Category: Horror

Pop culture reference. Haven’t done one of those in ages…

I’ve blathered on about different genres a bunch of times. It seemed like this might be a good time in the year to revisit one in particular that I haven’t talked about in a while. On the off chance you haven’t noticed the sudden rise of bats, pumpkins, and scarecrows in your neighborhood, we’re going to be talking about horror.

Maybe it’s just the particular bubble I’m in, but it feels like horror’s finally, truly inching its way out into the mainstream. Even just ten or fifteen years ago, a lot of folks still viewed horror as this big, general bin filled with Satanists, slashers, and screaming people. And, let’s be honest, anyone who wrote horror clearly was just working through tons of childhood issues, right? Probably didn’t help that for years there were some folks who loudly insisted you could only write horror if you’d gone through something traumatic…

Simple truth is, just like sci-fi or comedy or romance, horror stories get broken down into many different sub-genres.  Us is horror, sure, but that doesn’t mean we immediately lump it in with the new Halloween reboot. Cherie Priest’s The Toll is horror, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing the same things as Wesley Chu’s Walking Dead tie-in book, Typhoon. And none of these are like my story Dead Moon.

I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that sometimes things get the wrong genre label hung on them, and it creates a clash of expectations. We went in told we were getting a story that would do this and this, but got one that did that by using that. And, personally, I think this is true with sub-genres, too. If I tell readers they’re getting a slasher story and it turns out to be much more of a monster story, there’s a good chance a lot of the story is just going to feel off balance to them. It won’t hit a lot of the “correct” benchmarks my audience is expecting.

That said, I wanted to toss out a couple different sub-genres of horror to think about. Some of them are well established and have been discussed (and debated) to death.  Others are just things I’ve noticed and named on my own that I feel are worth mentioning. I’ve brought up a lot of them before.

This one’s easy. It’s pretty much the classic spooky story. The pale woman out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night.  The awful-smelling thing down in the lower berth. That creepy guy in the elevator letting you know there’s room for one more…

There are a few key things about these stories.  One of the biggies is that our protagonist usually doesn’t suffer any physical harm. Their underwear needs to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years, but overall they tend to come out okay. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it’s usually the bad guy or a supporting character. Also, these stories tend not to have explanations– they just are. There aren’t any cursed objects or ancient histories at play.  This is just the kind of stuff that happens in a supernatural world.

Thrillers stand a bit away from the pack ‘cause they tend to be more grounded than most horror stories. Very few vampires, no demons, not a lot of machete-killers. Even if they have a supernatural element, the horror rarely comes from that element. They’re very real-world horror stories, for the most part.

The key thing is that a thriller’s all about right now.  It’s about the ticking clock, the killer hiding behind the drapes, or the foot that’s just inches from the lethal booby trap. There’s a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on them for the run of my story.  A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge for almost the whole story.

These are the tales when the universe itself is against my characters.  Every person they meet, every object they find, everything they do–it all serves some greater, awful evil. It’s just so big and overwhelming. You may have heard the terms “Lovecraftian horror” or “cosmic horror” too.

I think a lot, if not most, post-apocalyptic stories fall here. The ones that lean towards horror over sci-fi, anyway. The entire world now belongs to the zombie hordes, the cannibal gangs, the killer virus, whatever. I’d probably toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, too, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story.  There’s nothing else for us or for the characters to interact with. 1408, The Shining, and Event Horizon could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.

When you get right down to it, these stories are just about body count. How many men, women, and teenagers can the killer reduce to cold meat? Point to note–almost never children.

One of the big things with slasher stories is there’s usually a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it’s important to note it’s rarely deliberate or malicious. It’s just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job. They’re pretty much a parkour of death. The original Friday the 13th franchise pretty much became the standard for slasher stories, and it’s what most people tend to think of first when  the term comes up.

A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-elementto them, trying to figure out who the killer was. Then it kind of morphed into being a (usually) weak twist. Slasher stories also developed a bad habit of falling back on using insanity as their only motivation and got stereotyped as “psycho-killer” movies. Which is a shame ’cause some of them are very clever and creepy.

I’m not sure if Stephen King actually coined the term “torture porn” in his old Entertainment Weekly column (does he still do that?), but that’s the first place I remember seeing it.  At its simplest, torture porn is about making the reader squirm.  If I can make them physically ill, that’s a big win. 

The characters in torture porn are almost always underdeveloped, going with the idea that we’ll just relate to them and what they’re going through on a basic human level. More than any other form of horror, torture porn isn’t about characters—it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters.  They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected… and we’re getting every gory detail of it.  Somebody I used to work with once told me “porn is when you show everything,” and this sub-genre really leaves nothing to the imagination.

A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. They’re bound, drugged, completely alone, or vastly outnumbered. Unlike a slasher film– where there’s always that sense that Phoebe might escape if she just ran a little faster or make a bit less noise– there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away.  That hope isn’t here, because that’s not what these stories are about.

Worth noting there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story, and one of the big ones is the sheer number of people killed. Slashers are about the body count, but (as the name implies) torture porn is about how long single deaths can be drawn out.

The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm. Monsters are rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming tendency to be nigh-invulnerable. The emphasis here is that there’s nothing my heroes (or anyone else) do can that’ll stop this thing’s rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying.

I just talked about monsters a few months back, so I won’t rehash a lot of that here. You can just go read my birthday post.

To paraphrase from the original Hellboy movie (which fits nicely in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back.  While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back. Not in a desperate, flailing way, but in a trained, well-equipped, locked-and-loaded way.

I’m not saying it won’t go exceptionally bad for them (and it often does), but there stories are about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale.  For a while, anyway.  To quote an even wiser man… even monsters have nightmares.

So there’s a couple of subgenres we could break horror down into.  And like I said before, there’s many more.  It’s not a complete list, and you can probably think of some others we could talk about. Feel free to add ‘em down in the comments.

Also, why are we talking about this?

When most of us start off as writers, we flail a bit. We attempt to copy stories even though we don’t quite understand all the mechanics of them.  We’re not sure where our own stories fit under that big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or…).  We’ll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the overall tone of yet another. 

Y’see, Timmy, it’s important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons.  One is so I’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere.  Two is that I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is. If I tell the editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected. My readers may toss it aside.

At the worst, they’ll all remember me as “that idiot” the next time they see something of mine.

Next time… well, next time it’s actually Halloween. But it’s also the day before November begins. And for a lot of writers November means NaNoWriMo. So I wanted to toss out a few quick thoughts about that.

Until then, go write.

I’ve rambled on here once or thrice about characters. Protagonists vs antagonists. Main characters vs.  supporting characters vs. background characters. Who should get namedand who shouldn’t.

But it struck me that one thing that almost never comes up is, well, how many characters should I have. How many can my story really support? How many does my story need?

Yeah, that sounds a little odd but some stories need more characters than others. A murder mystery with two characters doesn’t leave a lot of room for red herrings—especially when one of them is dead on page two (thanks, Owen!). If I want to write a slasher or torture porn story, well, I’m going to need a few extra teenage campers to send off into the woods. Heck, think how much it could limit my sci-fi story not to have a red shirt or three that can head up to that ridge to look around.

The truth is, a lot of stories have certain minimums. Nothing’s written down, mind you—there’s no chart somewhere that says romance=8 characters, mystery=15, urban fantasy=23.  But, as I just hinted, I can start hitting some odd problems when my story’s understaffed. Suddenly my murderous alien monster seems a little less genetically superior because, well, it’s not managing to kill anyone. Because there’s nobody for it to kill.

One of my Saturday geekery movies a few weeks back had this problem. It was a slasher film. Nubile kids up at the lake smoking pot and having premarital sex (a recipe for sudden death). Thing is… there were only four of them. Two couples. Which… well, it didn’t give our murderous killer much to work with. He just kinda stood around for a lot of the movie. And then he had two “attacks” where he didn’t kill anybody. Or even wound them.

If I had to guess, based off my own experience with such things, the screenplay went through a lot of revisions and had a lot of cuts. A LOT of cuts. And one thing that went away was extra characters. All those people with just one or two lines, anybody who only had a single contribution toward advancing the plot, everyone who was only there to look good in a bathing suit or a wet t-shirt.   They all got trimmed and cut and combined and suddenly—again, this is my just my guess—this summer camp went from nine or ten counselors to only four. And, sure, each of these four had a lot to do, but they were just too rare for our mystery murderer to kill one of them off at the end of act one. Or even act two. The story couldn’t afford to lose a character, so the killer kept… not killing them.

Essentially, it was a slasher film where nobody got slashed.

Sometimes, weird as it sounds, we need that nubile teen in the wet t-shirt running through the woods. Okay, we don’t need her specifically, but we need somebody there because what happens to that person is setting a certain mood and letting us know some things up front. More characters raise the stakes and heighten the mystery. We need the red shirts, the lab assistants, and that guy who’s acting shifty but has a pretty solid alibi for the time of the murder because sometimes they really are advancing the plot.

And, yeah, I know this may sound a little odd to say because I’ve talked a lot here about paring away excess. I’ve made many posts about trimming the fat and figuring out if I really need this character or not. But this is one of those odd balance things we all need to figure out for ourselves. Which really sucks, I know. I wish that chart did exist so I could just tell you how many characters is the correct number for your story.

Y’see, Timmy, this is one of those things that just falls under experience and empathy. It can’t really be taught, it just needs to be figured out. And I’m going to need to figure it out every single time, because my mystery in the Hamptons is going to (hopefully) be different than my mystery in the Catskills and neither of them are like my Long Island mystery (which partly takes place at the club, so there are at least a dozen suspects. Three dozen if we’re going to consider staff). I need to figure out that perfect balance between enough characters to propel the plot forward, but not so many that I’m bogging it down.

It’s tough, but it can be done. And you can do it.

I was going to say “count on it!” but that’s just way too cheesy.

Anyway…

This weekend is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies and also the Dystopian Book Club at the Last Bookstore. If you’re in the southern Californiaarea, maybe I’ll see you there for at least one of them.

Next time here… okay, look. Next time I’m probably going to do something quick. I’ll explain why then. But if you’re in the Dallas area, leave the 20th open.

Until then, go write.

Tomorrow’s my birthday. One of those big landmark/milestone birthdays. Which seems impossible because I don’t feel a day over 200 most of the time.

Anyway… to celebrate my final day as a young man, a couple of us are going to go see the new Godzilla movie tonight (I’ll be watching it at midnight when I become old), and that got me thinking about monsters. 

Monster stories are one of those sub-genres of horror I think get glossed over a lot. I’ve mentioned them in passing before, but it’s worth taking a closer look. Just because I have a monster in my story doesn’t automatically make it a monster story. And it’s my birthday so screw you all, we’re going to talk about monsters.

Horror is, simply put, the scary genre, so it’s not shocking to say that monster stories almost always involve some element of fear. It’s worth noting this fear should involve the characters and the audience. If only the audience is scared, this is more of a suspense situation.  If only the characters are scared… well, that could mean a lot of things.

The big thing that sets monster stories apart, I think, making them their own little sub-niche-genre, is that they’re about unstoppable things.  Go back to Frankenstein.  No matter what happens, the creature always breaks free, always survives. I’d tie this all the way back to the original novel, where even in the end the monster can’t be defeated—he just wanders away on his own terms to die. Except even in Shelly’s original book, we don’t know he dies. Even she left this window of “maybe he’s still out there.” Heck, go all the way back to Greek myths—we can cut off Medusa’s head and she’s still the most dangerous thing in a ten mile radius.

Because of this, a major element in pretty much every monster story is “getting the hell away from it.” Maybe it’s just the two of us running through the forest, trying to catch up with that bastard Wakko who left us behind (he’ll get his, don’t worry…). It might be a full scale evacuation of a city. There may be other elements, maybe even more dominant ones, but trying to get away is pretty much always going to be a big part of a monster story.

Another thing most good monster stories involve is a degree of self-reflection and sympathy. We’re scared by the monster but we also tend to feel a bit of pity for it. Every version of Frankenstein (well, okay, every good version) recognizes that the monster is horribly lonely, desperate to find any sort of companionship. The original Rodan has a complete gut-punch of an ending (I rewatched it recently and holy crap I did not register so much of it when I was a kid). Yeah, the monster in Super 8 is killing people, but it’s also been imprisoned and tortured by humans for the past twenty years or so.

This ties back to a common character trait I’ve mentioned one or ten times—relatability. We feel sympathy for monsters—even if it’s just for a few moments—because they reflect some basic truth about us, or humanity in general.  We all know what it’s like to be lonely. We’ve all lashed out. We’ve all growled at people and waved our arms and retreated up to the old windmill to fight off the villagers.

Anyway…

That leads to another point. Monsters tend to be characters in their own right. They aren’t nameless, unknown, unseen threats. They have personalities and motivations. They often have names. Like, actual, personal names, not just vague titles or pronouns. We all understand the difference between it and It, right…?

And one last thing. This one’s less of an absolute, but I think you’d find it to be a very common element. Comedy. Most of the best monster stories have some kind of comedy element. At the very least, they’re not dry and humorless. Partly because comedy is just unavoidable, and it naturally comes out at the most bizarre times.  But also because it lets us hang a lantern on the inherent absurdity of a lot of monster stories. Yeah, come on.  Be honest. I mean, seriously—how does a 350 foot tall lizard go unnoticed for so long? He’s five times bigger than a blue whale. Think how much it’d need to eat.

I mention all this because monsters are cool.  And because knowing my genre is important. All genres come with expectations, and the more often my genre story deviates from those expectations, the better the chances are it’s going to fall flat with my chosen audience.  If an anthology editor is looking for monster stories and I send in a piece of torture porn… that’s not going to work out well for me.  If I’ve led my agent to expect a monster story and instead I give him a fantasy romp with dragons, he’s probably going to start over from square one in a lot of ways. And if every movie in a franchise has been a slasher film and I suddenly decide to make a sci-fi monster movie…

Well, I’ve just made Jason X. Which isn’t a bad movie at all (I kinda love it), but it went against a lot of people’s expectations and stumbled hard because of that. It’s a monster movie in the middle of a slasher series.

Anyway, there’s some thoughts on monsters. Ponder them while you cheer on your favorite kaiju this weekend.

Speaking of this weekend—even though it’s my birthday, I’m helping out Jonathan Maberry by taking over the San Diego Writers Coffeehouse on Sunday.  So swing by Mysterious Galaxy between noon and three as we talk about writing, publishing, and all that.

And next time, maybe we’ll talk about worldbuilding a bit.

Until then… go write.