Jeff VanderMeer

Writer: Ben Thomas
Weird Tales Story: The Man with the Myriad Scars (Issue #TBD 2008)
Writer Bio: Ben Thomas is the author of dozens of short stories, four screenplays, and a forthcoming novel; he’s also the lead editor of The Willows Magazine . At Literacity, he muses about counterculture and writing in a semi-coherent manner.

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For a guy who loves to be horrified, I loathe the horror genre. I hate the conceptual box in which it’s locked itself, and I’m tired of watching films whose directors seem to think the way to my heart is through my gag reflex. And I’m sick to death of the typical horror fan’s defense: “It’s all in the terminology!” That isn’t true, because a ghost is still a ghost, and mentioning one in intelligent company these days will frequently provoke smirks. But I wanted to know why, and how, and when this had befallen my beloved tales of fright. So I sat down to think it over.

It wasn’t always this way, I knew. Shakespeare wrote of ghosts, but no one considers Macbeth or Hamlet a “horror play.” True, the Bard was writing in the infancy of the Enlightenment, and supernatural elements would hardly have stood out. But even that fact begs another question: why were witches and ghosts still “mainstream,” so to speak, in those days? To put more of a point on it, why weren’t stories including ghosts shoehorned into a separate genre (or genres) of their own, as they are today?

For the answer, I had to look to history. This next bit may seem like a rehash of facts you already know, dear reader, but please be patient and let the rest of the class learn.

In the 1500s, creatures of folklore still occupied a major niche in the fears and beliefs of the average Briton. Beneath the systematic exploration and categorization of the Renaissance, the gears of cultural change turned at a slower pace. The line between natural and supernatural, between scientific and mythical, was drawn less firmly than it is today–when it was drawn at all. Ghosts were a part of Shakespeare’s cultural vocabulary: they could reveal secret knowledge, come to the aid of petitioners, or just frighten the hell out of people. The theater crowds of Shakespeare’s day would have understood and believed these things, at least on some level; to many of them, such bogeys were an invisible but frightening fact of life.

H. P. Lovecraft, on the other hand, immortalized his name by carrying these ideas to a different apogee: the universe in which he set his fiction is essentially without meaning: it is cruel because no ulterior god cares about us, and we perceive the alien deities as evil because human morality is irrelevant to them. As August Derleth spread Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu mythos” across the moral and political battlegrounds of the 1960s, these fears resonated with a populace disenfranchised by a universe whose rules seemed outside their comprehension. Though (most) readers didn’t accept these stories as literal fact, fans gravitated to them specifically because of their horrific elements. As Michael Hollenbecq famously wrote, Lovecraft set himself “against the world; against life,” and a crowd of readers, perhaps feeling that life had turned against them, welcomed his blind idiot gods with quasi-religious fervor.

And who inherited Lovecraft’s chair as poet-laureate for the Beyond? No obvious single heir has emerged, and these days, scary stories occupy an awkward spot in culture: they’re regarded as the black-clothed stepchildren of our media. Horror films and books often endure terrible reviews, pathetic distribution deals, and that vague distaste that spreads across the faces of people at parties when you start to explain what sorts of stories you write. This hostility is, to some degree, understandable; scan Blockbuster’s horror section, and you’ll find rows and rows of lame sequels, in-jokes, and ripoffs (more on that in a moment). Nevertheless, frightening movies refuse to be banished, and every time a film like 28 Days Later pulls in $80 million, it’s obvious that moviegoers are voting with their wallets.

This does all have a point. The key to the success of a frightening story, I believe, is relevancy. Both of the writers mentioned here addressed specific fears, questions, or confusions in their cultures. Catharsis is the one of the primary purposes of frightening stories, or at least the reason they remain so popular. They seem to provide a catalyst for readers to put themselves in horrific situations of every sort, knowing they’re safe in a soft recliner. Thus, those of us who write stories of fear must first struggle through our own fears–and later, through the demands of a cynical, exacting readership.

Somewhere along the line, though, these sorts of tales started losing respect. When Pan’s Labyrinth was hailed as a work of crossover genius, some critics reacted with pleased surprise, as though Guillermo Del Toro had written in enough pathos, or beautiful dialogue, or something, to balance out the story’s horrific elements. We connoisseurs of grue tend to react to this by folding our arms and making loud raspberries at the critical establishment, but that gets us nowhere. This whole question of crossover appeal is only part of the problem, because it implies a more significant shortfall: these days, many horror writers seem more concerned with maintaining their cred in front of horror-hound fans than in joining any larger cultural dialogue.

Once any group of stories are placed in a genre box, their motifs and conventions tend to inbreed. Watch a slasher film, and you can instinctively pick out which character will eat the blade of a knife first. Read a book about vampires, and you won’t be able to help comparing it to the horde of other vampire-related films and books you’ve encountered over the years. But slashers and vampires, just like Shakespeare’s ghosts and Lovecraft’s gods, were born out of a cultural need; they addressed a current question or concern in the minds of their audience. Those needs have changed, but much of horror has remained the same.

Some authors are addressing new fears as they emerge: Harlan Ellison springs to mind for the 1970s; Chuck Palahniuk might be one of his rough equivalents today. As the threat of war looms ever-present, Cormac McCarthy gave us The Road. The Hostel films let us face our terror of helplessness in the face of torture. M. Night Shyamalan’s Happening will explore our fears of global warming. And fresh young blood is always seeping up through the cracks.

But not only the craft is evolving; fears, too, are protean. The Red Scare doesn’t pose much of a tangible threat to the average citizen anymore, but the idea of a universe without God is still frightening to many. If people are afraid and confused, they’re right to look to authors of horror stories–us shamans of fright–for catharsis. Critical and financial success wait for those authors who will stare new fears in the eye, and experience them on paper for the rest of society. Where are the horrific novels addressing stem cell research, or extreme interrogation, or economic collapse? They have yet to be written, and readers are waiting. Our job is to learn to wield the vocabulary they expect.