 Horror/Scary: July 14, 2021 Issue [#10878] |
This week: What's happened to horror stories? Edited by: Andy~hating university  
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There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don’t understand. Internal is the human heart.
~~John Carpenter, 2011 |
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I'm Andy~hating university , and I'm today's NL guest editor.
It's easy to write a story filled with blood, guts, and gore (BGG). There's nothing wrong with this kind of story, but it seems that we have lost what the horror genre started out as.
The horror genre has ancient origins, with its roots in folklore and religious traditions. European horror-fiction became established through authors who were Ancient Greeks (such as Euripes), and Ancient Romans (such as Pliny the Younger and Plutarch), though the genre dates as far back as the earliest writings of Mesopotamia with the stories of Gilgamesh (dated circa 2100 BC).
A lot of our traditional horror fiction comes from real live historical people, such as Prince of Wallachia Vlad III (the source for Dracula), Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (the source for the vampiress), and the Baron de Rais (the source for Bluebeard). Even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was greatly influenced by the story of Hippolytus, who was revived after dying.
The slasher genre has a lot to answer for. Now I love slasher films as much as the next person, but they've affected the way we define horror in modern film and literature. Horror has, to some extent, moved away from the plot-driven "natural world" story with a horror element, to a plot-driven "horror world" story with a real world element.
The slasher genre started with films like Bay of Blood (1971), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Black Christmas (both 1974). They spawned some of the biggest characters in the genre, many who are easily identifiable by their first name, such as Freddy, Jason, and Michael. And today we have so-called horror films, such as Saw, that are really nothing more than torture for torture's sake.
Really good horror creates an eerie and frightening atmosphere. Doing that without BGG, or with minimal BGG, is not an easy task.
The next time you write a horror piece try it for yourself. |
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