Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Write What You Know

I had this story idea. The main character (told in first-person, of course) was going to be wandering their old elementary school when they remember that, as a kid, they never went into their school’s basement. Nobody did. Because, you know, of what kind of story it would have been, when our main character inevitably explores that lower level, they come across all kind of demonic imagery. There would have been blood, either molded or crusty with age (I didn’t do any research and wasn’t sure) all over the walls, sometimes forming a pentagram, sometimes, just there because, well, that’s what you write about when describing a room like this.

There was going to be something else in the room, too. Something alive. Something contained in that basement that, now that the door had been opened could escape and enact whatever sinister plan it had.

I never got that far. I never even knew what the creature was going to be. I just knew how I would have felt descending into that basement, and I knew what had to be at the bottom. You see, I never had to deal with demons or other such monsters in elementary school, but I did have to deal with my third-grade English teacher.

Nancy was, from what I remember of her, an okay English teacher. Like, she certainly didn’t go above and beyond fostering her students’ latent interests in writing, but she, you know, did teach us the ins and outs of sentence structure and hey, I guess that’s all you can ask for in third grade. And by the way, Nancy’s not actually her name. But if I’m going to speak ill of the dead, I’d rather not use more identifiers than I have to. You see, Nancy had an, ah, other side to her. And when trying to remember events from my elementary-school life, she tends to dominate my thoughts.

Sometimes, for example, Nancy told these old wives tales. Which, you know, is fine. But to impressionable eight or nine-year-old minds, well, when you tell them that cracking your knuckles leads to brittle bones and your mother cracks her knuckles all the time, well, it just might drive a kid to tears.

But there were also these other, more sinister moments. We were talking about street names once, and Nancy polled the class asking what type of street each person lived on. “A street? A road? An avenue? A boulevard?” I never raised my hand to any of those. I lived on a “Way.”

Nancy never asked what I lived on, though. At the end of those four questions, instead she said, “Well, I don’t know what else you could live on unless you lived in a bag.” And I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because I knew I lived on a way. But I didn’t have the words to express that at all.

In my story, the demon was going to torment the protagonist in largely the same way. The demon was going to present these illusory worlds, at once both grotesque as they were beautiful, and it was going to be these visions that would prompt the protagonist to investigate in the first place. Because the world couldn’t be wrong by itself, right? Somebody had to be at fault, right?

There’s this recurring dream I remember having during my time as a third grader. I don’t remember too many details now, obviously, but I do remember lying on my back, arms outstretched like some sort of horizontal crucifix, being bathed in a dim red light. And then, well…

So the basement at my school was full of rumors. Nobody ever seemed to go down there, and the few times that somebody did open the door, there was this weird red tint over everything, like somebody had put red tissue paper over the single lightbulb down there. And the smell! The rumor going around was that teachers like Nancy snuck down there to smoke cigarettes.

It always smelled like brimstone to me, though.

• • •

There’s one specific moment that sticks out when I think about Nancy. I remember staying a little after class as a sort of detention for not turning in homework on time. Now during this detention I remember Nancy not really referring to me by name at all, just saying things like “Sit here and do your homework.” Which, you know, is fine. She was mad at me. Whatever. But as I was packing up and getting ready to go home, she said, “See you tomorrow, Finlay.”

My name’s not Finlay. But when I said that, she said, “Well, you don’t deserve your name.”

In my dream, I remember a claw reaching out and making a cut right around my left temple, tracing my face in a single blood-red line down to my chin, then back up and around, following my hairline just so before returning to its original starting point. I remember how loose and ill-fitting my face felt in that moment, and how I tried to scream as the claw started peeling it off. But I couldn’t. That’s the thing about dreams, if you’re not lucid, you’re completely helpless against them.

I wanted to translate that feeling to the protagonist of my story, too. I mean, if I was basing it off myself it should have been easy, right? I could have this character who would lose his sense of place and identity to this… this thing, and I mean, I still remember those feelings well enough, right?

• • •

There’s one final story I remember about Nancy. You see, near the end of the school year, she would lead all the third graders on an overnight field trip up to the lake. This was “the big thing” back in third grade. Kids spent a month preparing for it and even longer talking about it. It even infected schoolwork, with science classes spending time talking about fish biology and all the math word problems having a “lakeside” theme to them.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great time! I mean, when you’re nine, every time is a great time, but this was one of the first times I had ever been up to the lake, and with so many different things scheduled, it was hard to not enjoy it. But at the same time, there’s this one moment.

It was late. I mean, I don’t remember exactly what time, but I had just woken up to use the restroom, and Nancy was standing there right over me. There was a dead look in her eyes, like this time, of all the times, she had slipped a little bit further into the abyss.

“Nancy?” I said.

And she just kept looking at me for a long while, as if she was still deciding what to do with me. For the longest time, neither of us moved. We just stared at each other, me. helpless, barely under the covers and her, well, I don’t even have the words anymore to describe her. But then she spoke:

“The angels are gone,” she said.

It was barely a whisper, but it was deafening in the silence.

The next thing I heard was Nancy slowly turning and shuffling back out of the room. In the morning, she was fine! I mean, she didn’t mention anything about the previous night (and I didn’t dare bring it up) but she was, you know, normal! She was back to telling us how dangerous leeches were and how her sister once nearly got eaten alive by the things, back to getting overly fussy around docks and all those other things old teachers do.

• • •

Nancy retired a couple years after I graduated elementary, but when I was in college, I would come back and volunteer with the after-school program. It was easy enough, take attendance and then play with the kids until their parents and/or guardians picked them up. After that, I just had to clean up a little and I could go home.

I never had to go in the basement, but it always tempted me. I could always see that familiar red tint under the door. But I always told myself it was none of my business. And it never was.

One day, though, well, I figured just a peek wouldn’t hurt, right? I mean, Nancy had tormented me, not just in these moments during the school day, but in my dreams as well, right? I had to know what was going on down there because there had to be something. She was down there all the time! What was she doing? Acting solely on this whim, I marched straight to the basement door, threw it open, and went down those final stairs.

But there was nothing. It was just a smokey old storage basement. And when the door creaked closed behind me, I was left alone, just me and my thoughts.

-F

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Raindrops on Roses (Part Fifteen) -- Creepypasta

I promised three posts ago that one of these horror-themed Raindrops on Roses posts wasn’t going to be strictly-speaking good, and I think even just looking at the title might give the impression that this one is the one I was talking about. But before we get into why I kind of adore these b- or c-grade stories, I have to do talk a little bit about the etymology of the internet.

Sometimes the internet really likes a certain turn of phrase (or, perhaps more accurately for the purposes of this post, a certain turn of text), and when that happens, it tends to spread rather quickly. In cases like “john is kill” or “He Boomed Me”, these phrases are mutable enough to become memes in their own right, but sometimes the actual text is deemed perfect in the eyes of the internet and becomes the go-to text for expressing an often sarcastic version of a particular emotion. Fake outrage, for example, draws the “Navy Seal Rant” (and yes there are variations on Navy Seal, but unlike the first two examples, they’re far less popular than the original text). These instances are referred to as “copypastas” or simply “pastas”, which itself originates from “copy-paste”.

But not every copypasta wants to associate with an asterisk everytime it wants to evoke an emotion. Especially with an emotion like horror, which needs to be taken seriously (at least the ironic sort of seriousness that a comedy-horror sort of story like Shaun of the Dead might go for) or risk utterly breaking its audience’s immersion. Because of this, these viral horror stories have distanced themselves a little from their copypasta roots and now tend to go by the name “creepypasta”.

So what makes a creepypasta? More specifically, what makes a creepypasta different from, say, a normal horror short story? Perhaps the most glaring difference is the insistence on a first-person past-tense perspective. Creepypastas want the reader to believe that this truly happened (as opposed to media like It Comes At Night which describes a post-apocalyptic scenario that might happen), and one of the ways they do that is with “I”. This also lets the author skip by a little bit of character establishment. Sure, the “I” might have an occupation or friends that spooky things also happen to, but their purpose is better served as the metaphorical cameraman, guiding the reader through a series of events.

The consequence of this, of course, is the same consequence that lets cameramen (in most cases) not die during action movies. The main character in creepypastas seldom dies, so the horror generally has to come from elsewhere. One of the ways they do that is downer endings or, in some cases, no ending at all. Frequently this hinges on a Shyamalan-like twist (As an aside/fun fact, the plot of Sixth Sense was originally going to be part of a horror anthology TV series, so the ancestry is certainly there), which lets the author narrate a proper resolution before pulling out the rug and going “Surprise!”

Just like Shyamalan movies, though, these twists can easily be marred by how out-of-nowhere they are. The novel Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, itself a collection of six connected creepypastas tends to fall prey to this, with each chapter describing a spooky event and then going “Haha! It was a pedophile!”

Lastly, creepypasta itself has its own subgenres. The most popular is what I like to call “corruption of the innocent,” which takes a piece of media and twists it. Some of the more famous examples of this are “Lost Episode” pastas like Suicide Mouse or “Haunted Video Game” pastas like Ben Drowned or the incredibly poorly titled Godzilla NES Creepypasta. The problem here is that if it is popular enough to spawn its own subgenre, it can easily breed familiarity, and familiarity can easily break immersion, which as previously discussed, can kill the reception of a pasta.

Do you recognize the pattern yet? Every trope that makes a creepypasta a creepypasta also can easily be a detriment to its quality. So why do I like them? Well, some of that I admit is because of how I consume them. I generally get these stories in audio form; I listen to them while doing more menial tasks where my mind would otherwise wander (closing up shop at work, for example). And in that way, it transforms these stories into almost campfire stories, where the focus is less on the quality of the story and more on the act of telling. So sure, creepypasta is generally on the lower end of the quality spectrum compared to a lot of horror, but just like everyone has a favorite campfire story to tell, everyone has a creepypasta they like to share around the internet.

I close, then, with links to and comments on some of my own favorites.

Candle Cove: This is one of those creepypastas that often comes with a the (italics included), as in the creepypasta. And that’s not without a good reason. Its forum-post style makes it easy to spread around, it moves deftly from beat to beat and is able to recontextualize old low-budget children’s tv in a way pastas like Suicide Mouse or Squidward’s Suicide never could. It was also expanded into a miniseries as part of SyFy’s Channel Zero, so that’s a fun fact as well.

Killswitch: I don’t think Catherynne M. Valente intended for any of her posts on her Invisible Games blog to be viewed as truth, but the legend of a game that is only playable once certainly stuck around. In my head, it influenced the creation of games like One Chance or Execution, though that’s just me guessing. I don’t even think it was the best story on the now-defunct blog (the link before goes to archive.org, which may not have grabbed all of them), but it certainly was a good introduction to the stories it wanted to tell.

Godzilla NES Creepypasta: Yes, the title is garbage. Yes, the plot has been done a thousand times down to the specific beats. But just like the game in the story itself, the narrative just keeps going, adding on more and more, slowly weaving its own mythos. Add on some creative sprite work to simulate screenshots from this haunted game, and it’s at least worth a look.

SCP-1981: I don’t generally like the SCP Foundation subset of creepypastas. They have a faux-scientific style that reads to me as more dry and boring than scary, and the community tends towards being fascinated with potential world-ending catastrophes as a source of horror, which, you know, doesn’t work if the world’s still here. But sometimes the foundation comes across something more mundane, (say, a videotape with some odd properties) and in those instances, I think the writing style can work.

-F

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Raindrops on Roses (Part Fourteen) -- Anatomy


I noted what could perhaps be a poor response to the opening paragraph of last video. I made what some considered to be a leap in logic between the title of certain films and phallic imagery. So instead of leading with a similar paragraph here, let’s jump straight into talking about… Anatomy.

One of the weird things about video games is that, because the medium is so new, there isn’t much clout behind, say, some of the “B games” like there is behind “B movies”. Sure, there are rather large-profile independent games (for example, Fez, Super Meat Boy, and Braid, as featured in Indie Game: the Movie), but the large majority of games go unknown and unloved.

One of the more recent “B games” to break out is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which actually commented on this. Bennett’s game is actually an interpretation of Sexy Hiking, and in the game he talks about his fascination with creation on a personal level. Getting Over It is his, and not just because his name’s in the title. He talks about how some games don’t really care about the player because it’s more of an expression of the creator’s intent than the ideas the player puts into it.

Anatomy by kittyhorrorshow doesn’t care about the player. Not because of anything Bennett Foddy says (though that’s certainly part of it), but because really every moment in the game expresses how much it doesn’t want the player there. This isn’t even the first kittyhorrorshow game to tackle this theme, 000000FF0000 (that's, uh, hexadecimal for Black Red) managed that a little earlier, but it doesn’t do so as completely as Anatomy does.

Anatomy is about a haunted house, which is exactly the type of house that one would expect to not want the player there. But it’s not the type of house that has spooky ghosts (though technically it does have one), it’s more about emptiness and loneliness. I asked last week, “What happens to a house when it is left alone?” and that’s what I was talking about.

But what’s more is that Anatomy is about familiarity. At every point in the game the player is exploring some facet of the house, wandering around the house searching for some unexplored nook or cranny. But when you go back to where you’ve been before, you realize that something’s off, which in turn only gets worse and worse as the game goes on.

And by the end, it’s all the player can do to not be consumed.

-F

Next time: Short, not often sweet, but worthy of discussing nonetheless.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Raindrops on Roses (Part Thirteen) -- It Comes At Night


Perhaps one of the odder observations to come out of distribution company A24’s choice in horror movies is how closely they match slang terms for a penis. The VVitch is perhaps the furthest away but in this particular take gets by as a pet nickname one might give their own, Hereditary is pretty self-explanatory, and then, of course, It Comes At Night. I don’t bring this up because any of these movies are about penises themselves, it’s just something that I found amusing because secretly I’m twelve.

It Comes At Night is a deceptive little film. I almost considered not providing a trailer link because of how misleading the trailer can be (another problem some people have with A24-distributed horror movies). But even past the marketing more focused on getting people into seats than knowing what they’re in for, the movie is still deceptive. I would almost call it a zombie movie without the zombies.

The best thing a piece of zombie-related media can do, and I’ve talked about this before when I was writing about The Walking Dead, is focus as little as possible on the zombies. Oh, they can be there, sure, and all the awards for best makeup or effect can certainly help sell a show, but a zombie story is still a human story, generally about mistrust in a post-apocalyptic setting, and the disasters a mistake as simple as waking up at the wrong moment can cause.

The fact that there are no monsters in the traditional sense is almost a spoiler. Like I said, this movie is deceptive. Even the house that is the setting for most of the film doesn’t have a specific architecture, almost as if changing based on the subconscious whims of its occupants (an idea I’ve touched on before and definitely will again by the end of this month). This makes the movie dreadful to watch (and I say that in the best possible way). Everything seems to be designed to lie to the viewer, and it can be difficult to find out what’s actually going on and why. You see things happening, and you know what’s probably going to happen next, but no, that wouldn’t happen, right?

There is no titular “It” in It Comes At Night. It’s not that type of story. What it is a story of is two families trying their hardest to survive in a world that has already ended. It’s a sort of nihilistic way to look at the world, actually. The world does not care about the characters in this film. In fact, it actively tries to kill them. The characters know this too. It’s all they can do to simply survive in the vain hope that things might get better.

-F

Next time: What happens to a house when it is left alone?

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Adjectives That Describe Your Bones Sometimes

I hinted in my last Raindrops and Roses post that I wanted to cover something related to skeletons and the spookiness and/or scariness that occasionally describes them. So of course October would be the perfect month to talk about the theme for this month: horror.

I used to hate horror media. Even dystopian fiction -- a genre generally associated with horror even if it isn’t quite -- weirded me out. If I could remember my dreams, 1984 probably would have given thirteen-year-old me nightmares. I don’t think I got the same catharsis horror aficionados say they experience coming out of a horror movie, or if I did, I was more fixated on the “being in danger” part of being scared. When I was even younger, a particularly zealous performance in a for-kids production of Beauty and the Beast drove me to tears.

I can’t say exactly when the change happened, when I started being interested in being scared. I think I realized just how large a swath of media I was just dismissing off-hand, and wanted to at least take a second look at these films and games and stories before relegating the genre to “things I just didn’t ‘get’”.

I also understand that a large portion of my readers have already had their one or two experiences with horror, and didn’t like it that much. It’s probably going to be difficult to convince you to watch or play or read any of these in that case, but to help try and convince you, I wanted to talk about which specific horror I’ve found myself enjoying before we get into the specifics:

In regards to more visual media, let’s talk about jump-scares. They’re fine in small doses, but constructing a horror movie or game out of them just gets repetitive. They also have to represent the end of a particular scene. It’s the payoff, as it were. Cutting down on their frequency also reduces how predictable they are. One of the reasons I didn’t enjoy A Quiet Place, for example, is because every “jump scare scene” ratcheted the sound effects up and the ambient noise down, meaning you already knew the scare was coming.

The characterization has to be strong. This seems like an obvious point for any story, not just horror, but horror tends to lend itself to stupid decisions more often (“Let’s split up. We’ll cover more ground that way.”), and those have to be justified. Uncharacteristically poor decision-making isn’t a deal-breaker, but again, most stories have characters, so most stories should have good ones.

Lastly, I’ve found with horror movies that I’ve enjoyed them more before they introduce the supernatural aspects into them. For example, The Witch (stylized as The VVitch if you’re pretentious (which I am)), loses something when you realize the existence (or, at least, the confirmed existence) of the titular character could be cut entirely and the movie would be just as compelling, if not more so.

Again, these are just opinions. I’m certainly not going to say that any of these are the best things ever (or, in one instance, even strictly-speaking good), but they are things I want to share and talk about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these next few posts, and if not, well, some stores already have Christmas decorations up, so you’ve got that to look forward to.

-F