'Danse Macabre'

Autumn: changing leaves, pumpkins, Halloween, spooky stuff, and all the rest. It's a fun time of year, even if one I have mixed feelings about. Halloween, apparently, was one of the old man and his twin's favorite holidays for their roarin', party-filled twenties.

Exterior horrors can hide much worse interiors; they're still big into horror and got all the cash for their toys.

We still had all the old decorations and when the closest person in age is eight years older, well, the jokes can get mean. October meant a lot of time hiding in my room because of this 'hilarious' portrait that was motion-activated to thrust out and screech at you. Scared the hell out of me. The old, adult masks that smelled funky, allegedly because of a Halloween party when the twins (presumably drunk) thought raw meat would make for a fun 'trick' for unsuspecting guests who reached inside were never fun to encounter, either.

Once I got past my initial distaste for the holiday, however, I have found a draw toward stories of things that go bump in the night—though I remain squeamish.* I digress: Halloween, spooks, October, and what better author to mention in connection with the month but Stephen King?

Now, say what you will for Stephen King being a top-two contender with Haruki Murakami for terribly written women characters (“…and here she stood in her shortie pajamas, with her nipples no doubt sticking out like headlights..." vs. "Her nipples were not overly large, and they were soft, still quietly groping for the maturity that was to come…”—yes, those are real lines written by the respective men), there’s something else people also sometimes know him for: the horror genre.

Along with On Writing, it falls into an interesting set of books that discusses a bit more of the theory of writing and his background. And King's knowledge of horror is encyclopedic, which is unsurprising given the ubiquity of his characters and stories in culture, from Stand by Me to Pennywise the Clown to the Overlook Hotel to The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption. King's most enduring influence, of course, is on the horror genre and thus there's a lot of value in a book looking into his thoughts and some of the ideas and philosophy that go into his writing.

Those little masks on the wall are similar to the portrait that scared me as a kid—it was covered by a veil, but it'd thrust out to outline a face. 

For example, King presents a relatively simple separation of horror, early on: just about every monster can fall into the category of a werewolf or a vampire. This can be seen from small-scale to fictional proportions—the man turning into a hairy, four-legged creature need not be any more than.an explosive temper winning and someone lashing out; a vampire doesn't need to literally drain your blood, it can be someone like Colin Robinson in What We Do In The Shadows, who just bores you to death and sucks the energy out of a room.

There's another excellent distinction made: while people do want horror, we want it tempered to an extent. In a sense, I see this a bit akin to Senecan tragedies: there are lines an audience doesn't want to see crossed, or things that people find too disturbing to see, and so those tend to turn people off as opposed to drawing them in. We can see a contrary strain of this in some more modern gore flicks, other horror that pushes the line and the like, but there's a reason you're unlikely to see Human Centipede up there next to Dawn of the Dead or Psycho for classics anytime soon.

Earlier forms of this are also pointed out by King: one comic book story  he recounts tells of a massively disliked baseball player who, after falling afoul a team, is killed and his body used for a gruesome game. One limb is used in place of a bat, another in place of a ball, and you get the idea. Similarly, he discusses the 1932 film Freaks, which used actual disabled people and sideshow performers from circuses in order to portray the titular "freaks" more effectively.

In both cases, as King discusses, people more often reacted with genuine disgust as opposed to the cathartic experience one gets from attending the movies and strolling out with, most likely, a happy ending or an open-ended one making you wonder whether you want a sequel or if its liable to fall into the trap so many have with a half-assed sequel for a cash-grab.

Pictured: two safe, on-screen horrors; one "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife."

One workaround to showing horror onscreen without portraying, so to speak, for this can be found with off-screen horror, or a monster only glimpsed in parts—HP Lovecraft can be pointed to for this, where eldritch abominations are described as so awful to behold that even a sighting can drive one to madness. We can see this in larger modern monsters as well: Cloverfield is not the only modern horror film where we are teased with only partial glimpses of a monster. Contrast this with, say, Godzilla, and we see another interesting note mentioned by King: the odd overlap of comedy and horror. 

The horror of a distant, calamitous monster is made almost comical when presented as a nuclear-powered reptile crawling up from the ocean floor to be a stand-in for nuclear weapons and then to play Rock-'Em Sock-'Em Robots with the monster flavor of the week.** Such a skewed perspective also can lead to unintentional humor when horror goes too far into bathos (see, perhaps, the end of some Greek tragedies—like Oedipus gouging out his eyes) or absurdity.

Unseen horror, or the hint of it, also need not be massive: both Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers keep their visages hidden behind the mask, leaning into a monster we never quite see on-screen as an audience. Similarly, in True Detective''s first season finale, we are never explicitly shown what is on a certain VHS tape: the responses shown by the characters to it are enough. Being off-screen is not a shortcoming; as with a play, often we find that what we conjure in our own minds, tailored to our own fears and experiences in life, is much worse than any number of details the author could provide.

This also, I believe, feeds into the cathartic feeling at the end of a horror story: unlike life where a sequel or a repeat experience is beyond our control, we are able to, in an abstract sense, grapple with whatever darkness ails us and throw it off—even if incapable of doing so with our real-life bedevilments, which continue to haunt us at the worst of times.

Gotta be grateful they didn't have an army of animatronics when I was a kid

This last part, in particular, I find important: in imagination, or living vicariously through the pages of books, we can slay any number of dragons effortlessly; all too often, the hardest horrors to forget are the most mundane and inescapable: those we have encountered in our own lives and pasts.

While I have to acknowledge it's been some time since I've read Danse Macabre, I still find myself thinking back to it, both when I am watching some darker material from thrillers to true crimes, given the genre overlap, as well as when tinkering around with a few of my own (poorly-attempted) shitty first drafts.

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*I've also possibly grown a bit of an interest in some meaner pranks, as an ex who was surprised by an alarm of 'We've Only Just Begun' minutes after I'd pretended to leave for work the morning after we watched 1408 can attest to.

**And hey, nothing against some campy, fun horror: who couldn't love Fraser's Mummy series or Campbell's Evil Dead?