What makes you like horror?

[*Melody*]

I was thinking of why I watch horror movies. I'm not a huge fan of horror, but yet there's something that makes me want to see one now and then. Why is that? Do I like to get frighten? Or is it the feeling of that someone maybe watching me right now? Or that this can happen in real life?

Hmm, I don't know. At least it ain't the last part. It scares me that some horror movies have happened or could happen in real life. Those I can't watch.

What about you? What makes you want to watch a horror movie or don't watch it? Do you have any favourite? If you do, what makes it so good?

 

[suupaabaka]

I watch horror movies in part because I like the sheer variety of themes that can be incorporated into a horror movie effectively (although I hate exploitation horror) and in part because I'm on a sort of quest to find a horror movie that really scares me. The only movies to have come close were the Exorcist, the original Ring and for some strange reason, Blair Witch 2... the last I attribute to some funky mood I was in that week.

I read horror novels because they genuinely do have the ability to creep me out... Clive Barker has been the most effective at this so far.

 

[Spade]

It's hard to scare me and/or make me feel uneasy.. so I look for that. It's happened a few times over the years.

 

[dustinzgirl]

Semi-naked women.

Sue me.

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

The Exorcist, the Ring and the Blair Witch Project scared me too. But I must say that I was in awe of darkness when I was little. Seriously, I mean.

And I tend to be too scared by certain scenes from films, although, in real life I am a very cold-headed person in dangerous situations.

So, I'd say that I am part of the minority that doesn't like horror films. I see them because someone drags me there, and well, it's not that I suffer. I admit it can be fun, too.

And I liked Lovecraft. I maybe horror literature isn't as scary as horror cinema is. Or is it?

At any rate, as a writer, I have always stayed away from horror.... until yesterday. There must be something in the tea they serve here, because I posted my very first spooky story in the Really Spooky Stories thread. I am very surprised. It's a first!

Maybe I am converting to Horror.

What should I read, to convert more?

 

[j d worthington]

G.C.: You might take a look at the "Classic Horror" threads for some suggestions; or, since you already said you enjoyed Lovecraft, take a gander at his Supernatural Horror in Literature essay for suggestions -- though, unless you're into late 18th- early 19th-century novels, I'd skip a fair amount of the things up to Le Fanu as listed there. (On the other hand, if you aren't put off by such older material, he has some wonderful suggestions in there....)

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE (1927, 1933 - 1935) by H.P. Lovecraft

Works Referenced in Supernatural Horror In Literature by H. P. Lovecraft

I'd also suggest Robert S. Hichens, especially "How Love Came to Professor Guildea":

http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0734.pdf

and Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One" (for that matter, the entire collection Widdershins):

http://www.horrormasters.com/SS_Col_Onions1.htm

Newer horror: I'd strongly suggest Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell (at least, a fair smattering, though he can be quite disturbing), T. E. D. Klein (despite Nesa's good points about "Black Man with a Horn", as in all other ways the story is a gem; quiet, understated, and grows on repeated readings... whereas the rest of his work doesn't even have that caveat), Dan Simmons (especially Carrion Comfort and Lovedeath), China Mieville, and Caitlin R. Kiernan (though I have some trouble with some of her stylistic preferences here and there -- nonetheless, for weaving an eerie, nightmarish atmosphere, she is very good indeed). And of course there's Richard Matheson, as well...

As for why I like horror films.... well, I'm not a big fan of most modern horror film -- especially as done by Hollywood; though there are quite a few exceptions. I'm not into gore, slashers qua slashers, etc., but like something which gives me that frisson of the fabric of reality wearing thin, if you will... a sense of the unknown just beyond vision (Robert Wise's film of The Haunting being an excellent example, as are Val Lewton's films... and quite a few things coming over from Asia, Spain, Mexico, etc.) I like things that unsettle, that are creative, that stretch the mind and touch on that Burkean sense of the sublime.... And, of course, I have my favorite older horror films, such as the old Universal films, because these are old friends (they formed my Mother Goose, one might say....)

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Thank you, J.D.

To date, I have read something by Mary Wollstonecraft and Sheridan Le Fanu;
all of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.

I'm going to explore the classic horror thread, now.

*smiles with anticipation*

 

[Curt Chiarelli]

There remains many subtextual themes, motivs and reasons that run pulsing beneath my love of the horror genre. The one that looms largest in my long list of predilections, personal quirks and preferences is the disruption of the natural order of things. A sense of ominous portent is also something delicious to be savoured in all the best authors for all the right reasons - it's the spice that gingers up the stew. I also have serious unresolved issues surrounding death, decay and their associated places, persons and paraphernalia (cemeteries, funeral homes, hospitals, oily funeral directors, inept physicians, dissection tables, caskets, tombstones, etc.). So, the less said about that particularsubject the better!

 

[HoopyFrood]

Why do I like horror? Blimey, that's like asking why fish swim in the sea -- they just...do I've watched horror films from a very, very early age; one of my earliest memories is the ending to Silence of the Lambs and when younger I had a red-headed doll that I named Chucky! It's just the best genre, in both films and books, in my eyes. I love all kinds of horror -- I love the feeling that chilling horror induces, raising the goosebumps and making you feel uncomfortable, but I also like the gratuitously gory scenes as well (although I admit I usually end up laughing at them!) I am getting rather bored by the endless teenagers-running-around-and-being-murdered type films that are being churned out nowadays, and definitely do prefer the older films, especially the Romaro zombie films and the Evil Dead films. I love the effort involved in these films, with the amount of make up and stop time animation in them! I don't care how much people complain how fake it looks, I adore it! Although I'm also very keen on The Ring and The Grudge films (and of course Ringu and Ju-on) particularly for their weirdness and creepiness of those dark-haired women! I guess I'm quite ghoulish and do have a fascination especially with those scenes that are likely to scare or revolt people the most -- my favourite part in Hostel (which was a poor film overall, but some delightfully gory parts!) is where an eye is cut off with a pair of scissors. I can't help it, I just find these kinds of moments the most entertaining! But damn, I just love horror in general and will watch any film of that genre that you care to shove my way!

 

[j d worthington]

Hmmm... Hoops, if you like the gore that much, and you haven't already tried some of his films, you might give Lucio Fulci a go -- but I'd look for the more recent releases of his films, where they've been restored to the way he intended (most UK and American releases of his films were butchered -- better say botchered -- beyond recognition). I especially recommend House of Clocks (La casa nel tempo, 1989) and The Beyond (E tu vivrai nel terrore -- L'aldilà, 1981), as both have the graphic gore, yes, but also a very eerie atmosphere and unsettling storyline....

And I would imagine that you've seen Mario Bava's films, or at least some of them. If not, see if you can find a copy of both Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, 1963) and Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960) with Barbara Steele in a double role... a very nice example of black-and-white at its most surrealistically atmospheric....

 

[HoopyFrood]

I'm not fanatical about gore...

OK, yeah, I am But as I said I'm also a fan of the creepy and the chilling and the uncanny -- hell, I love all horror!

Anyway *Rubs hands together gleefully* Thanks for that, J.d, I shall certainly look into those!

 

[Connavar]

Stephen King ?


Seriously i havent read as much Horror as i would have liked but i like mental horror not graphic ones. They have always interested me.
I like people that can scare me with tension and the idea of what might happen. SK Salem's Lot was actually my first horror story. A very good. I have read a few since then.


Horror is too damn big to know what type and authors you might like.

Gladly Nessie the generous has send me collections of HPL, so i can read more horror soon.

Le Fanu i will also read more. Man there should be a sticky recommendation thread for horror if there isnt already im totaly newbie at the genre.

 

[j d worthington]

Well, this memory has been nagging me the last day or so, and I finally put together which essay it was. This may help to explain it a bit, just as the essay I've included in the "Horror Recommendations" thread (by Anna Laetitia Aikin, prefacing "Sir Bertrand" does, what the attractions (or at least some of them) may be....

The Spectator vol. 3

And, to save some time, here's the Aikin essay and story, as well:

Aikin, from Misc. Pieces in Prose (1773)

 

[power 0wns]

I love reading horror because the thrill, its like a new sensation being scared, I love writing, and sometime scare myself heh heh, better to read alone though, no people around, silence, =] awsome

 

[tangaloomababe]

Mostly I hate horror, I hate being frightened and yet every once in a while I feel compelled to watch something that I know will scare me terribly. Some books I have read I just have to put down, I cannot read them at night, they don't seem so scary by day.
Maybe it makes our daily life seem that much so safer!

 

[Talysia]

I'm the same as Tanga. I don't go out of my way to read horror, but when I do read it I like it to be subtle and intelligent. The type that makes you use your imagination.

 

[Daenerys]

Do people really like horror, I wonder. I know my other half makes me watch loads of zombie and horror films, and I have gotten to the point where I can laugh at Saw or Dawn of the Dead, but I still would not be the one to volunteer to watch a horror film.

As for books, theyre another matter. Then it comes down to defining horror. I do like quality. So like Talysia I'd prefer my horror to be intelligent and challenging, like any other book I read, just with an edge to it.

As for Stephen King, I used to read his books like mad, when I was 14-18. But even then I always felt let down when the climax of the story came round. Now as a woman I am perfectly aware that it's not always important and that it's just as enjoyable to have a good time while reading the leading up to the climax part, but still... It's when you are shown the monster that it stops being scary, right?

Good horror does not have to be all about monsters and ghouls anyway, right?

 

[HoopyFrood]

Yes, I truly do like horror. And I always volunteer to watch horror films -- if I arrange to go to the cinema with friends, or if we're going to watch a film together in the house, my first choice would be some sort of horror film! I have a small collection of them here in the house, so there's always a new one waiting to be watched by everyone I happily watch them by myself too, especially films like Evil Dead, The Ring or Silent Hill (the latter mainly for the music and the scenery; it's too CGI based for me to truly love it).

I'm a big fan of Stephen King and, as I constantly rave about around this site, his endings are one of the main things I love about this books. You rarely get a happy ending with King but it suits his style; he's big on verisimilitude, and takes a long time setting up the characters' often gritty and troubled backgrounds, and creating the community in which they live which also more often than not has its far share of problems, too. I think it would go against all this detail if these gritty stories suddenly had a happy ending. And I feel that the idea of the journey being just as important as the ending is one of the things King addresses in his Dark Tower series -- when Roland is forced to repeat his travels, it reminds both him and the reader that often it's the journey that counts the most.

I don't think it necessarily has to stop being scary when you see the monster -- it creates a great creepy atmosphere when you're not quite sure what's going on (I love the first half an hour or so of Poltergeist where strange but subtle things go on around the house, but after that it does get rather silly) but then finally seeing the monster gives you that shock of finally confronting it, especially if it's particularly evil/grotesque looking! My favourite part in the Ring is, without a doubt, the ending when you finally see Samara in all her scary glory

 

[j d worthington]

Well, Daenerys, for purposes of this thread, I'll make a distinction here (one I tend to agree with), using the older model of Mrs. Radcliffe (followed by Devendra P. Varma) between horor and terror: Ann Radcliffe included a line in one of her essays that "they must be men of cold imaginations indeed to whom certainty is more terrible than surmise", noting that "Terror and Horror ...are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them...; and where lies the great difference between terror and horror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?", while Varma drew the distinction between "awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse". So I'd have to say I'm more a fan of "terror" than "horror". Yes, the more grotesque, graphic, and gruesome tale does have its place and its own worth (certainly Ambrose Bierce put it to a wide variety of uses with his work, from the evoking of pity to sheer horror and repulsion to terror to presenting the reader with a situation where one either laughs and feels awful about what one is laughing about or doesn't and proves to be a prude and prig); but I'm much more a fan of that which expands the imagination and has -- as Teresa has been discussing in another thread -- that sense of the numinous, rather than the typical horrors in more recent fiction. (Again, we have some excellent writers working in the field now that don't fit this profile, but they aren't the ones people generally think of when they think "horror" or "macabre" literature.)

As for this type of story -- the tale of terror -- yes, people distinctly enjoy it; it remains quite possibly my favorite type of tale because it does take a great deal of imagination and "thinking outside the box"; it takes a sensitiveness to nuance and shadings of language and symbolism, and an appreciation of subtleties and shadowings. (E.g., the possibility that the Roger Chillingworth that makes his appearance in The Scarlet Letter may not be who Hester thinks he is, but an infernal being sent to ensure the damnation of Rev. Dimmesdale, something hinted at but left very uncertain; or the chapter in The House of the Seven Gables depicting the silent vigil of Judge Pyncheon, with the cat who waits outside the window... the cat who is more than a cat, and waits for a special kind of prey -- just to take two examples from Hawthorne.)

I find this sort of tale gives me a frisson as special in its own way as the beauties of great poetry or music -- and there's a very close connection there, actually. Again, to take a note from a very cogent commentator on the subject (Robert Aikman), the best tales of this type are very closely allied to poetry, as they require a very delicate, deft touch that adumbrates rather than states baldly... thus leaving the reader room to create something much more terrifying than what could ever be put on any screen by the most talented special effects team around, not because of the mere bodily harm such a thing may be capable of inflicting, but because of the implications to our perception of reality, something many of the best writers often force us to reexamine....

 

[HoopyFrood]

I like those distinctions between horror and terror; it describes them particularly aptly. Terror really is like a growing sense of dread, a rising emotion that seems to fill you completely and a thousand possibilities going through your head, whereas horror is a sudden closing down, indeed a contraction, focusing entirely on that one horrifying thing.

I think I do prefer that sense of terror in books -- one of the times I've truly been 'creeped out', as it were, by a book and felt the goosebumps break out was in The Shining, where Danny is inside room 217 and hears the shower curtain draw back behind him. And when he leaves the room, he hears footsteps running across the floor inside and the door handle shakes as something tries to get through the door. It's the idea of not knowing what's in the room, hearing it but not seeing it, is very creepy. And in films, I love the build up that usually happens in the first half an hour or so -- when strange, subtle things start happening and things just seem...awry. Crooked pictures or strange sounds or people acting ever-so-slightly odd. Gore and grotesque you can become desensitized to, but that eerie feeling will always make the hair stand up on the back of one's neck and to shift uncomfortably.

That said, I do like the shock factor too. Those moments where you just can't help exclaiming out loud!

Ah, I don't know...give me both (not necessarily together, of course) and I'll be happy.