Dying. Car accidents. Getting stabbed. Heights.
These are all things that scare me. But there’s a difference between “scary” and “horrifying.”
Scary, to me, instills a kind of shock as they’re happening. Fright, alarm. In the moment. All those things up there, I’m afraid of them, but for the most part I can ignore being afraid of them and carry on. It’s usually only when one of them is brought up do I go, “Yeah, I’m scared of when those things might happen.” Meaning the moment they happen.
There’s no long lasting dread, though, and to me that’s horror. It’s kind of like the rectangle and square: things that are scary aren’t necessarily horrifying, but horror can be both if you want it to be. It’s an overall feeling of uneasiness, of unrest, or “Das Unheimliche.”
Das Unheimliche is the very essence of what makes us horrified, and this is what writers who want to “scare” people are actually wanting to do. There is no direct translation to English, but the closest this is this: Un-home-ly.
Take, for instance, sleeping in your own bed. Easy, right? You’re knocked out in a few minutes, you’re comfortable, you’re safe and secure. Everything is normal.
Now, think about the feeling you get when you stay the night at somebody else’s home for the first time. It’s weird. You’re aware that to someone else everything around you is normal and relaxing, but to you, things seem off. It’s just a general sense of not being used to your surroundings. You’re out of your element, and you can feel it.
This is what I want in a horror story. I want someone to bring that feeling to locations where I normally feel at rest. Or just throw me into somewhere I’m not familiar with, but it’s especially effective when we have our guard down. I don’t want to be surprised (you know, scared), so much as I want to just dread what’s coming next. And here I don’t mean that feeling you get when you just know there’s going to be a loud spike in the score when something quick happens.
The best example of this off the top of my head right now is The Shining. Nothing ever seems right in that hotel, and it’s for extremely good reason, too. Not only is the pacing of the script and the story of the characters just downright horrifying, but there seems to be something extra that you can’t put your finger on. What is it?
Is it the flowing, beautiful, camera work? The makeup? The dialogue?
Well, yes. But interestingly enough, it has a lot to do with the spacial impossibilities that Kubrick had built into the set itself that we are not consciously aware of while we’re watching.
Check this out:
VIDEO
Now that’s the extra effort into feeling “das unheimliche” that I’m talking about. Horror should be about creative ways of generating that feeling of dread without us, the audience, being actively aware that it’s happening.
That’s the reason why the masters have told stories set in locations where the audience feels a shared sense of relaxation and easiness: Murders in the shower. Home invasions. Ghosts watching you sleep. Turning on a car to find someone in the back seat. Etc.
All of these have been exploited. Our job as writers to think of new things. Things to send the audience home thinking twice about what they do on autopilot. Either that, or invade those used spaces in a new and horrific way. Creativity is an awesome tool.
So use it.
What’s horror to you?
B