No doubt most of you have seen the 1979 masterpiece Alien by Ridley Scott. If you haven’t you really should. If you’re a fan of scifi and horror, especially slow-burning Lovecraftian horror, I can’t recommend this film enough. So when I heard that Scott was returning to the universe he and the amazing H.R. Giger had crafted thirty years ago I was stunned, excited, apprehensive, and somewhat confused. I was stunned because this would be like James Cameron returning to the Terminator franchise after all these years. I was excited because Scott has been going all out on historical dramas recently and hasn’t done much scifi which is a pity since he has an amazing talent for creating detailed, believable future worlds. I was apprehensive because it sounded like a prequel. Not only that, the Alien franchise has been very poorly served in recent years. I know that this is Ridley Scott we’re talking about here but I couldn’t help but wonder if I wanted to go back into this universe again considering the mess others had made of it. And I was confused because when asked about the project, Scott consistently gave tantalizing hints that the film would involve the world of Alien yet he adamantly refused to elucidate whether this was a prequel, a sequel, a reboot, or what. It seems now that it is indeed a prequel to the original story and this point is only hammered home by the trailers that have finally come out. So why am I excited?
Well first of all, this may finally inject some much needed dignity into the franchise. The Aliens vs. Predator series has really removed anything frightening or ominous about the Xenomorph and replaced it with a well-lit, boring, by the numbers elimination game. The original Alien was cleverer by far, playing with our fears of bodily integrity and violation (raped or made host of a foreign organism). The second film took this and turned it into a well-honed action, sci-fi film that played with conceptions of gender. Our hero Ripley does what an entire platoon of Space Marine bad-asses can’t. The third and fourth films began slipping (The third can’t really be blamed on the director, David Fincher, since he was forced to start filming even as the script went through multiple rewrites. It’s a miracle or a testament to his skill the film turned out as well as it did.). The fourth wasn’t bad but retread the same waters without adding anything to the mythology. A fun film? Oh hell yes (plus really great cinematography in the style of Delicatessen and the City of Lost Children which strangely enough also starred the always awesome Ron Pearlman.) but maybe not a necessary one. Finally though, we have the return of the visionary who started this horrible, slimy, face-hugging ball rolling. I know that sometimes having someone come back to material they made a while ago doesn’t always end well (i.e. Star Wars) but I have a feeling that Scott really could tell an interesting story with this material. Is it a story that really needs to be told? We know that the Nostromo responded to a strange signal on a dead planet and that hell breaks loose soon after. Do we need to know what happened before that? How critical is it that to our appreciation of the film and the already established mythology?
If this were any other situation, I’d think that this film may be giving us information we don’t need. But you know what? Because this entire back-story had already been in mind when the first film was shot, I am really curious to see what this universe would have looked like if Scott had had the opportunity to put all his ideas to celluloid. As you can learn here, a chunk of the xenomorph’s origins was intended to make it into the very first film but had to be cut. Additionally, I appreciate when someone takes the time to create detailed, consistent worlds and I’m curious to see where this film will take us and what it will show us. In a way this feels like a film for the fans who want to experience more of the world as Scott had originally intended it to be. I’m sure that’s part of the reason I’m so eager to see this film. The original presented just a slice of what felt like a complete, complex, and believable world, one populated with horrifying and brutal monsters and creatures of mystifying origins. I’m looking forward to diving back into this world of unknown and dangerous cosmic knowledge and learning what else may be hiding in the shadows of this barren, but not lifeless, planet.
Plus, who doesn’t love alien wing-wong?
Nothing says love quite like- hurk-glurch-glurch-arrrrgh! All rights belong to Scott Ramsoomair.
I just finished Christopher Moore’s amazing book A Dirty Job and I got to thinking about the horror genre. One of the thoughts that ended up developing was how the book managed to both make me laugh and at times descend into horror territory. I won’t say that it’s a scary book. I can’t really think of any times where I was really feeling the glacial drift of ice slowly filling my veins. However, there were parts that could certainly be said to be uncomfortable. Still, the thing that got me was just how well the two seemingly opposed aspects fit together. This got me thinking about the 80’s again (though that isn’t all that hard to do.). What struck me was that many horror films in the 80’s managed to pull of being genuinely scary while being humorous. And I’m not talking about the camp-tastic Army of Darkness either. I’m talking about genuine frightfests like Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and to a lesser degree In the Mouth of Madness. These films, while certainly not comedies, brought forward material that managed to provide us with a giggle, even an uneasy one. But why mix such diametrically opposed tones into a single work? Could it be that maybe they are more alike than they seem and that they may even complement each other?
The obvious and I suppose you could say calculating reason to include humor in a horror story is to disarm your viewer or reader. Often horror is like an arms race. You bring out a scare. The next one has to be bigger, otherwise, the emotional impact will lessen and then stagnate then the reader or viewer will totally lose engagement. So the ante has to be constantly upped to keep the audience enthralled and frightened at what will come next. However, if you frighten the audience then disarm them, the next jolt will seem as powerful as the first since they won’t expect it. They will go from a low anxiety state immediately to a high anxiety state and the shift will be very jarring. This isn’t as easy as throwing in a joke or a clown in the middle of a scene though sometimes the characters can lampshade the events of the story and try to crack a wry remark. It’s risky but if done right it has the potential to give the audience a moment of levity before rubbing salt in the wounds again. So this tactic is used in conjunction with scares to keep the audience afraid. The risk of course is that the addition of humor in an otherwise straight-faced horror film can call attention to itself like a beacon and draw the audience out of the world of the story. But this is not the only reason horror and humor cooperate.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolutely terrifying film in my opinion. It’s a demented odyssey into realms of twisted human psychology. But it maintains a perverse sense of humor that is just as entertaining as the scares. So how and why? How do we not end up taken out of the film? The answer to that I think is that the humor and the horror grow organically from the situation. The humor is not forced into the situation but is a direct result of it. The main psychopaths are funny themselves. But they aren’t funny in the way that a genuine comic relief would be funny. Instead they are funny as a result of their absurdity. While they are undoubtedly insane and dangerous, their instability and exaggerated personalities allow for the very stuff that humor and horror are made of: exaggeration. And that is why I think that, when done well, humor and horror may actually be great partners.
“The divine is no less paradoxical than the vicious,” said Eric in The Crow and there is a lot of truth to that. Both humor and horror develop when the universe drinks too many whiskey sours and ends up flopping on its ass. Both take what is expected, what our lives have so far told us is possible and to be expected, and subverts it to the point where we can either react with mirth or terror. For example, the dead coming back to life can be played for laughs since the idea is so absurd as to be unthinkable or we can play it as horrifying since it takes something that shouldn’t happen then slaps you right in the face with it. It all depends on what aspect the creator wants to emphasize. But by recognizing that both horror and humor are both a result of roughly the same process, the creator opens up new avenues to explore the idea. How far can you push until the horrible becomes laughable or the humorous horrendous? What does that say about the subject or our reactions to it? How can it just switch emotional textures? We also have to consider that both laughter and horror can be used as defense mechanisms. Sometimes something can be so horrible that the only way to respond to it is with laughter. Like when people suddenly laugh at a funeral. The more accepted or predictable response to something frightening are the typical physiological reactions we usually associate with fright. But both are ways of reacting to uncomfortable stimuli therefore, playing with both reactions can be very powerful for the audience especially since it can potentially lead to cognitive dissonance where they are no longer sure what they should be feeling. This ties nicely into the feeling of being trapped in a dream or rather a nightmare. Without any rules or land marks, the audience is totally at the mercy of the story. This takes the horror and elevates it to the level of a subconscious assault where the audience may be uncomfortable and not even know why. And the unknown is always scarier than anything any author or director can com up with. Thus, using humor in horror is a way of snaking into the audience using a method they may not be aware of and thus have no defense against. As an audience, we no longer can say what is safe and what is dangerous. Is there any safe place at all? Can anything in this insane world of the story be trusted? The humor here only heightens our apprehensions so that the world of the story becomes one massive dangerous labyrinth.
To wrap up before I go on for too long again, humor and horror, seemingly of the good twin evil twin dichotomy may not be so at odds as they seem. Both play with what we expect and subvert our expectations. Because of this, both can be deployed in the service of creating more tension and unease in the audience. When done well, the audience is stripped of a sense of knowing what will or what ought to play out. This thus a fantastic way of keeping the audience of balance and constantly wondering where you’ll take them.
I didn’t want this blog to go political but sometimes you have to talk about these things. Sometimes these issues sink into the ground like radioactive isotopes and threaten to poison the very ground you stake your home and livelihood on. The SOPA bill (Stop Online Piracty Act) is just one of those occasions where we have to look beyond the niche topics we cover and see the quagmire of under-the-table corruption, cronyism, and insidious fascism that continually assault us. These are mad times we live in boys and girls. Mad times plucked by the atrophied, gnarled fingers of old ideologues who can’t begin to envision a world where their rules are considered quaint and hokey yet utterly irrelevant. Of course I’m referring to Lamar Smith and his buddies. Our good friend Lamar is Republican House Judiciary Committee Chair from Texas. He’s the quisling who sold out rights out to the movie and record execs with the introduction of the SOPA bill. There has been a lot of talk about SOPA and a bit less on its deformed cousin PIPA recently. You might have heard about it. Or you might have noticed that your favorite websites are looking a little different today. Wikipedia has taken itself down for 24 hours as protest to the bills that would take an acetylene torch to everything good about the internet. The internet really is one of the last places we have that is truly free. With the Patriot Act and wire tapping that might have even made that naked mole rat Nixon retch, this republic is collapsing into itself like a geriatric who’s been clocked in the diaphragm. But never mind our national nightmare and let’s concentrate on this most recent affront to our dignity as members of the so-called free world. SOPA will create a firewall around the US pretty much. Sites based in foreign servers can be blacklisted and made inaccessible if there is any indication of copyright infringement. So you better pray your web content providers are paranoid bastards who only use public domain photos and pictures of their own kittens (which will have a watermark under the fur of course). And if you should be so daft as to upload a movie clip to youtube or facebook, you can expect Uncle Sam to bust down your door with a machete in one hand and a strap on in the other. You can look forward to luxuriating in Club F*ck Your Rights for up to five years. Yeah. That’s right. If an exec wakes up one morning and decides he wants a gold plated speed boat that can fly across the surface of the sun and he doesn’t quite have the cash for it, he’d going to send his good squad’s greasy little tentacles through the web, find some poor granny who thought it would be cute to put a clip of 101 Dalmations on facebook, and send her senile ass to prison for half a decade. Because her and her verminous criminal ilk deprived him of the money he needed for his solar boating expedition! Yes! I know this sounds a bit crazy. I seem to have gone off the rails a while back. If you’re still unsure of what all this is about, check this video. I am feeling more than a bit frigging crazy with this thing but we can do something about it. This is the important part so listen closely.
Boycott the fiend intelligences who are mainlining money into the stenosed veins of congressmen to support this bill. Groups like Sony, Viacom, and Marvel. Also, write to your representative in congress and tell them that this is unacceptable. Do not let these twisted people carve up the internet. It isn’t perfect but they are going to use a scorched earth policy then sow salt in their wake so nothing can grow. The internet has irrevocably change everything. It is a dreamscape where innovation and ideas can lead to amazing things. It’s a small wonder these people are so fervently trying to kill it. It’s like watching elk in rutting season bellowing and scrapping the ground with their antlers. They need to perpetuate the comfortable way of life they have been accustomed to, just blindly following the cycles. They may only be able to articulate these lizard brain needs through belches and grunts but you don’t want to get in their way because like the dumb beasts they are, they have only one setting. The internet has gotten in the way. It is unprecedented in human history and so those who have depended on locking information down are feeling a distinct chill march up their spines.
Now, stop reading this and write to your congressperson. Don’t let them erode our rights any more than they already have. And don’t let them carve up the vast, amazing dreamscape of the internet.
Dawn of the Dead, Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, Brain-Dead (or Dead Alive in the US), Suspiria, The Last House on the Left, The Thing, Videodrome, The Fly. These are all films that I enjoy. And they are all films that pack in the gore, violence, dismemberment, and evisceration. I do not consider myself a gorehound but there is no denying that watching a zombie get its head cut off, especially if it’s by Tom Savini, is particularly gratifying. But the main question that these films pose is where do we draw the line with violence, gore, and sex. All of these films had almost all of these elements in spades and there are many books that are just as, if not even more, brutal than some of these films. So the question is, where do we draw the line? Is there a line?
When it comes to writing a horror story, there is usually an element of physical danger. Not always. Sometimes it is a purely psychological threat of madness but most of the time we get some form of physical threat. I believe I can say with some level of certainty that feelings of fear and horror are inextricably tied to the body and our sense of bodily integrity. A good example is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion which is a psychological horror film that we could say is mostly about the main character’s mental break down. There is a bit of violence in it but the main source of horror is the protagonist’s increasingly loose grasp on reality. But if we break down the protagonist’s problem, we find that at its root, is the fear of sexuality. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the main character develops a fear of heights after his partner falls from a great height. In the fantastic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (seriously, check this movie out) we are treated to a romp through a dreamscape where everything seems to be metaphorical which is why this could be considered a psychological horror. But there is still the issue of the titular character’s coming of age which is of course tied to the body again. So the use of violence and gore can be justified in general. Our sense of self is deeply tied to our sense of body and when it is harmed, we react strongly from instincts that are in place to keep us alive. But the films I presented at the start of this post do more than vaguely hint at bodily violation. They dive in up to the elbows! So how can those films be justified?
The films at the top of the post do gore and they do it well and almost to excess. But what they do equally well is story and character. We care about the characters or at the very least, we want to know where the story will take us next. The gore is integral to telling the story since the story is about the body and the body’s destruction. David Cronenberg’s masterful remake of The Fly has as its subject the slow, painful transformation of a scientist into a man-fly hybrid. The Last House on the Left by Wes Craven is truly brutal in the depiction of the abduction and systematic torture of two young girls by a group of sadistic lunatics and what their parents do when they discover that the group of people who’ve sought shelter in their house are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter. While the violence and sadism of the film are shocking, one can’t say that it is too much because it is no worse than what happens in real life. To deny the film as a cheap shock-fest is to turn a blind eye to the reality that we are embedded in. The Thing and Videodrome, while science fiction and extremely gooey, once again take body and its violation as its main theme though there are additional themes layer on top. The Thing deals with paranoia and, on a deeper level, is about the fear of contagion. Keep in mind that this film was made back when AIDS was becoming a real threat and people were terrified of this new and seemingly omnipresent infection. Videodrome deals with the question of where television and reality intersect. At what point does reality actually become subservient to illusion? How better to explore this than by looking at the body? Since the body is sort of the first thing we can say that we recognize and is the beginning of and filter through which we collect information about the reality, what happens when it is warped and remolded by fiction? How can we tell what is real anymore when the body becomes contorted by illusion? In these and many other stories, the body is the subject or the body plays a central role. In that case, there must be blood. We must be reminded that we are viscera machines. Soft, squishy, and vulnerable. But the gore serves the story. It is there as a mandatory condition. To sanitize it is to remove the story’s reason for being which is to explore our physicality and everything that goes along with it. But there is another type of entertainment that isn’t interested in these questions but just wants to slap us in the face with a bucket of giblets.
Back when I was doing a philosophy course in undergraduate, during my brief stint as a philosophy major, I wrote a paper about the ethics of modern horror films, comparing the use of gore in the films with earlier and equally graphic films. In the end, I concluded that many of these modern films go beyond good taste and presented gore in a less than ethical way. If only I had considered the implications that would have for grind house and splatter punk genres. Luckily, I’ve thought more about this issue since then and have reformulated my conclusion. I’ve also lightened up a bit and got off my high horse. Now, I all I can say is that if you enjoy it fine. While great entertainment may carry a deeper message about the human condition, sometimes fun is just fun. Planet Horror and Crank and Crank 2 were both violent, gory, and filled with sex. Both hearkened back to an era of film making that emphasized stupid fun over substance. These films knew what they were and didn’t try to be anything else. Compare The Toxic Avenger with something like Transformers. The former realizes that its premise is ridiculous and runs with it like a sugar-crazed bird with a gummy worm in its beak. The latter plays it way too straight, not realizing that we went to the movie to watch giant robots beat the living motherboard out of each other. I don’t really need much more beyond that. If you at least make the robots interesting or likable, like our much beloved Toxie, we won’t mind the absurdity. Now, The Toxic Avenger had some of the most outlandish gore out there. People were beaten stupid with their own severed arm! But if you went into it with the right mindset, you’d have a damn good time. Of course, these films had gore akin to a Saturday morning cartoon. It was so excessive that you couldn’t take it seriously. But then there are films like Hostel that require a bit of a different approach.
In a film like Hostel, the gore and brutality is played straight. You are not supposed to laugh. You are supposed to be uncomfortable and sickened. We as an audience are not supposed to enjoy what we see. But as we watch the simulated torture we become voyeurs to sick and twisted behaviors that, since they are already committed to film, cannot be altered. And we can’t claim ignorance either. We know going into a film like Saw or Hostel what is on the menu. Most of the characters in those films are not going to make it. They are squishy cannon fodder. We know that they will suffer painful, protracted deaths. But we still go and we still watch. I’d argue that these films do in fact push beyond certain boundaries. I don’t know if I could successfully argue otherwise when these films are doing everything in their power to push beyond the boundaries. But is it too much? In terms of censorship, I can’t say yes since I oppose censorship. But are they too much in that they shouldn’t have been made? Again, I can’t say I’d support that either. Movies aren’t always nice. They may show things that are deeply unsettling for no other reason than to provoke a reaction. Can I blame them? When trying to provoke a reaction, sometimes the cheap tricks are the best tricks. We are of course sickened and shocked by gore and violence and for different reasons. We are shocked by gore because we are not supposed to have an intimate, face-to-face relationship with the things inside our bodies. Our organs and blood are not to be seen and when we see on screen or read in a book that the intestines have come out to say hello, we react with a deep feeling of wrongness. Violence shocks us because we are empathetic creatures. We have a tendency to feel or at least understand what others are experiencing. So to see someone get stabbed or read about it, we take some of that into ourselves and experience a bit of that pain. But there is a bit more to the story of the modern “torture porn” flick.
One of the deeply embedded facets of human nature is the propensity to violence. We can run with the humanism thing all we want but in the end, we are animals like other animals and we have gotten to this point today because we were better at killing and destroying than anything else on the planet. That is not the only reason we have been so successful. Intelligence, farming, and tight-knit groups that cooperated helped a lot. But we can’t say that weapons and a taste for blood didn’t help. But how often do you kill someone or something these days? I think the last time I killed something was zapping a fruit fly. But young men are still full of primordial fury! This is why there are so many cases of aggression coming from teenagers and men in their early 20’s. It’s that urge to clobber something resurfacing in an environment that doesn’t allow for such behavior. These films allow people to experience something brutal without getting their hands dirty. Though of course, this suggests that some people, instead of identifying with the victims, are identifying with the torturers. This is a frightening thought but not surprising. We all have the capacity to do horrible things and these films allow for those who are more inclined to that sort of behavior to experience a vicarious thrill. And so far, I haven’t heard of a case where someone kills a person then blames it on Hostel. This reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, the novel, not Stanley Kubrick’s stunning adaptation. At the end of the original text, our faithful narrator Alex grows out of his violent behavior and decides that he wants to act like an adult. So if the thought that these movies creating a horde of testosterone leaking psychopaths is weighing heavy on your mind, don’t let it. Especially because my next point puts it into a bit of context.
In these days, manhood isn’t what it used to be even though we are still relying on software or hardware that is ancient. We still feel the need in many cases to earn the distinction of manhood. There are still many cultures around the world that have initiations in which young men become adults.
But we don’t have any such rituals in this culture. But with these films, we’ve found something like battle-testing ourselves. We challenge our friends to sit through these films and not throw up or run out screaming. In these films, we’ve found a proving ground to separate the men from the boys as the saying goes. Think about the demographic these films are marketed to. Young males who will go to other young males and dare them to sit through it. “Dude, I saw the sickest movie. A guy totally pulled another guy’s pancreas out through his ear!” They will talk about it and dare each other to sit through it. Since we can’t go into battle and retrieve an enemy’s head, we now come back with a ticket stub.
So where do we draw the line? As a writer, especially a writer of horror, this becomes a crucial question. My stories so far, don’t feature a lot of blood or overt violence. But that isn’t to say they won’t and I have some stories I’m planning that deal directly with themes of bodily violation. How does one balance the need to portray gore without going to the limits of excess? Or perhaps that is a false concern? Maybe the limits are not there. Take for instance, Salo by Pierre Paolo Passolini. It pushed every boundary imaginable. It is a film that I have not been able to watch through twice due to how unpleasant it is. But it was a good film. It dealt with the wretched excess that would be the logical conclusion of the fascist regime in Italy in World War 2. Morbid and perverse, it presents the fictionalization of an era’s ghouls who hid behind the mask of authority. So maybe it isn’t the question of how much is too much but what it is being used for. Is it to provide immature laughs, allow someone to experience deeply repressed urges, or reveal something about human nature? The amount of gore and violence is thus taken out of the issue of taste and propriety and put in the area of intention. What is the effect you’re trying to create in the reader or viewer? Shocks? Scares? Gross-out reflections on the vulnerability of the human body? I think this is why there is no line, only a sliding scale that you have to place yourself.
Have you ever had a dream that, the second you wake up, you want to write it down? “This would make a wicked story!” you think to yourself, imagining the potential plot. Especially if you write horror, dreams can be a wonderful source of inspiration. The feeling of being trapped in a nightmare, with something horrible chasing you, or something just wrong with the world of the dream and you can’t pinpoint it but you know it’s horrible. If you could translate these feelings into words, surely you’d be able to terrify readers. I sometimes turn to my dream for inspiration but there’s something I learned from repeated attempts at transcribing my dreams too closely.
A while ago, I had a dream that deeply disturbed me. I dreamed I was being pulled through a department store. I felt like something evil was growing inside me. I didn’t know what it was but I could feel it growing, taking over more and more of me. I struggled against whoever was tugging me. People stared in horrified disbelief at what they saw. We passed a mirror and I felt the horrible urge to look and see what was happening to me but I was too afraid. I kept closing my eyes and jerking away but somehow my eyes kept fluttering open. Each time they opened, I caught a glimpse of something monstrous squirming in the mirror. Finally, the terror reached a fever pitch and I woke up. Needless to say, I woke up frightened but inspired. I saw the potential for this story. In fact, I was sure that the story would write itself. This was December of 2010.
By May, I was still nowhere near completing the story. The story I had decided on was still based on the dream but incorporated heavy elements of Chinese mythology and the history of Unit 731. I suggest reading about it because it is one of the finest examples of how the atrocities of human beings will somehow always outdo the things we writers can imagine. The story was about a college student living in London whose family had somehow escaped the atrocities of the infamous unit. On the night of a particular festival that her family observes she goes to a concert instead of observing the ritual and begins to have horrible hallucinations and comes face to face with the thing the ritual was supposed to keep at bay. Now that I think of it, and with the distance of time separating me from the story, I can see where I went wrong and how to make the story work but, during those frustrated months, nothing I did seemed to be enough to get the story moving.
Since then, I’ve actually derived a short story I completed and a novel that is being developed from the raw materials of this one unassailable short story. In the process, I figured something very important out that has since helped me not just in turning my dreams into stories but with writing in general. My ideas went all over the place when writing that story. I was hell-bent on capturing the effect the dream had on me. I wanted the reader to feel terrified and confused. After two initial attempts, I had the confused part down. But with that version, there was a serious disconnect with the character and what was happening to her. She felt like a cipher. I didn’t feel connected to her and I didn’t know what she was doing or why. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all just a bit too much to expect my readers to suspend their disbelief this far. The story was breaking down and I didn’t know why. The harder I tried to put it together, the worse it was coming. I came to the conclusion that I needed to change the setting. I changed the setting and powered through the story. I came to the end and I still wasn’t totally satisfied. What was wrong?
Now that I look back, it is obvious. I could have kept the original setting. I could have kept the original characters and the original story problem. What was wrong was much less tangible than the setting. The story lacked a skeleton. It wasn’t plotless but it lacked cohesion. It felt strained, like it was trying to be more than it was. I had crammed too much in, had too much backstory, too much of everything but a central narrative pillar. There is probably no story so crazy that it can’t be turned into a working story. What I had done was mixed the lines up between what works in a dream and works on paper. A dream works according to a unique, internally derived logic. By sticking too closely to the dream, I was trying to have both a nightmarish, dream-like experience while adhering to a story in which the rules of the real world mostly apply. If I had gone with a totally surreal set-up, that would have worked without nearly as much as the hassle but instead I mixed both together and kept tearing itself apart as quickly as I tried to stitch it back together. The root of the problem I think came not from even a lack of focus but too much focus on creating a certain emotional effect without enough thought to the story that would carry it. Sure it might be creepy at parts and I might get the result I’m aiming at, but without a narrative and characters to carry it forward that might as well be a description of a napkin blowing down the sidewalk. Sure it can be poetic but it’s still not a story. Because I was so single-mindedly pursuing my goal, I forgot one of the most important things about writing which is to tell a story with memorable characters.
Routinely, I have dreams and nightmares that I think would make good short stories or could be worked into a novel. However, I now realize that the important thing is not to transcribe the dream image for image or feeling for feeling onto the page but to think about what the dream was about. Sure one can incorporate those images and feelings but to concentrate solely on those aspects will probably lead to frustration. The trick is to analyze the dream and figure out what it was really about. The most affecting part of these dream experiences are how they reveal deeply ingrained, almost hard-wired fears and vulnerabilities. By looking at one’s dreams and learning to read them and thus learn why it was so deeply affecting, one can create a story that will haunt readers by digging into those liminal areas of their consciousness that they keep hidden.
So go beyond the image, dig past the outward horror to find what it is about the experience that is truly traumatic. That is where your story lies. I’d suggest keeping a dream journal where you record your night’s dreams. It will help you identify and zero in on the aspects of the dream that will work and that will create a great story.
If, like me, you love horror films, then there are two documentaries available on youtube that discuss, in length, some of the great films and how they came about. Both documentaries focus on the incredible period of the 1980’s when horror was absolutely everywhere and was routinely raking in the money. I’d consider it the second true renaissance of horror. The first being the Universal monster movie era that spanned from approximately 1920 to late 1960 but that saw its best output between 1923 and 1943, starting with the film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’d also include the Hammer Horror films coming out of England as being part of this first horror renaissance though it came a bit later, in the mid 50’s. Nevertheless, the Hammer Horror series continued on with the themes and monsters of the previous Universal monster series while introducing new elements to their horror. We could go back to the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and place the marker of horror renaissance there, after all, they did make remarkable film during the German Expressionist period that were deeply affecting, but for now I’m relegating the selection to movements that were specific to horror. For instance, Metropolis is part of the German Expressionist movement but is not horror.
So, without further ado, I’ll introduce the two players. The first is the documentary Decade of Horror. It’s cut into three parts, 1.3, 2.3, and 3.3. It has interviews with John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London, Joe Dante, director of The Howling and Gremlins, and Stuart Gordon, director of From Beyond and Re-Animator, among others.
The second is a personal favorite of mine that first aired on IFC as part of their Halloween special programming. It is The American Nightmare: The History of Horror’s Golden Age. It includes interviews with John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, and others as they discuss their films and horror in general. This is probably one of the best explorations of horror I’ve ever seen and has academics discussing the impact horror has had on them and society and how society impacted the horror that was produced.
Enjoy these great looks into the minds of some very talented people.
Nothing like a good decapitation to start the day out right in a zombie infested post-apocalyptic world. And judging by how zombies have utterly taken over everything in culture, I’d say we’re already in the zombie apocalypse. It seems like every book, videogame, movie, and television set are overrun with the undead. Not to mention sex shops. (Slightly NSFW: Why God? Why?)
A heart warming story about zombies learning to recycle.
Who remembers the Night of the Living Dead and the absurdly fun Return of the Living Dead? Even if you haven’t seen it, you know about it. It’s part of our collective cultural consciousness. You probably also know about Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and all the other dead films George A. Romero has been making. Then there is 28 Days Later, its sequel 28 Weeks Later, and so on. We’ve got the Resident Evil series of games and movies. These are just the most obvious examples of zombie films. Now we have books about how to defend yourself from zombies (Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide) and Marvel has decided that it would be fun to see what our favorite superheroes would do if they were zombies. We’ve seen a gradual ramping up of the amount of zombie content in just about everything. You can’t throw a stick without hitting something zombie related. Even our roads are fair game.
We can’t stop here, this is zombie country.
So what is going on? Why are there just so many bloody zombies? And rotten zombies? And fast and slow zombies? And every other zombie you could conceive of? We can go the boring route and just say that everyone is just hopping on the bandwagon and booking it to profit town (which probably is partially to blame) but is there more to this? I think there is because people are buying this stuff. If they weren’t, there would be no incentive to create this kind of content. So it may be that the real question is why do we love zombies so much all of a sudden?
There have been many who theorized about why we love the undead and love media in which the undead come back to gnaw on us. Death is the final frontier. After that line has been crossed, there is no undoing what has been done. All wrongs done in life transfer into death. This is probably why there are many cultures that put a stone over the dead. Imagine a wraith returning to get a little payback on someone who’s done them wrong. There are many such myths across the world of the dead coming back such as the draugr of Viking mythology. As bad as that is, imagine a giant skeleton coming for you. This myth comes to us from Japan and is called the odokuro. Everyone is afraid that the dead will make a return world tour at some point and so we devise practices to appease them and dissuade them from coming back to visit. So, the dead come to represent all of our misdeeds and wrongs. They are our bad behavior incarnate. More generally, they are our limitations and weaknesses. Who do you think put those skeletons in the closet? You did. And with zombies, they come out to get you. The zombie can therefore be our deep-seated fear of all that we’ve done or failed to do. They are the mythical wraith come back to exact revenge on the sinful living. This shared fear helps to make zombies so popular. We don’t want the dead to come back, we are afraid of this antagonism between what is alive and what is dead. This also explains why in so much zombie fiction and film, one of the main characters gets infected and turned into a zombie and out other protagonists have to kill him or her. This is also why it is so affecting. Our other protagonists have failed to protect this person and now have to take responsibility for their failure.
But there is a literal fear of death itself. A lot of it goes back to our fear, not specifically of the body, but of all the things that can go wrong with it. This is a fear that has traveled across centuries with us. The dead remind us of our mortality and they also show what happens when the wonderful machinery of the body gets shut down. We are instinctively repulsed by decay, sickness, and death. Sit around a hospital waiting room for a while with broken bones, coughing, sneezing, and all manner of bodily fluids leaking and I don’t think you’ll be having a big dinner later. When we see what can happen to others, I think we tend to wonder if that can that happen to us. Not only that, we wonder, can I catch that from this other person? The zombie is the absolute embodiment of this fear of both contagion and death. When a zombie comes along, oozing bleeding, moaning, zombie lore dictates that the shambling mess is going to try to bite you. If your horoscope that day says that Jupiter and Neptune are at odds and have conspired to send a hoard of undead cannibals after you, you know that once the inevitable happens, you’ll join their ranks. You will be infected. Even the act of infection though is redolent of ancient fears that go back to when we weren’t on the top of the food chain. We can deal with getting shot, stabbed, blown up. Our media is filled with representations of this kind of cruelty. But being eaten is somehow even worse. It isn’t a fast process. You get shot in the right place, you’re gone in a flash. But imagine being eaten alive. Imagine the feeling of jaws clamping onto your flesh and ripping it from you bones. The thought is perversely horrible. And it goes back to when there was a threat that you could get mauled by something much more powerful and deadly than you. Now why would you want to experience this? Probably for the same reason you experience any adrenaline pumping experience: the distinct, visceral feeling of being alive. It’s almost like exercising a muscle. We still want to experience that rush because it gives us access to other parts of ourselves that we don’t normally encounter. I discuss reasons for loving horror in an earlier post though so I won’t dwell on it here. The preceding reasons go into very broad, almost universal fears that predispose us to enjoy this particular sub-genre of film and they do partially explain why we can’t get enough of them but I think there is a more specific reason for our love of this gory genre.
Better than the jogging dead
Zombies seem to resurrect when we go through some kind of turmoil. Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, the year before the infamous summer of ’69. The hippy movement was strong and we were embroiled in a very unpopular war. Spring forward to 1985 when the classic Return of the Living Dead came out. At the same time, Reagan was president and we were in the middle of a repressive moral cultural movement. Now, flash forward to September 11, 2001. I don’t think I need to go into what happened. The year after, in 2002, we got the smash hit 28 Days Later. It was a hit. And since then, we’ve been inundated with zombies. We’ve had a remake of Dawn of the Dead by Zack Snyder. We had George A. Romero come out with Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. We’ve had the hugely popular Shaun of the Dead. We’ve seen the world get in on the zombie love with Rec from Spain and The Hoard from France. I could keep writing and writing. The point is that zombies have made quite a nice living in the post-9/11 landscape and I have some theories as to why they’ve done so well.
After 9/11, an avalanche of changes hit the world. We were all terrified of the threat of terrorism that could strike everywhere and anywhere. There was no place you could feel secure. We suffered invasive increases in security and domestic spying turned the world into a sick mirroring of Orwell’s 1984. War was killing thousands and driving the country into bankruptcy. Then the housing bubble burst and people were finding themselves homeless and without a job as the economy tanked. Meanwhile, the rich continued to live in peace, secured by their massive stocks of money. For the rest of us, the world was no longer certain. And it wasn’t just us. It was everywhere. Riots shook Greece, Italy, and Britain as they floundered. There was nothing to be trusted. Establishments we thought were secured began to crack and no one came to save us. Sound familiar? It should. This is the plot of every zombie apocalypse story I’ve ever heard. It’s often the case that life imitates art imitates life, creating a feedback loop. Entertainment is also the place where we can exorcise our demons and after this decade, it was time to break out the crowbars and shotguns. Zombie fiction, film, and games allow us to deal with the traumas we’ve suffered. We can see characters trapped in a world that no longer offers any safe place. Danger comes from everywhere and when your time is up, you get to join a legion of the walking wounded. We put the pain and suffering on the screen or on the page and it helps to draw it out of us. And it also allows for the possibility of vicarious revenge on forces that are far beyond us.
The senseless war that dragged on and on, the dead economy, foreclosures and banks still standing colossal. It felt like living in the valley of the giants. Or in this case, watching the dead stalk towards you. It’s something you can’t reason with. It is driven by something you can’t understand and the only thing you can be sure of is that it means to hurt you and those dear to you. This is sort of how many of us felt as our world collapsed around us. The zombie embodies this strange, threatening Other. The zombie, like whatever forces were busy this decade, is unassailable with our present conception of how things ought to be. But with a zombie, unlike burst bubbles and wars waged on dubious premises, you can blow its damn head off. And don’t we all love that moment? You know the one. At some point, things have to get gooey for the zombie. Arms and legs get blown or chopped off. Heads get vaporized. The thrill is even more extreme in games where you get to pull the trigger. Through these representations of zombie violence, we get to take back a little feeling of control. Every crowbar to the skull makes us feel like we’ve gotten back at the things that have stolen our faith in a reasonable world.
In the end, the zombie stands tall and ugly as one of our archetypes of fear. It is iconic to the point of becoming a cliche at this point and, as some are saying, it may be time to retire their rotten hulks to the crypts. But this isn’t the last we’ve heard of them and I can expect that, even if they go away for a while, they’ll be back when we’re at our most frustrated and wounded. Remember, they always come back.
So, the big question a lot of people ask me is, “Why do you like horror?” That’s a good question. I suppose I could answer with how horror has the peculiar ability to raise my pulse and get my adrenaline flowing. This is partially true. When I watch a scary movie, a definitely get the goosebumps, the elevated heart rate, the shallow and sharp breathing. But, I’ve watched a lot of action movies where I get the exact same thing! So let’s try again. I like action movies so maybe the action movie and horror movie experience are the exact same thing. No, that’s not quite right. I know when I’m in the mood to see some stuff get blowed up real gooood and when I feel like covering my eyes with my hands. It’s a different feeling so then why horror? The other thing people ask me is, “Why in the world would you want to be scared?” Again, I could answer with what I said before about the pulse and the fear and the adrenaline and all that nice cushy neuropsychology stuff. But I think it goes deeper. It’s a qualitative, not a quantitative matter. So why do I watch horror? Why do I want to be scared.
I think partially it goes back to my post about the different types of scary experience. I’d like to reassert that distinction here because it’s important in discerning what it is about the horror genre that I like. For those of you who haven’t read this, there is considered, at least by some, to be a difference between terror and horror. The difference is that terror is slow building, mind-expanding anticipation before the thing pops out at you while horror is the moment where the horrible thing actually confronts you head on. Both provide great fun in my opinion and though they go about it differently, I think both of them are appealing for similar reasons.
First of all, horror is different from a lot of other genres in that it is in a way, sincere in its intentions. For example, in a romantic movie, we want to be like the protagonists who end up with each other in the end. In an action film, we want to be the hero who saves the world and brings the bad guys to justice. In this way, the relationship between the film (or book) and the viewer is like that of the light and the moth. You are drawn into the film and want to inhabit its world. You want to be the person on the screen or page. But since we can’t we live vicariously through these characters. If you’ve watched a horror film, you know you don’t want to be one of these characters because, considering most of the time you have at max two survivors, chances are you’d be dead by the time the credits come up. What horror does is force you into yourself as much as it draws you into the story. Haven’t you ever yelled at the screen as a character does something utterly stupid? In my opinion this happens in horror films more than any other because we are acutely aware of what we would do because we are thinking the entire film. We are testing ourselves to see if we’d survive. In this way, it’s like we get to play along in the adventure. In the action movie we want to be someone else. In the horror movie, we come as we are and take our own insecurities and fears into the melee thus making it a very personal journey.
On the other side of personal is the inherent, “otherness,” that is almost at the heart of horror. I love the novelty of the situations the characters are placed in. Whether it’s vengeful ghost girls like in Ju-on or Ringu, creatures from another world like John Carpenter’s The Thing, hallucinatory vampiric creatures like in Marebito, perversions of the flesh like in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome or the horrible things we have lurking inside us like in American Psycho. Each of these films presents us with something that goes beyond normal experience. I love the first time in a film when the threat becomes known or you get a hint as to what’s wrong in the world of the film. It’s this awareness that the world is about to get crazy in one way or the other that is so much fun. The rules get put on hold and something new, something unexpected walks on the stage. This is one of the things I truly love about horror. We get plunged into a new world, often times a world that borders on the absurd. This is one of the things that sets the experience of horror from another, sometimes very closely related genre, scifi. In scifi, there is an emphasis on some technology and its implications. It would take a whole other post to delineate between horror, scifi, and fantasy and all of the genres tend to intermingle at some point but for now I think it suffices to say that horror, even at its most plausible such as psychological horror, all concerns the idea of a world gone mad. For me, this is fascinating and fun. With the rules gone out the window, the imagination of the creator gets to be unleashed. Even when the killer is human, the rules of reality are bent a little. Can he or she appear anywhere and still somehow have the good luck to be undetected? Is he or she stark raving mad and operating with a different interpretation of the world? Do we get to see this schismatic representation of reality? Are the people dumber than usual so as to provide a reliable source of human pin cushions? Is it a supernatural threat? A monster? Creatures from another dimension? In these cases, the world becomes an enchanted place. Enchanted with a dark kind of magic but it fascinates us and bewitches us with its horrible spell nonetheless.
I suppose it comes back partially to wanting to experience, “the other,” or the “unknown.” How often do we get to experience something remarkable in the out-of-the-ordinary sense, something that challenges our notions of what is possible? I have always been attracted to the odd and the uncanny. I don’t know if some people are born that way or if it’s a result of things I’ve experiences in my life. But for me, there is something wonderful about the strange. And in a weird way, there’s something beautiful about the horrible and frightening as well. Maybe it goes back to the sublime feeling of being in the presence of something larger than oneself and appreciating just how small I am in the cosmic and universal scheme of things. An abandoned building, sitting ominously back from a quiet and pot hole scarred road sparks my imagination because it is a monument to the cyclopean gears of time that are always turning. Or a story about a serial killer reminds me that, in each of us, is a world more dangerous and mysterious than we can imagine. Whether it’s ghoulies or monsters or maniacs, horror reminds me that I don’t know what the universe has up its sleeve next. And it’s that feeling of living in a universe that has the potential to be so bizarre, so unpredictable that excites me so much about horror.
One of the great things about living in this technological age is that we have access to pretty much anything at any time. Go on Amazon or Google and type some random keywords and you’ll come across many different products or articles and webpages. It truly is quite incredible. In fact, there is a game in which you try to think of two words to search in Google that will only get one result. I’ve been successful once but then again, I don’t spend my days doing that. No sir, I’m a productive member of society. But never mind that. Literature is similar in that there are too many genres and subgenres to count and there are always more coming along. What I’m interested here is talking about an incredible new genre I’ve discovered recently and that I’m quite excited about. For those of you with children or still developing clones, you may want to have them leave the room because we’re talking about. BIZARRO FICTION!
So what is bizarro fiction? There are a few sites you can look at that will answer that. To get some answers right from the source, I’d suggest reading a great interview with Rose O’keefe who is head of Eraserhead Publishing, one of the main publishers of this evolving genre. Another description of it and its many conventions can be found at the always insightful tvtropes. But here is what I have picked up about the genre so far and why I think it’s an exciting genre to keep an eye on.
A story that deals with giant monster penises, impregnating Satan’s daughter, or a living suit of cockroaches can’t possibly be considered good fiction, right? It’s just puerile, crass humor, right? Well, how about if instead I described three books as a look at how one’s insecurities can lead to terrible consequences, how love and and feelings of responsibility can bridge the gap between families, cultures, or creatures of different planes of existence, and finally how important companionship is and how it can be found in the oddest of places? They sound a bit better though both descriptions pertain to the same books. Yeah. The books are The Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, I Knocked-Up Satan’s Daughter, and Angel Dust Apocalypse. It is partially this disconnect between theme and execution that attracts me so much to this genre.
Many in the genre have described bizarro fiction as first and foremost being a genre dedicated to entertaining the reader. With stories like those, I can see that writing philosophy in action. It is also described as being the written equivalent of the cult movie section of the video store. Again, no argument there. Another prominent aspect of this genre is how its style or MO are very punk-like. One can’t read one of these books and not think of the avant-garde nature of punk and its energetic refutation of everything established. This alacrity is wonderfully refreshing as is its willingness to dive into the ultra-violence of a Saturday morning cartoon or the crazy sex antics of a- come to think of it I can’t even begin to equate the sex antics of anything of this world. Nevertheless, everything is on display for entertainment and if you get offended, it’s probably more of a personal malfunction than mean-spiritedness on the part of the writer. After all, if the story didn’t push some, or all of the limits, then it wouldn’t be a bizarro story! Enter at your own risk and buyer beware.
I’ll be sure to keep posting about this genre and maybe get some reviews up in the future of books in this genre.
Have Yourself a Wretched Little Christmas... F'tahggen!
A Merry Christmas to all! May your solstice have been packed with joy and unspeakable cosmic terrors from beyond the placid shores of this universe!
If I had known about this cute little guy before hand, I would have summoned him from the depths of his dread house, which you can access here. But there is always next year. I’d love to invite the Great Old one into my home where he could wait and dream till it is time to rise once again and cast the Earth into madness and misery.
Speculative Fiction Writing 