What Horror Means To Me
by FK Marlowe
Ok, cards on the table (and nope, they’re not even Tarot) – if you’re the kind of horror reader who likes lashings of blood and gore, I’m not for you. No disrespect to the Wade H Garretts of the world, it’s just not my jam (or other red substance.) Maybe I watched too many episodes of Casualty (Brit hospital drama, for those across the pond) as a kid, but severed limbs and spurting arteries just leave me a little meh. They’re yucky, sure, and the old needle-in-the-eyeball level of ewww makes me as queasy as the next person, but in the end, it’s all just meat to me.
Now, minds ripped apart? That’s the stuff that keeps me up at night.
I’m not fussy what does the ripping. It can be the slow corruption of a long-buried secret, or the frantic flicker of dark figures at the corner of your eye, their beckoning growing more and more insistent. I’ll take a claw down the spine or a simple droplet of ice water. Basically, to me, horror is zero to do with blood and guts, and all about the dread. And the best basis for dread, is to ask, “what if?”
It’s at the core of every horror I love to read, and what I try to write myself – the nagging what if that won’t go away.
What if that house is haunted? What if that sweet old rose-growing lady really does drink blood? What if my neighbour is a psychopath, a ticking timebomb under a polite, polished smile? What if I’m losing my mind?
As a species, we’ve evolved to be pretty good at recognising risk in advance, and heading it off with all manner of barriers and protections, physical and otherwise. Nowadays, thankfully, most of us, or at least those of us at leisure to read horror stories, don’t have to worry about existential threats on a daily basis. But what if the rules of the normal world, the laws and customs we depend upon to go on living our lives, aren’t as solid as they seem? If our own perception of reality is wrong, warped? If we can’t trust our senses? The kind of story that makes me ask those questions, that’s what horror means to me.
Fear is a funny thing. You can rationalise some of it away, but really that’s just the surface stuff. The makings of a mild panic. The truly heart-pounding, mind-blanking terror has its roots so deep in our psyche, there’s no bringing it out into the daylight and staring it in the eye.
When I was researching this piece, I tried to be rational about it. I went searching for the sources of horror. There are, it turns out, 5 primordial fears humans allegedly share, which are the basis of all others. Psychologists agree these are, fear of extinction, of mutilation, of loss of autonomy, of separation/isolation, and ego-death, which is apparently some variant of being fatally embarrassed. All other fears are, it’s argued, mere modifications of these Big Five. Which does help to explain why slasher movies always seem to do so well, even if we all know only a complete idiot would go down to that cellar alone.
It also makes me feel a bit better when I read one of those lists from horror publications that dourly lecture any author rash enough to submit their tale of terror for consideration that “we do not wish to read any of the following,” only to list every possible permutation of horror story known to humankind. If there are only five fears underlying all the rest, a poor horror writer can surely be forgiven for straying into well-trodden territory. (And anyway, didn’t Freud write a whole essay on the uncanny effect of finding yourself in a familiar place despite your best efforts?)
But the idea that haunted houses and creepy children are passé, which strikes me as unfairly ruling out a whole slew of fabulous plot starters, does bring up another element of great horror – it’s not necessarily the complete originality of the premise that makes for superior shivers, but the way the story’s told.
You know the sort of telling I mean. Tales where the protagonist seems as normal as you or I, maybe even a little boring, until some tiny thing strikes a note that’s just a tad off, and everything starts to tip out of balance. The impossible comes to horrid life. Suddenly, every shadow is breathing, every dark corner hides a demon, and our poor, previously dull hero or heroine is holding on to the shreds of their sanity by their fingernails. And the truly terrifying thing, if it’s spun properly, is that every tiny step of this yarn seemed so plausible…
I suppose the tyrant of this kind of terror is the King himself, by whom I mean Stephen, but I’ll also take Du Maurier, Poe, or le Fanu for company on a dark, stormy night. Though I might have to sleep with the light on afterwards.
Speaking of King, although sadly I can’t find the quotation, so you’ll have to take my word for it, an interviewer once asked him how in the world he didn’t give himself nightmares by writing what he does. His answer was that he gets all his fears out on paper, so they just terrorise the rest of us. If that actually works, I can only imagine he sleeps like a baby.
My own bed is calling, so I’ll leave you with a few of the “what ifs” at the heart of my stories. You can read some for free on my website, to see if my kind of terror is to your taste.
What if you had a tattoo that came to life and ate you away from the inside?
What if scientists discovered vampire moths that pupated inside their unfortunate human hosts?
What if the secret you thought you’d buried came back to bite you, literally, with razor-sharpened teeth?
I’ll leave you to ponder these, or fears of your own. Night night. Creepy dreams…
F.K.Marlowe is a Shropshire lass who lived in London and Beijing before moving with her husband, three daughters and rescue pup to Vancouver. She writes horror stories with a tendency to the paranormal, and Young Adult fiction with fangs and sass.
Find out more at https://www.fkmarlowe.com or subscribe to her newsletter at https://subscribepage.io/FKMarlowe
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