As a Horror writer I've been often and pointedly been asked why I write this stuff. It's not ever said directly, but it's always there: Is there something wrong with you? In my own defense, quite a few people enjoy reading this same stuff and even more get a thrill out of watching it on the big screen. Just to hazard a guess, I'd say most people have in their life read a horror book or seen a horror movie. The question then becomes: What's wrong with us?
My first occasions to hear horror stories was as a child in church. I was told that there was a man in a red suit and horns who carried a pitchfork and watched everything I did and wanted to send me to the worst, most horrible place ever if I did bad things. Worse than this, I was told that there was something called 'original sin' and just by being born I was on God's crap list and if I didn't repent for things I'd never done, the man in the red suit would still get me. It didn't seem quite fair to me that my little three year old wrong-doings could earn me the same trip to Hell that someone like Hitler got.
I was scared constantly. And that was the point of those stories, to scare little boys into behaving as their parents wanted them to.
Fairy tales have the same theme: Obey your parents, or bad things will happen. I can't swear that I remember all of my fairy tales, but I do remember as a child being - probably - unreasonably worried about being eaten. For the time, being eaten seemed about the worst thing that could happen to me and I looked warily at strangers trying to evaluate in my mind whether they would try and eat me. Fortunately, there were very few cannibals in Wisconsin at that time. Jeffrey Dahmer was one, but for the life of me, I can't think of any other Wisconsin cannibals. Oh, wait. Ed Gein - but that's it.
Parents frightening their kids is one thing, but why do people want to scare themselves? Did you ever wonder why you paid good money at the bookstore and at the movies for this service that your parents would happily provide you for free? Well, horror stories are about fear, but it's not just about making yourself scared - that alone is no fun. Horror stories are about conquering your fear, and the way they do that is symbolically by creating a monster that represents a fear and by having that monster defeated. Thus it helps you to overcome your subconscious fear/Monster by identifying with the destruction of the one in the story. Works out pretty neat, huh?
Here's how it plays out in a few familiar scenarios. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was thought to the first real science fiction book, although it really is a horror story. In the story Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life - itself! As an experiment he creates for himself a man sewn together from cadavers and then embues it with life, and then seeing what an awful looking creature he's created, he abandons it. He does this because it looks so hideous, though for the life of me, I can't figure out why he had to make the thing out of several icky corpses instead of just finding one beautiful one and giving that one life. Anyways, the monster runs away and then comes back to haunt him and he has to destroy it.
The explanation for Frankenstein is that the monster represents science and the Victorian fear that science and progress had gone too far. Science, once the obedient servant of mankind, had, like Frankenstein's monster, broken free and turned against its master - us. A hundred or years later this same theme is echoed in the movie The Terminator, only this time the science that breaks free is computer science. Computers, our formerly docile servant, turn against us and band together to become one giant warlike mind which for some reason or other decides that all humans must perish throughout time. I guess we had it coming to us.
Vampires, another popular monster, have represented the once prevalent infectious disease that used to regularly wipe out giant swathes of human population. In modern times, Vampires have been reinterpeted to be kind of sexy, that is, they represent the dark sexual impulses people have inside themselves that they also think may destroy them. Vampire stories, then, become our victory over our dark, forbidden desires. Which are represented by those sexy, sexy vampires.
Sex is a constant theme in the slasher movies. The Scream movies brilliantly satirize this by having the teen-agers in the movie aware of the conventions of the genre they are living through, yet helpless to change them as those conventions become their fates. In the slasher movies young girls fear of their own sexual maturity is confronted symbolically by the slasher who represents teen-age boys through the menace of wielding the very Freudian penis/knife. You'll notice that the heroine that inevitably prevails in these movies is the virgin who never succombs to the temptation of sex and not coincidentally, does not succomb to the slasher, either.
My favorite monsters are the ones from the Japanese monster movies, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and, of course, Monster Zero. The reason I love these monsters is that they are political monsters. Think about it: Godzilla is a giant, super-powerful radioactive monster who comes from over the sea who is created by radioactivity and then attacks Japan with that same radioactivity. Sound familiar? (Hint: It's America). All these monsters from overseas are constantly attacking Japan and being beaten up by the cohesion of the Japanese people.
Now, the obvious question for me - being a horror writer and all - is: What are the symbolic monsters in my book, Breakfast with the Antichrist?
Well ... I'm not telling.
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