For tonight, this is sort of a spin-off post of one of my first on the blog–delving into the characteristics of horror and what makes something scary.
It struck me pretty fast and hard, the thought of what really scares us. What gets deep inside our minds and gives us chills? And I mean personally? We all have private fears. Those are the ones that scare us the most. And they could be anything.
The saturation of ’scary’ images out there can blur easy among the masses, and you know what I’m talking about–the overflow of vampiric imagery, blood, gore, flashing lights, screams, bumps in the night, stuff like that. That’s all great, to be honest; but to be truthful, it’s like drinking a regular Pepsi. It gives you that fizzy sugar buzz but then leaves you wiped, bored, bloated and thirsting for more.
What’s missing is that element that would make it a Pepsi One! (Yeah, far-out metaphor, right?) Same great taste without the loss of energy. All that saturation, man–bad stuff, it is.
The horror elements in any piece, really, has to identify with us personally. That can be tricky. Because everyone’s different; so naturally, everyone identifies differently.
I bring this up only because I recall picking up Stephen King’s DUMA KEY in the grocery store. He always fascinated me. You have to have the right temperament, though, for his writing: he has a bit of a sour mouth. In my opinion, that just adds to the flavor.
Again, everyone’s taste is different.
I contemplate DUMA KEY only because I’ve heard comments about his novel transcending traditional motifs in the horror genre. Hearing that always interests me. I hunger for innovation sometimes. Especially within me.
So I picked up DUMA KEY there in the store and started reading a few chapters. Again, the man loves to inject a bit of comedy into the genre. Always a nice tactic. It’s sort of like throwing in cayenne pepper into a sweet chili. The heat and the sweet work together, you know?
Anyway, I came up to a particular passage that clutched my heart in the worst way. And the way he wrote the passage tugged me even more. It was like wrenching. And it was almost like he enjoyed the wrenching. Damn you, King. You’re good.
The main character, Edgar Freemantle happened across an awful accident on a quiet neighborhood street, one accident that was particularly chilling for me. An oblivious, uncaring, thoughtless woman, a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other, I believe, literally ran over a poor dog on the street. While the owner, a little girl, watched it happen.
Now normally that just sounds sad. And awful. But it wasn’t the scene that made it chilling for me. It was the way King described it. The way he described the poor dog, dying.
That’s what I’m talking about when I say…personal. I happen to be a dog-lover. And I hesitate to say that King went over the top with the description of how much the dog suffered (let’s simply leave the details out and just say that King was pretty graphic), but he tread that line pretty darn close. Even that wasn’t the end of it, though. A few times in that particular sequence, he mentioned how the dog screamed.
What a word choice. And it was the perfect one.
I was actually able to picture it, too. He didn’t use howl, which would’ve been the simple, perfectly solid choice. Others would do, too–yelp, cry, raspy whimper. Anything like that–that all evokes a pretty intense image. No. He chose screamed. And he even deliberately implied, through Edgar’s ears, that the sound of it seemed really like an actual scream. Not from a dog.
The fact that he gave the dog a human element just made it worse. We still feel helpless, because probably a dog has less of a chance of surviving that bad of an accident. But now we can’t help but feel that it’s almost…human. That’s like torment.
I’m pretty sure no one likes seeing death, especially something gruesome and also completely trivial as a car running over a measly dog. Those are the kinds of situations that make us feel incredibly helpless and at the same time shamefully and horribly indifferent. I mean, it’s not our dog! But still…. The dog is slowly dying. Right before our eyes. And then we hear that screeching, scratching, God-awful scream.
What was worse was the sequence immediately following that, this remarkably intense barrage of poetic imagery, flashes in the mind as Edgar picks up the dog, cradling the dog. As the dog slowly dies. The chilling part was that King left it unclear, I think, whether the dog died due to the seriously terminal injuries of the body or due to Edgar’s crushing embrace. I got the strange, eerie feeling that poor Edgar in his private torment took it upon himself to silence the poor dog for good. It was the lack of clarity that did it for me–it left me feeling so fragile that I almost had to put the book down and walk away. King cut my heart into pieces with that 1-page sequence. And I hadn’t even gotten too far into the book at the time.
And there is that one other element that is absolutely essential to the whole of the nature of horror: that lack of clarity. The unknown. King has this sickeningly twisted talent of presenting a very blurry image and then slowly sharpening it for us. But only so much, and only so fast. And we beg to see more, to know what it is. But King won’t let us. He works at a simple pace. He doesn’t reveal much. But he reveals enough.
But seriously, the point in that one scene alone is what affirmed my wonders about the book itself, what with all the comments and discussions I’ve heard about the interesting novel DUMA KEY: there were no demons, dragons, vampires, ghosts, goblins, ripped-out organs, scary voices, scary eyes, ’scary’ everything. Again, people: saturation, saturation. We need a little moderation. No, he had none of that in that one simple scene. It was nothing more than a few onlookers, a heartless, businesslike woman in a car, the main character Edgar, a little girl. And a dog. And everyone identifies with that scene. It’s happened in life many times. It’s normal.
And that’s what really scares us. When things that are normal actually scare us on a personal level. Those things do exist. Yes, they do. We simply sometimes forget that they’re around. The basic things that scare us deep down.
Find that core, and no matter how many vampires and demons and devils and God-knows-what-other-chilling-gruesome-monsters we have in our work, that would easily take what would normally be a fresh, shaken can of Pepsi (or Pepsi One), normally bursting open but only this time mixed with a little Mentos. The expected result would astonish, really.
