What do these words have in common?
There’s a door in my house I never open. Even in October, when I hear that strange
knock…knock…knock…
You’re probably suspicious that things like these are lurking on the other side of that
door. Words that hide the unknown. But you’re not scared by plain lexical items. I mean,
you need context. A narrative. A scary story.
The kind that has an unknown menace that psychologically intimidates your characters (add +1 If the
menace is linked to wider social ills), a sense of despair or hopelessness that comes
over your audience as they fear that the menace is too powerful to handle, a macguffin, a
person or object that drags us into the depths of fear without distracting us from the main
story, a plot twist for added suspense, and, if yours is a psychological thriller add another
+1 if by the end we find out that the narrator telling us this true tale is unreliable.
So there’s your scary story checklist. Good night! Happy Halloween! What? Where did it
come from?
Okay, sure, the storytellers of old knew how to spin tales with monsters and ghosts like
in Homer’s Odyssey, spirit possession in Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji or even spooky
settings as in Dante’s Inferno.
Ancient Sanskrit drama theorists even shrewdly separated that personal feeling of anticipation
you have, sitting there alone with your heart beating faster and faster from the shared
sentiment of terror that descends over the entire audience, and then the reaction of
horror that follows.
But these high artists were focused on telling a perfectly balanced tale, not indulging our
fears for hours on end.
And then there’s folklore. Lowly local tales tales of the shape-shifting aswang haunting
the forests of the Philippines, or of spirits exiting the Otherworld to walk the earth during
the Celtic Samhain. Samhain, the very same harvest holiday behind our Halloween. Aha!
Folklore and horror are both full of strange, mysterious, supernatural tales! But the path
from one to the other wasn’t direct. It took a reaction. The kind that happened in
the Enlightenment as Europe grew more and more rational and sophisticated. And then
Romanticism reacted with pure, raw emotion.
Usually those emotions were nice emotions, but, of course, not all emotions are nice.
One of these emotions was the "sublime" - the immense shock and awe you feel when looking
at mountains or huge Gothic buildings.
Philosopher Edmund Burke talked about this, the idea of "horror and terror" being feelings
of the sublime. “[Pain and terror] are capable of producing delight…a sort of delightful
horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.” We want to be scared. We enjoy
it. How…sublime!
Novelists took this dark emotional journey and created the Gothic trend, turning medieval
castles, towns, priests and monsters into objects of fear, things that hide a dark side.
Over time, novels, movies and games capitalized on those dark emotions to engineer our scary
story checklist. Take that funny word, “macguffin”. Sure, our story needs a menace, fear, uncertainty
and surprise. But Alfred Hitchcock thought, what if we add an extra item that grabs our
interests? Here’s a recent example, sort of recent. A little old skeleton key may not
ultimately determine whether or not the spirits in the attic will snatch our bodies tonight,
but it certainly keeps us curious long enough to stick around and find out what happens
next. Modern horror uses elements like these to tighten our experience of fear from start
to finish.
So from folklore to rationalism to romanticism to Gothic to modern horror, we have a whole
history of scary prose to thank for this basic checklist we’ve come to love.
Or fear. Love to fear.
So if prose scares, poetry must haunt. Head over to my channel, Critical Lit, to find
out more.