What does horror fiction really mean to us? What place does it have in our lives?

Here’s a few pieces on the true meaning of horror….

What Does Horror Mean To Me? by Shaun AJ Hamilton

What does horror mean to me? Well, firstly, this article is gonna be about the movies. I have no problems with horror literature – and very rarely have over my lifetime because there are great swathes of brilliance out there. Both US and UK authors have produced – and are producing – some amazing work. But the movies have been pissing me off for a while so I’m going to concentrate on those for now – especially as it was Hammer’s movies that so readily influenced me all those years ago.

These days I see horror in much the same way as I see my sense of fashion. What I wear now isn’t necessarily what I’d have worn when I was sixteen – and vice versa. Whereas I used to wear jeans with writing and patches on them, these days they have pockets and logos. Shirts in
those days were worn for school; these days they’re worn on a night out. So as per my clothes, my feelings towards horror have changed over the years.

For a start, it’s a long while since I watched any of today’s movies.

I wasted my time by watching HOSTEL and suffered the pain of sitting through SAW. I witnessed the remake of FRIDAY THE 13^th and caught the debacle of THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE and throughout them all there was one common denominator.

I was bored shitless.

As actors and actresses were diced and sliced or had their mouths sewn to arseholes or cut their own feet off, I couldn’t stop myself from getting up off the sofa and doing things around the house. As an Oriental bloke crapped into an American girl’s mouth I tidied my lounge; as a doctor took a blunt hacksaw to his ankle I began sorting out my DVDs; when some bloke was slicing away at a teenager’s ankles with his scalpel
I was… well, you get the picture.

They were pants. They had no soul, no heart. I had a discussion with Gary McMahon about HOSTEL. He reckoned it was a commentary; a piss-take on we, the audience who were watching people pay mercenaries for the opportunity to watch others cut up of strangers for no reason whatsoever. Apparently the viewers were as bad as the murderers because we paid in the same way they paid the mercenaries. And I could see his point. I recognised his argument but for me it all fell apart when a bloke who had just had half his fingers removed walked into a train station toilet and put on a glove – and all with nothing more than a wince. That isn’t commentary. That’s exploitation. The director simply wants to see blood spill and limbs separate. It had nothing to do with pointing the [severed] finger at the audience, it was satisfying the masturbatory urges of a strange man – in this case, Eli Roth. If it had been a commentary on the audience it would have been real; it would have been lifelike and we’d have seen the pain and suffering the victim went through; known the hell they were suffering just to stay alive.

Instead they walk into a public toilet, put on a pair of gloves over their bleeding stumps and kill the person responsible.

No heart. No soul.

They call it torture porn – I call it crap.

Like a coat I used to wear as a teenager, I’m no longer interested.

Because as a teenager – as per plenty of today’s teenagers – I’d have loved that. Tits, arses, blood and gore. Who wouldn’t have loved it – and as a thirteen-year-old, do you really think I’d have understood the social commentary? Really? Or would I have been looking out for the next exposed nipple?

Just because I don’t watch the remakes or Torture Porn* doesn’t mean I don’t watch some modern horrors. For example, tonight I watched PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, and while it wasn’t the best or scariest movie of all time, it did have some redeeming features – and was a whole lot better than the first one which just had me shouting at the TV,“ Put the fucking camera down, you daft twat!” – but most of all it had heart. It understood where the real horror lay – in our imagination. Same as softcore porn can be far more of a turn-on because we’re imagining what’s going on under the covers, movies such as PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (and others such as THE ORPHANAGE and the stunning PANS LABYRINTH) are asking you to think. Asking you to wonder and imagine. HOSTEL and its kin compels intellectuals into asking questions that aren’t actually there – like a GCSE English teacher talking about Shakespeare. Some believe that if the bard knew today’s kids were being forced to learn his works and the hidden meaning behind his words, he’d have thrown away the quill (and no, that’s not based on the Blackadder Millennium sketch). Shame Eli Roth doesn’t share his point of view.

*(Sorry, McMahon. I know how much you hate that term but for some – me included – that’s exactly what it is, although I think a more accurate title would be ‘Soft’ Torture Porn; in the same way softcore porn doesn’t show penetration whereas hardcore does, movies such as HOSTEL 2 and SAW 6 or HATCHET 2 or whatever don’t show real deaths – they just leave that to the 6 o’clock news!).*

These days I’m tend to watch the classics I missed out one when growing up. The SHAMELESS Collection has certainly helped with this, but box sets such as those of Mario Bava and Jess Franco along with the Vampire Collections of REDEMPTION and the rereleases of classics such as EYES WITHOUT A FACE and the seminal NIGHT OF THE DEMON have educated me in the movies I had heard about but never seen. And if I’m not watching these I’m watching the classics again: The UNIVERSAL and HAMMER HORROR collections; putting myself in the minds of an audience watching something so disturbing for the first time.* I watch HALLOWEEN and THE OMEN and THE THING and JAWS (a
movie which still scares the shit out of me and has had a huge effect on my sea swimming abilities). BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, DEVIL DOLL and THE ABOMINABLE MR PHIBES. Or the Orientals such as THE RING (the best of the bunch), The EYE and PULSE are outstanding (but as per the Hollywood, they went too far and should have stopped years back instead of milking the dying cow e.g. THE GRUDGE and its pointless sequels/remakes) – but one movie I struggle to watch is THE EXORCIST. An outstanding movie; an amazing, shit-scaring, super deluxe movie – but one I can watch only if someone is willing to hold my hand – and no, I’m not ashamed to admit it. It isn’t the religious imagery (which is often an easy target for directors – old and new, which is why I haven’t bothered with FLAVIA THE HERETIC or KILLER NUN – and has to be unbelievable in script and production to rise above such puerile attempts to offend (no, I’m not religious, just easily bored and frustrated as must already be clear to you by now)), it’s the sheer brilliance of script, directing, producing, sound, acting, effects – everything. My favourite horror movie of all time but one so difficult for me to watch.

*I know that blows my own argument regarding HOSTEL et al sky high; I know my own words of disgust were probably aimed towards my beloved Hammer movies half a century ago by disturbed censors – but that won’t make me change my mind. The Hammer’s might have indeed been upsetting for the audience at the time but at least they cared about their characters; at least their murder victims weren’t annoying teenagers (until, perhaps, DRACULA AD 1972, by which time American influences on the industry had taken control – though it’s not all Hollywood’s fault; Hammer Execs were just as much at fault for its own demise as anyone else involved with the movies). Hammer – and Universal – spent and earned a fortune by caring for scripts, audiences and their characters. These days the movies feel like you’re being gobbed in the face by a rich punk!*

So horror movies, like my fashion, have changed for me throughout the years. I can’t say the same with books – and have purposely kept the literary side of things away from this article because horror is so much easier to find in books. Modern, historic, fact, fiction, crime, sci-fi, romance, erotica – they all have horrific elements in them, yet they purposely avoid putting the horror tag on their covers to ensure healthier
sales. Surely THE WASP FACTORY, THE KILLING KIND, SKIN, THE BLACK DAHLIA, THE BUTCHER BOY and their brethren should be on the horror shelves, but no. Publishers won’t do it because there’s no money in horror – yet the movies moguls are all happy to throw the pennies to make a quick buck.

And the small presses are just amazing at finding quality horror. Instead of a large publisher producing piles of Jordan’s scary text, small press publishers are finding genuine scares; the type to leave your underwear stained.

This is all from the disjointed view of an amateur whose opinion means very little to some and nothing to others. There are far more knowledgeable individuals out there who could explain this better than I (Kim Newman, Mark Morris and Gary McMahon all spring readily to mind) but as far as I’m concerned, horror means this to me:

Good, decent proper horror is the leather jacket you wear for years; the favourite piece of clothing you can’t bear to throw away. Most of today’s movies are the cheap market stall t-shirts that fall apart after one wear. (But again, I have to stress most – THE DEVIL’S ROCK is enjoyable as is WOLF’S CREEK and the first FINAL DESTINATION but so many of the rest are just too much used bog paper.)

Some of my favourites are:

THE EXORCIST

HALLOWEEN 1 & 4

RINGU

THE MASK OF SATAN

BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING

HORROR OF DRACULA

FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN

PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES

THE BLACK CAT

…and many, many more…

Halloween & Horror with David Moody.

Halloween – what a great time to be involved in horror, and what a perfect time to start a new horror blog!

The 31st October is fast becoming the busiest time of year for horror writers, artists, and film-makers etc. My calendar this year has been filled with invitations to give talks, sign books and contribute to lots of horror-themed websites and online communities. When I was asked to write a few words to open this new blog, I got to thinking about how much Halloween has changed.

I grew up in the UK, and my formative years were the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Back then it was no fun being an underage horror fan. Not only did I have to persuade my horror-movie hating parents that watching such films wouldn’t corrupt me (maybe they were right… maybe they did?!), I also had the frustration of being unable to get hold of any of the films I wanted to watch most. Around that time, anything even remotely horrific was labelled a ‘video nasty’ and completely banned here. Other than the Universal movies of the 1930s and the occasional Hammer film, you had no chance.

Books became my only escape. I’d spend hours in bookstores looking at the horror section; flicking to the centre of movie tie-in novels for the eight pages of colour pictures they’d often include. I remember standing rooted to the spot and reading through the whole of the ‘Alien’ photo-novel in one go, and also running home completely terrified after just a glimpse of the cover for the ‘Incredible Melting Man’ (which was actually more frightening than the movie turned out to be!). But what really did it for me was walking flesh-eating plants. You see, back in junior school, my teachers had never heard of ‘The Day of the Triffids’, and they certainly didn’t know it was a horror novel. Somehow a copy ended up in the school library – I innocently took it out and read it, and everything changed. It was my first experience of post-apocalyptic literature, and it scared the heck out of me! But I was completely hooked, and my fascination with horror became a fully-fledged addiction.

That was thirty years ago. How things have changed since then!

It seems bizarre now, but one of my earliest Halloween memories was watching ‘ET’. Until then, I’d rarely come across trick or treating, and to see kids dressing up as monsters and going house-to-house to scrounge for candy was unheard of. In the thirty years since ET was first released, Halloween and horror in general has become much more accepted. The fuss surrounding horror movies finally faded away, and by the early 1990’s, all those films I’d long wanted to see – The Exorcist, Evil Dead, Romero’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, Cronenberg and Carpenter’s incredible movies – were finally easy to get hold of on VHS.

Horror stories are wonderful opportunities to look into those dark corners we’d otherwise ignore and walk past, to think about worst case scenarios when we’d usually focus on the positives, and to confront and challenge our deepest, darkest fears. At its best, horror allows us to ask ‘what if?’ and to look at ourselves without the layer of consumerism, bullshit and spin which seems to saturate almost everything today. Horror gives us a way of cutting through all the periphery and finding out what makes us tick. Horror is much maligned, and yet it’s also vitally important.

These days, Halloween is less about the ancient festivals and myths where it has its roots, and more about a celebration of all things horrific. Okay, so it might seem a little strange celebrating vampires, zombies and the like, but I for one am pleased that, even just for one night a year, our beautifully dark and misunderstood genre is able to crawl out from the shadows and take pride of place in the mainstream. We’re too big to stay hidden underground now. Get out there and celebrate all things horrific!

Horror as Therapy by D. M Youngquist

The question was, what has scared me the most, and at what age.

That’s a bit difficult, as I’ve spent a good deal of my life reading things, both fiction and non fiction that scare the living daylights out of me. The first image I can recall really scaring me was a photo of WWI. There was a picture of the remains of a British Tommy who had been killed in No Man’s Land. He had been assaulting a machine gun nest, and was one of the thousands killed that way. His body had fallen into a shell crater, where it rotted away. It had rained, and the crater was a swamp. Rats had eaten his corpse down to bare bones. His helmet lay just slightly above his head. His rifle lay near him, but was coated in mud. His head was bare skull, as was his hands. I remember that image scared the hell out of me. I must have been eight or nine when I ran across it in one of my grandpa’s books. I remember being so sad, as his family would never have known what happened to him. The caption simply read unknown British soldier. WWI was before dog tags were common. I have a lot of family members who serve, and every now and then, even today, that picture pops up in my dreams.

The first movie that scared me to death was the original “Dracula.” When I was a kid, several of our families would get together on the weekends. There were a bunch of us kids about the same age growing up, and we’d go horseback riding during the afternoon, then grill out during the evening. The grown-ups would drink beer and listen to music while us kids played. At midnight on friday nights, one of the local TV stations played a “Creature Feature.” These were classic horror films that ran. Everything from Dracula, to the wolf man, to Vincent Price flicks. (I did learn to love Vincent Price this way) Dracula scared the piss out of me, and I remember hiding behind the couch in the living room. I must have been about 10. This is also where I saw ”Night of the Living Dead” for the first time, with pretty much the same reaction. I still haven’t watched the original all the way through. How’s that for being a tough horror writer?

The first book that scared me was The Book of Revelations in the Bible. That books should never be inflicted on a kid under the age of ten. And after that only with someone who knows what the book is about. I was in Sunday School at the time, so figure I was about nine or so.
As a grown-up, more mature person, the first book that really sent chills down my spine was ’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King. I came to King late in life. Never picked up one of his books before I was 35. ‘Salem’s Lot was one of the first I read. I remember just the constant thrill that book sent down my spine. It has everything: Fear, pathos, misery, victory in the end, even though Sue was gone and it was just to two guys left. I look at ’Salem’s Lot as one of King’s best. Perhaps only surpassed by “The Stand” and his “Dark Tower” series.

Now. . .horror fiction in life. As a writer or a reader? I’ll do both, since I’ve seen it from both sides of the keys.
To paraphrase my Mom: Why do you write such scary, nasty stuff? I like the other stuff you write. Why do you insist on horror?
My short answer: It’s therapy. In a weird way, it’s how I deal with all the things in life that piss me off or scare the heck out of me. It’s a way to deal with stress. Most of the time, I don’t use a lot of blood and guts (tell that to someone who has read Snareville). A lot of my stuff is more intelligent, I like to think. It has need for spillage, but I like more of a psychological scare. I like to delve into people’s lives and see how they deal with a zombie horde or vampires. Or even Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Snareville has the blood, and as Sylvia Shults says, “you really know how to blow stuff up!” But there’s a lot more to it than that. I wanted the readers to care about Danny and his little group of survivors. Some of my short stories are a lot bloodier. I find I can have a lot of fun with short stories. ”To Reap What is Sown” is probably one of my nastiest pieces. Deals with how a serial rapist gets what’s coming to him when he picks the wrong victim.

As a reader, I like horror as an escape. Before I started writing a lot of my own, I devoured horror. It’s just the reverse of writing it. It’s a way to get away for a while. A way to lose the worries of life. How bad can your own life be if you’re not trapped in your car by a rabid dog? It’s the thrill of reading a good book, turning off the light, and then being scared to walk down the hall to the bathroom. It’s an adrenaline rush. It’s the same reason people ride roller coasters. It’s the ride, baby, it’s the ride!

Wayne Simmons on Horror.

For me, horror is about entertainment. I love it served old-school: The wind and rain, the darkened woods, the crackling thunder and flash of lightning. I’m a child of the 80s and back then horror almost exclusively meant a guy with a knife chasing randy teens about.

‘The first horror book I read was CARRIE by Stephen King and it remains my favourite to this day. There’s something to be said for an antagonist that appears more sympathetic than her victims, and that’s why Carrie is so effective. Along with Sadako from Kojo Suzuki’s RING series, Carrie is one of my all time favourite horror characters. Forget FREDDY VS JASON, let’s get those bad girls in the ring. Bring it!

Why Horror? by Graham Masterton

Believe or not, I have never thought of myself as a horror writer. Horror to me is just a category which book retailers put your books into because they happen to have violent or supernatural content, or both. I have never made any distinction between horror fiction and any other kind of fiction. Fiction should always challenge what you believe in, and make you think hard about what it is to be a human being.

I started writing fiction at a very early age, inspired by Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe in particular. I would write three or four page stories and read them out to my friends during lunchbreak at school. Some of them were horror stories, but I also wrote science fiction, and war stories — even some humorous stories with a character like a modern-day Mr Pickwick.

Some of the horror stories, though, made a lasting impression on my friends. Twenty-five years later, a schoolfriend told me that even though he was now a city manager, he still had nightmares about a man who no head who used to walk about the house singing Tiptoe Through The Tulips.

What almost all of my stories shared, though, even at that age, was my feeling that fiction should take readers right to the very edge of human experience. Reality is strange, and exhilarating, and tragic. Sometimes reality is well beyond our understanding. But I always believed that fiction should take us even further, right to the very boundaries of our humanity.

When I was 13 I wrote a 400-page horror novel in which the sole purpose of a mysterious sect of vampires was self-destruction. At 15, I discovered the Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who were taking both the style and the content of their writing to an extreme. William Burroughs wrote a novel called The Naked Lunch which caused an uproar when it was published in 1962 because of its political and homosexual content and its open discussion of drugs.

William was living in Tangier at the time but I wrote to him and we kept up a regular correspondence until he came to live in London in 1965. By then I was deputy editor of a new men’s magazine called Mayfair. William wrote for Mayfair regularly and we spent many evenings in his apartment in Duke Street discussing revolutionary writing techniques. With William’s encouragement and involvement I wrote a novel myself, Rules of Duel, the manuscript of which I recently discovered after forty years and which was published last year by my good friend David Howe from Telos Books.

The writing that William and I did together was difficult, often obscure, and pushed convention and accepted taste right to the very limit, and beyond. You probably won’t be able to grasp much of what Rules of Duel is all about. But William had some very good lessons, not just for a horror writer but for any kind of writer who wants to take writing to the very edge.

The writer should not appear in his own work. He should be El Hombre Invisible, the invisible man. Learn how to construct sentences so balanced and rhythmical that your readers are scarcely aware they are reading at all. This takes painstaking practice, especially with dialog, and a complete understanding of the mechanics of grammar. You need to be able to take your work apart and put it together again like a motor mechanic.

When you’re writing, don’t look at the page in front of you (or the screen, these days.) Be there. Feel the wind on your back and hear the noises all around you. Take your characters by the hand so that you can physically feel them.

.And never be scared to say anything. Ever.

Several times, I have purposely taken my work beyond the boundaries of accepted taste. I suppose it started with my novel Ritual, which was a jolly story about gourmet cannibals.

The Celestines were a religious sect who believed that they would eventually get to see God by devouring their own bodies. They kidnap the son of our hero, who rather appropriately happens to be a restaurant critic, and in his attempt to rescue the boy, the critic joins the sect.

To be accepted by them, though, he has to show that he is prepared to consume part of himself. He cuts off his own finger, fries it and eats it.

Other stories that have gone right to the edge and over include the notorious Eric the Pie, which was the cover story for the first issue of Frighteners magazine, and was considered to be so disgusting by WH Smith that they banned it from their retail outlets, leading to the magazine’s very sad demise after only two issues. You can read Eric in the fiction section of my website www.grahammasterton.co.uk and make up your own mind.

Eric recently reappeared in a chapbook called Tales Too Extreme For Cemetery Dance. Cemetery Dance also published a chapbook called Sepsis which I deliberately wrote to go right to the limit of what readers could swallow. A story calledEpiphany was sadly dropped by my publisher from my forthcoming collection of short stories Festival of Fear (Severn House) because of its sexual content.

A favourite device of mine is to make ancient and mythical threats re-appear in the modern-day world so that ordinary people like you and me have to find a way to deal with them. The reason why legendary beings can be so frightening is because they were devised in days when people had no understanding of disease, or natural disasters, and so they attributed them to demons and ghosts and vengeful gods. Why did your cattle die? Because creatures came in the night and sucked the blood out of them. What caused cot death? Witches who crept into your house when you were asleep and stole your baby’s soul.

But again, I don’t consider this to be “horror” fiction. It’s just stories as stories have always been told. Stories to make you think who you are. Stories to help you to come to terms with your mortality. All of us who are alive at the moment are like a city, with its millions of lights sparkling in the night. One by one, though, the lights are extinguished, and then there is nothing but darkness. There lies the horror.

Horror. HUH! Good God, Y’all! What is it good for? by Erik Smith

I have been asked to write about “the place and function of horror fiction in the real world.” This is a subject that has been touched on by many people more educated than I, so I shall simply ramble on, attempting to create something coherent from my varied musings.

Much like mythology (and religion, in this atheists opinion), many monstrous creatures were “created” from fear of the unknown. Tales of vampires and werewolves ”explained” such things as genetic abnormalities, diseases, and decomposition; things we take for granted today. Author H.P. Lovecraft wrote his stories in an attempt to assuage his fear of insanity and the unknown. But, as science propels us forward, the unknown becomes an ever shrinking part of our world.

In the 21st century, our fears are more concrete. Rampant technology, terrorism, bio hazards and chemical attacks, as well as world governments which seem to have their own agenda, are all part of modern consciousness. These things are today’s monsters.

Now, I’m not one to analyse the movies I watch or the books I read; if I’m entertained, then I feel that my time was well spent. BUT, having been tasked with writing this, I would say that there are two major components to “the place and function of horror fiction in the real world.” Again, this is just the opinion of a simple man, who is a fan of horror.

First, we have allegory. Right off the bat, I think of Gojira and Dawn of the Dead as two older examples of horror story as allegory. Nowadays, there are still many examples that we can look at.

Our fear of technology is represented in books such as Cell by Stephen King, and movies like Pulse. I mean, do cell phones cause brain cancer or not? What is really going on with smart phones and the internet? Computers have opened up the world, while isolating us, at the same time. And they keep getting smarter! I know quite a few people who are opposed to modern technology, and horror does a fine job of addressing their fear.

I think that we are more likely to be overrun by zombie stories than we are by actual zombies. (Yes, I know what I said.) The proliferation of zombie books, aside from the usual fear of death, speaks to me of a fear of contagion, chemical attacks, and a government experiments gone wrong. After 9/11, these are very real fears, felt by a great number of people. Big company’s seem to care more about money than, well, anything else, and the environment is the least of their concerns. Chemical run-off and dumping is doing great damage to the world around us, causing damage to not only nature, but to people, as well. Since the beginning of the industrial age, fear of mutation from bio hazardous material has been fertile ground for great horror.

I could go on and on, but I shall move on to the second component of horror in the real world, which is…. Safety.

The fictitious horrors which we read and watch, allow us to experience fear in safety. We get a rush from a well told tale of terror, without having to face actual danger. While we can do nothing about those things listed above, we can face down ghouls and ghosts, creatures and killers, from the safety and comfort of our couch. Hell, it’s even safer than a roller coaster, the literal “thrill ride.”

If I may, I would like to share a personal story.

When I was just a young’un, I read The Mist by Stephen King. I was in my bedroom, sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed, with my back to the only window in the room. I was completely immersed in the story; trapped in that grocery store, surrounded by monsters in the mist. My mother shouted up to me, asking me to walk the dog. My immediate reaction was one of stupification. How could she even suggest that I go out there? Didn’t she know how dangerous that was? I glanced at the window and was surprised to see the sunshine of a beautiful autumn day. Relief washed over me, and I laughed. My heart was racing, my breathing rapid, and I felt GOOD! I raced down the steps, snapped the leash onto the dog’s collar, and headed out into the clear, SAFE, day.

So, there you have it. My thoughts on horror fiction in the modern age. I may be completely off base. Perhaps there is an even deeper meaning, or no meaning at all. I’m no scholar; I’m just a fan of a well told story that will scare the hell out of me. If that story makes me think, or feel something deeper than a simple thrill, well, that’s just gravy.

Erik Smith has been a fan of horror since he was knee high to a flesh-eating grasshopper. At present, he writes reviews for Monsterlibrarian.com, co-hosts the weekly radio show Delamorte’s Dungeon of Deadly Delights, and does the occasional proofreading (and is always looking for the opportunity to do more. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.) Oh, and he writes fiction, as well.

The Meaning of Horror by Scott M Baker

When Emma asked if I would be willing to contribute a posting to The Horrifically, Horrifying Horror Blog, I was honored to be included.  When Emma asked me to discuss why I write horror and what the genre means to me, I was at a loss for words (a rare event, according my family and friends).  I considered talking about how horror is nothing more than the latest manifestation of the classic struggle between good and evil, or how the genre provides an ideal psychological study of how my characters respond to extreme situations.  Yet all those responses seemed pretentious.

The truth is, I love telling stories and I love monsters, so writing in this genre gives me the opportunity to indulge in the two things I enjoy so much.

For anyone familiar with my work, you know my novels and short stories deal primarily with vampires or zombies, with the occasional sewer creature or desert dweller thrown in.  While I try to include elements of suspense and terror, my writing tends more toward action and copious amounts of gore.  I thrive on battles between man and monster, whether it’s humans waging an epic battle against evil vampires, handfuls of survivors trying to make it through a living dead apocalypse, or an alcoholic mall Santa battling zombie reindeer (see “Deck the Malls with Bowels of Holly” from Living Dead Press’ Christmas Is Deadanthology).  This harks back to my origins as a Monster Kid when nothing excited my imagination more than a good creature feature.

Writing about man versus monster is a tradition that goes back millennium, with authors much better than me describing these struggles almost since writing began.  How many of us attended Sunday School where we read about David battling the giant Goliath?  Or thrilled to classical heroes pitted against the Cyclops, the Gorgon, and other mythical monsters of Greek and Roman mythology, or Sinbad’s confrontation with the Roc?  Or sat on the edge of our seats when reading the story of Beowulf, whether it was the original Muslim tale as told in The 13^th Warrior or the famous European poem?  Even the fairy tales that frightened us as kids are monster yarns, from Hansel and Gretel shoving the witch into the oven to Little Red Riding Hood matching wits with the Big Bad Wolf.

Monsters are ingrained in our psyche.  Every one of you reading this remembers that movie you begged your parents to let you watch, only to be so scared afterward you had to sleep with the lights on for days.  Or that novel which so enthralled your imagination you found it impossible to put down, staying up until sunrise to get to that final page.  (For me, it was Graham Masterton’s The Manitou, a Christmas gift I received when I was ten years old.)  Once we get that taste of the fear and gore, it becomes addictive.  No matter how much these monsters scare us, we always go back for more.

Will I ever write a suspenseful novel where the horror is in knowing that something evil lurks in the shadows just beyond, likeThe Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity?  Maybe.  But right now I have too many monsters roaming around in my head that want to run amok and be defeated, and will soon begin work on a new novel that will unleash a veritable Hells Gate of creatures on my readers.  So for me it’s back to the laptop where I plan to exercise (rather than exorcise) all those inner demons.

The Meaning of Horror by Simon Kurt Unsworth.

I think the point of this post is to wonder, what is the meaning of horror in life? Can we quantity or even accurately identify it? And my answer is simple and, I hope, succinct: probably. Sort of.

This is one of those weird things, an idea that you can approach from a number of different directions. If I’m being serious, I can (I think legitimately) argue that horror’s true purpose is to help us understand how precious and important our own life is, that it’s only by seeing and hearing and maybe experiencing horror that we’re able to really appreciate the good things. I’m sure there’s some truth to this idea, to be honest: I know from experience that it’s only when my safety or security or those I love are in some way at risk that I get a real and true sense of just how important those things are to me. Most of the time, I take things for granted, and having that jolted out of me, even for a short period, can only be a good thing. Maybe we need horror, maybe life’s terrors are a way of throwing our life in sharp relief and assisting us in genuinely valuing what’s good and important in our lives.

Of course, this seems like an extreme way of getting us to realise what’s good about our lives. After all, not everyone’s as blasé as I am about their spouses and children and friends, some people appreciate them without having to be scared they’ll lose them; besides, how much horror is too much horror? Do I have to lose my job to appreciate my life? Or just have my job threatened? Do I need a major illness to think ‘That’s it, its healthy eating and carpe diem from now on!’ or would a bad cold or a chilblains or two suffice? Everyone’s different, and what breaks one person another doesn’t notice, so it’s an inexact science, this ‘horror as revealer of the positive’. Perhaps it might be better to say it’s a philosophy. Or a possibility…

Which brings us to horror fiction (by which I aim to include all the visual arts as well as books). If most of us live relatively safe lives these days, then we might seriously argue that horror fictions allow us a vicarious shot of fear and subsequent moment of ‘thank god that’s not happening to me, I’m gonna be nicer to my wife/kids/dogs because I realise now how much I love them’. It’s a more tenuous argument, to be sure, but I do think there may be some truth in it. Most of us are rarely genuinely scared, so horror might well be a way of safely accessing those more extreme emotional and physiological reactions, fight or flighting our way into an understanding and knowledge of our bodies and our own mental responses to threat. We might, as a subset of this argument, be remarkably pretentious and argue that, as our lives have become more and more complicated, our dreams need to be more and more complicated as well, and fictions are a way of moulding our dreams to ensure that they are complicated enough. Horror, in this sense, is merely one element of what we might call social dreaming, helping us to contextualise the world around us. Recently, there’s been a spate of shark attacks around the world, and thinking too much about being attacked by a shark whilst swimming, about what it might feel like and how scared and shocked and agonised you’d be, and you’d never go in the water again. But, because we have numerous (good and bad) movies in which people are attacked by sharks (and crocodiles, and octopi, etc.), we can reduce the real things down to the level of fictions; they become manageable but not minimised, and we can carry on, going back in the water (or wander on the moors or whatever it is). I suspect, rather to my shame, that I agree with this argument to some level as well. I think good fictions, good horror fictions, do give us a set of parameters into which we can fit both our own experiences and the reported experiences of others. By seeing things through the filters of fiction, we can get a better grasp of them and what they mean. Don’t believe me? Think about 911 – did the film of the towers, of the people falling, look real to you? Really? Or did it look like the latest, verite-style blockbuster, astonishingly well made, gutwrenchingly awful, but somehow distant from most of us. Understanding that tragedy was easier for me at least when I thought about it in terms of it being a bad-taste blockbuster. Only when I did that could I grasp the enormity of what I was seeing and start relating it to the individual tragedies that the gross tragedy incorporated. J G Ballard understood it best, and the links and crossovers between dreams and life and fictions run through almost all of his writing like seams of gold in the ground beneath our feet. We use horror as a way of keeping the world small enough to grasp, to understand and to shape in ways that we can control and have influence upon.

So, that’s it explained then: horror, real or fictionalised, is a way in which we can better understand ourselves and, by extension, better understand and empathise with other people and the predicaments in which they find themselves. My work here is done, and the first drink’s on you.

Oh, no, wait; we’ve not quite finished. We’ve missed something, something possibly more important than all the philosophies and psychological theories we’ve touched on so far: horror is fun. Not that it’s fun to think of it happening in reality: that’s the bit that people who don’t ‘get’ horror always miss, that enjoying horror doesn’t mean we want to do or see this stuff in real life, but that the act of being safely scared means we can enjoy it. There’s a genuine pleasure in jumping, being creeped out, being horrified or disgusted and knowing it’s not real and not dangerous. It’s why people laugh after they jump, because you can enjoy the moment in retrospect and know that you were never at risk. It’s why the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan will always be more upsetting that the Saw movies or Hostel; because one set of grotesqueries were a (fairly accurate) representation of a reality that people like you or me might well have been involved in, and the others are fictions, designed to scare and disgust without being ‘real’. That and Hostel and Saw were crap, of course.

Here’s the thing: I dunno about you, but I like being scared, not actually in real life genuinely scared, but in a safe environment, and horror fictions can do that, often brilliantly. I’m at the stage now where I’ve watched and read and seen and heard a lot of horror, so part of the fun is that point where you say, ‘So impress me’ and sit with your metaphorical arms folded to see if what’s coming is as scary as, say, The Haunting or Ringu or is a mere Dinocroc Vs Shark, or whatever those damn movies are called.  Be clear: I have no urge to meet Sadako or a bloody great prehistoric shark or a house that holds a malignant, grouchy life in person, but on film, or in a novel? Bring it on! And the great thing is, even as I enjoy it, I can argue that it’s doing me some psychological good!

Now, we’re definitely done and that first drink is calling me.

Oh, no, dammit, wait a minute, this doesn’t explain maybe the most important thing: what’s horror in my real life? Well, it’s all of the things I’ve said already, and more. For me, horror is a lifetime’s love, a lifetime’s work, a lifelong search for the next scary, creepy, terrifying, outrageous experience. As long as I can remember, horror has been the type of art I love the most – not exclusively, because that’d make me a) very narrow-minded and b) terribly dull at parties, but it’s been the thing I go to first, and probably always will be. I can’t, I’m afraid remember the first horror book I read, so I don’t know quite where to lay the blame, but I have a few potential candidates. I had Tom Barling’s illustrated adaptation of Dracula when I was young, which I liked a lot, and I read Carrie when I was very young (about 7, and no, I didn’t understand most of it). I have a very clear remembrance of watching a show on BBC with a bloke in a chair, made up as a Victorian gentleman, telling stories, one of which mesmerised me – I know now that it was James’ ‘The Mezzotint’, and not long after watching that I went and hunted out a full James’ collection, read it and fell head over heels in love with those stories. All of these things and more contributed to my love of horror – seeing An American Werewolf in London at the age of about 9 and practically pissing myself with fear for one – but I can’t point to a single thing. I know that, after Carrie, I read ’Salem’s Lot a couple of years later, and just adored it – and still do. I remember an episode of Scooby Doo that scared me, and seeing a short scene from (I think) a hammer movie with a severed hand falling out of a sack, and there’s more: I remember reading Herbert’s The Rats and then The Fog, and Smith’s various killer crab novels, and loving the sheer energy of them (although I didn’t recognise it as ‘energy’ then; I just liked the shagging and the bloody great animal attacks).  There’s more, of course; there’s always more, and I could go on about them for ages. I have them, and so do you. Remember them, and revel in them; don’t forget them, they’ve served you well!

The great thing is, that sense of finding something new, something startling, never ever stops. Watching Ringu for the first time in about 2002 one very hungover New Year’s Eve afternoon, reading Junji Ito’s Uzumaki sitting on a train coming home from Liverpool, watching Ghostwatch when it was first released on DVD and realising that it was still a sublimely creepy piece of film, reading Lincoln Preston’s The Relic and rediscovering my joy of the creature feature, watching Jaws and not being able to go in the water even in a swimming pool for at least a couple of weeks afterwards, all of these things and many, many more have built on those early experiences and continued reminding me why horror is so important to me. Horror, in real life, is simply this: something I love.

Right, I’m really done this time. Shall we drink?