Okay everyone, have a seat and get out a pencil and a piece of paper.
Write down this formula: Something horrific = horror. Now is that
right? It does look like it, I'll admit. 'Something' could be
anything, and 'horrific' even contains most of the letters of horror.
But I hope everyone here has the same feeling in their gut that I
do, that there's more to it than that.
Straight up, in-your-face horror only scares us so briefly that the
length of time might not be measurable unless you use one of those
branches of math that's built on unreal and irrational numbers. The
kind of horror that makes us feel better when it's over contains a
measured amount of ambiguity and a measured amount of certainty, in
the right proportions and added at the right time. To use a cooking
analogy, something I'm just as qualified to use as I am to repair
Model T's, the dish isn't dependent on the meat as much as it is on
the spices and the preparation.
Let's compare two dishes. They both contain the same meat but follow
two different recipes, and end up with two very different results.
The meat we'll use will be something solid for this genre: the slow,
agonizing death of a child.
The recipe in one story is from a movie my wife told me about that
starts off with an exceptionally gruesome scene. An innocent little
girl is trapped in a small space, and the space is flooded with wet
cement. She screams for her daddy the whole time, and the scene cuts
just before we see her die. She could be anyone's child, yours or
mine.
I watched the whole movie, Walled In, and while the girl's death is
mentioned later, there's no direct relevance. She isn't the only one
to die that way, and that was the only scene that the young actress
has. That whole gut-wrenching event was a throw-away.
The other recipe comes from the Japanese movie 'Ringu,' and its
American remake. In this example, we see a little girl thrown into a
well and left to die of exposure. Though the death is later
explained to be slow and terrible, we're only given a few seconds of
the attack and seeing her fall.
This little girl has supernatural powers, and those powers make life
hell for the people around her. Her death isn't revealed until we're
halfway through the movie, and the person who kills her is a family
member driven to the act out of desperation. She's a central
character and the protagonists spend the movie trying to find out
just what happened to her. One item to note is that in the Japanese
version, it's hinted that she might be of non-human origin, (and in a
horror movie that kind of hint is pretty reliable) and that she kills
a man with her abilities even before she becomes a vengeful ghost.
This makes her something alien to us, and even though we cringe at
seeing her killed, we can move on.
So set these two entree's on the table next to each other and compare
them side by side. One has the meat dropped on top where it's the
first thing you'll taste when you bite into it, and the other has it
further in. Why does this matter?
In real life, the death of a child horrifies us, as it should.
Whether we read about it in the news or hear about it in a
conversation at the water-cooler, it means something to us. Using
that connection when you tell a story, either on film or in print, is
like using explosives to blast a tunnel through a mountain. You damn
well better know what you're doing, or this shit will go off in your
face. The meat needs to blend in with the rest of the dish.
The silly thing is that the throw-away wasn't needed in Walled In.
The movie was good, with what I would call solid acting and a fairly
good story. I'll guess that the girl's death was put in to shock us
right off the bat. Well, it does that, but it makes the whole rest
of the movie seem like it's waiting for the real action to begin.
When you get the spiciest part in the first bite, the rest can't help
but seem bland.
I loved The Ring. It's a good, well-paced ghost story that pushes
the right buttons. It has the meat mixed in with the spices, and
things blend. It leaves us wanting more of the same taste.
That's why we cook.
That's why I write.
