german tangerine
I have been watching more horror movies and consuming more horror books lately. It just seems like a summer thing to do. I probably read every giant Stephen King from his booze-and-cocaine era lying down in a chair made of plastic tubing, a Snoopy beach towel my skin’s only defense from a vinyl-stripe cattle brand. Like I’m in a hardcore frat that is dedicated to beach sitting. We burn lounge-chair webbing into our FLESH! Because we’re BROTHERS! Brother Jeff got a tattoo of a Weber grill!
BACK TO HORROR
Some horror is fantastic and a very, very large proportion of it is “okay,” and a probably higher-than-average percent of it (compared to other movie genres) is flat-out terrible. However, as every horror fan knows, there are not just shades of terrible when it comes to horror, there are actual genres and subdivisions of terrible. There’s terrible on purpose (which only works if it’s also legitimately funny on purpose). The opposite is terrible but “oh shit they were serious” (and funny by accident), which is honestly my favorite kind of terrible.
So it doesn’t really count that a large proportion of horror is terrible because you have to exclude the terrible-on-purpose, which is a large exclusion and also an artistic tradition in its own right. My point being that in this case you can’t use “there’s so much bad horror out there”* as a way to shit on the genre in general. It’s just a function of numbers really.
*I don’t get that anyway. You don’t watch horror because so much of it is bad? Okay, just watch the good stuff! Do you not read great poetry because bad poetry exists? Do you not eat the exquisite Parisian croissant because there are Pop-Tarts in the world? Do you hear how silly you sound?
HERE COMES THE PRETENTIOUS BIT!
Consuming horror is a wholly unique experience and different from any other literature/film experience. (This is probably true of some other genre-type things, in fact one in particular that I’m going to mention at the end of this paragraph,** but I’m sticking to what I know.) You have to watch or read horror and PRETEND THAT THIS IS HAPPENING TO YOU.
I cannot stress that enough: if this were an academic comparative-literature journal article I would be calling it Smartypants’ Axiom or something. Horror has to be happening to you for it to be horror. (If it’s upsetting but is not happening to you, it might be psychological suspense.) The self-insert way of watching horror is how you know it’s horror.
**I am not a big fanfic person, but I know enough to know that there’s a whole subset of “you” fanfic called “Reader Insert” or something like that where that’s the whole literary conceit, the second person.***
***Used to great effect in my impressionable-age encounter with Bright Lights, Big City, which notably is a very short novel—I don’t think second person is easily sustainable and I also think most developmental editors would maybe argue against for multiple Reasons
ANOTHER PRETENTIOUS BIT, I’M AFRAID
If you try to analyze a horror book or horror film in a standard-literary-analysis way—the characters and the climax and dialogue and all that—you’re going to have a bad time.
Hark! I am not advocating that those things don’t matter in genre fiction and that they will get a pass for sucking. My point is that as long as they don’t stand out as actively bad, they’ll be fine. People aren’t looking for a horror movie to win “best scriptwriting.” The fewer times you think “that wouldn’t happen”**** or “no one would do that” the better.
****Excluding paranormal phenomena, obviously. Of course you have to believe in those, in the context of the movie. You have to be at least “if that were happening [to me], that is totally how it would go down.”
No way could you get away with just plot/scene/moment after plot/scene/moment and some “plausible” characters and dialogue in a literary-fiction book. Publishing houses***** wouldn’t touch it, critics would ignore it. That’s not because literary fiction is held to a “higher standard.” (I don’t play the “genre fiction don’t get no respect” game, it’s clearly untrue.) It’s not even really because the two different styles of literature don’t have the same audience. It’s because the literary strategies of literary fiction and horror fiction are literally (ha) different.
*****(Let’s save the self-publishing discussion for another day, it’s actually interesting but I DON’T HAVE TIME, DAMN IT)
A Big Important Novel****** wants you to fall in love with its characters (Franzen, Irving), plots and vibes (Patchett, Everett), or words and sentence structure (DFW, Saunders). You’re in the novel’s world, but you admire it, you watch it. (The best is when a book is like a really good movie; unless it’s too much like a movie. I don’t like books to feel “scriptwrite-y.” I don’t like books to feel like the author either sees it as a film or consciously wants to make it easy to adapt. Either one of those scenarios is no bueno for me as a reader.) (It’s also sad, because you’re depriving yourself of someone’s creative vision for adapting your book because of trying to control the situation. ART DEPENDS ON NOT TRYING TO CONTROL THE SITUATION!)
******These are kind of Sarcasm Caps but not wholly. I love Big Important Novels and read as many as I can. I mean, you know this already. DFW fangirl? Multiple read-throughs of Infinite Jest? Reaches for that excerpted bit from The Pale King whenever I get Too High? Yeah. I’m down with the BIN.
ME ME ME ME ME
Horror is a constant “oh wow that would be so bad if it happened to me.” You don’t really care about the character experiencing the horrible things. You might identify a little with the source of the horror (like in a slasher********) but barely. You have to be in the mindset of me me me ahhh that would be so scary, ahhhhh I would hate to have my eyeball gouged out by this vengeful tentacle ghost or whatever. Eeeek I wouldn’t like it if the door was pushed shut by an unseen hand and a china doll with crossed-out magic marker eyes turned its head toward me. No!
(Note: the hastily described horror scenes above are not from movies that I’ve seen, they came from my brain. You are welcome to have them, we can do like a take a penny/leave a penny situation.)
********Even this is hard, as they’re mostly blank slates. I have often longed for a middle ground between a silent blank slate slasher who kills a bunch of people (Michael Myers, for example) and a wisecracking sitcom character (shut up Freddy) and you’re mostly going to find it in fancier fare like Pearl. (God I love Pearl.)
(Another question: does “slasher” imply stalking and killing or is any movie with sufficient gore a “slasher”? Discuss in the comments oh wait I don’t have those. Find me and tell me.)
—mimi smartypants was also released as a promotional single in France.