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OCTOBER 21, 2009
What is scary?
Many things have raised this question for me recently… Last week I wrote of scary (or not so) movies. When Megan was writing of Where the Wild Things Are, I noted I didn’t want to see the film, though it looked technically very well done. Why? I found the book and the movie trailer, scary. This has been given no credibility, as I also announced I wanted to see the new film, Zombieland. But I hold one thing has nothing to do with the other.
Since it is the season… in one of this month’s Library trade publications was a short write up on the differences between what men and women find scary. The male writer wrote that men find plotlines in which people they love are harmed and they are powerless, terrifying. The female writer suggested it was tales that wrote of threatening interpersonal relationships frightening.
This sponsored me thinking…what have I read or seen that I found truly frightening? Nightmare frightening? Hauntingly frightening?
There have been a few…
(The book, not the movie.)
So, what have you found truly frightening?
Let us know or check out these books @ the Library!
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Comments
Dora said, on Oct. 21 at 5:38PM
The Road -- chilling.
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L. Williams said, on Oct. 22 at 4:47AM
I am reading a teen book called "Carbon Diaries, 2015" by Saci Lloyd (Holiday House 2009). It is a "diary" of a 16-year-old girl in London in 2015. Everyone has been issued a card for carbon rationing. You have to choose between heat and TV... between light and your "epod"... Blackouts are constant, even on the subway, where you can be trapped in a dark car that will not open to let you out.
It's TERRIFYING!
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CarolK said, on Oct. 22 at 5:32AM
My first thought would have been the earliest stories I recall, those being told by my father, Hansel & Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, even The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but then, no, I realized these were more delight than fright.
As an adult books that explore man's inhumanity to man, make me uneasy. I've never been frightened by books that depict something I can't conceive. That's why books that have mad machinery taking over the world don't bother me. Possibly you can conceive it, I can't.
A book that has always given me the creeps, is Stephen King's Pet Sematary. A fan of King since his early days, this one frightened me so that I refused to read King for years. Glad to say I got over it and have added him back to my radar.
Nightmares, no books that I can recall have caused them, but movies, here's a few. Those Chucky movies, I think it started with Child's Play. The thought of that doll being alive and the pure evilness of it, scares the heck out of me. I won't watch them.
I love ventriloquists as evidenced recently by giving a star to Terry Fator's dvd from Vegas. But any portrayal of evil dummies gives me the shivers. The movie Magic, Twilight Zone's The Dummy 1962 are just two examples.
Most of the time these frightening images are out of sight, out of mind. But now that you've encouraged me to remember them, I hope I sleep tonight!
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Marla said, on Oct. 22 at 11:47AM
I have always found the less "gory" the more scary.
The Haunting of Hill House by S. Jackson was *way* more thrilling and scary than any Texas
chainsaw massacre.
The gory are just laundry lists of more and more macabre ways to rub people out.
That's a top of the head (and that's a whole head -- not chunks) reaction.
This will be interesting, I think.
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Lynn said, on Oct. 22 at 1:07PM
I'm frightened when evil is portrayed matter-of-factly. Stephen King often inserts passages where the protagonist (you know, the good guy!),
with very little buildup, does something unspeakable. It just gives me that "Eeeek! This stuff could happen anytime to anybody!" feeling.
Pet Sematary was one of my
"not going to sleep tonight" books as well. Great fraidy-cats think alike!
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Rachel said, on Oct. 22 at 1:08PM
I tend to think that horror comes from one of two things (or both things in
conjunction): the unknown, and the commonplace becoming strange.
In the case of the former, it's the things you don't see or don't understand that become menacing. Cabinets inexplicably opening, things not where you left them,
mysterious shadows that could hide any number of things. For the latter, it has to do with the everyday suddenly menacing you. The kind neighbor who bakes you cookies is a serial killer, a loved one vanishes, fire destroys your home, your pet dog turns
into a hellhound.
We fear what we don't understand and what threatens us, and what should be safe suddenly not being so is the ultimate terror.
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Tammy said, on Oct. 23 at 6:02AM
I'm in total agreement with Rachel's assessment of "scary" (see below), re. the unknown and the commonplace becoming strange.
The most frightening movie I've ever seen is The Blair Witch Project, where you never
get to actually *see* what's frightening the characters, and they don't really see much, either; you just get caught up in the increasingly tense energy.
And the twists of everyday life are a sure shock to the system. Mark Danielewski's The House of Leaves is one of the scariest books I've ever read (though certainly not an easy beach read), with mysterious hallways and tunnels suddenly appearing within an average, everyday house. I made the mistake of reading it while I was ousesitting
and spent the whole night thinking "If I get up in the morning and there's an extra room anywhere in the house, I am *so* gone!" (There are certainly
psychological undertones and symbolism in Leaves, but the basic concept is startling.)
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Pegleg said, on Oct. 23 at 6:23AM
I agree with you. The aspect of powerlessness is powerful. JF Gonzalez' Survivor is one of the strongest of these. Yet one of the most memorable horror stories I read was a unique twist on relationships, from a woman's point of view. As an editor of an extreme volume, I rejected it, but encouraged the writer to submit it elsewhere.
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bas bleu said, on Oct. 25 at 6:45AM
Stephen King's The Shining -- I remember I read it while my husband was away, and I called him up and made him come back home! At least he didn't say, "Honey, I'm home!" when he arrived!
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CarolK said, on Oct. 25 at 7:14PM
A nervous laugh remembering The Shining. That was one scary book. I don't blame you for not wanting to be alone.
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Dennis Lien said, on Oct. 26 at 10:27AM
Robert Bloch was famed for popularizing (I'm not sure if he actually first came up with it) a paradigm of horror being "the clown at midnight" -- the idea being that a clown seen from a lofty seat at a circus is funny, but if your doorbell rings at midnight and you open the door to see a clown in full regalis standing on your doorstep, you will experience horror rather than humor.
Arthur Machen (I think) described the essence of true horror as "when a rose sings" -- another example of the commonplace becoming strange.
(You might be charmed reading a fairy tale about talking flowers or animals etc., but if you really encountered such suddenly in your daily life you'd be scared out of your wits.)
I find the most frightening element of horror to be an encounter with something supernatural which seems to be operating according to laws that exist but which are not understandable by mortals. By far the most scary "true" haunting etc. story I've ever read is the original
nineteenth century narrative of the Bell Witch case, which fits that to a T:
bellwitch02.tripod.com/the_red_book.htm
(The recent novelization of the case by Brent Monahan pretty much bored me -- all of the good bits were taken over directly from the original source, and his Freudian "solution" struck me as trendy and nigh-laughable and certainly deflating of any sense of true horror.)
My favorite horror short/medium-length stories, "Schalken the Painter" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu and "The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood also match this, as do almost all of the stories of Robert Aickman. The only novel-length work I've encountered that I thought sustained the thread
of horror successfully throughout (and admittedly it's a shortist novel), NAOMI'S ROOM by "Jonathan Aycliffe," also matches this and adds another specific element that always gets me: the idea that the only hope of not being overwhelmed/destroyed by denizens of a supernatural world is to not attract their attention in the first place -- once you foolishly do so, your doom is assured and can best be only slightly delayed (during which time you may infect others).
Dennis Lien "University of
Minnesota Libraries"
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Rebecca said, on Oct. 27 at 3:26PM
I completely grew up on and loved horror films but never cared for much horror that I read. The scariest book I read as a kid was "The Amityville Horror" by Jay
Anson. This was back when people still believed the book to be true. The most frightening books I recall reading as an adult are "The Mothman Prophecies"
by John Keel and "The Stranger Beside Me" by Ann Rule. I'm obviously most frightened by "true" stories. I occasionally still have images from all of these books flash through my mind when trying to fall asleep. Pigs and blood, men
in black standing at the foot of my bed, a man gruesomely murdering a young girl in the room next to me. Nothing is scarier than the truth for me.
I find the scariest films to be those with the most lasting images like "Night of the Living Dead" and "Halloween." The films for me are as beautiful as they are scary though. I find them visually, aesthetically pleasing. I
think for some people gory movies are beautiful in a way. Viewers appreciate the craft it takes to achieve those effects, the visceral reaction they feel when seeing such grotesqueness, the way the image burns into your mind, the beautiful colors,
etc. etc. I know some avid horror readers would say the same about the written word,
but I personally have just not had the same experience with horror fiction and horror
films. This is a very interesting thread and one that I could obviously go on and on
about.
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Mercedes said, on Oct. 30 at 12:34PM
I have had nightmares from a few books but the very first that I can remember came after reading "101 Dalmations". The descriptions of Cruella de Vil's menacing blood red and midnight black mansion woke me up terrified. Definitely darker than the Disney movie!
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Todd Mason said, on Oct. 30 at 9:20PM
As someone prone to blow hard about horror, I've been very happy to see the tenor of the discussion so far [on the librarian-oriented list Fiction-L, from which many of the comments have been reprinted in whole or in part here, and which can be read online by all]. I've suggested that the nub of horror, or at very least horror's appeal, is that it is the only kind of fiction that is required to deal with one of our most basic facts--that we can be and will be personally extinct--and perhaps the most basic problem associated with that: that we don't know or cannot control, certainly beyond a certain point, how not to be extinct, sooner or later. Suspense fiction, horror's closest cousin (they blur into each other very thoroughly) has the same agenda, though what suspense fiction gains in "realism" it loses in the range of metaphor available to its fantasticated cousin. If adventure fiction is about how to survive, suspense fiction is about how not to die, and horror fiction is about dealing with not being able not to die. (Very broad strokes, of course, in the manner of how contemporary mimetic fiction is
about how to live, sf is about the best [and worst] possible ways to live, and fantasy about the best [and worst] imaginable ways to live.)
As for gender dichotomies, I think they can be overstated rather easily. Certainly the current dustup over suspense fiction at the LITERARY REVIEW in the UK is exemplary, where the problem as stated by Ms. Mann is essentially not that all crime fiction she's been reading for review is misogynist torture fiction written by women but that entirely too large a minority of the would-be bestselling fiction is.
Todd Mason, a fan of Kit Reed and Richard Matheson, and even more of Kate Wilhelm (DEATH QUALIFIED, THE GOOD CHILDREN, CAMBIO BAY, and WELCOME, CHAOS, among many others) and Robert Bloch (most famous for PSYCHO, perhaps the single writer in horror fiction closest to corresponding to the significance of Hemingway or Dashiell Hammett or Robert Heinlein in other fields--a consistent emphasis on lean, modernist prose that engaged with the contemporary culture, for starters)
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Todd Mason said, on Oct. 30 at 9:26PM
Not to slight Ms. Atwood (LADY ORACLE probably my favorite so far), or Ms. Reed and Mr. Matheson for that matter, or Mr. King when he's on (CARRIE, "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," "The Children of the Corn" [I gather the film is terrible, but the novelet is one of his best I've read], or ON WRITING). Mr. King can be Very off, however ("The Cat from Hell," "The Gunslinger," and on and on...)
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