Ask the question, “What is horror?” to a group of 10 people and you’re likely to get 10 different responses. It’s a genre. It’s being scared. It’s seeing someone get hacked to pieces. It’s walking in on your grandmother while she’s getting out of the shower. Yikes! The point is, the word horror means different things to many people.
Folks have tried for decades to define horror, and while I can’t even fathom trying to answer that question here in any clear-cut way, I can tell you what horror means to me.
When I was a young boy, the first horror movie I ever saw was JAWS. I remember staying up late in my pajamas to watch it with the family, and upon seeing the shark spring out of the water after Roy Scheider mumbles, “Come on down here and chum some of this shit,” I promptly retreated behind the easy chair my mother was sitting in and whimpered like a little a girl. To this day I refuse to swim in an open body of water.
What I just told you can be described as visceral horror. I saw something, got scared, and ran away. I wasn’t scared by anything I thought or felt, but by an image that was projected onto my brain by an outside source.
Some years after JAWS, I picked up a copy of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. It has
since gone on to become my favorite novel of all-time (followed closely by Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot). Reading that book scared the crap out of me. The words Blatty used to describe young Regan as she fell deeper and deeper into possession astounded me, and the impact that had on my mental movie theater affected me in such a way that I couldn’t read the book at night before going to bed because I was afraid my mattress would start to shake, or that my dresser would somehow project itself across the room by forces unseen.
Here’s the kicker, though: long after putting the book down, I was still scared. For days, weeks, and months afterward. I imagined things flying around my room as the result of some maniacal demon. I imagined my mother’s head turning around while she cooked dinner. Hell, I even imagined my cat doing the spider walk down the stairs. Rest in Peace, Sparky.
The point is, I was scared by things I was imagining. I worked myself up into a frenzy over nothing. Not from anything I was immediately seeing in front of me, but by the things I was thinking in my mind. That, to me, is logical horror. Horror of the mind. Not brought on by what’s seen, but what is unseen. You can’t touch it, smell it, or look at it, but you can imagine it; and sometimes the things we imagine are far scarier than the things we see.
So for me horror is two things: visceral and logical. I can get scared by the things I see, or I can get scared by the things I don’t see, but think I see. Is one scarier than the other? You bet your ass it is.
Folks, this just ain't scary
The mind can come up with things that put Hollywood to shame. Most times, when the monster is finally revealed either in the movies or in fiction, we’re disappointed. “That’s it?” we ask ourselves. “That’s not scary.” As a young boy, JAWS was scary, but nowadays I wonder what the hell I was ever afraid of (I still won’t go into the water, though, because of the things I think).
In fiction, you can reveal the monster if you want, but I submit to you that it’s a much more satisfying experience for the reader to never see the beast, but to see the results of it in their mind’s eye. Let them step into the position of the hero/ine. Let them work it out as they go along. Reveal too much of the monster, and you risk taking your reader out of the story by not making it believable enough for them.That’s the kiss of death.
Of course, when it comes to stories about werewolves, zombies, vampires, or a psychotic serial killer who likes to dine on her victim’s flesh, then you have no choice but to reveal and describe what it looks like. There’s balance to be had, though. You can choose what you want your readers to know, based on what your antagonist knows. You can describe the thing that goes bump in the night, but you don’t necessarily have to describe how it operates. You can show a room with blood and hair all over the walls, with body parts hanging from the ceiling fan, and eyeballs peering out of glass of water, but you don’t have to show how it happened. Let the reader work that out. Let them imagine someone being dismembered three ways from Sunday.
Your job as the horror writer is to evoke fear in the reader, and it’s their job to fill in the blanks, so make sure you leave enough blanks to be filled. If you never leave anything to the imagination, then what’s the point?
