When I was a kid, I hated anything that was supposed to be scary on purpose.
It was like I didn’t understand the object of going out of one’s way to be afraid; maybe I had an easier time imagining the awfulness or pain or general distress these things were supposed to threaten than other people. Or maybe, it’s perfectly likely, I was just not as hardy as some other kids might have been, either way, scary was not a thing I sought out.
The more time I spent as a kid, the longer the set of things that scared the ever-loving bejeezus out of me seemed to get. The most prominent examples that recur to me now include:
-Bees (not allergic, just hated being stung)
-E.T. (but really who could blame me, he screams and dies)
-Any deep water, manmade or natural (especially natural, as I was sure something would come swimming up to grab and/or bite me);
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| Nota Bene: This never actually happened. (I never got in the water.) *Head to scale |
-Anyone screaming in a movie (for instance, in All Dogs Go to Heaven, just when Burt Reynold’s unflappable protagonist falls from paradise, and his heavenly whippet tour guide shrieks “Charlie!!”);
-That episode of the Simpsons with the angel skeleton (a later example, but seriously it gave me the heebiejeebies and I don’t even know why); and last but not least
-In the George C. Scott A Christmas Carol (1984), the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. (Sweet lord that horrible horrible Ghost.)
This last example was actually so potent that black-shrouded figures in general tended to terrorize the imaginary landscape of my darkened bedroom (this was years before Dementors and Ringwraiths, which for some reason have never bothered me).
As a matter of fact, few years back the movie was on TV again while I was wrapping some gifts, and in a good-natured and carefree way I decided to try and face my old fears and see just what was so unnerving about that old movie, anyway.
Despite my believing myself to be considerably better-equipped by long experience to cope with things being scary in movies, when that shrouded figure appeared and started making the horrible sounds it makes (which I had altogether forgotten -- something like if a rusty gate could groan and scream at you), I confess I nearly broke out in a cold sweat, and was only too pleased when the scenes that feature that hideous sending were well past.
Some things just stay scary, I guess.
(I also re-watched All Dogs a few years back, and although it didn’t give me any flashbacks, I’m pretty convinced that it’s way scarier and more R-rated in spirit than any other movie I’ve seen marketed to kids. But, still pretty good.)
I mentioned a moment ago that long experience had accustomed me to coping with scary things. Of course that’s the real difference between being a kid and being an adult; you’ve been through a lot more, hopefully, and you have a sense of when things are really dangerous, or awful, or unpleasant.
And nine times out of ten, the things which scare us in movies have almost nothing to do with the things set up to scare us in stories (unless the stories are very good, or are a different and much worse form of fearful that deserves another article altogether).
But I think there’s also a fiction-based component to this cumulative and desensitizing experience, whereby we get used to seeing scary things in stories and acquire a taste for them as part of the overall emotional palette at a good storyteller’s disposal.
What were some of the stories that brought me into better terms with things that go bump in the night?
For the most part it happened as sort of a trade-off, where there was a movie or story that I thought was really awesome by and large but which had some scary parts in them as sort of the price of admission. The earliest and clearest example of this for me was the King Kong if you will for the early ninety’s generation: Jurassic Park.
I did not have scary dreams after I saw Jurassic Park. True, when Dennis Nedry and Robert Muldoon got killed (spoiler alert!) I had my head under my jacket, but the rest I saw and it didn’t bother me a bit, not the way “scary” things had always bothered me before. There were other less clear examples after this, but that was the first and the big one: the lesson was, sometimes spectacular things can happen in movies, but you’ve to be big enough to handle the scary parts that go with them. I thought that was just fine.
At the same time, the more I spent time at friend’s houses, the more I came into contact with traditional horror movies (which didn’t get a lot of screen time at my house, my parents not really feeling that the heavy stuff was were much good for kids anyway). Friday the 13th comes to mind as an early example, and Scream, and random others.
I didn’t enjoy watching these particularly, but when they were over and I’d watched the whole thing I was pleased to find that I’d survived and that they really hadn’t been that bad.
Of course, going to sleep later on was another story, but it turns out I could manage that as well.
Then, and probably most significantly, a good friend of mine brought me into contact with a little show called Mystery Science Theater 3000.
For the uninitiated (there are some good episodes on Netflix by the way, at least at the time of this writing; check out Laserblast among others), the premise of the show is the hosts, a guy and his two robot pals, watch an old, awful movie and spend the whole thing talking over the dialogue and cracking jokes. The references are often super obscure and the humor drifts towards corny a lot, but it’s such a great show. Once you get a taste for the regulars, it’s the sort of thing that gets to be part of your media family, as it were.
Anyway the reason why this show was significant is the two kinds of movies most frequently screened by the inveterate hecklers were old science fiction B-movies and old horror films.
Briefly put, what you’re watching when you watch a horror movie is a series of more or less effective illusions designed to make you feel a certain way, and most of the time if you can laugh about what you’re seeing and pick holes in it, you can easily remember it’s just a movie, that it can’t hurt you, and you’ll turn out fine.
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| It's probably best that film hadn't come out yet. |
If there’s a better way to get it into your head that it’s just a picture and it can’t hurt you than to sit with imaginary friends and laugh at how ineffective those images are, I’m apparently not sane enough to have recognized it.
In the end, probably one best thing that fear in fiction can do for us, if it works well enough, is this: we can experience the things which frighten us or unnerve us in a (more or less) safe environment, and help us to see that when the fear has passed by and we’re still there, we can see and examine what was there to be frightened by in the first place; usually it’s nothing at all.
Unless of course you live in an area where you’re likely to be abducted by a supernatural entity bent on tormenting and destroying the innocent. If that’s the case, boy I don’t know what to tell you, you may need to read another blog.
I remember in middle school or thereabouts finally watching perhaps the first movie that had scared me the most, the dreaded Jaws, and found that far from terrifying it was actually mostly an exciting sort of adventure story, with an emphasis more on getting your heart pounding
By the time I was in college I had definitely acquired a taste for a kind of grown-up Jurassic Park films, that is films that are scary, and scary on purpose, but not because the movie itself tries to be nasty or unpleasant, but to explore ideas which are interesting in and of themselves and which happen to have nasty or unpleasant consequences.
Some of these are still favorites of mine, including The Fly (1986), Alien, and the Thing.
So far I’ve noticed that although there are an almost infinite variety of emotions that fiction can convey, there are only a handful of kinds of feelings that “scary” stories try to get across.
First is terror, which I usually consider some form of the jump scare. The emotion, stripped of its intensity, is about 50% fear, and 50% “what?!” The sudden startle is as much responsible for the reaction as whatever it actually is that jumps out at you.
Great for relieving tension if it’s the cat, or turning the tension up to eleven if it’s something that grabs, stings, stabs or bites and doesn’t let go. It’s typically handled through a straightforward three-step process: first, get the audience to wait for something to happen, then get them to forget that they’re waiting for something to happen, then hey presto out comes the toothy clown.
Next is suspense, which happens to a certain degree in every story ever told. If an audience isn’t in some form of suspense (at least with regards to what’s going to happen next) they probably aren’t really paying attention. It’s more or less an emotionally-charged form of waiting, waiting when you feel like what’s coming is for better or worse worth the wait.
But suspense can be colored of course with terror, described above, and its big brother horror proper, described below, to make it a completely different animal from the ordinary “what comes next” variety.
Because you can’t have every second of a story (at least, not a good story) be jump scares or actual horrible things happen, suspense winds up accounting for the bulk of a scary story’s length.
It starts as a sort of dramatic irony (where we know something the character’s don’t; namely in this case that they’re in a horror movie), everyone seems happy enough going about their business, but we know something awful’s coming towards them soon enough.
The best scary movies, and the best tellers of scary stories in general, have managed to master the art of suspense. That is, getting your audience engaged enough to keep going with a story and its characters, maintaining or slowly increasing the tension without letting it cool off or boil over. It takes a lot of practice to get right, and is almost unnoticeable when it’s done properly.
Finally there’s what I think of as horror proper, which is probably the hardest of the three to really pull off well (unless of course your audience is a bunch of kids that frighten easily). The opposite of terror, where the fear comes from not knowing what’s going on, this is fear caused by knowing exactly what’s going on, and it being so unpleasant that the reaction is acute and forceful agitation. They open the door and finally find out what’s inside and...it’s not pretty.
The reason why I think this is the hardest kind of scary to pull off well has to do with what it is that we’re being scared of. It takes wisdom and emotional sensibility to be able to come up with something good to scare the readers or viewers with and to do it well.
Why wisdom and emotional sensibility?
Because it’s not hard to make people afraid of something, we can pull the sort of things that everyone’s afraid of out of thin air. I tend to think of most horror ideas as fulfilling the big three things that everyone’s afraid of.
First is the gross fear, which is sort of just “I’m not eating that” turned up to eleven. There are an endless list of things that can happen to us that are simply disgusting, nauseating, or distressing to think of, and if you want to conjure a monster that will force these things upon your characters all you have to do is write down the words.
Next there’s injury, that is sheer pain and disfigurement, second-highest on the list.
And it’s topped of course by the ultimate universal fear: death.
If you look at the canon of horror stories, as it were, the vast vast majority of these have to do almost exclusively with things, persons, or forces which will cause the characters first one of these things and then the other, then remove them from the story altogether; and this is done invariably without pity, without hesitation, without fatigue, and most often without having a compelling reason.
There’s nothing wrong with a good old monster story, where everyone’s running or hiding from something that wants to eat them. The problem is that this story has been told a zillion times, and most of those times aren’t really worth watching as stories. The die-hard fans of horror for horror’s sake need only apply.
So how can you tell a scary story without relying just on the big three methods? This often takes a stroke of ingenuity or a touch of experience that’s as coveted as a good story idea itself. In fact, for many scary stories, we can basically boil down the core of the story to the awful thing that’s causing the characters their anxiety and distress. It’s impossible to write a prescription for originality, that is lay out never-fail rules for how to come up with good ideas (and anyway if I could do that, who’d be crazy enough to publish it?) but I think we can at least characterize ideas into the more or less interesting varieties.
The Big Three scary things I laid out above fit generally into a kind of fears I’ve read increasingly as “child” fears, or childhood fears. The counterpoint is “adult” fears, or I guess things which only grown-ups are afraid of, but I think this is a silly distinction for reasons I’ll go into in a minute.
As far as child fears go, the monster example sums it up pretty nicely: the idea is that kids don’t have to be afraid of monsters coming to eat them, they’re afraid of these all their own.
So I guess the idea is that child fears are the ones we’re hard-wired to feel, whether we want to or not: unless you have a rare neurological condition of some kind, you probably want to avoid disgusting things, intense pain, and death whenever possible.
This is fine as far as it goes, but I think it’s the idea of these “adult” fears that bugs me. The idea that there are things that only grown-ups get to be afraid of or are capable of being afraid of seems silly to me on its face; I could be wrong, but I think scary is scary, and grown-ups calling dibs on half the kinds of fears there is giving grown-ups more credit for insight and emotional sensitivity than we deserve.
Adult fear examples? I hear “not fulfilling your dreams” thrown around a lot, or “not being able to pay your bills and getting your house taken away,” or “getting ripped off,” and so forth. They’re generally more boring or subtle than a monster under your bed, but also have the rough stamp of being distressing without causing any actual fear.
Now, there things called adult fears that are actually frightening. Losing one’s mind, or any other slow and terrible disease; a loved one betraying you (in any of the classic or obvious ways); losing or outliving a child or a family member in general, probably the biggest one.
Children may not always conceive of adult betrayal in the same terms that we would, for example, but I think they’d find the idea that they can’t trust their closest friends not to hurt them just as scary as we the grown-ups would.
I think the above are all 100% comprehendible by almost any chid old enough to read and understand stories on its own. All they require is a little empathy and imagination, and saying that children lack either by their nature lessens what we think and can expect of them. But that may just be me.
It might just be that we’re exposed to these risks more often and have more to fear from them, and more often than not they’re the kind we dread from experience rather than because we’re hard wired to.
All that said, obviously it’s the child fears that are easiest to portray and get people to feel in a movie or a story, because again they’re the ones we’re hard-wired to feel no matter what.
It’s the adult fears, that is anything that scares you and doesn’t have to do with getting tortured and killed, that are difficult and nuanced to portray and, crucially, to get people to feel suspense over, because they generally deal with things over a much longer time-scale, are way more abstract than just getting your head sawed off, and require the audience to sympathize with the characters and understand what’s happening to a much more complicated and character-driven way.
Most of the time, when a movie is made compelling and is about an adult fear, it’s not recognized as a horror movie at all, it’s just a movie, without genre (I guess that genre would be “drama,” though that categorization has also been bothering me for a while -- but that’s too much nitpicking already!)
All this aside, the thing that scares the characters, and us by proxy, can absolutely be a child fear if the scary story is still a good one.
So, when scary good in fiction, and when is it lousy?
Like almost every other emotion we could ask this question about, the answer is a two-parter.
First, the technical aspect. How well does the storytelling convey to emotion to the audience? Is it clear, in terms of feeling, what the speaker (film maker, writer, whatever) was trying to do, and is it clear that they did it?
There are always good and bad movies, novels, etc. that we can draw on for examples, and each different media has different rules, official and otherwise, about how the visual or semantic language of storytelling gets across to the viewer/reader. But usually my rule of thumb is, if there’s no technical aspect that winds up distracting you from the moment by being less than convincing or of inconsistent quality than the rest, the author has done at least a passing job.
The second aspect is probably the most important of all: why do we care that the things we’re seeing or reading about happen at all?
The answer is the same one it seems like we always come back to: do we care about the characters, and do we care whether they can get through this struggle they’ve become entangled in.
This point also hints towards why it’s less interesting for a story to be just another one about a monster that slashes and kills, without any reason or engaging characteristic to set them apart.
“Why would she answer the door like that?” “Why would they go down in the basement when there’s a killer on the loose?” “Oh, of course they get a flat tire just then.” All observations of an audience that either isn’t buying that the struggle is genuine, or that doesn’t care whether the characters succeed or not.
There are happily an infinite number of possible characters for stories, and an infinite number as near as I can tell of struggles for them to get into.
But what will always always make the difference between a good story and a bad one is the reason why the characters do what they do, and whether the audience can understand those reasons and get behind them.
Recently, in the last six or seven years or so, I’ve started giving main-stream horror films a shake, and have seen good and bad. I’m still learning and growing into the horror genre, and am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.
But I like the fact that horror is open to me now, it’s like there was a wall in my house that’s now fallen down, and there’s a whole suite of rooms I didn’t know was there.
Of course, I don’t go in there all the time, it’s dark in there, and there could be spiders.
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