Horror

[smokingboot]

You bored?

I'm doing research on horror stories. If anyone wants to help me by answering the questions below (no need to email me privately, just bung them in the comments section) that would be fantastic, bearing in mind that if you give me great ideas, don't be mortified if I use them! If your list includes trigger events, can you add a warning to the title of your comment, so that people know to scroll past if necessary?

1)What personally frightens you?
2)The most frightening thing you can imagine happening to you in real life?
3)The most frightening nightmare/unreal scenario you can imagine?
4)What feels as though it should frighten you but just doesn't?
5)What is the most frightening book/story you ever read or were told and why?
6)What's the most frightening film you ever saw and why
7)What's the least frightening thriller/horror movie you ever saw and why?
8)What is the physical environment most likely to scare you and why?
9)Creepiest city/town and why?

Thanks for any input you can give xxx

Comments

[mitchy.livejournal.com]

You want answers here or emailed?

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

here's great! I'll just amend my post so that's clear:-)

[caffeine-fairy.livejournal.com]

1)What personally frightens you? Suddenly discovering that things are not as I thought they are - real life gone off kilter. Also, zombies scare me witless.
2)The most frightening thing you can imagine happening to you in real life? - Losing my husband.
3)The most frightening nightmare/unreal scenario you can imagine? - Zombie attack, as per Shaun of the Dea or similar.
4)What feels as though it should frighten you but just doesn't? - Darleks - they're mobile dustbins, how were they ever scarey?
5)What is the most frightening book/story you ever read or were told and why? - I forget the title but there's a Michael Marshal Smith short story which scared me so much I couldn't sleep for two days. It's about a chap who finds pictures of a work colleague on a porn mailing list and it eventually becomes clear she's been kidnapped. It's that sense of normal life off kilter - terrifying.
6)What's the most frightening film you ever saw and why - Watership Down. I was four and had a pet rabbit. I still have trouble watching it now, especially Columbine.
7)What's the least frightening thriller/horror movie you ever saw and why? - I find nearly all horror movies scarey, even the bad ones, but Blair Witch 2 was beyond even my talents. It was just...dull.
8)What is the physical environment most likely to scare you and why? - Encounters with spiders, of which I am phobic.
9)Creepiest city/town and why? - Postmouth, where I grew up, especially the old dock area.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Very very interesting, thank you very much, there's lots here for me to chew on. Why zombies, do you think?

[caffeine-fairy.livejournal.com]

I have absolutely no idea, unless it's something to do with the "normal gone abnormal" thing. It's so bad that the trailer for Shaun of the Dead at the cinema gave me nightmares. Which is a pain, because I love that movie, but I can only watch it if I'm willing to not sleep well for the next couple of nights.

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

1 - Inability to relate or being treated as an object - so anything that can't/won't relate to me, (which includes zombies to some extent). Spiders.
2 - Dementia, or complete loss of capacity to communicate with/perceive the outside world.
3 - not sure I can answer this
4 - most horror films!
5 - the one which sticks in my mind is a short story where a woman lives in a flat, and there's a character in the flat below, and she ends up becoming that character, and it's awful because it's the loss of self - turning into a creature which is unable to communicate
6 - Carrie, partly because was very young, and in scary situation.
7 - can't single one out
8 - institutional buildings - loss of identity, being treated as an object
9 - Hexham. Don't know, just is. Freaked me out.

[ellefurtle.livejournal.com]

1)What personally frightens you? Heights - I want to jump off and that's terrifying. Loud noises. Old age and loss of ability, my parents getting old. Death.
2)The most frightening thing you can imagine happening to you in real life? There is no room in my head for losing Bry or family especially suddenly. Other than that I think being buried alive, or having something attack my eyes and ears.
3)The most frightening nightmare/unreal scenario you can imagine? Those horrible stories where people's mouths or faces vanish. It's just so...hideous.
4)What feels as though it should frighten you but just doesn't? Blood and guts. People who try to intimidate me, especially physically. It's just so sad....
5)What is the most frightening book/story you ever read or were told and why? I can't actually remember a good one. Although I did find those campfire stories about the serial killer banging on the roof of the car and it's her friend's head really scary.
6)What's the most frightening film you ever saw and why - i had to turn off children of the corn because I found evil, blank horror-children really scary
7)What's the least frightening thriller/horror movie you ever saw and why? Blair witch. It's dull. And a bunch of crappy B movie things that are just blood and guts.
8)What is the physical environment most likely to scare you and why? I think a wood at night.
9)Creepiest city/town and why? Naples was really creepy at Easter - big city, totally empty. Just weirdos and thieves.

[squeezypaws.livejournal.com]

Are you plotting our downfall?!! Probably loads of upsetting things below btw...

I have a skin paper thin and can't look at knives without imagining them stabbing or tall buildings without imagining flinging myself off. Not that I WANT to or PLAN to, its just the endless existential possibilities. I think Satre said something about this, it might have been something related to "Bad Faith.."

Anyway, scaryness: its got to be torture - contemplation of in any form, any location - just terrifying.

Connected to this; I think seeing grown men panic is desperately upsetting. I rarely watch crime dramas but where there is imminent torture and a man is panicking at the hands of the assailant - that can make me wibbly for hours. Women - meh *shrug* children, probably worse actually but my brain just won't let me go there. Silly details like seeing the clothes they are wearing and thinking how they put them on that morning in a mundane attempt to look after themselves, and how futile and vulnerable the clothing appears in the frightening context. In Spooks when Malcolm the kindly techie got hung and he was crying and sobbing as the murderers took his glasses off and clicked them shut. That ruined me for hours.

And one of the scariest realisations for myself was that you can think for years that you're GREAT under pressure. Normally. But the world can chuck more pressure on than you can normally contemplate and then you might find you are ACTUALLY a trembling little leaf, sobbing terrified and vulnerable in the face of an uncaring world.

That was all strangely cathartic.

:)

[ellefurtle.livejournal.com]

Ooo yes, I can't watch a torture scene at all. I find it really really upsetting. But possibly not so much scary, as horribly disturbing - hmmm dunno if there is much difference really.

[squeezypaws.livejournal.com]

I am with you on Blair Witch. I just wanted the snivelly one to DIE. Preferably painfully. Torture and all!

[jfs.livejournal.com]

1)What personally frightens you?

Being deprived of my senses, especially sight. I'm not sure if temporary (locked in a small dark room) or permanent is worse.

2)The most frightening thing you can imagine happening to you in real life?

Having someone I love assaulted / raped / killed.

3)The most frightening nightmare/unreal scenario you can imagine?

Desperately needing to communicate something vitally important, and everyone around me either not being able to understand me, or worse, obviously not caring.

4)What feels as though it should frighten you but just doesn't?

Zombies and Vampires and things that go bump in the night. If such things existed, perhaps I'd take more notice of them.

5)What is the most frightening book/story you ever read or were told and why?

I don't recall - I'm rarely scared by things I read or hear.

6)What's the most frightening film you ever saw and why

Silence of the Lambs / Manhunter, because Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins / Brian Cox respectively) was so plausibly inhuman.

7)What's the least frightening thriller/horror movie you ever saw and why?

Anything which relies on surprise (Boo! The Monster just jumped out of the dark) or shock ("And now they're having to eat each other") rather than suspense, because frankly it's just lazy story-telling.
Which describes pretty much every 'horror' film I've ever seen.

8)What is the physical environment most likely to scare you and why?

Heights with unsure footing. Cold. Pot-holes.

9)Creepiest city/town and why?

I don't think I've ever found a city creepy in of itself.

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

OK. Big question. I'm not sure the actual numbered questions would address it much.
Should horror actually really deal with actual phobias and fears a reader or viewer has? Surely if it addresses an actual fear in such a way as to engage that fear it will logically disengage the reader/viewer?
My own take on horror is that it should not actually directly go for fears but instead tease, imply and suggest. The space where subtle implication gently starts to unsettle the reader/viewer is the one in which shadows take on strange shapes, where we feel it might be unwise to turn the light off, and start to look over our shoulders 'just in case'.
The problem with directly looking at fears is that the natural response to real fear is to remove oneself from the source, and thus the fiction becomes irrelevant because it is rapidly rejected. The 'game' of horror fiction is to keep the reader/viewer engaged, but unsettled without invoking a full fear response.

Most horror for me either becomes unsubtle enough to produce revulsion and I disengage with it (slasher movies, some Clive Barker etc) or just fails to be engaging in the first place (HP Lovecraft is just too plain nebulous and irrelevant). My vote goes to writers like M.R.James or Le Fanu (the 1979 adaptation of 'Schalcken the Painter' was for me horror at its very best- http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1154981/ ). The implied is where real horror is at...

so..
1)Implication, suggestion and evocation of the de-personalised, strange and unknown. Thats what = a good horror approach for me anyway. It shouldn't actually be the thing I am scared of itself.
2)Irrelevent - a good horror writer should be able to evoke a response in me with all sorts of stuff Im not actually scared of. Its not what it is, its how its conveyed.
3)In discussion with a friend about those creepy feelings where you feel like you are being watched, I asked him-well, what if you are, but you just can't see whats watching you? It creeped us out the whole night and still lingers as a disturbing thought to this day.
4)Most modern horror - especially slasher stuff. Its just banal gory 'boo' stuff.
5)See 3, but also my earlier comments.
6)'Schalcken the Painter', 'Whistle and I'll Come to You', 'The Railwayman'
7)see 4. They are all much of a muchness alas.
8)None- its not the environment itself, its what the imagination can fill it/transform it with.
9)It's in my imagination - a town named Darkport where the imaginary and the real blend until they become indistinguishable. I really must get down to writing my own 'Darkport Tales' sometime soon...

:)

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

An interesting point!
Is 'horror' actually something beyond what we actually want in entertainment though? Are we actually wanting to be disturbed and unsettled, rather than horrified? So is it perhaps actually the case that something like torture is real horror, but we just dont want to go there? That the people who can watch torture scenes in a film are those who dont find it horrifying? Which for me kinda makes the people watching the film more disturbing and unsettling than the film itself...

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I have never come across Schalcken the Painter, and now I will look out for it.

Written horror seems to have a chance of being much more evocative than film horror, perhaps because evocation in a film seems to make said film slow. Witness Don't Look Now, a film that scared me for months on end when I saw it in my teens, but is painfully slow and dull now. Written horror stories are almost debarred from subltety the moment they are included in the genre. Lovecraft could frighten the moment he stopped trying to include in his nameless horror catalogue of adjectives. If he kept it small, it stayed frightening. A rat with a man's face, the portraits in Pickman's model, little hands found on a chair...these things could frighten. The earliest of his stories I ever read was The Moon Bog, and it didn't scare me, but I liked it... ironically, Stephen King, when he keeps it in the neighbourhood, can scare with the familiar become a terrible enemy. Saki could do it, with Gabrielle Ernst and Shredni Vashtar, and one terrible tiny story whose title I can never remember, where one image stays with me...a mama duck leads her brood onto the water, totally trusting, only to find they can't swim at all. They all drown.

In these images, I find horror.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.

I find I share with you a greater fear of the real than the unreal. The supernatural does not scare me anymore, except in dreams. Real cities, real people with the edge turned, these things give me the creeps.

SOTL and Manhunter while magnificent, didn't scare me...except for Clarice's initial walk past the row of cells to meet Hannibal, and the meeting between reporter and he who would be dragon...in the latter, it had as much to do with the knowledge of Will's complicity. He knew.

I didn't worry too much about him getting back to his boat after that.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Well now, that is very interesting. What is it that makes the torture scene in Casino Royale watchable?

Is it cos we know he's going to win, cos he's Bond? is it cos it doesn't last long? I don't know.

The gorefesters always worry me, though comedy gorefests like the Evil Dead series made me laugh until I knew it too well ('This is my boomstick' remains a favourite line of mine) and Ash's duel with Evil Hand always made me laugh. But then ED was never meant to be taken seriously. Things like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre bored me as concepts so I never bothered watching.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. I agree with you about details. Little things scare me more than big things, and yes, torture. I can watch horror films and be completely nonplussed, but documentaries about atrocity ruin me.

But then I guess this is the thing about horror in media; it's a specific form of escapism, the gribbly is extra special nasty for one of many reasons, but mainly for entertainment; sometimes it's tailored to stimuate minds who need an alternative world, a big enemy to destroy; other times it entertains the same mob who would once upon a time have come to Tyburn to watch a hanging, or a crowd cheering at a badger baiting. There is no horror like the cruelty of human beings. Depict that truly in a film, and one may create a work of art that no-one can bear to watch.

I still have not seen Hotel Rwanda, but I will. Stupidly, I feel I owe it to a whole bunch of living and dead human beings to understand what they went through.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. Hexham? Hmm...

And yes, incapacity. A world where no-one hears you. Works for me.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the input, you know I can actually imagine Naples being really creepy...

Blair Witch is interesting cos as marketing goes, it is just plain masterly. Then for so many it doesn't deliver, and I wonder why? I know it's a shaggy dog story, but so was Hitchcock's The Birds, and I seem to be the only person who objected to that film's non-ending...

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

If you manage to find a copy of Schalcken the Painter do let me know-its horribly hard to get.

I agree about pacing, though with film its largely dependent on expectations based on the overly fast pace of much American cinema these days. IMO anyway. Dont Look now is still damn creepy, and that ending really jolts. But only if you can forget its going to happen and relax into the film- a skill we seem to be loosing these days, which is a shame.
Actually those short films like Schalcken the Painter, Whistle and Ill Come To You etc all still seem to work precisely because they are short. They can build the general suspense and mystery, start to creep you out, and then hit you with something highly disturbing without it ever dragging on too much.

I notice you speak of images staying with you- and perhaps the essence of good horror lies in just that-the ability to create a persistent image that wont go away, an image that haunts and disturbs so it starts to follow you around in the dark when you turn the lights off. Partly thats a function of language-of using the right words to convey it, but largely it seems to be about evoking the reader/viewers imagination. Lovecraft tried using all those adjectives to do just that, but thats just a bit corny. I think its about using the right word to trigger subconscious associations. They are often not the obvious ones, but very ordinary words. Ordinary words in the wrong context perhaps?

I have been reading some Haruki Murakami. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruki_Murakami
'Dance Dance Dance' springs to mind (very Twin Peaks before Twin Peaks came out actually). Its a brilliant book - and the horror aspect is very subtle. The book raises more questions than it answers and can be very disturbing, but often its the ordinary bits that do it, not the 'spooky' bits. Its remarkable tactile writing-it manages to make you feel familiar with it very rapidly, it feels 'right', like the way we often experience reality, but then it becomes very wrong.

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

Maybe. It also doesn't seem very extreme to me though - it feels like acting. Also the method used is one that is something we know would hurt, but we cant really 'see' as something drawn out and painful. It is brutal rather cruel. It is the sort of thing we might see in a fight anyway.
Now-if he was restrained and then we saw a scalpel being slowly and repeatedly dragged through his skin, the blood welling up like little tears on his body, or his flesh being peeled away-that would make more of us turn away and wince.
Plus I think you are right in that we know he wont be permanently harmed and that he will escape-so that lessens its effect.

I think there is a fine line between visceral horror that is effective, too effective, or just downright funny. Often its in the way its done, but also its something to do with the way individuals respond to it as well. I saw the first Robocop film in the cinema and found the part where they blow his arms and legs off with a shotgun really unpleasant (not horrific mind-just nasty), while others in the audience found it really funny.

My own take on horror is that visceral horror is always fallible and prone to be a bit cheap. Any hack can write or film visceral horror. Its one of my big problems with Clive Barker - he is, to me anyway, a deeply flawed writer. He has a brilliant imagination and I love some of his concepts, but in executing them he often sinks to the lowest point to create horror and the second half of everything of his I have read (and since I do like his concepts I have read a fair number of his books) tends to just fall apart and become remarkably clunky and dull, never rising to the promise of the earlier premises.

[primroseport.livejournal.com]

I have to answer this when I'm home from work.