When I was eleven or twelve years old, I discovered the writing of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul. To be fair, it was my childhood best friend who introduced me to these. We both loved everything about their writing… perhaps a strange obsession for a couple of tweens. What can I say? My first movie obsession was The Lost Boys. Shrug. 🙂
Something about the Horror genre resonates deeply. Except when it doesn’t.
Once in awhile I read or watch something marketed as Horror and it has all the makings of a great Horror story – haunted houses, vampires, corn fields – but I just can’t get into it. The villain pursues the main character(s) and there’s a lot of tension, but… well, to be honest, it bores me.
And I know why.
Jessica Brody said this particularly well in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, so I’ll start with a quote from her book.
The prey that the monster is stalking (often our hero or heroes!) cannot be completely innocent. Someone is responsible for bringing the monster into being, invading the monster’s territory, or waking the monster up. And it’s usually either the hero, a counterpart of the hero, or even all of humanity who has committed this sin. Either way, this catastrophe is somehow our fault.
That resonated with me on a very deep level because it’s true. Horror is compelling because, like Gothic fiction, it deals with the things that we can’t prove. Things we can’t define empirically. It takes the intangible world – whether that’s a supernatural, spiritual one, or simply the hidden aspects of ourselves – and makes it tangible. Horror should run deep. It should tell a story about how the characters face their own flaws and learn to overcome them. But it does this in a more confrontational way than other genres do.
Think about it this way. Say you want to write a story about a family who moves into a new house only to find that it’s haunted. Yes, it’s been done before…a million times. And often it doesn’t work. I’ll show you why.
On one hand, the family buys or inherits the house, moves in, and is pursued by some ghost or demon for some reason. And there usually is a reason. But it’s very often divorced from the main characters. Perhaps the ghost was murdered in the house. The ghost is angry. Of course. He wants his own house. Why? Who the hell knows. Supposedly ghosts don’t like sharing real estate. The only hope is to help them find peace so they’ll move. Otherwise, your characters should start packing. Of course they won’t. They want the house too. So instead the ghost will chase, terrorize and generally attack them until someone wins.
I think you can see how boring that story is. Sure, the characters are flawed in some way. But the crucial point is: the antagonistic force is pursuing them arbitrarily, simply because they happened to choose the wrong home. The horror is unrelated to what’s going on within their own hearts. And when that’s the case, horror fails. There’s nothing about this story that has anything to do with me. Or any other reader. It’s not relatable.
Let’s try an alternate version.
Imagine a family with a couple and a school-age daughter. The couple have a rocky relationship. On the surface, readers can see that something’s off in the family. The mother-child relationship is strained. The mother-father relationship is cold. The father-child relationship is co-dependent to the point of being dysfunctional. Now, what might happen if the daughter begins to go mad and terrorize the family, especially the mother. Maybe the madness spills over and begins to affect the father, who also takes out his rage on the mother. Over time, readers discover that the mother tried to drown her daughter years ago, perhaps when she was an infant. She didn’t want the child. The father did. But her attempt to kill the child failed. There’s a lot of latent conflict there. It’s something that neither of them have dealt with. It’s that sin, that unresolved conflict that is manifest in the daughter’s – and later, the father’s – horrifying actions.
I think you can see how much more meaning the second story would have. And the possibilities are endless. Take any unresolved failing, any secret sin and give it legs. Let it take to the streets and terrorize those who refuse to face what they’ve done or who they are.
Then you’ll have the makings of a phenomenal Horror novel. One that speaks to people and causes us to think about the things that we haven’t addressed. The unreconciled areas of our own hearts that haunt us.
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