 Ginger Nuts of Horror is proud to present an interview with Darryl Jones the author behind the book that we described as "Sleeping With The Lights on is to Horror as A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking was to popular science." Darryl Jones is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and popular fiction. His books include Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film, the Oxford World's Classics editions of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories, and Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson. He has also written numerous articles on nineteenth-century fiction and supernatural literature. Hello, Darryl congratulations on the release of your new book. For those who haven’t read our review of Sleeping With the Lights on, could you tell us what the book is about? It’s a book about the function of horror in civilization, how it’s inextricably bound up with human culture, from the very earliest literature. But it’s also a book about how horror works, what it is, what’s the nature of the appeal. One of the things I’m very insistent upon throughout it that horror is a form of radical art, that it has to be confrontational. What was the genesis of the book? Did the idea to write it come about from doing research into something else, or did you have the idea for the book and carry out the research for it? The book has a lot of roots, some of them very deep. In one way, these are ideas and questions I’ve been wrestling with for decades, perhaps all my adult life. But in a more local sense, I found myself watching Pasolini’s Medea a few years ago. It’s a wonderful, thought-provoking film – a free adaptation of Euripides’s tragedy, starring the great operatic diva Maria Callas. So this is definitely high culture – and yet it begins with a very graphic human sacrifice, a scene so visceral and disturbing that it immediately put me in mind of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. And so I thought to myself: what’s going on here? The book is one part of the answer. How long did it take to research and write it? It’s a short book, so I guess it took me about six months to write, once I’d applied the seat of the trousers to the surface of the chair, as the old adage goes. But honestly – I’m 50 years old, so I would say over 40 years of exposure to horror, and probably 25 years’ formal research in the field. Sleeping With the Lights on is something of a busman’s holiday, have you ever considered publishing a book outside of the realms of your day job, and if so what would be your ideal subject matter? I’m lucky enough that I get paid to do what I would be doing anyway. But as far as my university is concerned, I am a specialist in 19th-century English literature – which means I’ve written books on Jane Austen, and on poetic theory, and articles on Dickens and George Eliot. But mostly these days I’m in the world of late-Victorian and Edwardian genre fiction – M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve got a new edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles for Oxford University Press on the go at the moment, and my next major project is a biography of M. R. James. Research in itself is something that a lot of writers have an aversion to, what are your tips for efficient and fruitful research? Develop a routine, take lots of notes, be curious, love libraries. Despite the efforts of yourself and many other scholarly fans of the genre horror never seems to be taken seriously by the public at large. What do you think is the largest stumbling block that the genre faces with regards to getting out of the cultural ghetto? Well, one of the arguments I make is that horror should never become too respectable, too mainstream. It needs to be edgy, to piss people off, to make them want to censor, purge or ban it. I don’t always agree with Clive Barker, but I share his sense that running battles with censors and authority can be an artistically fruitful thing. Sleeping With the Lights on you have an excellent passage on the differences in meaning of Horror, Gothic, and Terror, do you think that we have become too tied up on genre titles? Yes I do. They can sometimes be useful if we want to make precise distinctions – for example between the kind of horror that sets out to make your flesh creep, the kind that sets out to make you shiver, the kind that keeps you awake at night, the kind that harrows your soul, and the kind that makes you puke. They’re all horror, but they’re not the same and we need to recognize that. Do you like the term horror as a descriptor for the genre, and do think there is a better term for it? I do, and I tend to insist on it, because it’s blunt and crude. ‘Gothic’ is an overused term these days, and liable to be emptied of meaning if we’re not careful. Anyone who uses the term ‘Dark Fantastique’ should have their tongue torn out by the roots. Like most of us, you were first introduced to horror in your adolescence, why do you think that adolescents are attracted to horror at that age? There are many theories about this. Overwhelming sexuality; bodily metamorphoses; uncontrollable moods, desires, and urges; the sense of being strangers to ourselves, or that those around us are suddenly alien; subcultures and identity politics. But also, I think, the fact that there is something transgressive and confrontational about horror – it exists to annoy your parents (unless I happen to be your parent). Horror is more accessible to the masses than ever before, at the risk of sounding like every other older generation that has gone before, do you think the younger generation has become spoiled by the ease at which they can access it? No, I think each generation needs to find its own horrors – the reason vampires cast no reflection in the mirror is because it is ourselves we see looking back at us. The book ends with an account of post-millennial horror, and my great anxiety in writing it was that I would sound like a superannuated old git. That said, there has unquestionably been an acceleration of culture over the past decade or so. One of the pleasures (though it didn’t seem so at the time) of the video nasty era was actually getting your hands on copies of some of these films. The fact that they were banned added a real element of taboo and danger, as though by watching them you were actually taking a risk. Horror has evolved and mutated over the years to represent the cultural zeitgeist of the era, and most of the significant periods of output has been in a period of great social and political unrest, do you think we are now due for another bumper era of horror? And how do you think it will be represented? Futurology is a mug’s game, and I try not to do it. That said, I fully expect a wave of monstrous Trumps to come our way – if indeed it’s possible to out-monster Trump himself, who every day beggars my imagination by proving himself grosser than I could ever have believed. (My Trump movie would have strong overtones of Brian Yuzna’s Society.) Ecohorror is firmly established as a response to our times, of course – and I think that the renewed interest in British folk horror is a domestic version of the same tendency. Most people encounter horror in the cinema when watching the latest big blockbuster movie, do you think these sanitised, created with a checklist, cookie-cutter films are harming the genre? Yes. In the book I call this ‘unhorror’ – an ugly, unsatisfying word for an ugly, unsatisfying phenomenon. Of course, popular culture has always been deeply interwoven with capitalism – hence the term ‘culture industry’. And cinematic horror franchises have existed since at least the 1930s. It also depends where you look. A 20-year-old who grew up with Asian and Hispanic horror might fairly conclude that this was a golden age. A middle-aged observer 30 years ago might have thought that all these Nightmares on Elm Streets, Halloweens, and Fridays the Thirteenth were a sign of imaginative bankruptcy, whereas I was having a blast. A middle-aged observer 50 years ago might have thought that Hammer Studios recycling the same films really was tedious, and that Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had so much more style. So we need to be careful. Despite some of the biggest films in recent years being horror films, the written word side of the genre has never seemed to have been able to capitalise on the success of the movie, why do you think people are so reluctant to cross the divide? I think things are improving. Ten years or so ago, horror sections were literally disappearing from bookshops, but now they’re back. We all have our qualms about the monolith that is Amazon, but it’s made horror fiction available again. So I’m optimistic. In a feature for Fivebooks.com you list your five favourite horror books, all of which were published before 1940, why do these books still hold such high place in your opinion? If you had to make a list of books published in the 50 years what would be on that list? Well, I did tell you I was a 19th-century specialist, and really I like my horror fiction written by men in smoking jackets. But if we must:
You have also said that you find ghost stories to be more terrifying than zombie stories, could you elaborate on why you feel that way? Atmosphere. On the whole, ghost stories work better in the short story form, because can pack a concentrated wallop and observe the unities of time, place, and action. These are very old-fashioned artistic virtues, and the ghost story tends to be a rather conservative form. But it works for a reason. Zombie culture is sometimes satisfyingly gory, and often satisfyingly thought-provoking, but rarely scary as such, at least not for me. Horror is probably at its worst when it has nothing to say when it has just been created for a cheap scare, what do you think has been the one film that is guilty of this? I’m afraid I find the entire oeuvre of Rob Zombie to be an exercise in empty, mean-spirited, cheap nihilism. This is a shame, because Mr. Zombie and I are more or less the same age, and obviously grew up watching and loving the same films – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Halloween. I love the fact that he casts people like Judy Geeson and Ken Foree in his films. All the elements are right, but the films are horrible. Horror and comedy, share a common base psychological response, and yet horror comedies are on the whole not very successful at either being scary or funny, what do you think is the biggest mistake made when trying to do horror comedy? Not sure I know the answer to this! The League of Gentlemen works so well because it’s funny and scary in precisely equal measures. I suppose my advice would be: set out to make a horror movie, and let the laughs take care of themselves, as they did in An American Werewolf in London, or Gremlins, or Braindead. (Rather showing my age with that list, aren’t I?) Sleeping With the Lights on is released on 11 October, are you doing anything regarding book signings etc. to support its launch? – from Anna Gell: Forthcoming events:
Halloween is just over a month away, how will you be celebrating the genre’s Christmas Day? I will be reading from my book in Blackwell’s in Oxford! And then going out for dinner with my wife and daughter. Then probably a black mass somewhere, spot of cannibalism, tucked up in my bed by midnight. It has been an enormous pleasure chatting with you Darryl, do you have any final words for the readers of the website? They are the weirdos, not you.  Four o'clock in the morning, and the lights are on and still there's no way we're going to sleep, not after the film we just saw. The book we just read. Fear is one of the most primal human emotions, and one of the hardest to reason with and dispel. So why do we scare ourselves? It seems almost mad that we would frighten ourselves for fun, and yet there are thousands of books, films, games, and other forms of entertainment designed to do exactly that. As Darryl Jones shows, the horror genre is huge. Ranging from vampires, ghosts, and werewolves to mad scientists, Satanists, and deranged serial killers, the cathartic release of scaring ourselves has made its appearance in everything from Shakespearean tragedies to internet memes. Exploring the key tropes of the genre, including its monsters, its psychological chills, and its love affair with the macabre, Darryl Jones discusses why horror stories disturb us, and how society responds to literary and film representations of the gruesome and taboo. Should the enjoyment of horror be regarded with suspicion? Are there different levels of the horrific, and should we distinguish between the commonly reviled carnage of contemporary torture porn and the culturally acceptable bloodbaths of ancient Greek tragedies? Analysing the way in which horror manifests multiple personalities, and has been used throughout history to articulate the fears and taboos of the current generation, Jones considers the continuing evolution of the genre today. As horror is mass marketed to mainstream society in the form of romantic vampires and blockbuster hits, it also continues to maintain its former shadowy presence on the edges of respectability, as banned films and violent internet phenomena push us to question both our own preconceptions and the terrifying capacity of human nature.  
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