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evening_tsarWhat's horror mean to me?
Around Halloween time, I heard this was asked. Though not of me, I've never let that stop me before. So here we go.
(*ahem*)
I was born just a few days before Halloween. So I came to be at a time when things were getting colder, darker and spookier. As long as I can remember, celebrations of my existence coincided with that of ghosts, witches and goblins. As a child, I could not help noticing that people would carve out their jack-o-lanterns just as I was blowing out my candles, and break out the masks just a few days later. I was born into Bradbury’s October Country, an autumn person thinking autumn thoughts.
As such, I’ve always had nothing but warm, fuzzy associations with dead leaves, bare trees, black roses, cobwebs, ravens and crows. I came to love the woods, caves, churchyards and looming archways. Of course I loved ghost stories!
Naturally I was drawn towards the gothic. That meant Poe.
Poe could do no wrong (especially if read by Basil Rathbone). He was master of the story, of the sentence, of the sarcastic send-up and put-down. Poe did not just entertain, or enlighten, or frighten, though he did indeed do all this. Poe I think made sense of the world. Poe understood us. He understood that our weaknesses governed us more than our strengths, and that our flailing frailties were often what gave life meaning, such as it was. He identified the quality he called “Perverse”, which he defined as acting against one’s own interest. Doing the opposite of what better judgement demanded; doing what ought not to be done largely because it ought not to be done. Long before legions of self-deprecating memes sought to sheepishly justify every vice from laziness to alcoholism, Poe had a name for it.
This was Poe’s great insight. Oddly enough, I don’t see it as cynical. I see it as honest. We’re human. Being human means accepting great ugliness as well as great beauty, and accepting that they often come from the same place. Great passions rarely spring from self preservation. More often, they spring from the Perverse.
That’s largely what horror means to me.
Poe had more to tell us about people than any anthropologist. It’s one of the reasons I trust literature and poetry more than sociology. The great horror writers had their own insights as well (though none as great as Poe).
Bierce was the great satirist of his day. He saw through and shot down our absurdities.
Lovecraft knew what we were really afraid of: that sneaking suspicion, following Darwin, that we actually inhabited an indifferent, Godless universe.
Even Stephen King, whom I have no great love for, does understand a few things: how delicately balanced our lives really are, and how easily that balance can be overthrown.
There is hope too. The Exorcist teaches us that we can overcome evil. Not easily, and not elegantly, and definitely not without a high price in pain. But we can overcome evil, and that which we think of as God, the goodness and self-worth within ourselves, can triumph.
That’s horror for me.
You’ll notice the absence of slasher films and torture porn. I’m not interested in nihilism. I take no joy in the desecration of people and refuse to glee in others’ suffering.
That’s not horror to me: it’s not supposed to be an exercise in sadism. Not just that anyway. That said, the appeal of the scary story, the anticipation of something going “BOO!” in the night, and sheer simple morbid curiosity is as old as language itself. We’re often drawn towards things our better judgment insists should repel us. The Perverse again.
Poe would have had something to say about that. “There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction” he wrote, just before diving into one of those very themes.
Of course, these days nostalgia plays as big a part as anything. Often enough I just want the sights and smells of trick-or-treating, bound as it is with my birth. As such I’d as soon watch Donald Duck take on Witch Hazel, or Bing Crosby’s Ichabod Crane as anything from the Saw franchise. Or just take a nice walk in the woods.
That’s what horror means to me.
Around Halloween time, I heard this was asked. Though not of me, I've never let that stop me before. So here we go.
(*ahem*)
I was born just a few days before Halloween. So I came to be at a time when things were getting colder, darker and spookier. As long as I can remember, celebrations of my existence coincided with that of ghosts, witches and goblins. As a child, I could not help noticing that people would carve out their jack-o-lanterns just as I was blowing out my candles, and break out the masks just a few days later. I was born into Bradbury’s October Country, an autumn person thinking autumn thoughts.
As such, I’ve always had nothing but warm, fuzzy associations with dead leaves, bare trees, black roses, cobwebs, ravens and crows. I came to love the woods, caves, churchyards and looming archways. Of course I loved ghost stories!
Naturally I was drawn towards the gothic. That meant Poe.
Poe could do no wrong (especially if read by Basil Rathbone). He was master of the story, of the sentence, of the sarcastic send-up and put-down. Poe did not just entertain, or enlighten, or frighten, though he did indeed do all this. Poe I think made sense of the world. Poe understood us. He understood that our weaknesses governed us more than our strengths, and that our flailing frailties were often what gave life meaning, such as it was. He identified the quality he called “Perverse”, which he defined as acting against one’s own interest. Doing the opposite of what better judgement demanded; doing what ought not to be done largely because it ought not to be done. Long before legions of self-deprecating memes sought to sheepishly justify every vice from laziness to alcoholism, Poe had a name for it.
This was Poe’s great insight. Oddly enough, I don’t see it as cynical. I see it as honest. We’re human. Being human means accepting great ugliness as well as great beauty, and accepting that they often come from the same place. Great passions rarely spring from self preservation. More often, they spring from the Perverse.
That’s largely what horror means to me.
Poe had more to tell us about people than any anthropologist. It’s one of the reasons I trust literature and poetry more than sociology. The great horror writers had their own insights as well (though none as great as Poe).
Bierce was the great satirist of his day. He saw through and shot down our absurdities.
Lovecraft knew what we were really afraid of: that sneaking suspicion, following Darwin, that we actually inhabited an indifferent, Godless universe.
Even Stephen King, whom I have no great love for, does understand a few things: how delicately balanced our lives really are, and how easily that balance can be overthrown.
There is hope too. The Exorcist teaches us that we can overcome evil. Not easily, and not elegantly, and definitely not without a high price in pain. But we can overcome evil, and that which we think of as God, the goodness and self-worth within ourselves, can triumph.
That’s horror for me.
You’ll notice the absence of slasher films and torture porn. I’m not interested in nihilism. I take no joy in the desecration of people and refuse to glee in others’ suffering.
That’s not horror to me: it’s not supposed to be an exercise in sadism. Not just that anyway. That said, the appeal of the scary story, the anticipation of something going “BOO!” in the night, and sheer simple morbid curiosity is as old as language itself. We’re often drawn towards things our better judgment insists should repel us. The Perverse again.
Poe would have had something to say about that. “There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction” he wrote, just before diving into one of those very themes.
Of course, these days nostalgia plays as big a part as anything. Often enough I just want the sights and smells of trick-or-treating, bound as it is with my birth. As such I’d as soon watch Donald Duck take on Witch Hazel, or Bing Crosby’s Ichabod Crane as anything from the Saw franchise. Or just take a nice walk in the woods.
That’s what horror means to me.
