Study_of_Horror_Writing_Techniques

Macabre Musings: A Study of Horror Writing Techniques In The Shining and I Am Legend By Keaton Banks English 20: Mrs. Dunseith December 15th, 2009 The fantastic thing about the horror genre is that it so verily envelops the macabre and morbid fascination that grips everyone. Who doesn’t remember being anywhere between five and ten years old, watching some horror movie with their fingers over their eyes, leaving a slight crack open just to get a glimpse of the monster at hand' What really expands upon the method in ways a movie really couldn’t is the literature because left to one’s own devices; the creature being described begins to take the form of a personal greatest-fear. It’s really the whole theory the characters are meant to have some essence or complacency that the reader can identify with and almost personify him towards the book. In a good horror / suspense ridden novel the main character is so deeply personified, with such blatantly human characteristics as to give the reader a template in the form of a metaphorical bed, waiting for it’s inhabitants. A relatable work background, some set of similar idiosyncrasies. These mental contacts can vary from political views, music choices, habits; it really doesn’t matter as long as an emotional bond is formed with the character that then absorbs the poor mentally unstable mind of the viewer. Once ensnared in the comfort of familiarity, insanity takes hold. An estranged level of psychosis then grips out fateful protagonist, which plays upon the deep primordial human fear of the unknown and alien. In direct correspondence, the antagonist or thusly-branded ‘Bad Guys’ become and are the real focus of the entire experience. A building full of weapons is useless with nothing to use them against, as is an illogical and Darwin-branded fool another citizen without some omnipotent being for him to coincidentally escape death from. The villain really has to act as an essential foil to the character at hand. The vampires counter Neville’s strong spirit as much as he gives them the mad hope of potential feast. The lone knight a visage of pure and holy goodness, and even more so when the oh-so-malevolent necromancer is slowly toying with his mortal fate. A good villain should be anywhere and everywhere, so that one may get the delusion of safety as the reality of the situation hits him like cement filled busses. Unfortunately, this devilish scenario and battle of the minds has to take place somewhere, even if that were a purgatory-reminiscent void (which subsequently would be interesting to see, provided the author pulled it off). The firm point here is that a landscape or general setting should be doing it’s very best to either drive you mad or ill you itself. Every blade of grass, tree, hill, and cloud should hate your guts with a passion not easily reached by mortals. The necessity to extrapolate upon the two major themes of horror: Paranoia and claustrophobia can only be aided by a setting so very committed to your demise. Whether that be through oppression (the snow in The Shining), the isolation (empty city in I Am Legend) or a seemingly ‘nice’ town / neighborhood (either Pet Semetary or Amityville Horror) no one should make the mistake of feeling safe in the environment laid out for them. The perfect propagandistic fool is flawed and familiar in an almost perfect yin-yang symbiotic. The emotional connection between reader and helpless victim should be almost instant and strong, because a good story in any genre has clearly defined and supported character relationships. Amongst this, the main character should leave the reader with such a clear definition as to their persona that if called upon to answer a “What would [INSERT NAME HERE] do'” question the answer would be clear as crystal. Take Jack Torrence from The Shining: A middle aged man, still wracked with guilt from mistakes made long past. Recovering from a hard alcoholic obsession after years of being off the metaphorical wagon. Has a mediocre job that was once stunning and fabulous, now a dead weight attached to his shoulders. Has a fair-weather friend. Has a wife and a child. Unto these qualities he is an ample canvas for the exchange of knowing-nods as well as insight. With these qualities in mind, we can cling to the grounding idiosyncratic processes throughout the imminent and most likely horrific tribulation to come. When we have that little window of prevalence to see the inner workings; the madness to the method, with which we peer into an important part of our beloved meat shield. Psychosis encompasses a variety of psychological disorders; Paranoia, Schizophrenia, aggressiveness, and so forth. The video game Doom (original) had no horror bearing because your character was a testosterone oozing tough man whom carried guns in one hand and hormone crazed women in the other. It really painted too much of a picture of bravado. In Doom 3 however, everything was to be created by the player himself. No character background, no self-confident box art, the entire experience was player maintained and it was genuinely pants wetting terrifying in bits because the dark corridors and creepy accents played upon the personal feeling rather than a generated self-righteous fodder. Robert Neville in I Am Legend had been stranded alone amidst the blood hungry undead for years, and thus develops methods of ‘talking’ to himself which cripples his character and causes multiple glasses of fine rum to hit the wall with an explosive crash of rage and fermented sugar. “ He chuckled at the simplicity of it, then shoved himself up and walked crookedly up to the bar. Why not' His mind plodded on. Why go through all this complexity when a flung-open door and a few steps would end it all' For the life of him, he didn’t know.” (I Am Legend pages 29-30) Here, Neville wrestles with two halves of the same demented and socially starved coin. This theme of suicidal vs. survivalist thought proves the one agonizing point in Neville’s characterization, and hence strengthens the story in an almost ironic way. Jack Torrence develops a spirit-enhanced (which will be discussed later) hatred towards his wife. His almost glaring flaw is his old drinking addiction, which the ever-omnipresent Overlook hotel is only too happy to exploit as its tool. This leads to the horrendously grizzled and disgruntled man committing ‘REDRUM’, or at least attempting it. The fatal flaw, the mind disorder, is not only exploited but franchised and industrialized to bring our familiarity to a desperate grip on humanity as the maelstrom begins its deliberate and invincible way onwards. A villain is the key essential component to any situation where the intent is to invoke feelings of ‘fear’ and ‘paranoia’. There is always something, whether real or falsely perceived, to create the conflict (later escalated into that whole ‘horror’ thing everyone keeps going on about) in attempts to avoid what we call the ‘preventive childhood’ syndrome: wherein, to avoid trauma, a child is not subjected to any form of contrasting beliefs or clashing forces. The whole idea of fear is as a survival instinct; a base trait meant to heighten caution towards what the elusive and reclusive mind deems ‘dangerous’. The perfect antagonist for a creepy novel has three main obligatory facets: They are physically creepy, or not strictly physical at all. They encompass and exploit the traits of the selected victims. They are no-nonsense, no compromise, completely dedicated to the extermination laid out before them. The fantastic thing about the Alien movies was that the creature depicted looked really damn creepy. The whole physicality was upright enough to be human, but morphed enough to be alien. The tongue was another mouth, it had eviscerating claws, it could crawl unnaturally fast on walls / ceilings, and it’s children are parasites. The complete mutilation of general earth anatomy caused the whole ‘unnatural’ feeling, which is very prominent in horror. The same mental tangent that makes fear a survival instinct also envelops the unnatural. We don’t understand it, thus is it an instant threat. The short fuse of panic is so tuned to keeping one alive that anything not immediately diagnosed as familiar and passive is so readily an enemy. Outside of that, a villain non-manifested is just as strangely creepy because they are not so bound by physical affirmation. The only time you ever get to ‘see’ the omni judicial freak in Amityville Horror is through a single obscure glance towards a window from the boathouse, where he thinks he sees a pig. The incident with the pig eyes doesn’t count, as those are arguably not a physical manifestation but a delusion through mind games. While evidence of a genuine malign presence is evident, it remains aloof enough to not provide a definite form for it, which is important. Everyone will perceive the ‘being’ a little differently. This means that without a concrete enemy to do battle against, we are metaphorically blind and justifiably defenseless. A lot like a fear of the dark due to the inability to see an enemy, nor defend all angles from the seemingly invisible attack. When an enemy is everywhere and anywhere, the entire tone becomes understandably claustrophobic. When one hides under the covers (which are bloody impenetrable) he is shutting off the outside world and limiting the present reality. Much the same other than that the oh-so warm and safe blanket becoming a fiberglass coat that weighs a good forty pounds. Let’s look for a minute at Pet Semetarty (Stephen King, 1983) The character there has an analytical mind, and severe indecision. This leads to what is not so much a villain, but an indecent movement nonetheless, leading to the fateful twist of fate. It escalates. The thing that makes a villain so creepy is the relentlessness of their pursuit. Check any zombie movie and see, they will test your fortifications until their arms fall off, and even then will begin the ol’ headbut routine. The themes of claustrophobia discussed above are prevalent here as well because a zombie will continuously attack until dispatched. You can’t weather the storm increments as in The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). Granted, Robert Neville of I Am Legend had the daytime as a reprieve, and yet the vampires made equally horrific monsters as the commonplace bird. The direct correspondence; both were willing to risk life and wing for their prize. That relentless driving spirit is so naturally unnatural due to human nature. Like all mortal beings, self-preservation is a base instinct (which are obviously about as difficult as removing a car’s entire wheel-spinning system while it’s still rolling down a hill). In an extraneous sense, the words of an old Chinese Proverb hold true. ‘The Wise adapt themselves to situations, as water moulds itself To the pitcher’ Meaning that if one tactic isn’t working, one will switch to another for a more varied and successful victory. The sheer determination and will of the zombie / bird / vampire / insane asylum attendant unleashes that sense of resolute hostility, which is nearly always unsettling. A villain doesn’t need to be overly and often redundantly stoic, mind you. In the case of The Shining, the hotel tries many fears and psychological prods to push the family to the brink. Either way, the whole idea of constant and unfluctuating hatred is what will always make a villain in any story more than just one man irked to the verge. Reprieve is a funny thing, because unfortunately assumed safety is always showing up like an extremely metaphorical kool-aid man. This of course should either be horrendously shattered or never really prominent at all. To that end, the absolute epitome of creepy and crazy abodes has a few discerning characteristics the learned land tycoon would surely display. It should be dismal, disheartening, and depressing. It should be desolate in at least some way, shape, or form. Finally, it should offer little to no help at all towards the desperate and most likely failing leads, or alternatively do absolutely everything such a seemingly inanimate landscape can to destroy the victimized. There is no story of butchering and slaughter in Happyfunville USA without it first taking a huge and dramatic change from sparkling meadows to deep, dank pits of burning bodies, From dancing rabbits to smoldering husks of fur, From happy sun to cloudy and grey sky. The whole point here is that the entire idea of creepy is so far from what usually makes us happy (unless you’re one of those hippy degenerates with flow-constricting pants and ridiculous hair. In that case, go away! Nobody loves you for you when all you do is sit there and mope.), and switches polarity faster than the plotline to Rocky Horror Picture Show. Treasured childhood memories are desecrated to elicit us out of that comfortable niche we’ve all sunk into past our ribs. Skies refuse to relent their blockade; cold winds blow in so mocking a sense ever blunder is an insult. When one is bereft of surrounding joy and bliss it begins to seep diligently into other vectors of their mentality. Entrapped and entombed in cold packed snow, the Overlook hotel form The Shining is about as perfect an example for desolation as it gets. The Overlook was modeled as a hotel in the northern states, kept open during the summer as a prime vacation spot for it’s excellent view and well-maintained facilities. During the winter the snow is so thick they won’t even send out crews for roads past the closest village in the valley. The isolative state begins the sheer wall of obligated snow extend beyond the hotel’s borders. That physical barrier is the one thing that makes the hotel any different. Outwardly, there is a beautiful view, unprecedented cross-country skiing opportunity, and what not. Unfortunately the focus is on that aspect of being trapped like an animal (once again, claustrophobia rears its bitter-sweet head). Robert Neville lives in a hermit’s haven as he wanders the abandoned and over-grown streets of a major urban center in I Am Legend. However, the uncharacteristic lack of fully functioning and not vampire-habited people creates a strange and unsettling illusion of being truly alone as one passes by each productivity studded skyline element. While, in the book, no outward hint towards his feelings in the area is, human psyche will automatically recoil. The brain picks up patterns and develops a set of rules it uses to not govern, but identify the surrounding landscapes. Cities are naturally mentally paired with people, so a supreme lack of them is unnatural and as we’ve discussed before, goes against the survival instinct, which took this moment to leap up and scream “NO! NO! NO! THIS IS BAD AND UNFAMILIAR!” The sense of strange, not fictionally alien but literally alien areas creates that euphoric sense of existentialism that nobody save mild drug users enjoys. Open hostility is a fantastic thing because unlike a passive aggressive threat, open hostility can hardly be ignored or passed off. In that respect, an environment should optionally (depending on how much moral stress you’re willing to put your characters through,) be an active agent of opposition. In the Evil Dead film (Sam Raimi, 1981. Renaissance Pictures lmtd.) Trees rape Ellen Sandweiss’s character Cheryl. While absolutely horrific, it also serves as a fantastic example of how you are safe absolutely nowhere when your environment (much like your enemy) is absolutely everywhere and working to rip you limb from literary limb. It’s only once we look back and see just how much of a humbling and belittling force evil is that we appreciate the essential beauty of it all. The flawlessly created ‘everyman’ (slash woman, because everyone is so very gender neutral these days) with that metaphysical head consisting of an open book, allowing the reader a near first person experience unparalleled by an emotionless slab of soon-to-be-deceased cannon / zombie fodder. Most likely matched unfairly against the omnipotent, all powerful, and persistent creatures manifesting itself as a horror only those with less personal hygiene than Tim Burton could muster. All this takes place in an environment so depressing, so bleak, so unnaturally empty that it often has to break the tedium with a full fledged attack. Much like the powerpuff girls, these get cosmically stirred into a giant boiling vat of malicious intent and perceived genius until a massive accidental glob of pure creative persona gets added to the already potent (and basil scented) mixture, and you the perfect formula for a good horror story. Wield your power wisely, mind you, because you’ve been reading the works of a perfect example. Why' Because all work and no play makes Keaton a dull boy. Works Cited Evil Dead. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Bruce Campbell. Renaissance Pictures, 1981. Videocassette. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Garden City: Doubleday, 1983. Print. King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Pocket Books, 1977. Print. Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. Orb Books, 1955. Print. Charmack, John A. Doom. Computer software. Vers. 1.0. Isd Software, 1993. Web. 02 Dec. 2009.