the appeal of broken taboos. And he will explore his history with the genre to show this with the power of critical analysis.

So, dear reader, we must start with what is likely to be the least lengthy of the analyses, and it is speaking of horror as taboo. Perhaps it is because this author has little experience with that sub-genre that this genre that it is getting short shrift, but to be fair, it also happens to get short shrift from the horror fandom in general. The term “torture porn” has grown in vogue as of late to describe this genre, including films such as “Hostel”, “Turistas” and later entries in the “Saw” series that seek to shock and disgust.

One argument could be that films like this have always been around in one form or another, such as the infamous American ending to “Snuff”, the first two films in the “Guinea Pig” series, and the nigh-legendary “Cannibal Holocaust”. But an article by Adam Lowenstein also argues that the term should be more like Spectacle Horror. He also makes the case that the films that the term was coined for, Turistas and Hostel, also have a very dark satirical aspect to them, with “Hostel” in particular being mentioned as a giant satire of American actions overseas. 

This is perhaps very similar to the themes many scholars have read into Cannibal Holocaust, but that's another topic entirely.

But the genre should actually be called taboo horror, for that is its appeal, the breaking of taboos. Steven King says something similar when he talks about “go for the gross out” in his landmark study of horror “Danse Macabre”. And, as Lownstein mentions by bringing up the films “Execution of Mary Queen of Scotts” and “Electrocution of an Elephant,” this phenomenon goes all the way back to the dawn of cinema. 

And King mentioned that in horror films, the gross-out can sometimes reach a point of art, which is what the films seem to be aiming for. He mentions oneincedent in particular, a spider being mulched up by a juicer in the film “The Giant Spider Invasion”, and there is a moment of disgust when a woman drinks it. This spoke to him about the frission touching the audience on a deeper level than these films' paltry narratives can touch upon. But there's the argument about something more being at work to be had.

It is the argument that it's not just a connection at the gut, but a connection of the will, as an endurance test for one's gut, to prove one's strength in the face of the absurd, or perhaps their willingness to embrace it. 

This ties in to well to another of horror's icons HP Lovecraft, who has been called the JRR Tolkein of horror literature for his deep yet awe-inspiring worldbuilding, creator of the Cthulhu mythos and establisher of several of horror's most iconic tropes, such as the concept of the apatetic monster god who who could crush us like ants and not even give a crap (Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Haunter In The Dark), archetectual geometry that defies rational explaination (Call of Cthulhu, Dreams in the Witch House), and even the ancient astronauts trope that some people actually believe in today (The Shadow Out Of Time, In The Mountains of Madness). None of those people are actually non-idiots, but still.

And yet, for such an innovator, the man was also surprisingly conservative and averse to change. His work brims and bubbles with cartoonish levels of racism, describing with horror minorities and 'half-breeds” taking over, whether it be the cultists of Cthulhu or the immigrants in The Horror At Red Hook, he spoke with terror of the “debased hordes” slowly shambling to breakdown all that “we” (that is to say, his own group of white anglo-saxon protestants) hold dear. 

And the geographer James Kneale, in talking about the role of the crossing of boundaries in his work, mentions a quote of his saying, “Change is the enemy of anything really worth cherishing,” saying that all the innovation and pioneering he did stemmed from his racism, the taboos he brought up and shuddered over were the very thing that drove his creation. And that is, perhaps, the secret to his appeal, that feeling of the taboo and the violation of the boundaries of sane life that he captured though his sheer white boy neuroticism.

Note that this is not an assertion that Lovecraft's fanbase is racist. Indeed a large chunk of his fanbase makes fun of this element of his work, including critic and cartoonist Johnathan Wojcic (Who will be addressed later). But, rather, it is an assertion that the breaking of taboos from which he took his fear touched on something in the popular consciousness that even he only half understood. And that is what fascinates people about his work, taking all that humanity holds dear and revealing it to be a lie we tell ourselves to keep ourselves from comprehending the magnitude of infinity, even if they do not hold his morbid dread of it. 

Steven King in “Danse Macabre” talks about how horror is an inherently conservative genre in “Danse Macabre,” because it is almost always about an imbalance in the natural order of things that needs to be solved. And while this author would not take it that far, there certainly is some degree of truth to that assertion.

And then that leads into the second avenue of horror's appeal, the approach of fear. Steven King in the “Danse Macabre” chapter “Radio and The Set of Reality” talks about tension derived from imagination as a key factor for creating fear, with a very memorable quote attributed to William F. Nolan.

It goes like this,albeit in a version condensed for space: “You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it... The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall."

And while there are more factors to fear than the use of tension, which will be gotten to later, this explains perfectly one of the key advantages of found footage films, which have exploded in popularity since The Blair Witch Project.

 “Paranormal Activity” might be the go-to example for this, and indeed this author loves that movie to death, but this report will use the anthology film “V/H/S/2” as an example of the subgenre, namely because of its extreme stylistic variety and also because this author also loves it to death.

The film is extrememly disparate in terms of subject matter and style, with the subjects of each story ranging from space aliens to disturbing demon cults to zombies to even some inklings of cosmic horror. But despite that variety, there is one thing all of them have in common: the stare. Thanks to the nature of the footage, they do not cut away to a different location, they do not take you out of the danger, they just stare through the camera's eye, always in the situation, always there. 

And that's what keeps the films consistently powerful, the fact that due to the necessity of the format there is not even a moment of seeming respite, and thus the tension that King's quote addresses. And on the unknown that that tension leads up to, the film also works well with this thanks to its format.

While at times found footage films have been criticized for use of what some call “shakey cam,” it is actually arguable that the deficiencies of the format can actually add to that piece of the format the lack of seeing. 

The lack of professional lighting and a consistent view of the creature create not only a disturbing sense of reality, but also a sense that the events are actually occurring. This is most notable in Slumber Party Alien Abduction, where the aliens are done in the image of the classical “greys,” and the costumes are very simple. But under the quickly moving camera and the dim natural lighting, it makes the glimpses we do see of the costumes into something nightmarish, distortions of the human form.

This does not just work in films, but also in literature, as Lovecraft knew. One of the best examples of this is, actually, Call of Cthulhu. For, while the description of the titular creature speaks of the typical hybrid of human, dragon and octopus, this is only actually ever used in-story to describe his human-made depictions. The actual appearance of the And the impossible architecture of Rylleh, the idea of which he uses in many, many other stories, could not possibly be described in text, but the insinuation that a person is essentially swallowed alive by its impossible geometry says a lot about it in only a few words.

And then there is the second type of nightmarish horror, the horror of the bizarre, the things that don't make sense. It is something very much like the unknown, but less in the context of the main plot, and more in the context of the larger setting of the story. That is to say, it means even when we know what the horror in the story is, it still leaves the reader with more questions than answers, and leaves a feeling of weirdness. HP Lovecraft captured this feeling very well in many of his stories, most notably in The Colour Out of Space.

 Said story involves a meteor made up of impossible colors that crashes in the earth and then starts slowly shrinking until it disappears. Afterwards, the people and vegetation in the land start slowly getting warped and deformed, with that color showing up more and more within them. And in the end, the colour coalesces from all the life it has warped into one being and flies off into space, while leaving a part of itself in the water supply. While the area is about to be dammed for drinking water. And yes, the disquieting implications of this are brought up. 

The reader does not even know that the thing is a living being until the end of the story, and even then questions are raised about its nature and what will happen with what it left behind. This is perhaps one of the reasons that Lovecraft considered this his favorite story he wrote.

Even in his more conventional story “The Whisperer In Darkness,” the story is still leading up to the reveal of tentacle-headed unphotographable fungus-lobsters with a base on Pluto who are putting human brains in jars and taking them to space. And by the end of the story it is still unrevealed what they're using the brains for. 

 

And that perhaps is what makes his mythos so intriguing, the repeated hints of a far larger cosmology than is shown in the full text, but a lack of revelation of what that is. Perhaps that is why the mythos has been cheapened as of late, because too much of the material is devoted to explaining it.

The certainly is the perspective of Johnathan Wojcic, a cartoonist and critic who runs the website Bogleech, dedicated to all things monstrous and morbid. He's held a short horror fiction contest in both 2012 and 2013, and his largest piece of advice has always been the same “Less explaination, more mystery”. And that philosophy also shows up in his own work.

For example, in the story of his own he put into the archives of the contest, “The Five,” the protagonist talks about some vague disaster that happened throughout, where people are repeating the last five days of their life before the occurrence. And then, in the end, we get what the disaster is with a single line: “Where, exactly, did all the heads go?”. 

 

And in the sequel, we find that the answer to the question is that they're all rolling to a single point, gathering in a formation that's somehow significant to the narrator. But the appearance of the formation is not explained. Just raising further questions.

And he also continues this idea in his Mortasheen concept, a worldbuilding project soon to become a tabletop roleplaying game, which is much akin to a sci-fi/horror take on Pokemon with the tone of the average Terry Pratchett novel. And yet, despite this tone, he still manages to carry over horror's sense of mystery to the creatures.

In particular, a class (Mortasheen's equivalent to Pokemon's “types”) known as “Unknowns” have this principle to a creature, with beings having such anomalous properties as people being able to remember the results of their actions, but never their actions themselves (Longfellow), a being eternally covered in ever-shifting holes as if moving through an other-dimentional medium (Vorlune), a silicon-based being with quadruple helix DNA that drains an unknown sort of energy from its victims (Vaccuthax), and mineral beings that are not even technically alive, but still act like they are (The Meteor series).

But these themes can be seen all over the series, from the angelic life-giving Oovule possibly being the ultimate evolution of the Zombie type to the Devilbirds and the unknown forces they have tapped into. And while the tone of the series is rather dark-comedy, this creates a sense of horror underlying the whole thing, with things far beyond the game's scope.

Even a follower of his, Christopher Howard Wolf (Known by the online handle Slimebeast), has most of his many, many short horror stories end with no answers. Most of his stories have incredibly ludicrous premises and twists, such as a horrible mascot-posessing demon lurking under Disney property to an ever growing flesh Katamari to a bizarre mockery of a “Stranger Danger” character who abducts children and makes everybody forget them, or a shut-in manchild who makes disturbing videos placing horrifying content into normal programming. But they are still powerful and disturbing because of the fact there's no answer. In most of them, there is no answer, there is no explanation behind the final circumstance, just the faint feeling that there is just something deeply wrong with the universe.

And that is perhaps the reason why, out of all the short horror fiction writers online, Mr. Wolf was known as one of the best. Well, at least until people unauthorizedly using his stories for their own profit drove him to quit. But that's another rant.

And that leads one to the final piece of horror fiction that attracts those who read it: the creativity. It is likely the most attractive piece of horror fandom for many people, due to the fact that a large amount of horror is not all that scary.

Take for example the horror movies profiled by the websites I-Mockery and X-Entertainment, two of the earliest and longest-running websites (If one counts X-Entertainment's spiritual successor by the same author Dinosaur Dracula, which is practically the same anyway) profiling, tributing and poking fun at “trash” culture of earlier years. I-Mockery for example, has a yearly series of articles where they take a look at the site's self-proclaimed greatest horror movie moments.

If one looks at these kills, one would note that they are not particularly scary. They are usually quite excessive, and while that may be disturbing and tie into the earlier appeal of horror as taboo, that does not mean that it is scary. But what they all are is creative. From the death of a man by having a voodoo-doll-ice-cream-bar in his likeness being eaten to a huge rolling sphere of small, toothsome aliens to a man ripping himself open like a sheet of paper, they all have a morbid inventiveness to them.

Indeed, it was X-Entertainment's profiles of the films “House” and “Dead Alive” that convinced this author to see those films, and it was those films that brought him into the fold of horror, namely because those films sounded so incredibly strange. And that is also likely why, out of all of King's works, this author likes Graveyard Shift the best due to its collection of very strange ideas still taken seriously by Mr. King, who shows no shame towards his chosen genre.

It is perhaps in the spirit of Danse Maccabre that tis aspect of horror exists, a making of merriment with the knowledge of death. How appropriate that that is Steven King's title for his affectionate look at the genre