The Art of Horror - at The WriteIdea , the Ideastore, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets on Sunday Dec 17
In response to requests from audience here are the notes for my talk on the Art of Horror:
Study the work of the classic horror writers:
Edgar Allan Poe
Stephen King
Clive Barker
Bram Stoker
Poe1809-1849 - his own life was a horror story. You don't want to go there. But like him, you can use elements of your own life, memories, nightmares, fears - even if you have to exaggerate them.
His drew some inspiration from his experiences as a pupil of the Manor House School in Stoke Newington between 1817-20 under a brutal headmaster
This reverend man, with countenance so
demurely benign - could this be he who, with sour visage, administered, ferule
in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh gigantic paradox, too
utterly monstrous for solution...!
I'll talk more about paradoxes later, but for now, let's see how Poe used his nightmares, his worst fears...
even drink. He knew that even as a child he saw things differently from other children - he saw the skull beneath the skin, the saw the shadow on the wall.
To write good horror you need to explore your own fears but how far can you go into your own darkness?
Stephen King:
“We make up horrors to help us cope
with the real ones.”
But Clive Barker ('The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, Sacrament etc) put it a different way:
“[Horror
fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and
that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
At the age of four when Barker witnessed the death of the Birdman Leo Valentine at the Liverpool Air Show in 1956. This began a lifelong fascination with horror - with the idea of 'teetering on chaos and oblivion' at every moment, just as the Birdman had.
Bram Stoker 1847-1912 constructed the story of Dracula with building blocks from his own life - chance meetings, locations and images, characters, incidents - and more systematic research.
How he did it is a literary detective story in itself - and it's worth making a list as a guide to your own horror writing.
It began when he was a child during a long period of illness, when he was left with only his imagination for company. This was when he first started playing with 'the shadows on the wall'.
When he was older he visited the crypt of St Michan's Church in Dublin where he saw the mummified remains of three bodies - an image which remained with him throughout his life.
He became fascinated, even obsessed, with vampirism - the idea of 'the undead' who rise from their coffins during the hours of darkness and fortify themselves with human blood.
He read books about vampires - and was much influenced by a meeting with the writer Amin Vambery who collected folk tales from his native Hungary.
Stoker consciously began to look for his own story while he worked as a stage manager, or director we would say now, in a London theatre.
Things began to come together on his holidays in Whitby where he went annually with his wife and family.
He was haunted by the image of the ruined abbey and cemetery on the headland above the town - and the 199 steps leading up to it, with resting places for the coffins.
Then a Russian ship went aground on Whitby beach during a storm and there were rumours about a black dog that had leapt ashore.
The story began to come together.
In Whitby public library he discovered the story of Count Vlad of Transylvania, one of the leaders of the Christian Slav resistance to the Turks. Vlad killed his prisoners by driving a stake through their bodies and was known as Vlad the Impaler.
When the Turks finally caught him, they cut off his head and buried it in a separate place from the body, so he could never return, even after death.
Vlad was a knight of the Order of the Dragon, - Dracul in Romanian. Stoker had his villain - and a name - Count Dracula.
He began to collect more characters.
Two young women staying in the same boarding house became Dracula's victims, Mina Murray and Lucy Westernra.
A local solicitor became Jonathan Harker, who was sent to Transylvania to see the count and sell him property in England.
A legend was born.
You might have your own plot already - and like Stoker you only need to add to it with ingredients from your own life, or from the lives of others.
If you don't you might think of adapting a fairytale ie using elements of the fairytale as your basic plot, but adapting it to your own needs.
Charles Perrault 1628-1703 was the first person to write down the old peasant folk tales. Many of them are classic horror tales, though they've been sanitised over the years and given happy endings.
Red Riding Hood provides a great template for a horror story. It has all the classic plot elements.
Angela Carter adapted some of them to her own themes and ideas in The Company of Wolves.
And it was done most spectacularly by novelist Thomas Harris. In The Silence of the Lambs, Red Riding Hood, aka FBI agent Clarice Starling, is given a mission by the Authority figure, Crawford, and 'sent into the forest' to meet the Wolf - Hannibal 'the Cannibal' Lecter - but warned 'not to stray from the path' - not to let him into her mind. In the sequel 'Hannibal' Clarice is betrayed by Authority and the Wolf becomes her hero and her saviour - and they go off together to Buenos Aires to learn to tango.
Another great example is Don't Look Now - with its story about the child in the red raincoat who drowns in the family pond - and the red-hooded dwarf/killer in Venice who becomes her 'vampire'.
In conclusion - most horror writers play with their own worst fears, their nightmares - the shadows on the wall - but beware if you play games with Horror - it has a way of playing games with you.
INGREDIENTS for a Horror story or Ghost story might include:
• Haunted Location or
Image
• Myths and Fairytales
• Evil character
• Innocent/vulnerable
character – may be child
• Irony
• Predestination
paradox
• Coincidence
• Bits and pieces of
your own life
• The shadow on the
wall
• A sense of mischief
