Horror

So where did Horror come from?

• Horror originated from Gothic literature

• No no no, not that kind of gothic…

• More of this kind of gothic…• The term ‘gothic’ came from the architecture

of the time. Think dark creepy castles

Gothic Literature

• Gothic literature began in the mid to late 1700s with novels such as The Castle of Otranto, Romance of the Forest, Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Monk.

• The story line usually went something like this:

It takes place in an ancient abbey or castle, which is overrun with ghosts and gruesome sights, cursed by an ancient prophecy, and run by a tormented villain. To this sinister setting comes a young woman who ends up pursued by the villain; along the way she is frightened by real or imagined brushes with the supernatural while lost in the intricate maze of passages in the castle. Somehow, amid a tangle of subplots, flashbacks, false turns and dead ends, the heroine emerges unscathed. The curse hanging over the castle is fulfilled, the villain overthrown.(Martin Tropp. Images of Fear) Ovid.cs.depaul.edu

Other ‘horror’ authors of the time:• Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher)• Charles Dickens (Bleak House)• Rudyard Kipling (The Phantom Rickshaw)• Oscar Wilde (Picture of Dorian Gray)• Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)• Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)• Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)• Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde)• Bram Stoker (Dracula)

How has the definition of Horror changed over time?

• In his 1982 anthology Prime Evil, author Douglas Winter stated, "Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion."

• What makes horror literature so pervasive is that its need to evoke the necessary atmosphere and sense of emotional dread is utterly dependent on who we are as readers -- as people. As children, we might be afraid of the shadows looming from a half-closed closet door or of the monster we believe lies under the bed. Terrors of the imagination run wild at that age. As adults, our fears become more sophisticated, more grounded in worldly events. They become the death of a loved one, the terminal illness of a small child, the fear of our lives running out of our control. Horror, by nature, is a personal touch -- an intrusion into our comfort levels. It speaks of the human condition and forcibly reminds us of how little we actually know and understand.

Back in the seventies, an unknown writer burst onto the scene with a novel called Carrie. The work went on to be made into a wildly successful film, and a new genre was born. The author I'm referring to is, of course, Stephen King. King set the stage for what horror was to become in the eighties and early nineties.

http://www.horror.org/horror-is.htm

Stephen King

• Stephen King is arguably one of the most popular horror writers in the past 40 years. He is the author of: Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, It, Misery, The Green mile, The Dark Tower, Hearts in Atlantis, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Stand by Me, Pet Sematary, The Shawshank Redemption, Secret Window, 1408, The Mist, Bag of Bones, and many others. Dozens of these books have been made into movies.

Eyeglasses for the Mind

Stephen King

I did the Mike Wallace radio show in New York at the CBS building. We went in and the electric eye had a case of the hiccups. The door was one of these doors where you’d step on the pad and the door would slide open. And this door was almost pitching a fit. It was jerking back and forth, not closing or opening all the way.

And my feeling about that is that somebody else would look at that and say: “Oh, that door has the hiccups.” Whereas a little kid would walk up to that door and might very well shrink away from even going near it. And say: “It wants to eat me, it’s alive!” Children see things from a different perspective. And in that sense I’m childlike. I looked at the door and I thought: “Gee, that would make a good story if that thing came alive and somebody walked up to it and CHUNG!” Which is a very childish sort of fantasy.

People respond to this perspective. It doesn’t really die. It atrophies and lies dormant. And I get paid to show people that different perspective. It’s like exercising a muscle, rather than letting it go slack. But I’ll tell you a funny thing. There are writers who look like children. They’ve used this facility for so long that they literally look like children.Ray Bradbury is sixty years old and he has the face of a child. You see it in the eyes a lot of the time. Isaac Singer has the eyes of a child in that old face. They look out of that old face and they’re very young.

That’s why people pay writers and artists. That’s the only reason we’re around. We’re excess baggage. I can’t even fix a pipe in my house when it freezes.I have no skill that improves the quality of life in a physical sense at all. The only thing I can do is say: “Look here, this is the way you didn’t look at it before. It’s just a cloud to you, but look at it, doesn’t it look like an elephant?” Somebody says: “Boy! It does look like an elephant!” And for that, people pay because they’ve lost all of it themselves.

You know, I’m like a person who makes eyeglasses for the mind.

(1979 Interview from Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King)