 I. The Good What's good about the horror genre is that it's not a genre. It's a literary mode, or perhaps "mood" is a better word. It's a feeling. Horror is an approach to a narrative, a method that can inform, infect, and inflect stories of many genres: literary, realist, science fiction, fantasy, even romance. That's good because it makes horror unpredictable. Horror's range stretches from the comforting Christianity of Seabury Quinn to the bleak nihilism of Clive Barker or Thomas Ligotti, from the working-class realism of Stephen King to the decadent grotesqueries of Clark Ashton Smith, from the queasy body-horror of David Cronenberg to the needling psychological tension of Alfred Hitchcock. These and countless more can all legitimately claim to be within the field of horror. Other genre fiction is often extremely predictable, and that's often the point. In a romance, the lovers will end up together; the Western's lone cowboy will win out over the forces of civilization; the superhero will come back to defeat the villain. Genre fiction exists in a limited range of tropes, and it's meant to comfort the reader with the certainty that their expectations will be met. Horror offers us no such assurances. The source of the horror might be turn out to be a supernatural force, or all in the mind of the main character, or purely human and explicable, or not explained at all. The plot can be a slow burn of tension or a relentless assault. The story might conclude with the horror contained or destroyed, or for the seeming resolution to be false, and the evil return at the end. The characters might be saved, or their doom sealed, or left unresolved. All of these are prefectly legitimate and common in horror to an extent that most genre fiction couldn't tolerate. In horror, the only expectation you can be sure of is that your feelings will be unsettled. In that way, horror is more realistic than most genre works, despite any supernatural elements. We know we can't expect happy endings in real life; we know the good guys don't always (or often) win. We know, living our day to day lives, that innocent people suffer, murderers get away with their crimes, the rich and powerful escape justice. We know that society, or government, or business crushes the individual. In a way, it's quite affirming to have bleak truths told, even on a metaphorical level. II. The Bad What's bad about horror is also an aspect of its wide range and unpredictability. While perhaps it isn't one in the truest sense, horror is usually treated as a genre— or at least as a marketing term. Commercialization, the particular bane of all art under capitalism, ensures that every work will be packaged into a publishing category and more efficiently sold. If you're a horror fan– a fan of things that can be labeled as horror— then anything labeled as horror is assumed to be for you, the consumer of horror. When you open the chocolate box called "horror," you never know what you'll get. It might be just what you like best. It might be an new and unexpected delight. On the other hand, you might bite into the literary equivalent of a chocolate cherry nougat whip. Whether it's 80s slasher flicks or Victorian ghost stories, splatterpunk gore-fests or psychological thrillers, body horror, or existential cosmic terror, it's all lumped together under a single heading called horror. The field is so wide, the mode of horror so adaptable, that there's honestly no limit. The very unpredictability that gives horror much of its charm becomes a liability at times. Critics will rave about a new "horror" film that is really a crime thriller, or a murder mystery, or an action movie. This is why we horror fans are generally such obsessive readers of reviews, and why we all have our favorite writers and publishers; magazines and editors; film studios, directors, and actors. There is so much to wade through that we all feel the need, at times, for a reliable guide. III. The Ugly What's ugly about horror is that is at times so terribly, numbingly predictable. Every so often, a creator makes a new way to look at the things that frighten us. For example, Richard Matheson and George Romero reimagined zombies not as products of Voodoo or necromancy, but as creations of science, or victims of a plague. They created a vision that evokes the power of the mindless mob and the desperation of survival. As the new idea becomes popular, it's imitated, the ideas behind it are codified, the elements standardized, and all the wonderful unpredictable novelty gets scrubbed away. Eventually, further innovations are greeted not with thrill of delight, but with some variation of "that's not how zombies work." It happens, seemingly, with everything. Vampires, ghosts, magic, even unknowable cosmic entities, all develop canonical rules that a writer breaks at their peril. Obviously this is a general problem with pop culture, not limited to horror. Innovations become themes, then tropes, and, ultimately, clichés. But for a mode of narrative that depends so strongly on mystery and the unknown, it's particularly galling. As H. P. Lovecraft said, the greatest fear we have is fear of the unknown. True fear is a unsettling feeling of terror. But when a horror theme is spelled out, defined, restricted, and boiled down to a set of familiar tropes, then fear departs, to be replaced with a smug pantomime, filled with jokiness and memes and jump-scares. IV. Mexican Standoff This is, I think, an unresolvable problem. The basis of horror is fear. The basis of fear is the encounter with the unknown. And the unknown is disturbing. As human beings, we seek out novelty and danger, but equally (or more) we value we familiarity and safety. We experience a constant pull back toward the known, the safe, and the tested. There's a constant tension between wanting the new, and wanting the known. But as long as we have our guideposts— in the form of editors, reviewers, writers and directors— to lead us toward what we want (especially if we don't yet know we want it) then maybe we can navigate the treacherous good, bad, and ugly of horror.  David Howard is a writer who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He likes rain, fog, used book stores, and Halloween. He dislikes crowds, loud noises, and bright lights. His work has also appeared on McSweeney's Internet Tendency. You can find him at davidhowardwrites.com and @davbowhow on Twitter.   Comments are closed.
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