Horror as a Genre

 It’s been a bit of a weird week. I’m back at work after two weeks of vacation, I’m not sure if my ears have really unpopped after that last plane ride, two Star Trek actors passed away, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is getting New Game+, V for Vendetta is coming back to theaters, and also today is Halloween.

It’s a lot.

I just finished a book about Renaissance Italy, and am now starting up a book about the Cherokee War in the Carolinas.

Gonna try a new game this weekend!

Horror as a Genre

I have never been one who went for horror, as a genre. It’s just not my thing, and I’ll admit that I’ve never really seen the appeal of it. Which is a little bit weird, I guess, because I read and watch a lot of things with horror elements in them–Supernatural, for instance, is often pitched as a horror series, and I watched almost ten seasons of it, even though it was pitched as a horror series.

[It was also originally intended for a mostly male fanbase, but the majority of super fans they got tended to be female, something the show sort of just rolled with.]

Other things come to mind, too. Dresden Files has whole books dedicated to our hero fighting vampires, zombies, and ghosts. Hellboy has an awful lot of hauntings and horrible curses in it. The Witcher is built on the idea of a guy whose job it is to deal with things like malevolent ghosts and creatures that kill and eat people. These things have really ever given me the creeps, which isn’t really that hard, I think?

And to me, part of it is because… yeah, these are stories that involve horrible, terrifying monsters, except the main point of those stories is that there are people whose job it is to hunt and kill these things. I never really saw Supernatural as a horror story, just as an urban fantasy story about people in modern day who fight monsters. Yeah, Dead Beat has Harry Dresden come up against a horde of zombies, but it also has a zombie dinosaur and a bunch of wizards, which is more of where my attention landed.

It’s perhaps a bit silly, because there are genuinely horrifying things in those stories, I just never really focused on them as much.

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that ‘scary’ is such a subjective thing. Different people are going to be spooked by different things, that’s just life. I remember someone tried telling me a spooky story about our office building and suggesting that you may see ghostly shoes walking the halls at night, to which my response was, “Okay, so what? The ghosts of dead shoes? What are they going to do?” But apparently someone thought that the idea was spooky.

But a lot of times, in horror, the point isn’t the spooky thing in and of itself. Like, a lot of The Witcher isn’t about, “Oooooooh, spooky monster!” It’s about how the world reacts to it, or how the people involved made this happen in the first place. There’s a fantastic storyline involving a plague ghost in The Witcher 3, where the horror isn’t in the fact that a location is haunted, but how the ghost came to be in the first place. And it isn’t horrific in, like, a “Oooooh, this is spooky!” sort of way, it’s horrific in a, “Wow! People can be absolute bastards!” sort of way.

Because if your aim in writing horror is to just say, “Here’s something scary! Isn’t this scary?!” then you’re going to lose some of the audience, because inevitably there’s going to be someone who just doesn’t find it scary. That’s just life. This is part of why people complained so much about jump scares in horror movies in the early 2010s–when there are so many of them, there comes a point where you can see them coming, and if the only thing scary is the fact that something pops up unexpectedly, then it’s no longer going to be remotely scary.

If, however, you tie it to being more than just the idea of a scary element of a monster or a jumpscare or a kill–then you have something that will stick with more of your audience. It’s also a way to attract people like me, who aren’t really there for the obvious horror elements anyway. 

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