HORROR AND TERROR, SLASHERS AND STUMPS

Part Two of a Four-Part Conversation About Horror Fiction With Christopher Conlon, Lisa Morton, Kurt Newton, and Norman Prentiss

For Part One of this discussion, please visit Christopher Conlon’s blog at http://chrisconlon.livejournal.com/12355.html.

CONLON: One thing I find puzzling about the genre in general—and I’m speaking as an immigrant to this field, mind you, having spent twenty years largely in poetry and literary fiction—is the pervasive attitude I see among horror writers regarding style. Again and again I’ve observed, in people’s articles and on message boards, a kind of suspicion of the whole notion of style. Whenever someone asks, “Which is more important, story or style?” everyone jumps in with, “It’s all about the story, the story, the story!” Maybe it’s my background in poetry talking here, but I have no idea how anyone thinks they can meaningfully separate story and style—as if “story” is the Christmas tree and “style” merely some sort of ornamentation you throw on top of it that looks pretty but isn’t really necessary. One of the reasons people like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams were such a revelation to me when I was young was because they taught me what style was, and what it did for a piece of writing—in their cases it was a kind of rich, baroque style, but Hemingway’s stark, stripped-down approach is just as good an example. Or, within this field, take Ray Bradbury—particularly the early Bradbury. Everyone raves about his stories and his wonderful lyrical way with words, but these will be the same people who claim that style is somehow secondary. Yet imagine those early Bradbury stories written in the flat, pulp-fiction language of the time. They would die on the page. Bradbury is his style.

MORTON: Style is, I think, incredibly important to a good horror work, because so much of what we do is dependent on creating mood.

My partner Ricky reads more than anyone I know, and even reads a lot of literary criticism, so we ended up discussing this question. Ricky thinks that Americans in general tend to be dismissive of style because they see it as interfering with the naturalism that pervades American art. I think that’s probably somewhat true. So I’m going to say that I think that attitude you’re noting, Chris, has less to do with these people being horror writers, and more to do with prevailing contemporary attitudes across the board.

On a personal level, style is something I’ve thought a great deal about, partly because I often feel uncertain about it in my own work. I’m not sure artists are always aware of their style, and that’s probably a good thing. I’ve had friends tell me that my work has a distinctive style, but I can’t completely see it. Would I be a better writer if I could recognize and hone that style more? Or would I start to sound like self-parody? I truthfully don’t know the answer, and I’m somewhat envious of writers in this genre (like Thomas Ligotti or Dennis Etchison) who have a clear style that they wield like a weapon.

PRENTISS: A distinctive, literary writing style won’t necessarily save something that lacks a compelling plot; on the other hand, if the plot’s really original and compelling, that energy could compel readers to forgive some pretty bland, uninteresting prose. We’ve all grown up hearing crappy dialogue on TV, and in the days before they invented graphic novels, a lot of comic books featured terrible, short boxes of narration (and every sentence ended with an exclamation point, too!). If we liked the story or the characters, we didn’t mind. That said, I suspect that plot/story often steals some of the “credit” from prose style. When the style produces an effective atmosphere, many readers say “That’s good storytelling” rather than “That’s a good writing style.” Some people only notice a style when it’s bad.

CONLON: I think you’re right, Norman. Sometimes the most effective style can be basically invisible.

PRENTISS: And when style is bad, it’s really bad. One of the worst things for me is when writers strive for a literate, complex style, and they don’t have the chops to pull it off—instead, they write long sentences without elegance or coherent syntax. I’d rather read generic, serviceable prose than something that tries too hard and fails. When I got slush from beginning writers who tried to emulate the style of Poe or Lovecraft, I didn’t tend to read very far.

NEWTON: Style is the flesh to good storytelling’s bones. You can have one without the other, but one will be very soft while the other will be very hard. Together they form a more complete reading experience. Aside from Bradbury, one of my favorite horror stylists was Charles Grant. His prose had a dark, rich rhythm that stood apart. Nowadays, it’s difficult to tell who’s writing what. I bet if you took a major horror anthology and stripped away the names, readers would be hard-pressed to recognize the contributors.

Speaking of style, allow me to ask everybody: What influence, if any, have horror movies/television had on your own writing? What influence have horror movies had on the genre as a whole?

MORTON: First question: Probably more than I’d like to admit! In my case especially this might be a pretty skewed question, since I even majored in Screenwriting in college. I grew up loving all kinds of movies (and I still do), but it took a horror movie to completely rearrange my life: Up until I was 15, I thought I wanted to go into anthropology (and was encouraged to do so by all of my teachers, school counselors, and parents), but then I saw The Exorcist in a crowded theater and my life altered its course in two hours. It’s hard to get young people to believe it now, but the effect of that film on a packed audience during its initial release was absolutely astonishing: People screamed, fled, vomited, fainted, lost sleep, saw priests, and talked about it for weeks. I saw the film eleven times that year, and most of those times I studied the audiences. I’d never imagined that a mere piece of art could have that impact on people (and I can’t imagine now that it’ll ever happen again), and I knew that I wanted to try to create that effect. My counselors and parents were horrified (for the wrong reasons!), but there was no stopping me. Although I think my fiction was finally influenced far more by other works of prose I’d read than by movies, there’s no question that it was movies—or at least one particular movie—that made me want to write in the first place. (Side note of trivia here: A few years ago I was fortunate enough to meet William Peter Blatty, and I had him sign an original lobby card from The Exorcist for me. That card was immediately framed and placed over my desk, where it remains to this day as a reminder of my commitment to my craft.)

As to what influence horror cinema has had on the written end of the genre…wow, that’s a huge question. I think the relationship between horror cinema and horror literature is probably closer than it is with any other genre (with the possible exception of science fiction, and science fiction movies are a lot more expensive to produce, so there just aren’t as many of them!). For the first six decades of movie history, literature drove the movies, with adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein and (later) Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby leading the way. But then in the late ’70s things started to switch around. Horror cinema seemed to lead the way this time, with several things happening: Big-budget studio movies like Alien and Jaws set new highs for the level of gore in major films; Halloween made the masked (and possibly supernatural) killer into a trope; and some guy in Pittsburgh created an entirely new kind of monster in the cannibalistic zombie. And horror authors in the ’80s jumped all over that stuff, with higher levels of sex and violence in their books, a huge cycle of psycho killer novels, and of course zombie fiction (which, amazingly, is even more ubiquitous in 2010 than it was in 1980). Stephen King also exploded in the late ’70s, and he became his own cottage industry—the novels and the movies just sort of seemed to feed off each other. Now it’s not surprising when a hit movie or a trend in film spawns imitator novels—which, in the case of something like Twilight, can turn around and give birth to a new cycle of films, and etc. etc.

CONLON: Kurt, I’ll leave it to Lisa and you and Norman to discuss the effect of movies and TV on the genre. I really don’t know, because I read relatively few horror books and see relatively few horror movies. But in terms of the effects of those media on my own writing, well, like Lisa, I had a Rosetta Stone experience of my own with a movie when I was young—in my case Psycho, which I saw uncut, or very nearly, on late-night television when I was about twelve. Emily Dickinson said that she knew something was poetry if it made her feel as if the top of her head had been taken off—that’s a good description of the effect of Psycho’s poetry on me. I never saw it as just a “scary movie.” For me it was, and still is, a deeply emotional experience. I grew up with two alcoholic parents—my mother died of cirrhosis when I was a teenager—and so what that film has to say about loneliness and alienation and fear was profound and personal to me. I knew what it was to live in a home which presented one face to the world in the daytime, but which had a very different one late at night when the doors were locked. The movie spoke to me in ways that I think have reverberated throughout my life and writing. I sense in Reed Waters, the co-protagonist of my novel Midnight on Mourn Street, the distant shade of Norman Bates.

PRENTISS: The biggest influences on me were the creature-feature movies on television, and the Twilight Zone reruns. It’s funny that you mention an uncut version of Psycho, Chris, because the fact that most of the movies I saw were edited/sanitized, or were fairly mild to begin with, had a big effect on how far I thought horror fiction should go.

CONLON: I don’t know if it was literally uncut, but any censoring must have been slight, because the shower scene was there and it went on for quite a while. It was something to see.

PRENTISS: I always wanted to see the monster, but my expectation growing up was that all the violence would be offscreen or would occur during the commercial break. My earliest visions of blood were in black and white, with the biggest extreme being the chocolate syrup that swirled in Janet Leigh’s shower drain at the Bates motel. Later, there was a Saturday matinee series at the Aspen Hill twin theaters, and they showed reissue prints of Hammer films: Dracula Has Risen from the Grave was the first of these I saw, when I was about twelve years old, and it really startled me. I loved the movie, and Christopher Lee will always be my favorite Dracula, but I’m still emotionally attracted to the black-and-white or edited-for-TV depictions of horror. The red gore is an extra effect which I’ll use sparingly in my writing, when called for, but I’ll leave a lot of the gross stuff offscreen or offstage. I’d like to say the influence is Greek tragedy, but it’s really the TV editing of the ’70s.

As for the influence of horror movies on the fiction, I really admire Lisa’s analysis. The one thing I’ll add is that the perception of horror by the general public is shaped mostly by movies. Those people who look down their noses at horror, like the guy in Chris’s opening question, are reacting mostly to the slasher movies of the ’70s and the modern-day remakes and Saw or Hostel films. They haven’t read anything with “horror” on the spine, and base their judgments on the movies. Now, there are books like those movies—I’ve read quite a few of them, and even enjoyed a good number—but they’re not the only thing the genre has to offer.

NEWTON: Where I grew up there were two drive-in theaters. There was also an old movie theater called the Capital Theater on Main Street in the next town over. Funny Norman should mention Dracula Has Risen From the Grave because my father took my mother and I to the Capital Theater one night to see it. It was a disaster. My father was in rare public form—loud, belligerent, and quite possibly drunk (I remember the usher saying “I’m sorry” about a dozen times just to pacify him and get him to quiet down). If that wasn’t bad enough, I wanted to go home five minutes into the movie! After the opening sequence when the priest stumbles down the cliff and hits his head, cracking the ice where Dracula is frozen beneath, and Dracula tastes the priest’s blood and comes back to life—I was turned around in my seat, groaning and wanting to leave. It wasn’t the blood; it was Christopher Lee’s eyes that scared the crap out of me. There were these extreme close-ups of Christopher Lee’s eyes and they were more bloodshot than a three-day awake meth-addict! I don’t know how they made his eyes so bloodshot, but it looked real as hell, and that night, as I tried to sleep in my own bed, all I saw were those eyes when I closed mine. It was the last time I had to sleep with my parents. I was nine.

My father also took my brother and I to see Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch at the drive-in. Another movie that left a startling impression. From the burning of the scorpions by the children in the opening sequence to the graphic, slow-mo, blood-bag explosions of the gunfights throughout, I had never seen anything like it.

But the movie that really touched me was The Incredible Shrinking Man, based on the Matheson novel The Shrinking Man. I snuck down from bed one night and sat on the stairs and watched this through the railing while my parents watched it. I remember not moving until the end when the shrinking man had shrunk so small he could fit through a single square in a screen window. I remember crying and knowing why. He didn’t die. He simply grew so small he no longer mattered. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

Lastly, at the age of fourteen my mother took me to see The Exorcist at the Capital Theater. Like Lisa said, that movie wasn’t just a horror movie; it was an experience, one that I can honestly say hasn’t been duplicated since, and probably never will be. Not only was The Exorcist the most intense horror movie ever, it was one of the most intense movies ever. The acting was so good. The storyline simple and emotionally true. It definitely transcended the screen. I remember halfway through the movie, after the first 360-degree head spin, I kept expecting the people in the rows in front of us to begin turning their heads around. It was so real. I had a hard time sleeping that night too, but I was able to tough it out.

I also never missed a Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

As for the connection between horror movies and horror fiction? I agree with what each has mentioned so far. And I’ll add that it is my belief that the movie industry is what now drives the publishing industry. Novels that tend to have a more cinematic approach are the ones major publishing houses appear more inclined to publish. I don’t think when an agent/editor receives a manuscript he/she’s thinking National Book Award. I’m sure the first thing on their checklist is “Can this be made into a movie?” Which automatically puts the less graphic, less sensational styles of writing at a disadvantage.

For Part Three of this discussion, please visit Norman Prentiss’ blog at http://nprentiss.livejournal.com/5907.html.

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