What Is Horror?

What is horror? Most answers will say “horror is fear,” leaving it at that. But it is not that simple. Fear is complex, and so must then be the answer. “I know it when I see it,” works here to some degree. A serial killer movie could be a mystery, or horror. And while the line may be thin between them, we can sense it when we cross it.

The Stakes

What is horror? An emotion–Fear. But what’s horror fiction? We experience fear as a motivator in many stories. There is fear when someone cannot pay the mortgage. There is fear when the doctor has news. There is fear before a big speech. There is fear before asking someone out on a first date.

Most would say that horror has nothing to do with those kinds of fear. This fear, the horror fear, is a fear of loss, death, madness, fear of losing a loved one. This fear has a different kind of stakes, a more base level. This is primitive fear, the kind of fear that takes over the mind, that seizes upon something deeper. This fear is the one that is the base emotion of horror.

The fear of losing one’s home, having family, children, evicted into the street–is there horror there? How do we distinguish the horror from the drama? Does the on-coming blizzard? Does the need for medicine?

When we talk horror we are talking something more than normal fear. More than fear of the average. We have to elevate the situation to lower the fear to this primitive level. But the question is: is this due to the nature of fear? or is this a constraint of the genre? Are we basing our understanding of horror on this fear? or are we limiting our work to artificial constraints of genre?

The Monster

Do you need a monster to have a horror story? There are horror stories where the evil is human–but that is dancing around the question. Do you need a monster to have horror?

Why is The Martian, a story about a man trapped, surrounded by death, not horror, but The Thing with a similar setting is?

Mark Watney’s foe is the environment–this is Robinson Crusoe. Mars is a desert: no water, no food, no resources to get anywhere, no air to breathe. We are at the basic fear level here, and yet. And yet.

It is not merely the fear of death that brings horror.

Do we need a monster? In the sense that we need intent, I think so. Horror needs something more to feed it than simple fear. Something more than high stakes. It needs intent.

Evil? Evil is, perhaps, a lazy way, to describe what horror needs. No doubt there may be counter examples, but for now, evil it is.

Power

There is another side to “monster,” linked to both “monster” and “stakes”–power. Our monster cannot simple be monstrous, it must also possess the necessary ability to cause harm.

Two stories, both with a dog with rabies, threatening a child, parent present: Cujo and To Kill A Mockingbird. In Mockingbird, the dog, Old Tim Johnson, gets rabies, and Atticus has to shoot him. There is tension in the scene, but it lacks any horror, especially compared to Cujo.

Both dogs are deadly to humans: any bite will pass on rabies which is deadly, even if the bite itself is not. But Cujo has something Old Tim Johnson doesn’t: power. Cujo is bigger, stronger, and now with the madness of rabies is dangerous.

In this example, most of this is in the narrative for sure. Both dogs are deadly in real life, but it is a good example to work with.

The Monster

Zombie movies offer a large variety of stories, but usually we have a group of survivors and a much large group of zombies. How is a zombie horde different from an orc army? How is a zombie infested world different from Mars? The outcome is the same, death in the environment, lack of supplies, food, etc.

Zombie in a single word, describes the dangers outside. They represent “monster”, unlike the orc army, which, despite monstrous properties, is described as “enemy.” In horror, while there are enemies and friends, the evil is a monster. In fantasy, while there can be monsters, the evil is an enemy.

The Evil

So how do we separate horror from fantasy, such as The Lord of the Rings? Sauron is the image of evil, raising an army of monsters to destroy the world. He has the intent. We have fear. Our stakes are high, and I will reject the notion that the setting itself is a defining feature. So what differentiates The Lord of the Rings from horror?

Is it number? Can we have an army in a horror story? Is it the kind of people in the story? They are important, leaders, kings, they are special. Horror tends to be about normal people–but that is not a requirement.

The Nazgul hunting Frodo has every trapping of a horror story: a person hiding from impossibly strong creatures of evil. They are hunting him, not lashing out at random, like an orc army might. All of the things are there. This is a horror story trapped in the larger narrative of a fantasy epic.

Wrongness

There is something else as well. As evil as Sauron is, his presence in Middle Earth is normal. Horror brings something abnormal into the world of the story. That abnormality is part of what makes is horror–the “not right” is crucial component to this primitive fear. The fear of not just stakes, but of ‘wrong.’

And yes, I rejected the setting earlier–but that was in the sense that Middle Earth is a fantasy world. The fantasy setting in of itself is not enough to dismiss horror.

These components all come together to make horror. Fear is the basis, but not just any fear, fear of the wrong. We need to have high stakes, but–and this is important–this does not mean death. Stakes can be lower and horror still exist. We need a monster: with power and intent.

And there is one final piece to the puzzle–hope.

Hope

In many ways hope is a part of fear. They work together in the story. Hope is an amplification of fear. But they are not opposites, nor do they cancel each other out. Instead they each play a role balancing each other out.

An example against this is Hostel. In an attempt to ramp up the tension, we see several people killed, horrifically, but in a situation where there is no change to escape. There is no hope.

Torture and death without hope is tragic. It is grotesque. It is revolting. It is not horror.

There is no fear in an inevitable situation–the outcome is known. It is not until later when there is a real possibility for escape, that we have fear. The chase, being one of the dances between hope and fear, best conveys how this works.

This hope of escape, paired with the fear of being caught provides the tension. We are gripped in the horror, held firm in fear by our hope.

Hope’s dance can be a burst, like the chase. It can also be a slow release. Hope, held high at the start of our story, dwindling over time. Slowly we have replaced one with the other. This descent into hopelessness brings with it. We are holding onto hope, not realizing there was a leak in the container, not until we need it. Only then we discover how little was left. What do we do in these moments?

The Story

We are going to take all of these components to make horror: fear, stakes, a wrong monster with evil and intent, and enough hope to hold it together to create our story. Here is the foundation we will build from to find the horror.

So, You Want To Write Poetry, Part Three

Meter

You cannot escape meter. It is in all writing, all speaking, and whether you do it intentionally or not, it is always there in your work.

Meter is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in your words.
For the Roman poets, for example, meter was everything. Catullus, my favorite poet, wrote hendecasyllabic poetry. Shakespeare wrote most of his work in iambic pentameter. From Twelfth Night:

If music be the food of love, play on;

If you over exaggerate each stressed syllable, you can hear it. da DA, da DA…

If music be the food of love, play on;

You can hear it now, the beat of the words.

Iambs are only one of many patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. There are also dactyls, spondees and pyrrhic feet.

You will hear meter as you read aloud during editing. Particularly when a misplaced word sticks out. Breaking the meter has an effect on the ear, and can be used intensionally for emphasis or sometimes to the detriment of the line.

When rhyme started to fall out of favor, a form called Blank Verse rose. This is verse that retains a strict meter pattern, but has no rhyme (or at least does not require it). Lines would have a set number of syllables, stresses a certain pattern.

Structure, it seems was an important part of how poetry was defined for a long time.

When you write free verse (or prose, or blog posts, or even tweets), meter is both present, and in the background. You aren’t writing it to a set pattern, but it will still have an effect on the poem as a whole.

And I am not suggesting you need to scan your poetry, marking stressed and unstressed, looking for patterns–but I will suggest you should be able to. And as you read to edit, if you have a word that sticks out, but aren’t sure why, see if it fits the beat.

So, You Want To Write Poetry, Part Two

Rhyme

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
– Robert Frost

Rhyme is, perhaps, the biggest elephant in the room when we talk poetry, so I think we should just jump in.

Rhyme is hard. Good rhyme more so.

At one time, rhyme was an essential part of poetry in English. Poetry was mostly rigid forms, like ballroom dance. You wrote poetry, but restricted; you wrote sonnets, ballads, you wrote odes and villanelles.

Even as we move forward in time, poetry still keeps a meter and rhyme scheme. The form is more fluid–poets are creating the form they desire in their poem, and adhering to their own rules. Metered couplets, patterned quintets, etc.

Now tastes have changed, and, in a general sense, we have expanded past these restrictions on rhyme and meter. Most (I would estimate) of the poetry published today is free verse, that is without rhyme or strict meter. And while it is not verboten, rhyme has fallen out of favor.

Rhyme is hard. It is hard because it is a restriction on the word choice for the end of your line. It is hard because it will dominate the sound of your poetry. The danger being that the poem will sound ‘sing-songy’ with the stresses of the poem falling harder on the rhyming word than anywhere else.

Rhyme and meter tend to go together, because the pattern of sound becomes important as well. Not just ‘do these words sound alike’ but the spacing between them becomes important.

One way to combat this is to not make the end of your sentence (or phrase) the end of the line. By adding in a pause elsewhere, it helps spread the flow of sounds, rather than hitting the end of each line as a punch.

Other tool is off rhyme, or slant rhyme. These are words that aren’t the traditional rhyme, such as tours and yours but rather focus on the stressed sound. Yours and years are slant rhyme. Also eyes and light. That long I sound is matched between the two.

My recommendation is to come back to rhyme. Build up your other tool set first, working on your own voice. It may be that your voice and rhyme aren’t compatible. It may be they are perfectly matched.

That said, I do think everyone should go through the various forms. Writing a sonnet or villanelle offers structure, which can actually help free you to work. We’ll get to that soon.

so–
at a later time
we will come
back to rhyme.