Watching Scary Movies: Horror & the Inference of Blame in Current Events

Horror has always been suspect.

What kinds of people watch, write, or put on film and in our minds such awful images? What kinds of people like that sort of thing?

Since it first emerged as its own genre, Horror has been blamed for being the cause or the effect of mental derangement, of moral impropriety and religious slander. Hidden behind the guise of the immaturity of adolescent boys, everyone has intentionally overlooked the real origins and depth of the genre, trading it for gratuitous sex and violence and wielding it like a magic wand to explain the irrational behaviors we have come to embrace as “evil.”

Most recently we had the Slender Man girls. And now we have the Scary Movie-Watching Florida middle school girls who planned to murder smaller classmates in the girl’s restroom…

As a Horror writer, I feel we must brace ourselves for the interrogation of the genre that will surely come next because it has already been inferred: does Horror cause people to commit sordid crimes? Worse, does it cause or divulge mental instability? And do creators of Horror have any responsibility for subsequent audience behavior?

If you hear the creak of the attic door, you are not alone…

Evil As a Modifier

We are living in tumultuous times. With globalization comes the questioning of individuals as to how much responsibility any of us have in either causing, enabling, or allowing bad human behavior to unfold and have its way with innocent other people. The pressure can be phenomenal.

Because even if we sense, feel, or believe we have some level of responsibility for such events, or even feel compelled to do something about what common sense tells us are indeed bad things and that therefore the people who do them should be brought to heel, the facts are that we feel equally powerless as isolated individuals to prevent such human behavior. And the greater the guilt we sense we should shoulder, the more frustrated we become – all too often looking to blame anyone and anything else we can to absolve ourselves from having to address the issue so we can rebury it and get on with our comfortable lives.

We want so desperately to shut the images and their truths off.

It’s how we got here to this place of isolationism in the U.S…It’s how we got caught up in the idea that if we could only turn back the clock to “simpler times” we could all finally….breathe.

Yet the reality is isolationism does not work: ask native tribes that were living blissful lives until boatloads of Europeans floated ashore…Sooner or later the world comes for you and the trick is to be ready to embrace the facts that cannot be changed – not blaming yet another strata of people and superficial issues.

One particularly unsavory fact needing a hug is that human beings are flawed.

And none of us are exempt from those flaws, which include any number of mental and personality disorders. Why do you think psychologists and psychiatrists burn out? Can you imagine the horror of realizing most of humanity is not completely sane?

But because humans are also not entirely stupid, we realize that things are askew and we haphazardly seek to fix them ourselves or find explanations for why it is ok these little deficiencies exist. They disturb us. They make us doubt ourselves in ways that make us seek out others of our own kind and similar thinking (for how else will we get a fair shake?)… For a while, religion filled this function nicely.

Yet if we look at the evolution of the Horror genre, we see that humanity has always had questions that are not so easily put to rest, questions religion could not or would not answer directly. Through Horror we have pondered the Big Questions about the existence of God and an afterlife, we have poked corpses in the attempt to understand the differences between life and death and that mysterious road that leads from one to the other. We have asked where consciousness and life begin and end, we have recoiled from the many ways the human mind grabs onto sanity by buffering itself in insanity.

When religion fell short or its leaders were exposed to be just as human as the rest of us, we held God at fault. And we punished Him by running away into the dark forest, using our cellphones for light.

Horror is so brain science, so philosophy, so religion, so psychology…but it is also superstition and sociology. And to our endless Horror – history.

In our fear and trepidation, we manage to scoop everything we do not understand but fear immensely into one word: evil.

We like to think God abandoned us, not the other way around. And so we set out to clearly delineate what is God stuff, and what we can actually change. What is God stuff is all mystical and indistinct – anything that upsets our daily, ghost-free lives. So when two little girls act in ways that had clearly been banished from view, we need tools to make our world right again.

It was those darn violent, Satan-worshipping movies… It was those bad parents…It was all the Church scandals… It was those negligent teachers…

Or maybe it was just the devil. Because then none of us have to do anything. It all becomes no one’s fault – not even the little girls’ unless we want to make them into the personification of evil, but first we will have to look into the matter…do the criminal court thing…toss them into a pond to see if they float…

It is somehow easier to envision all manner of demons and devils rising from Sulphur-lined pits to test our faith and resolve than it is to admit that we all too often just get it wrong, or that we make decisions from ignorance or unsound minds.

It is an excellent, totally encompassing word that explains all and clarifies nothing.

It is a Band-Aid for a bullet wound.

And best of all it is a dehumanizing word. It gives us permission to act in irrational ways to bury the problem that scares us the most: mental illness in children.

Whether we are talking terrorists, serial killers, political opponents or middle-school kids… when we toss the word “evil” into the mix we give collective societal permission for everyone to nod in unspoken understanding, to shrug and walk away, to stuff the “evil ones” into the attic of social choice and call it a day. If the doer is evil, we are not only absolved, but elevated for being more moral, more ethical, more superior…less flawed…

Yet if Horror has taught us anything, it is that evil never dissipates – it merely changes form…

Two Little Maids From School Are We

When the Slender Man attempted murder story broke, there was ample discussion of what the girls had been into.

Fortunately for Evil-spotters everywhere, the newest culprits have supplied us with exactly what we need: they are admitted Satanists.

Forget for a moment that middle school kids no matter how “sophisticated” haven’t a clue what that means. This is a godsend. Clearly it was no one’s fault but the devil. We now have permission to proceed, but heads must roll.

Surely the watching of scary movies is of importance. Where on earth else would innocent children even learn the term “Satan worshippers”? Become “tainted”? “Infected”? Turned…

Obviously not from this election cycle…

The reporting uses words like “chilling” “disturbing” “childlike drawings” “planned killing” and “suicide”…It was emphasized that the plot was “hatched” while watching scary movies during a sleepover… https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/video/girls-stopped-carrying-deadly-school-assault-police-58738128

And every subsequent report reveals ever more sensational allegations – the intent to drink the blood of their murdered class mates, of being found with a goblet, planning to dismember the bodies and commit suicide…of being confessed Satanists. ..

Of course it is shocking. Of course we want to know how did this happen?

Because we so desperately want to believe it would be so simple as watching a few scary movies…that dreaded mental illness has its root in merely viewing what your parents told you not to watch, that you can save your children by banning exactly that.

The news reports reflect all of our responses…a certain and desperate need to believe this anathema appeared from nowhere to possess innocent children.

Of course it must be the Horror movies. It has to be the Horror movies. Because that way it becomes its own Horror movie and all Horror movies have formulas to follow and supernatural entities to blame…

And what about all of those horrible movies? That awful Stephen King? Those clearly twisted individuals who like and propagate the kind of psychotic drivel that is the Horror genre?

But these questions are not so simple. And contrary to the beliefs of questioners who will most certainly come forward, Horror – like video games – do not cause human behavior as clearly as both reflect it.

Horror is a mirror. Horror writers and filmmakers pull nothing from the air; they are not magicians. They merely report what they observe – pulling at loose threads because the questions of what causes human beings to do the terrible things they do to each other bothers them deep down…

Most certainly there is a spectrum upon which Horror creators fall. Some are more observant of some parts of human nature than others, some revel in the shock of human behavior and its implied consequences… Others thrash about in the darkness of the human mind, desperate to understand where all of the real lines are…But there is one common denominator: the determination to make their audience think, if not think twice.

Any balanced person who reads a Horror story or watches a Horror movie receives the warning in exchange for riding the roller coaster to the end. And the warning is always the same: tinkering with things you don’t understand can get you eliminated from normal life or life itself. Worse, it can drag you into hells you have never imagined and from which there is no hope of return.

Horror is fire and brimstone. Death is just the beginning.

So where do two middle school girls fall into this?

They fall into the category of like attracting like, of one more charismatic mind manipulating another eager to please. They fall into the category all of us dread – the mentally flawed, the psychotic or the wide range of antisocial personality disorders…And they did so with our social memories of movies like Children of the Corn and The Omen so vivid in all our adult minds…

Nothing terrifies us more than a child that seems to have preternatural, predatory awareness as shaped by mental illness.

It is so wrong, an anathema to our expectation and dreams of innocent childhood we all hope for our children.

It is an unforgivable unsettling of our little ordered worlds. And we wonder where this horrible disease might hide – that it hides being a whole different terror.

But in the end it is just illness. In the end, parents are busy and hopeful and rationalizing and maybe uninsured. Just like teachers. Just like neighbors. And even pediatricians. Signs get missed. Signs get subverted. Signs get blissfully, ignorantly overlooked. And sometimes they get hidden.

How do we know there is blame to be assigned? Owners of personality disorders and many mental illnesses learn early to hide their irregularities; many are astute observers of the normal so that they might imitate it, innocently trying to fix their own problems before embracing their differences. They can be very difficult to spot, even when you live among them – maybe more so because you live among them and desire better truths…

If these two cases of murderous little girls teach us anything, it is that we are none of us perfect – not in mental health, not in social behavior, not in being armchair psychologists…

We cannot hide our blindsiding dreams for our children that cause us to miss important signs, or underestimate the savviness of ill children to disguise their illnesses. But we should also stop believing that all things have a simple, black-and-white fix, that life is so easy we can patch the holes in the boat with an assortment of potent labels.

Horror does not cause mental illness. Horror creators as a group are not mentally ill, and no amount of binge-watching scary movies or reading urban legends and stories of Horror monsters cause crime or mental illness. That is not to say criminals and the mentally ill are not drawn there. Idiots dressing up as scary clowns to terrify strangers is the perfect example. But so are the imperfectly sane drawn to the important messages in the genre.

We have to stop calling people evil, using the word to modify any behavior we cannot or do not want to explain and take responsibility for.

We need to look at these two young girls as what they are – misfits, and unfortunates plagued by an unbearable illness — one that draws out the lifeblood of its victims and their families hope first.

We need to do better than wax poetic for the good old days.

We need to fix the broken ones we are living in now. And we do that by admitting we missed the signs…that we allowed ourselves to be distracted by easier or more garish problems. We owe these little girls that, we owe their parents and families that if we are to begin to fix the problems we have saddled our children with as a species and as a society. The weight of that burden is too great to bear alone.

It takes a village for a reason…

https://thegibraltarmagazine.com/mid-harbours-family-community-centre-inaugurated/o-helping-hand-facebook/

 

 

Slender Trends In Modern American Horror: How Original Are We Really?

For most of us older Horror writers and readers, the whole Slenderman takeover of youthful Horror audiences has remained slightly under the radar. Were it not for the heinous attempted murder trial of two unbalanced young girls which keeps resurfacing, it probably would have remained so…For many it is shocking, alarming…coming from nowhere – which makes it even more terrifying to contemplate.

Except for one thing: this whole scare-the-kids business with men in suits has been done before.

It might come as a shock – if not a disappointment – that the whole mythology of Slenderman is as old as, well, dirt. The fact that it tends to resurface in each generation or so is of mild interest, and often fanned by spinners of paranormal legend-making, offered often as proof that there are some paranormal “things” which have some basis in reality…thereby escalating the level of fear with which we treat them, and providing an emotionally charged platform from which to lob scary tales to haunt the young among us.

It works. Therefore, it is repeated.

But why does it work? And what in the world has the likes of Slenderman to do with Horror Literature?

Literature is For the Formally Dressed: Bring Your Tux

Literature (some will argue) has its own formula. Yet it is in the genres that we are most likely to encounter noticeably familiar rhythms and resurrected themes. Therefore, time and again Horror writers must do battle with originality within the framework of …formula.

Genre audiences have certain expectations. And as such, this has led to what are called “conventions”… certain established rules for achieving that expected outcome. And those conventions have in turn led to an overt expectation of formula. In genre Horror the most common denominator of formula (and therein subsequent convention) tends to be derived from folk and fairy tales, and “new” fairy tales – the urban legend.

Now, formula is not always bad. Consider it to be like music notation…a kind of framework upon which all the magic happens: it is both necessary, and noticed when it is missing. However it can be more flexible than we have allowed for it, as long as changes are clearly organic and roots remain visible.

Most often, we recognize certain “melodies” in writing. These are often the side effects of a subliminally understood meter or pulse behind the words – the “beat” that gets us moving, that connects to emotions.

In writing, words can be every bit as primal as a drumbeat. And to understand the connection between what we do now and what has been done in the past, we need only look as far as fairy tales and campfire tales…urban legends…myths. These are the past tense of genre. And while they are fun and intriguing, writers must exercise caution because these are powerful and obvious patterns – we must decide if we meant to make the connection obvious, and at no time should we attempt to “trick” or “surprise” the reader with the fact of those patterns: we simply won’t succeed, and our story – no matter how capably written, will be rendered “trite” and our plot overdone.

These are our primitive instruments. And being the first things we derived to create word-music, we tend to revert to them often. Simply, we value their power – their ability to really connect into our primal memories to summon certain emotional reactions.

This is exactly what Slenderman (and all characters of his ilk) are designed to do. In Horror, we take the word-music and make it discordant, disharmonious… unsettling and uncomfortable. To do this we must know what is pleasing and soothing in order to not-do it.

Horror is not about banging on the piano keys. It is about playing something with patterned dissonance – intentionally and artistically. This is why some Horror with violence is gratuitous and cheap, but the same act in another story is powerful in a Literary way. As Horror writers we have to be aware of where the line is and make educated decisions on when we cross it and why.

A masterful handling of such details is how inventions like Slenderman got their start and manage to hang on. And on.

There are simply certain images which disturb us on a basic, primal level. Typically these images are discordant. Dissonant. Out-of-step with what we perceive as reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babadook

This makes nightmares plumb hunting grounds for such images. As biology has taught us, every animal is prey for something else. So logic follows that if one is an apex predator, what could be more terrifying than that which stalks us?

The whole Slenderman profile speaks volumes about our modern fears as well as a few primitive ones. Today in “civilized” countries such as the United States the biggest villains are the faceless persons of privilege and power – the ones who move behind the scenes and treat us like their personal puppets. Their henchmen – figures of authority including government, law enforcement, religion…

It does not take much of a leap of imagination to see those representatives – the Enforcers of our warped society – within the description of Slenderman. We even speak of such authorities in derivative terms, reducing them to what they wear (“suits” and “uniforms”) to what they do (“Pencil pushers” “thought police” and “enforcers”). We proudly declare them “faceless”…”stalkers”… “dark web”…”hidden or shadow government”… They routinely take our children, curtail our rights, manipulate our reality, garnish our wages. “The long arms of the law”…. “the tentacles of government”… “the mind control of religion”…”the opiate of the masses.”

Never mind the perception of stranger danger… the constant presence of real fears of child abduction and the disappearing of whole children and people, the constant threat of societal perversion right here in our society… We were primed for the return of the Slenderman; we simply had not named him in this country…

But there is more to this picture. Because whether it is about survivor guilt or our own personal fears of the once-again suddenly noticeable influx of Others – of immigrants and different customs, language, and religion, we have customized a very old motif to fit modern worries.

And perhaps our human attachment to guilt – collective, racial, personal – all fold into those nightmare creations to build monsters which come at us from planes of existence which we cannot have control over. Perhaps it is a sense that we deserve whatever comes to us, combined with the knowledge our own perception of things has taught us: that when entities are vengeful they often take down whatever prey is available because they cannot reach the ones most often harboring the fullest measure of responsibility.

In other words, the innocent pay most often the debts of the guilty.

Peripheral damage. Collateral damage. Accident. Tragedy.

Humanity provides all manner of words. The Horror is that it changes nothing to cast labels along with our aspersions. But it does give us permission to revel in our customized misery. No one suffers like we do…

So when we create monsters, it is important that we be willing to sacrifice characters our readers have invested some of themselves in. It is important that we remember our own fears in order to translate them to the page.

Our history in storytelling assures us that we will not have to travel far to find such figures from which to diverge. Says Martin Tropp in his book, Images of Fear: How Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818-1918):

“The continued remodeling of popular myth is behind not only of the purpose and power of the horror tale, but also, as Bruno Bettelheim has shown us (in The Uses of Enchantment) one reason fairy tales have remained popular among generations of children…fairy tales have been shaped by their audience to reflect their wishes and fears. Certain patterns recur because the problems they echo are common to children – among them the fear of abandonment by parents, competition with siblings, the conflict between the allure of pleasures and the demands of growing up.” (7)

(I know. You are not children, you say. You are practically adults. I do know, because I was once you. In fact, only the mirror reminds me otherwise from time to time. And therein we are unavoidably linked.)

But here is the thing: as young adults, we all feel a weird pull toward the supernatural. It is a natural curiosity, typically happening when we fancy ourselves old enough to rightfully question our parents’ real authority, their religion if any, and the meaning of death.

Just like the wee children in fairy tales, we wander about in dark forests, invincible and immortal even as we know secretly that we are not. With a sense of superiority, we leave bread crumbs only to have wildlife eat them, leaving us stranded and lost. We test the things that threaten to get us if we cross the line. We buck authority, flaunt our youth. And we do it out of fear. We do it to prove we can out run those fears. Because bad things always have to happen to everyone else.

Except that they don’t. We see it right now with school shootings. With inner city crime. With war.

Continues Tropp, “Like classical or Christian mythology, stories like Frankenstein, Dracula or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thoroughly permeate our culture; you don’t need to have read the novels to have felt their power… And if myths are…the dreams of our race, then these [retold and reworked] myths have become our recurrent nightmares” the constant retelling of which “never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning.” (7)

Did you see the point where Literature and Horror collide?

Literature is all about bringing truth to the table. Fairy tales deal with raw truths about the human condition. Weave that into a tale which resonates with readers to inform about a period of time, an incident that will become history, and you are flirting with Literature. Horror in Literature.

It only makes sense that we would choose a fairy tale guy wearing a formal suit and sometimes a top hat to do the deed…

Fairy Tales Are Not For Children

Having been surrounded by nursery rhymes and geese wearing bonnets, it is entirely possible that you have no idea about the true nature of fairy tales, or fairies for that matter. Especially in the United States, we have sugar-coated our fairy faith with Disneyesque sparkle and glitter. Happy Ever After is our mantra.

But in reality, fairy tales were never meant for charming children. They were most often meant for adults, and when offered to little ones were done so with the intent of keeping rebellions in line. They were “cautionary tales” whose violation resulted in death.

How grim is that? Very Grimm. Go in search of the original stories and you will never be the same.

Reach into Celtic Fairy traditions and you will not find nice things. Fairies of old are first and foremost supernatural beings. Not human. Never having been human to anyone’s certainty. But they are full of treachery and tricks, working within their own understanding of rules and acceptable behavior.

Yet we have done our best to neuter them. We have turned on our electric lights, made leprechauns dance on bar tops, and spun Red Caps into singing miners. We absolutely will not acknowledge any other version of fairies than the kind that emit rainbows and hawk sugary cereals.

Match that against the monsters we now create upon their templates.

Because in order to put the Horror back into our storytelling, we needed to pretend we were being original when we made Slenderman up. Imagine the Horror… when that was indeed closer to the original…

When a monster so stacked with imagery which has been proven through the centuries of fairy tales, ghost lore, supernatural stories, and urban legend to terrify… springs forth, it does so in three dimensions. This is top class monster-building, and it only works when the general target population has never heard the original tales in order to connect them up.

The Phantom Coachman https://atashafyfe.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/ghosts-of-the-road/

This is how the younger generations become “easy” marks. And every year there is a fresh infusion of teenagers who have never heard of or read about certain monsters.

And so this is also why genre Horror is solely presumed to be an emotional playground for teenagers.

Never mind that this is a misconception. Never mind that Horror has even more in store for adults…

The constant recycling of monster traits can lead to some pretty heady stuff. When we as writers tap into primal imagery which has survived with its “scary” intact for centuries, we have the ingredients for a monster that will cling to the imagination in ways that do not let go.

According to Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, we should never underestimate the power of primal images to hijack our reason. Says Gottschall: “Take fear. Scary stories leave scars. In a 2009 study, the psychologist Joanne Cantor showed that most of us have been traumatized by scary fiction. Seventy five percent of her research subjects [my emphasis] reported intense anxiety, disruptive thoughts, and sleeplessness after viewing a horror film. For a quarter of her subjects, the lingering effects of the experience persisted for more than six years… for 91 percent of Cantor’s subjects, scary films – not real world nightmares such as 9/11 or the Rwandan genocide by machete – were the source of their most traumatic memories.” (149-150)

No wonder Moms everywhere warn against watching those scary movies.

And no wonder we sneak downstairs when the house is dark and watch them anyway. Sometimes, to life-changing effect.

Slenderman is no different when you take away his tux. He is merely a continued reshaping of a reliable mythic monster.

http://skulduggery.wikia.com/wiki/Springheeled_Jack

Alleged to have been “officially” created by Eric Knudsen in June 2009 for a website writing contest, Slenderman burst upon the internet scene and has not looked back…

But we need too. Because according to Knudsen himself, the monster was based on Mothman, Men in Black, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, the collective works of H.P. Lovecraft, Shadow People, and the works of Stephen King, among others (Redfern 19-20) This means he was more re-invented than invented…more invented than “discovered.”

https://www.dmhsperspective.com/government-and-their-secrets/2017/01/16/the-real-men-in-black/

The Slenderman template has a long history, stretching as far back as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Spring-Heeled Jack, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon…even spirits that haunted stately houses in Britain with tall, dark ghostly figures or stalked the moors, or drove phantom coaches…

All of these images work for a myriad of psychological reasons. For example, we have a built-in, hard-wired obsession with tall, thin, spindly characters in black, nattily dressed, and often sporting a full complement of razor sharp teeth when they aren’t missing eyes or mouths or features in general.

We are afraid of….strangers. Especially if they can just vanish before our eyes, or come and go out of fevered dreams…

Strangers have always been dangerous…whether we are talking child abduction, fairy/child abduction, avenging spirits of the murdered or apparitions of the improperly interred dead, outcasts that stumble across one’s tribe, or the only survivor of a plague… strangers often brought death to our ancestors. And they still do in some Walmarts, some high schools, some workplaces, some highways…

Yet in order to propagate fear properly, monsters’ tales must be told. And retold. Embellished. Made familiar and too close to home. It may well be why campfires were invented. And perhaps most importantly, scary things must be shared and believed in because adults do not believe in them.

Yet, the secret is…we still do. We just pretend we don’t. Because at our age, we know there is not a darned thing we can do about them.

This is how the Real World becomes entangled in fairy tales – and I mean the real kind of fairy tales that never end well – when Horror becomes Literature because “…sometimes what needs to be expressed can only be done through the monstrous, for sometimes the human condition is monstrous, defined by the breach of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the normal and the abnormal, good and evil, right and wrong.” (Held 4-5)

This is why I became a Horror writer.

And the sooner we see Slenderman as a stand-in for our deepest fears, the sooner we can make newer, scarier monsters from his mold.

On Finding the Original in a Many-Splendored Slender

I find it interesting that Slenderman has begat endless progeny in Horror, and that his likeness and progeny proliferate right now in American Horror.

Whether we are talking film or writing, we are being drawn into the vacuum of the tall thin monstrosity that stalks our world. He hides in the forest – a Freudian reference if ever there was one – lurking in our primitive desires and fears.

But like all fairy tales, his presence in our fiction has issued a new challenge to Horror writers. Tell any tale you want, but find the point of originality.

Here again, writing becomes like music. And like in music, in writing we have Jazz to deal with.

In music, there is the following of notes, and there is improvisation. If Horror writers insist on using our primal templates, we must also find a way to deliver the monster in some sneaky, unsuspecting way.

Some say all tales derive from fairy tales and their ilk…some say there are only three original plots in fiction.

But even if that is true, we have only to look at the many stories that these seminal stories themselves begat to know we can one-up the original. We simply have to figure out how, why, when, and where. We have to write and then edit with the realization that when we borrow these primal templates,  the melodies are familiar — but we don’t want them completely recognized. We need to surprise in order to delight, to terrify, to unsettle and then haunt.

And sometimes this unfortunately may mean shelving a monster because the sacrificing the original just won’t do. It won’t matter how well a story is told if the only image that surfaces belongs to another story. We see that now with all wizards and witches in Young Adult. Just stating the premise alone is flirting with professional rejection. We are still seeing the same problem with dragons in Fantasy. On one hand, a writer set such glorious imaginations on fire that the creative waters are bursting the banks, but on the other, the audience now needs time to forget in order to be surprised again.

It is an unfortunate characteristic of our species that we endlessly search for patterns. And when we spot them in fiction, they spoil the yarn.

Slenderman is doing this now in Horror. He has replaced Zombies, which replaced Vampires. And we are now nearing tilt.

Writers must endlessly search for the new angle on the old tale. And “sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said” (Held 5).

But we need not despair. Says Jacob Held in his introduction to Stephen King and Philosophy titled, “On Writing Popular Philosophy”: “Noel Carrol notes that ‘the attraction of supernatural Horror is that it provokes a sense of awe which confirms a deep-seated human conviction about the world, viz., that it contains vast unknown forces…’ we are attracted to that which horrifies us.” (6)

And indeed we are. The popularity of fan fiction websites like CreepyPasta which contain whole sections of fictional Slender tributes are the proof of our own self-horror. The fact that even left to our own devices we primally gravitate to the same monsters over an over are not proof of their existence, but proof that we fear ourselves most of all. We fear what we have become. We dread the endless threat to innocence. We fear we are already in a fairy tale of the old school…

Deep down, we know the truth: we are all faceless ruiners of innocent humanity. No wonder we see suits in the trees with preternaturally long arms waving and probing the night to grab us and drag us to face the laws of the dark forest… Judgement and justice always seek us out.

We cannot make a single choice that does not have ramifications which ripple across our geography and potentially damage other human beings.

And yes, we wear our finery when we wreak our havoc, top hat and tails, our suits and facelessness, professing our own innocence in the doing of our misdeeds. That we fancy ourselves as innocent makes us fair game for the tentacled arms of justice. It makes us deserving of the night gaunts and haunts that stalk the dark, wild areas of our imaginations.

This is what causes Lovecraft to capture us: our fear that we do not deserve the planet we occupy. Cthulhu waits. Judgement is pending. And all manner of dark things have come to course the night-world and hunt us. Including Nyarlathotep…a god masquerading as a man dressed in black… (Bilstad 208-209)

It should not be a far leap to see that the current impact of Slenderman on modern American Horror is nothing more than a continuation of a tradition of guilt and hair-raising storytelling. Because creating guilt even where there might not need any to be is part of our human legacy. But those among us – especially young, idealistic teenagers – who are just starting to explore the world around them as well as their own places within that world – are especially susceptible to the myths that spring from our very DNA.

This is not a bad thing at all…it is, rather, how great Horror gets its start… Because it is within those memories, those glimpses into the indistinct shadows of night where hungry, faceless things await us with inescapably long arms and featureless faces that we will see reflections of ourselves.

And the monsters just keep on coming… like they’re rolled out on a rack…

 

References:

Bilstad, T. Allan. The Lovecraft Necronomicon Primer: a Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos. Woodbury, MN: Llewelyn Publications, c2011.

Gottshcall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, c2012.

Held, Jacob M., ed. “Introduction: On Writing Popular Philosophy.” Stephen King and Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, c2016

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