Hello everyone, happy Saturday and early Halloween!
Hope everyone is doing well, hopefully with some fun plans for the weekend. The approach of this weekend has been a bit of a mixed bag. Life has a way of throwing everything at me at the last minute.
I was planning on sharing some thoughts this week regarding some thoughts I had regarding the wedding, but quite honestly most of that has been blown from my mind. So I won’t bore you with my attempts to remember and instead give my thoughts on the season.
Specifically, on the subject of horror.
From what I’ve seen, horror is rather unique as far as genres go. Leaving aside the fact that not everyone enjoys a scare, it can often be hit or miss. This is likely due to the fact that fear is a shared but diverse experience. We all feel fear, but we don’t all fear the same things. Of course, much like any other genre, the best writers of horror can draw us in and create fear regardless of the predilections of the audience. They show us things we never knew might lurk in the dark corners of our psyche and give us new reasons to fear those things that go bump in the night.
Creatures like the Xenomorph in Alien, Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s Mythos, or even killers like Michael Myers from Halloween spring to mind as examples. Each of these appears to be brought to life by a deep seated fear of their creator. Of course, that is not the end, they are then given shape and form within a narrative house of horrors, designed to emphasize their more terrible aspects. Whether it be a decrepit vessel drifting in space, the dark and mysterious depths of the ocean, or a small hamlet suburb on Hallow’s Eve.
Not sure if I’ve actually said anything of merit, but to summarize my thoughts as best I can, I believe that horror’s success and failure hinges on the writer’s ability to craft a kind of haunted house suited to the kind of fear they wish to evoke. The main characters, then, are simply a vehicle to drive the plot. Not to say horror characters can’t be complex, only that the horror does not live or die on their character arc. It relies on their ability to inspire empathy or immerse the audience into the story. The most memorable horror come when audience feels the fear and forgets that it is only a story.
And I believe that will do it. I apologize for the rambling, and hope you all found it amusing to some degree.
In regards to my own writing, I apologize that this week was not as productive as I had hoped. There was a quite a bit of catch up this week at work, then my family needed assistance with other personal affairs that made finding time for writing difficult. However, TFT chapter 4 is much more straightforward and I expect it to be a quick write compared to the last chapter.
My hope is that I’ll get it all put together and written in time for the end of November, but we shall see.
Hope you all have a great weekend!
