Ph33r

[smokingboot]

Thank you to everyone for your thoughts on horror. Intensely interesting.

See, I have a problem. The things that frighten me aren't. Interesting I mean. Or intense for that matter.

I have a busy month ahead; I should be writing. But I need to get admin out of the way first and this means phoning my accountant and asking what she needs. I'm afraid to, because she's really going to tell me off. Plus there's lots of filing and washing to do.

Wow. Move over Hitchcock.

Comments

Man sucked into aeroplane toilet horror!

[november-girl.livejournal.com]

Start writing some porn and the rest will follow if I remember rightly. :-)

Re: Man sucked into aeroplane toilet horror!

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

See, I started writing porn to get myself in the mood, and it turned into spectacularly bad romantic fic. I can't even depict a savagely sentient airplane loo. What's happening to me?

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

That was one of Lovecraft's problems I guess - he was obviously frightened of space and the sea. Not exactly the sort of thing that scares most people. Handled well in writing they could be scary all the same (I just dont think he managed to do it).

I really dont think its a problem not having deep seated intense and commonly shared fears when writing horror. Its not about the fear itself surely, but about the way we use words to invoke responses.

I have no fear of water, yet:
"He could not help looking over his shoulder as he walked past the old pond. For some reason he felt he always had to keep its still, glassy waters in view at all times. It was both a sirens song and a source of dark, screaming nightmare to him. An obsessive fascination with its cold, dark embrace haunted him, beckoned to him. He never felt that he could (or should) approach the pond - until today. Today the siren song of the pond was stronger than any repulsion at its clammy depths. As he walked toward it, crunching through the dead cold winter grass, he became convinced that the pond was actually looking at him - that its surface was the surface of an eye. He paused trembling at its edge...

Of course, he never came back. At least, not as you or I would remember him. All they found at the edge of the pond was a single shoe."

I'm no great writer - but I can find myself unsettled at the idea of that pond. Was there anything truly supernatural about it? Or was it just an ordinary pond taking on a horrible life to a man contemplating suicide? What does that mean "he never came back. At least, not as you or I would remember him."? Does he come back later as a ghost, or a lumbering weed strewn grey corpse? Or as a whisper in the night? Maybe I failed with this to evoke real horror, but then again maybe it was just enough to tease a readers imagination and let them find their horror within it?

I can recall a particular game of Call of Cthulhu where all I said (as the referee) was 'you see a cat sitting outside your window' and suddenly the player seemed scared. So I added another cat, and then another, until there was an entirely unreasonable number of cats mysteriously gathered in her garden. The cats did nothing, but the player was terrified. It was the irrelevancy of the cats, coupled with the player's fear of them, that made it work. Because there was no sane reason for me to have even mentioned a cat, or for there to be so many there, her imagination starting supplying its own answers.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

...At least, not as you or I would remember him...

I find myself how or in what form he came back.

I love the whole thing you did with the cats, telling and not telling, letting your player create her own fearful story. Familiarity and irrelevancy have their place in horror, warping the everyday, which to me is where the real tingle starts.