Over the past few years, I've become much more interested in the horror genre. Some of it is in response to how big of an impact It had on me (so much so that I read it every year for three years in a row; this past summer, I watched both of the new movies in lieu of reading the book, just to get my fix). But I'm realizing that I've been interested in scary stories since I was little. I loved reading the newest Goosebumps books--I even dabbled in the "more intense" Fear Street books every once in a while (what can I say? I was an edgy nineties kid). I still have Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares: Tales to Make You Scream, which I keep on my own kids' bookshelf in case they ever want to dive into the mind-numbing horror and utter depravity that is a kid's collection of spooky stories.
I never owned Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, though some friends (and maybe my brother?) did. The drawings in them disturbed me much more than the written words did--I had nightmares from those pictures, I'm not going to lie. (One of them leads this post.) I read things like Roald Dahl's The Witches, which scared me more when I saw the traumatizing ending of the movie. In short, I had an interest in the right amount of scary. Ghosbusters 2? I was there for that. Chucky? Not so much. There was something about being spooked just right that scratched a childish itch. This isn't to say I didn't have nightmares or bad dreams. I still vividly remember having a night terror where a gremlin (from the movie Gremlins, unsurprisingly) and E.T. (from the movie E.T., unsurprisingly) tried to shuffle out of the darkness in the corner of my bedroom to grab me. I kept screaming at these shifting shadows to go away. I even hurt my hand when I struck the side of my bunkbed while trying to swat them away. My mom came in, frantic (and probably furious at having been awakened). Her presence made them drift away, vapor in the wind. I don't know if she remembers it happening. Like all kids navigating a strange world, my imagination fueled plenty of frightening things at night, infusing the surety of surreality in my small mind and driving those sleep-depriving dreams deeply into my psyche. Yes, I dreamed of Freddy Krueger, despite having never (to this day) seen A Nightmare on Elm Street. His scarred face and knife-glove jolted me with a pang of panic for much of my childhood. At my grandma's house, she had a VHS collection of the TV show Fairy Tale Theater (hosted by Shelley Duvall, the actress from The Shining that many call the scariest movie of all time and I found interesting and enjoyable and not at all scary). My favorite episode was "The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About the Shivers". A jawbreaker of a title name notwithstanding, it was the one that I thought was the best made. Rewatching part of it recently, I can remember why I liked it so much--though I don't know what part really scared me. I recall that the Taylor Maid store at the mall I went to as a kid terrified me with its assortment of werewolf, zombie, and gruesome masks--enough that I dreaded it when we came into the mall via the entrance closest to that store. Yet for all of that, I didn't mind picking up scary books. I mean, yes, Goosebumps is hardly the example par excellence of horror, but for a third-grader, it's got some pretty intense scares. And it isn't even the idea that affects me now--namely, a written scary story hardly bothers me at all--that was going on back then. I distinctly remember reading Jurassic Park in the sixth grade (I don't know if my parents knew I had purloined it off my dad's nightstand and read the entire thing over the course of a weekend) and writhing with anxious dread and near-panic as Tim and Lex are chased by velociraptors in the kitchen on Isla Nublar. Heck, there was even a time--I can't remember the book now--where a jump scare actually worked with me and I jolted hard enough to almost drop the book. Nowadays, though, I don't feel that way. Written stories can gross me out (I read Brian Keene's City of the Dead because it was a new take on zombies; it was pretty gruesome), give me a slimy feeling, or fail to impress me (I think the much-vaunted-but-pretty-meh-for-me Hell House by Richard Matheson fits in there). Basically nothing I've read has scared me. Movies and video games, on the other hand… I find that really interesting, actually. I flatter myself that I have a fairly robust imagination (except for when someone's like, "Quick! Think of a clever way to say this…" and I completely freeze), but for some reason, the world of words doesn't feel dangerous enough, I suppose. Even if I imagine something in greater detail than a film might, it sits in my mind differently. I can only hypothesize that this is because of just how many words I use--both reading and writing--in my life. We're too intimate, words and I are, to have that disparity of knowledge that's crucial for cultivating fear. There are knives in words, yes, but they aren't in ghost stories. In the visual world, however, it's a different tale altogether. I already mentioned being traumatized by the illustrations of one of these Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books (though it might have been some imitator version, now that I think about it). During my early married days, another newlywed couple would come over each weekend and we'd watch scary movies. I saw The Grudge and maybe one or two of the other Scary-Face-Booga-Booga type movies that were popular at the turn of the millennium. We'd also play scary video games. Silent Hill 4: The Room, Fatal Frame 1 and 2, and a couple of others graced our CRT television. Once, the scares were so bad that neither Gayle nor I could fall asleep, with my wife finally asking me to talk to her about the details of my then-work in progress just to get her mind off the images of the game long enough to slip into sleep. I finally played Resident Evil VII recently, as well as the remakes of both 2 and 3. There are some jump scare moments in those games, though a lot of any creepiness is alleviated by the presence of shotguns and/or rocket launchers. And while Resident Evil has moved away from the true horror of its roots (with VII being an exception), I don't feel like I've been genuinely scared by an RE game in many years. I tend not to watch too many R-rated movies (clearly, I make exceptions, as I've already confessed my sin of watching both It movies), so I don't have a lot of experience with some of the real touchstones of the cinematic variety. Still, I know the difference between Jason Vorhees and Mike Myers, and while I couldn't really explain the plot of the movie, I can recognize Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre without prompting. Blair Witch Project? Come on: I grew up in the nineties. Of course I'm familiar with it without having seen it. I know the vintage monsters--Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and werewolves--as well as some of their more intense, frightening versions, including An American Werewolf in London. I've seen bits and pieces of The Thing and Alien, as YouTube is a great resource for cinema analyses, which tend to focus on some of these more popular movies. This has given me the chance to become more versed in the subgenres of horror, with an understanding of what I do--and don't--find interesting. I think psychological horror is fascinating; ghost stories are great. I'm not a fan of torture-porn (I don't care to learn what Hostel is about; the original conceit of Saw is conceptually interesting, but I don't have any desire to learn more about Jigsaw) and body-horror really distresses me. Slashers have a certain allure, but for the most part I like a hefty dose of the supernatural to go along with it. In other words, movies like Scream (which I saw on TV when I was younger and, so far as I can remember, is a surprisingly good mystery/horror film) aren't likely to catch my eye. I think part of that is knowing that true crime isn't something confined to opening and closing credits; serial killers do exist and that is alarming to me. Stories about the occult, demons (in certain contexts), and possession aren't for me. Pod-people stories stress me out, though I kind of like them. There's something about the inability to know or trust the characters that's really off-putting, which is the point of horror, of course. (Maybe this is why I really don't like Spider-Man stories with the Chameleon in them; it's so hard to know what's going on.) So I'm not an aficionado of horror films, but I know a bit about them. It's kind of weird, honestly. And, since it's October, I'm purposefully "studying" more about the genre via the aforementioned YouTube videos. And, since I'm me, I've been thinking about why I'm this way. What is it about horror that's drawing me to it, albeit in a slow orbit? Here's a possibility: Horror is supposed to show how people behave in extreme situations, so any demonstration of redeeming qualities--kindness, a helpful attitude, loyalty to friends and family--become that much more impressive. Not all--indeed, not much--of horror relies on that particular trope, however. So there has to be something more to it than that. Maybe it's the fact that horror stories often (not always, of course) show the eventual defeat of the darkness. The night is long, but sunrise eventually returns. That is a star-like glimmer of hope amid the inky sky of the horror story. Or perhaps it's the slight adrenaline jolt that can come. I'm not a fan of jump scares, but really creepy atmosphere? A pervasive sense of unease? The tickling at the back of the neck letting you know that something is wrong, though you can't quite discover how? That can be an enjoyable feeling, with the dread of the drop equaling a literary version of that moment before the doors on the Tower of Terror open and let you know that you're hundreds of feet above Disneyland. Whatever the reason, I'm sure that I'll continue to pick at the idea. Monsters have always been interesting to me; perhaps they'll act as a stepping stone toward other story possibilities in the future. I guess I'm just a boy who's gone out in search of the shivers. |
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