HORROR FEATURE: STUPIDITY IN HORROR BY KYLE MUNTZ

15/6/2022

If Chad’s lucky, the scene will cut with a menacing snap, and we’ll be back with his two friends at the party, wondering where Chad went. If he’s less lucky, we might actually see him get swallowed, or eviscerated, or whatever the heck else happens down in that idiotic abyss.

Stupidity in Horror
Kyle Muntz

Three young people walk down a path through a field somewhere. Their figures are tanned and slim against the blazing horizon; their faces are full of energy yet, somehow, oddly vacuous. At least two are girls. The camera seems to linger more on their bodies than anything they say. While it can, it strives to capture everything about them: the unmarked smoothness of their skin, that sense everything is just as it should be.

But then it drifts off the path to an old well. The exterior is cracked and broken; even from the road, there’s something ominous about it. As viewers, we don’t just suspect, we know. A loud rushing fills our ears as the camera swoops over the rim. Perhaps it even shows us the darkness inside, the sick presence of whatever might be in there as one member of the group—let’s call him Chad—happens to notice the well.

“Guys,” he says. “Shit, you see that?”

“What is it?” says another—Ashley. In the 2000s, if the movie had the budget, she might been have played by Paris Hilton or Jessica Alba.

“Ugh, it’s so old!” Sarah, the third member of the group, has dark makeup and a wilder look. “Don’t they know nobody uses these things anymore?”

“Wait.” Chad lifts one toned arm; sunlight dances on his neatly frosted tips. “I gotta go check it out.”

“Come on, Chad. Don’t be dumb. We’ve gotta get to the party!”

“No problem, I’ll catch up in a second. You go on ahead, alright?”

The two girls shrug and walk away, but Chad lingers, looking down. Already, the sound effects have changed: a harsh grating rises beneath the gentle noontime ambience. But then the perspective shifts, and we’re looking up. The creature inside the well sees Chad’s lips purse, bides its time as he nods and steps forward. Every viewer knows that yes, obviously, only a deranged person would come any closer when this is so obviously not a good place to be.

A moment later, Chad climbs inside the well.

What has happened here, exactly? If Chad’s lucky, the scene will cut with a menacing snap, and we’ll be back with his two friends at the party, wondering where Chad went. If he’s less lucky, we might actually see him get swallowed, or eviscerated, or whatever the heck else happens down in that idiotic abyss.

Either way, Chad is gone. Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows Chad needed to die. As the audience, you could even say we’re on the monster’s side—watching it kill these people is our whole reason for being here, even if (counterintuitively) we also want the characters to survive. All of this is for us: the build-up. The final rush of blood. And since it was all pretty much destiny, this way is as good as any other, right?

But many things happen in that baffling eternity as Chad slings his leg over the rim of the well. We feel, acutely, the unbearable weight of PLOT hanging over all this. “This person is not like us,” the film seems to proclaim as the vindictive darkness swallows Chad’s screams. And even while his bones crunch, or the creature rips out his spleen, or whatever, the audience is asking, I mean, isn’t he so stupid he sort of deserves it?

Chad’s stupidity signals that he can be easily forgotten. He’ll be less than a memory that night, when Sarah gets murdered after wandering into the middle of a cornfield—even though, probably, she’s heard at the party that people have been disappearing. And it’ll only be later, when Ashley finally battles the monster in a labyrinthine, half-collapsed building she had no specific reason for entering, that we’ll get a sense of somebody who maybe still has a few wires connected in her head.

The Chad who climbs down the well does something no real person would ever do. In the process, he marks himself as a kind of jacked, Zach Effron looking skin with nothing inside it: an entity so different from us he barely merits our attention. And sure, we all know the writers needed to get Chad down the well somehow—but did they really need to pick the easiest way?

What if he had a reason to climb down the well? What if, actually, we couldn’t bear to see him not do it? Wouldn’t the scene be more effective if at least some of us, in his position, might ?

But that presents a different problem. People don’t just hurl themselves into perilous, enclosed places for no reason—and, yeah, when we think for a second. Why the hell would anybody want to go down there? The ultimate answer is probably that Chad and his friends should be somewhere else, doing something that more clearly reflects who they are as people.

But I like this original scenario because it shows the dilemma of writing horror—or, really, of any genre. The challenge can be especially interesting when characters are put in these bizarre, improbable situations; to move them from within, rather than dragging them along with the plot. We must believe this character would do a thing no real person would do.

What exactly would this look like? That question has a million answers, but here’s one possibility.

Maybe, rather than a group of friends, this story is just about one couple—Chad and Ashley. They’re back from out of town to visit Chad’s family, but they’re arguing. Chad has done the kind of stupid thing men do; as they wander across the family property, they come upon the well. Ashley is angry. Chad is carrying a present for his sister, but Ashley grabs it out of Chad’s hand and tosses it into the well.

“Babe, what the hell?” he might say. “Do you realize—that was supposed to mean something, since we forgot her birthday last year? We’re here to—”

“So this is my fault now?” Ashley says. “You drag me all this way, and all you can think about is her—after what she said about me? Really?”

“Goddamn it, you realize now I have to climb down there?”

“I don’t care. Do it, for all I care.”

Chad opens his mouth to respond, but Ashley is already stomping off towards the house. And of course, Chad could just follow her. But he used to be close to his sister. It’s been months since they spoke: since that last conversation when she specifically accused him of always forgetting about her. And what would she think, after all that, if he showed up to his sister’s birthday without a present? Wouldn’t that make this whole trip a waste? Wouldn’t that prove she’d been right all along?

No. At first Chad hesitates as he looks into the yawning, hungry mouth of the well; but then he shrugs. It’s old, sure—but it’s not that bad, is it? Just a quick climb, and he’ll be up at the party. In the worst case, if the ladder breaks or something, Ashley will come back to find him. And then—this is the best part—she might even feel guilty about all this. Wouldn’t that be sort of great, if afterwards he could (not overtly, but subtly, without saying it) hold it over her? Wasn’t there a chance she might even admit she was wrong?

Yeah, he’ll think, as he lowers himself into the darkness.

It might seem weird, but really, he doesn’t have a choice.

THE PAIN EATER BY KYLE MUNTZ

Some wounds are too deep to ever heal.Two brothers from Michigan are reunited after the death of their father. They’ve never been close, but now they have to live together—and it gets more difficult when one discovers a strange creature, vomited from the body of a dead cat. A creature that eats human pain. It feels good: too good. Soon he wants to hurt himself more, just so the pain can be taken away. But the more the creature becomes a part of his life, the more he damages everything around him.

PRAISE FOR KYLE MUNTZ

“Playful and painful and surreally real, and great fun to read.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

“There’s a melodic beat to Muntz’s writing, terse descriptions of events interspersed with sudden bursts of graphic visuals, often macabre in its evocations. It’s a delicate balance, but one he masterfully navigates.”
—Peter Tieryas, author of Mecha Samurai Empire

“Here is prose of a high poetic intensity working in the service of a dark and cool vision… disturbing and enthralling in equal parts.”
—Rhys Hughes, author of A Universal History of Infamy

“One of the strangest, most original things I’ve read this summer… a work of radical, subversive innocence.”
—James Pate, author of The Fassbender Diaries

OFFICIAL RELEASE JULY 2022

KYLE MUNTZ

KYLE MUNTZ IS THE AUTHOR OF SCARY PEOPLE (ERASERHEAD PRESS), AND WINNER OF THE SPARKS PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION. IN 2016 HE RECEIVED AN MFA IN FICTION FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME. CURRENTLY HE TEACHES LITERATURE AND WRITING AT THE GUANGDONG UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN STUDIES IN GUANGZHOU, CHINA.