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

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