Thursday, July 31, 2008
Fear & Horror
We like to confuse fear and horror, but they're not the same thing. Human beings have only two inborn fears, fear of loud noises and fear of falling. Quite reasonable responses to eons of life on the savannah, where noise meant danger and high tree branches were sanctuary. Fear's a survival instinct. It tells you when to run. H.P. Lovecraft said the essence of horror is to walk into your garden to find your roses are singing... metaphorically he nailed it. Gardens of Song? Not in the natural order.
All stories start as horror stories. Every sitcom, every cop novel, every romance. They presume a natural order of things, then something disrupts it. Disruption is horror. This level of disruption and how it's dealt with makes it the kind of story it is. In most cases the status quo's restored. This is why most "horror stories" aren't really horror. If things go back to normal at the end, they're adventure stories. It's why some crime stories are really horror stories: because they're about death. Death is both the ultimate disruption to the natural order - there's no coming back from it - and the ultimate reminder of the real natural order, the one we pretend doesn't exist... By the time we're adults we learn to rationalize pain and death. Most children don't. Animals can't. That's why we have greater sympathy for small children and animals. Adults understand that under the skin of the world there are monsters lying in wait. We might not like it, but we know it. We know about death camps, about creepy men in backwoods houses who waylay strangers and make soup and tuxedos out of them, about burglars who rape and murder 85-year old women confined to wheelchairs and religious crackpots who kidnap teenagers from their bedrooms. For children these things are true disruptions of the natural order... disruption can never be healed, or even forgotten, only ignored.
Because ignoring it's the only way to tell ourselves there's a natural order where little girls can remain safe, where monsters don't really prowl under the skin of the world. Anything else means something has gone fundamentally wrong with the universe, or, worse, it was fundamentally wrong to begin with and there's no way to make it better.
Fear's a survival instinct. It tells you when to run. Horror's when you realize there is nowhere to run.
Post a Comment
All stories start as horror stories. Every sitcom, every cop novel, every romance. They presume a natural order of things, then something disrupts it. Disruption is horror. This level of disruption and how it's dealt with makes it the kind of story it is. In most cases the status quo's restored. This is why most "horror stories" aren't really horror. If things go back to normal at the end, they're adventure stories. It's why some crime stories are really horror stories: because they're about death. Death is both the ultimate disruption to the natural order - there's no coming back from it - and the ultimate reminder of the real natural order, the one we pretend doesn't exist... By the time we're adults we learn to rationalize pain and death. Most children don't. Animals can't. That's why we have greater sympathy for small children and animals. Adults understand that under the skin of the world there are monsters lying in wait. We might not like it, but we know it. We know about death camps, about creepy men in backwoods houses who waylay strangers and make soup and tuxedos out of them, about burglars who rape and murder 85-year old women confined to wheelchairs and religious crackpots who kidnap teenagers from their bedrooms. For children these things are true disruptions of the natural order... disruption can never be healed, or even forgotten, only ignored.
Because ignoring it's the only way to tell ourselves there's a natural order where little girls can remain safe, where monsters don't really prowl under the skin of the world. Anything else means something has gone fundamentally wrong with the universe, or, worse, it was fundamentally wrong to begin with and there's no way to make it better.
Fear's a survival instinct. It tells you when to run. Horror's when you realize there is nowhere to run.
Post a Comment
Excerpts | Blog Template by Gecko & Fly