We're gonna Need a Bigger boat

When I saw the multi-media round up prompt over at terror_scifi, I started thinking about what I love about horror/terror, gothic stories and supernatural mysteries. I’ve always been drawn to spooky stories, shows and movies and sometimes while I watch them, I wonder why I put myself through it, why I enjoy it as I do. There surely is something strange and bizarre about wanting to be scared, about watching something and being so anxious, so nervous that you have to mute the spooky music or watch through your fingers.

And, as a side note, why is it that watching through your fingers somehow makes it all the more bearable? (and if you’ve never done it, muting the music really does help!)

I have narrowed my love of things spooky and scary down to the following:

Catharsis

I think there is something very cathartic about watching/reading spooky/scary things for me. It’s like I somehow know I am scared, but I’m still safe. I can turn the tv off, I can put the book down. Although I’ve yet to figure out how to turn my brain off! It’s almost like a release, like a big, long, muscle-groaning stretch that leaches some of the tension out of me. I’m naturally a highly strung, overly anxious person, and sometimes I wonder if I’m drawn to ‘scary’ as a way to bleed off some of that tension. The relief I feel when the protagonist makes it out okay is profound, almost like a ‘fix’ of some sort.

Imagination
Oh, there is something about not knowing the full truth. There’s this delicious tingle of wonder when you don’t know exactly what is going bump in the night. To me, the best parts of the books I read is before you know what is going on. In Jane Eyre, you know something is going on up in the attic, but you don’t know what. Is it Grace Poole? Is it something else? What could it be? In Stephen King’s IT, I was TERRIFIED of Pennywise. What was he/it? What did it want? How could it be stopped? I actually liked the entirety of IT, until the ending. I actually would have preferred not knowing!

So there’s the element of imagination in it. You don’t know what is out there, and the possibilities stretch out before you, horrible and unknown and I love it.

Romanticism
Yes, my Jane Eyre is showing. I don’t so much mean romantic love. More so the ‘sweeping-ness’ or ‘epic-ness’ that I just find I don’t get in other contemporary fiction. Ideas seem bigger, more fanciful, more…. something to me in horror and terror. It’s all so open and wide - you can go as far as you want.

And good horror/terror has this cerebral quality that I like. I find the stories I like the most generally pit the more evolved side of the brain against our animalistic nature. This idea of trying to rationalize out the fear, our logical sides trying to calm/sooth our lizard brain which only knows to FLEE and HIDE and FIGHT. There’s something very elemental to me about the struggle between the intellectual and the primitive and I think that good horror/terror really highlights it.

It’s a shame that so many contemporary films mistake gore (slasher type movies) for horror/terror. Being “horrified” by gore is not the same as being scared out of your wits by what’s behind the closed door……

Certainly with gothic horror you get an element of romance - Sweeping castles, darkened turrets, wind swept moors….. Ah! I love it all!

Permanence
Good horror/terror lingers. I think about it for days. I am drawn to it the same way I worry a sore tooth or poke a wound. I am disturbed by it yet I cannot stop ruminating over it. Although, there are things I’ve seen in the name of horror/gore that have disturbed me so that I wish I’d never seen/heard/read them. I’m not so much for the gore, or… cruelty in horror. I like the more… emotional horror. The unseen thing under the bed, the lingering presence on a highway road, the way they say some houses are ‘wrong.’ Overly gory or cruel or inhumane horror lingers in a way that I found profoundly distressing. I saw “The Hills Have Eyes 2” and I really wish we’d never seen what happens after people were taken.

But the horror/terror I most enjoy leaves me thinking about it for days.

There may be other things that draw me to horror/terror but those are the big four that pop into my head when I sit down to think about it.


Side Note - What I dislike about some modern Horror
As previously noted, I dislike the gore, the cruelty. I don’t like rape, torture, overt and excessive violence. I really don’t have much to say about it other than I don’t like it and it disturbs me. Though I’m a horror fan, I actually avoid most modern productions.