HORROR 101: Private Vs. Global

Last time, I discussed Enclosed Versus Exposed horror and how these often are styles that define a larger category of horror—Private Versus Global. So this time, I’ll be tackling this larger category. Here’s how I described it in the previous post: “In the first category divide, we have stories that are personal terrors versus globalized ones—ie a haunted house would be a personal terror and a zombie pandemic would be a global one.” This is based on the scale of the horror being unleashed—ie personal usually affects one person, or at most, a small group of people and is usually contained to a smaller area. Whereas global, as its term would suggest, affects a larger group of people and area. These terms are mostly important to delineate between the two sides of horror so that we can consider how and why people are being affected within them and why that changes the dynamics of the horror itself.

In private horror, the horrors themselves often are symbolic of personal emotions—in The Descent, the claustrophobia and violence embodies the main character’s grief, for example. In The Sixth Sense, the ghosts might be representative of the way that children learn empathy and often carry the burdens of others in ways that are often invisible to the adults around them.

In global horror, the horrors are often symbolic of larger societal concerns—zombies might be are fear of other people or of disease, AI running rampant and overthrowing their creators is emblematic of our fear of technology. One interesting aspect of Global Horror, though, is that it often shifts into Private Horror. In the film Signs we start with worldwide terrors of alien invasion, but the story is essentially a film about family and how the familial bonds can protect us from disaster (a common theme in Global Horror). This makes sense because if we’re willing to risk everything to protect someone or to survive for someone, it makes sense when that someone is our loved ones. Ultimately, Global Horror is often telling us: you can survive even these horrors if you keep your loved ones close to you (whether literally or metaphorically).

This comes in a sharp contrast to Private Horror, in which the protagonists are often consumed by whatever personal horror the film (or book’s) horror is representing: your grief, your guilt, your crushing sense of loss, are things you can try to fight through but don’t always make it out from. Recently, in The Ritual the film seems to circle around the idea that the intertwined horrors of grief and guilt are only conquerable if you are willing to fight like hell and, likewise, to hurt like hell.

What might this be saying about how we perceive of horror? Are our personal demons always going to be stronger than our societal fears? Is the truest horror, the one you get when you look inwards rather than outwards? 

HORROR 101: Enclosed versus Exposed

Horror often comes divided into two categories in my mind: Personal Vs. Global. Within these two categories, the horror is then again divided into two sets: Enclosed Vs. Exposed. In the first category divide, we have stories that are personal terrors versus globalized ones—ie a haunted house would be a personal terror and a zombie pandemic would be a global one. This is just based on scale of the horror at hand, since ideally all horror is personal horror or you’d just have a bunch of characters no one cares about getting killed off in creative ways (oh, wait, that is a lot of horror. *raises eyebrow pointedly at some horror writers*). The other category divides between two kinds of how the horror is portrayed on screen: Enclosed horror is the tight spaces of something like The Descent whereas Exposed horror is the expanse of the ocean in Jaws, where the threat can be coming from literally anywhere around you. This edition of HORROR 101 is going to delve deeper into Enclosed versus Exposed, and a later edition will tackle Personal Versus Global more in-depth.

Both of the Enclosed/Exposed horror types with the feeling of isolation and being trapped in different ways. In Enclosed horror, we have the feeling of being stuck and unable to escape easily. In Exposed horror, you never know from where the monster will strike and you are literally an easy target as you’re out in the open. I brought up Personal Vs. Global horror earlier because many times these categories go hand in hand Personal horror is Enclosed Horror and Global Horror is Exposed Horror. Zombie apocalypse films are almost always Exposed, as characters have to navigate across landscapes rife with zombie hordes. Haunted house films are almost always Enclosed with characters trapped inside a house that wants to do them harm.

What do both of these horror types give us and what are the best examples of the form? We’ll start with Exposed as it allows me to bring up a very recent film. Annihilation (which, for the record, I liked a lot and I was glad it didn’t stick to the book very closely) uses Exposed horror to create a feeling of constant tension—the scientists in the Shimmer are always in danger, from all possible sides, as they make their way towards the lighthouse. This allows us to have a duality between the fear of attack, while also building up the way that they are literally being exposed to something beyond their control on a much more microscopic level (as the Shimmer may be messing with their minds or bodies in distinct ways). Other entrants in Exposed horror include films like 28 Days Later which does an interesting turn between Exposed and Enclosed 2/3 of the way through the film (a topic I’ll address more in an individual post on the film later); the aforementioned Jaws; and I’d argue the Nightmare on Elm Street series does this in an interesting way—the horror/danger scenes are all Exposed horror as they are literally dreams that can shift and change the surroundings of the victims, but, in some ways, they are also Enclosed as the horror is happening inside the victims’ heads (guess what? I’m also doing an individual post later on the Elm Street series.)

Enclosed horror uses tightly controlled spaces in order to raise the level of terror and does so often in unique ways. This can be seen in the use of ventilation systems in something like Alien to the sometimes collapsing cave tunnels of The Descent. Enclosed horror also allows every object in a given space to become and object of horror. One of my favorite recent horror films (and one of my favorite recent films, just in general, and why oh why didn’t Daniel Kaluuya win Best Actor at the Academy Awards??) Get Out uses this to maximum effect. Main character Chris is isolated in a house in the middle of the woods, so a common Enclosed horror trope. He’s also trapped within his own mind for part of the horror, enclosed within the already enclosed. This makes a dual form of isolation and raises the level of horror beyond just bodily entrapment. The hypnosis scene in the film is one of the most effective uses of enclosed horror that I’ve ever seen on a screen. Other excellent examples of Enclosed horror include: The Thing, The Others, The Devil’s Backbone, and more.

So, which do you prefer: Enclosed vs Exposed? What makes one better than the other? Join in the conversation by tweeting me @PintsNCupcakes.

POSTED BY: Chloe, speculative fiction fan in all forms, monster theorist, and Nerds of a Feather blogger since 2016. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes

HORROR 101: Surrounded by Others--Anatomy of a Pod Person

As a child, two of my earliest film-related memories are watching the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and watching the John Carpenter version of The Thing. In both, what stuck with child me was the depiction of a monster who not only could be anyone, but also could be someone that you think you know so well: your crewmate, your friend, your lover. This early exposure to these two films led to a longtime obsession with pod people (which the Thing is not technically, but I’m extending my definition here to any monster who can appear in the exact visage of someone you know and trust). As a child, there was a visceral terror to the idea, because the world was one I trusted. As an adult, while I don’t think pod people are likely, they still strike a certain fear because the concept at the heart of pod people’s terror-making is very much real. In this edition of Horror 101, I’ll be diving into the anatomy of a monster (a thing I’ll do occasionally in this series).

The most famous example of Pod People in their truest definition comes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a novel by Jack Finney from 1954—which was made into a film in 1956. In the book, alien spores (essentially) fall on a Californian town. Once there, the spores make pods where duplicates of the townspeople form inside. The pod people retain the characteristics, mannerisms, and even memories of the people they are copying. However, they lack human emotion and empathy. The epidemic is at first misdiagnosed as a kind of Capgras Syndrome (a real disorder in which a person believes their loved ones have been replaced by imposters). Ultimately, the film becomes an examination of paranoia and distrust, as the characters who realize the truth try to warn people who refuse to listen. The film, despite being outdated, retains a frenetic energy to its paranoia. However, the story reaches higher peaks of excellence in two remakes.

1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Philip Kaufman, stars Donald Sutherland, and heightens both the paranoia and the distinct unsettling terror of the original. One early scene that stuck with me so vividly as a child that I still sometimes flash on it (and which shares a few parallels with what I still consider Ray Bradbury’s most terrifying story, “The Crowd), wherein a crowd of onlookers stares at a body without showing any kind of emotion. The way to try to survive against the pod people involves stripping the emotion from one’s self, so that you won’t be detected—a disturbing uniformity through loss of empathy. The final scene of this film still remains one of the most effectively chilling of any film. One through line that both films retain is their loss of hope—how do we fight against that which surrounds us?

This question continues in 1993’s Body Snatchers, directed by Abel Ferrara. The action of the plot is moved to a military base but retains the underlying premise of the book and two previous films. This, along with the 1978 version, is one of my favorite sci-fi (or horror) films and features a distinctly chilling performance by Meg Tilly. This version shifts its heroes primarily to teens and children—who are consistently disbelieved. An interesting twist that capitalizes on the way youth is often used as an excuse to not trust the word of children in the face of the horrific (a device horror uses often). The film answers the previous question I raised by asking another, voiced by one of the pod people: “Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere... 'cause there's no one like you left.” This points to one of the most effective aspects of pod people as monsters.

If monsters are often the way we depict “others,” what then happens when the protagonists become the other? When pod people become the majority and they look just like your friends and family, who is the other in this situation and what does that even mean anymore? Pod people, in terms of monster theory, are fascinating because of the way they shift the dialogue from obvious monstrosity to a subtler depiction of both othering and what constitutes a monster. In a world where consistently loss of empathy towards others creates policies that enact violences (see my last Horror 101for a deeper look into violence as a loss of agency), isn’t a person who looks just like your neighbor but without a guiding emotional core or empathy, the ultimate kind of horror? Or, maybe a better question is, shouldn’t it be?

POSTED BY: Chloe, speculative fiction fan in all forms, monster theorist, and Nerds of a Feather blogger since 2016. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.

HORROR 101: Violence in Horror, Part One

A lot of times when I mention being a horror fan or horror writer, people say something about the violence in horror: “I can’t watch that stuff, it’s too gory” or “why would you want to write something violent.” Rarely do I want to go into pedantic scholar mode (except for my poor long-suffering students), so I usually just shrug. However, here in Horror 101, is exactly the place for me to get onto my horror scholar pedestal and say: good horror isn’t about the gory, or shocking acts of physical violence being depicted. Instead, it’s often about the true nature of violence which is the loss of agency.  So in this column, I’ll be talking about violence and agency in horror. Violence is a subject I plan to tackle from a few angles in terms of horror—while this is looking specifically at violence as loss of agency, later columns will address violence and women’s bodies in horror and other issues about the use of violence in the genre.

When we think of horror, we might think of the visceral moments that have stayed with us: the opening murder in Scream, for example, or the shark in Jaws taking off someone’s leg. Those moments stick with us because acts of physical violence cause such visceral emotional reactions: disgust, terror, an empathetic surge at the pain. However, beneath these physical moments of violence are the ones of the more subtle but insidious acts of violence.

Violence as a loss of agency is the idea that any act that removes agency is a violent one. These can be individual acts, like if a woman is stalked and then needs to change her patterns of behavior in order to feel safe, or they can be systemic ones like the judicial system putting policies in place that adversely affect a specific group of people. This is not to say that this style of violence doesn’t lead to physical violence, because it does. Get Out (WHICH SHOULD HAVE ALL THE AWARDS, JUST SAYING GOLDEN GLOBES, JUST SAYING) is a film that finds much of its horror and tension through exactly this type of horror and violence. I talked more in depth about Get Outand the rhetoric of violence and using genre as social action here, so I won’tgo into that as much now.

One facet that particularly interests me is how by often using female protagonists, horror allows us to view this type of violence in an amplified way (which is often what good horror should be doing—showing us some horror of everyday life and elevating to an extreme so that everyone can feel it). When Sidney in Scream has to follow arbitrary rules in order to stay safe, we see a loss of agency that all women have probably felt at some time in their lives (don’t walk alone at night, don’t tell someone where you live, don’t smile at the wrong person). So when she takes back control, it becomes a cathartic release not only in the sense of the film but to any woman who has felt like they had no control over the things being done to them.

By using violence as loss of agency in horror, the audience can contemplate larger societal issues around them. Horror is about fear and how we try to survive in the face of it. But, it can also be asking how we confront the things that make us afraid and how we can try to overcome them. I hope to see more socially conscious horror films, following the success of Get Out (here also is my review), as I think it’s a genre that can be more effective than most in making us feel those issues.

What do you think? Is this kind of violence important to discuss? What are your feelings about depictions of violence in horror? Tell us in the comments or tweet me @PintsNCupcakes.

HORROR 101: The Uncanny

For this entry of Horror 101, I thought I’d dive into my personal favorite kind of horror: the uncanny. While we often think of horror as something viscerally frightening, the uncanny builds its horror through the use of the slightly wrong and, through this, creates a far more convincingly real and terrifying world. The uncanny as a psychological idea refers to the idea of something being “strangely familiar” or what I like to think of as the “falsely known.”

The uncanny to me is a crucial element of horror: not being able to pinpoint exactly what makes us scared. While the extreme can be terrifying (the xenomorph in Alien is a category crisis—its something we can’t classify/is not instantly knowable—but it’s not uncanny because we shouldn’t be able to know it/classify it as its something completely new to the human experience). However, even more terrifying is that which is just a little off: pod people who may look like your lover, but they smile in just a slightly different way. A man with fingers just a little too long. Women with hair in front of their faces so that their expressions are unknowable.

In technology, we refer to the “uncanny valley” (a term coined by Masohiro Mori in the 70’s) when dealing with robots and computer designed images of people. A robot who looks human-like but not realistically so (think Bender in Futurama) wouldn’t trigger the uncanny valley but a robot who looks extremely close to human, but has some tiny bit of offness, such as the more and more realistic robots we have currently, would fall into it and create a sense of slight fear, revulsion, or distrust. In the film Ex Machina (which on its surface is a film about a Turing test going very wrong, but in its heart is a take on the tropes of Gothic literature and the Bluebeard fairy tale), Alicia Vikander portrays Ava brilliantly by making the robotic elements include both Ava’s movements (more perfect than an average person’s) and speech (carefully clipped and enunciated)—this heightens the uncanny valley feeling while going against the entirely human looks of her face (which wouldn’t necessarily fall into the uncanny valley).

In literature, the uncanny is prevalent in Gothic narratives (Madeleine in the “Fall of the House of Usher” clearly falls into an uncanny being even before her turn to something more monstrous) and ghost stories. Haunted houses, in many ways, are examples of place as uncanny: the familiar sounds of a house settling become othered when the house is not one’s own. The uncanny also often coincides with liminal spaces (a subject I’ll explore in even more depth in a future Horror 101) and how these shift our perceptions of what is going on: for example, the nostalgia for childhood mixed with a sense of unease in Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane falls clearly into the uncanny. The uncanny also shows up in more contemporary horror and monster films, as well.

Slasher films often times build off of the idea of the normal turned terrifying: a phone call (the Scream franchise) or a shower (Psycho and so many films since), for example. This twisting of what we should consider safe is a form of uncanniness (who didn’t look askance at their VHS collection after watching The Ring or wait an extra ring to pick up the phone after Scream?). However, even more interesting (to me) is when the uncanny creates monsters from the known.

In films with pod people or other variations on this theme, the uncanny is allowed to truly shine by raising our distrust in those we love (the ultimate kind of terror, really). From the shape-shifting thing of The Thing who could be right next to you, looking just like your longtime colleague, to your lover in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In pod people films, they look exactly like the person they’ve transformed into and yet they trigger the uncanny valley through their inability to do a trick with their eyes, a slowness to smile at a joke you’ve shared for years, a shift in their speaking tone. This is horror summed up: even the ones you love may not be the ones you love after all. If horror is at its roots often about loss, what greater horror than a loss that no one even believes has happened?

What are your favorite examples of the uncanny? Have a horror topic, style, or monster, that you’d like me to focus on? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter: @PintsNCupcakes or @Nerds_feather.

Posted by Chloe, speculative fiction fan in all forms, monster theorist, and Nerds of a Feather blogger since 2016. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcake

HORROR 101: Dread

What do you dread? How does dread build inside you as you’re thinking about it? It’s that sinking feeling in your stomach, the rising of your heart rate, the way your thoughts begin to fire too rapidly as everything else slows down around you. Dread in horror is a key feature to terrifying an audience—be it reader, viewer, or player. Dread is built in various ways for different mediums: movies may use visual clues of repetition, video games might use escalating sound effects, and books often use deliberate pacing through paragraph breaks.

In scary stories, from our childhoods, dread is often built through repetition that we know will eventually bring something bad: the sayings in variants of the Mr. Fox/ Bluebeard stories of “Be Bold,” then “Be Bold, Be Bold,” before “Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold, Lest Your Hearts Blood Run Cold.” It’s the campfire buildup of someone knock, knocking on a door, before shouting the last phrase so that everyone jumps. We find dread in patterns, because fairy tales have taught us to pay attention to patterns. In The Ring, for example, we know there’s a pattern set in place from the very beginning: watch the video, get the phone call telling you “Seven days,” have increasingly creepy events happen to you going through the next week, and then your TVs pop on and a creepy, demon girl comes to collect you. Not fun. The movie starts by showing us the end of this pattern for one unlucky victim, so that we’re already prepared for what’s to come—we know the pattern and so we can dread it. The film then highlights the patter, not only by counting down the days, but also with visual cues (screens—Tv or computer monitors-- are in a lot of scenes, visual elements from the video appear throughout the film, etc). This slow delay of the pattern, with end results we know are going to be horrific, is one way that films can successfully build a feeling of dread.

Another way is the slow build-up of creepiness through use of tiny visual and audio elements. I remember first watching The Orphanage and becoming so dread-filled that when there’s a banging sound near the end of the film, I probably jumped about three feet in the air. The film uses some, rare, jumpscares, but more effective in creating such dread-filled tension are its uses of small creepy elements—sounds that are just a little off, things flickering in the corners of our eyes.

The slow build-up to dread is almost even more effective in literature, where we have our minds as readers filling in the horrible blanks for us. I recently wrote, at Ploughshares, about the uses of dread in two stories, “The Night Piece” by Andre Alexis and “Sacken” by China Mieville. What I talked about was how each of those pieces used deliberate paragraph break pacing in order to sustain and build dread. In “Sacken,” Mieville makes use of several one to two short sentence paragraphs to force the reader into a pattern of reading that increases the tension leading up to the reveal (paragraph breaks are denoted here by slashes): ““Something was on the floor./ A darkness. A gross misshape. / Something huge and wrong and wet. / It blocked her way./ Mel’s throat closed. The new thing in the room dripped.”

In videogames dread is often built through ambience and sound. In Silent Hill 2 (WHICH WAS A MASTERPIECE), the main character walks through a fog cloaked town. A sign that nasty things are coming through the fog is the use of a radio whose static increases as things approach. When the sight line is diminished, the increasing static tells the player to prepare. Every blip of static, after the first time this effect is deployed, sends the player into a dread-filled panic. This panic often decreases the players chance of survival because we aren’t thinking as clearly which then reinforces the dread of the static.

Dread, ultimately is one of the best ways to build horror. It’s the difference between a jump scare which has an immediate tension and release and the feeling of horror that clings to you long after the film itself is over. Slasher movies tend to fall into jump scares, while dread is something more akin to a movie like The Ring (which bothered me for days afterwards). Dread when done right builds to an impossible tension level. I think of it as the typical plot chart of rising action, except it’s the rising dread that makes the viewer so unnerved that every moment become a terrifying expectation. Movies that utilize dread are often one’s talking about more universal conditions: The Orphanage’s horror is loss and the traumas of childhood, The Ring warns us against what we’re willing to do in the face of horror. I’ll return to my opening question: what do you dread? And how well has that feeling been conveyed through artistic mediums?

HORROR 101: An Introduction to Fear

What makes horror work?

Welcome to Horror 101. This will be an ongoing series of essays about the horror genre: from analysis about the elements of horror to using monster theory to in-depth looks at individual works of horror. While I have some plans already, please let me know on Twitter (@PintsNCupcakes) if there are specific horror texts/tropes/or monsters you think I should tackle!

For this first essay, I thought it would be helpful to illuminate why I’m doing this (and why I begged the lovely Powers That Be at Nerds to allow me to do it). Horror is deeply subjective, so it’s possible my analysis and thoughts about horror won’t agree with everyone. Thus, this might be helpful in gauging whether you wish to follow me on this journey into darkness.

I was drawn to the scary story at an early age—like think a three or four year old watching Aliens on repeat—but it rarely bothered me. I wasn’t a child who got nightmares—as much as I am a coward, trust me I am not the person opening the basement door where a weird noise has been coming from. So it wasn’t the fear that drew me to them, but rather the feeling of safety that they brought. I loved horror because it was contained. Close the book, turn off the movie, and the world was bright again. Even as a child this struck me as a power we don’t often have in life. I also appreciated that horror showed that people can fight against the darkness in their lives. It said be afraid, but be hopeful as well.

I read the Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series (aka the greatest books of all time) over and over again. Their reliance on folklore and almost fairy tale like logic certainly was an early spawn for my lover (and eventual study) of lore. I joined the Goosebumps book club and then graduated from those to reading very single Fear Street and Christopher Pike book the library owned (as a voracious and fast reader, the time between school ending and me getting picked up from the library was often enough time to read an entire book). By age ten, I moved on to Stephen King (who’d I’d already heard in audiobook form on family car trips) and a new idea about what horror could teach its readers. King often wrote of the underdog overcoming horror. Bad stuff happens over and over in King’s books, but the characters almost always won. One of my fondest childhood memories is reading the entirety of The Stand while home sick from school. It was a novel that tapped into my direct fears (me, with a bad cold, reading about the plague) while also illuminating the idea of people working together to fight evil (my favorite of all story types and one I’ll return to in future essays).

As a child who loved to write, I also found myself returning to horror again and again for my own creative purposes. When I got to college, I’d often come up against the same question again and again in creative writing workshops: why horror? Can you do anything other than monsters? Ugh, ghosts, again. But more interesting to me were the questions people asked that showed no sense of reality: everyone in workshops wanted the horror to be happening because people deserved it. The idea of horror as morality tale is certainly one that we see all over (horrors links to fairy tales is evident for a reason). But it’s a misguided one. To me the power of horror is that it can reflect reality: ie bad shit happens to good people all the time. Maybe it’s not monsters, but it’s the monsters of everyday reality: illness, violence, systems set up to mistreat. Horror can serve as a veil to describe life (something Get Out did recently in a masterful way).

So as a writer and reader I loved what horror could give me. As a teacher and scholar, though, I wanted to look under the hood. I became interested in exploring how horror operates on a level of mechanics as well as how it operates as a means of communicating ideas. What was the rhetorical value of horror? After studying monster theory, a fairly new form of critical study that looks into monsters and horror from the analytical perspective, I began to think even more deeply about the value of monsters and using them both in writing and in teaching. I’m lucky to teach at a university that allows me to shape my composition courses and this allowed me to create a class that teaches multimodal composition and communication through the theme of Monsters. Monsters are a fun way to get students thinking about much deeper issues. By exploring the ideas of monstrosity, we’re able to look at acts of othering and monstering that permeate history: racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and the list goes on. My students began to pick up on these ideas and tropes in various media they consumed. They realized it wasn’t just a “genre” thing as they could point to the language of othering and monstering in the speeches of politicians.

So horror has rhetorical value. It has value to me as a writer and reader. But what makes horror tick? To me, there are several key features to great/successful horror. I’ll be diving deeper into those in essays to come, but they include dread, the use of the uncanny, private versus global horrors, terror, awe, horror as masks, and more. Throughout these essays, I’ll be pointing to specific textual examples of successful deployment of these ideas. My horror taste runs the gamut from ghosts to zombies, supernatural thrillers to horror comedies, but as a head’s up I won’t be diving into torture porn such as Saw and its friends (which to me is not only not good entertainment, it’s also ethically questionable).

Finally, I hope you’ll stick around with me, as we enter Horror 101. You might not be a horror fan, but you may find that it has more to offer than merely goosebumps.

Chloe, speculative fiction fan in all forms, monster theorist, and Nerds of a Feather blogger since 2016. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes