Horror Fiction, Horror Films: No Maps, No Borders? Or Aesthetic Fundamentalism?

Aesthetic fundamentalism: the idea that certain forms of writing or filmmaking must be restricted to a limited range of elements and methods.

This becomes odd when applied to any field unlimited by tradition, any field that can absorb variations and hybrids without end, while remaining characteristically itself. For example, horror.

Horror is not a genre, limited by expectations or styles, but a mood, an emotional or intellectual response that can be prompted by any number of ideas and approaches. This refusal to be limited means that readers and viewers of horror can form their own aesthetic preferences.

An aesthetic preference is harmless, even useful, as long as we recognize that it reveals more about ourselves, about our own wants and needs, than it does about the field as a whole. For my part, I find more of what I love about horror in the writings of Thomas de Quincey or Walter de la Mare, in Elizabeth Bowen or William Sansom, than I have ever found in Lovecraft. I find more uncanny atmosphere in a non-horror book like L. P. Hartley's THE GO-BETWEEN, than in anything I've read or tried to read by Stephen King; more dread and strangeness in the films of Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Lynch, than in films from Roger Corman or Hammer. Yet I recognize that for many people, King and Lovecraft, Hammer and Corman are what horror means. Their preferences, and mine, are neither wrong nor right, but merely personal and subjective.

Yet I still meet opposition to this idea that aesthetic assessments are subjective -- inevitably subjective, given the size of the field, the sheer number of books and films available over the decades and centuries, the wide range of plots and images, tones evoked and methods applied; no single aesthetic preference could cover so much varied material.

I find this opposition all the more baffling because, for me, a great attraction of horror is the lack of maps, the open borders, the endless possibilities for personal expression and personal satisfaction. Its freedom from genre expectations gives horror the advantage of surprise; it can be found in the least expected places, as in the stories of Isaac Babel or John Cheever, as in a down-to-Earth, slice-of-life book like Sarah Orne Jewett's THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS. As a reader, as a watcher of movies, I take pleasure in being caught off guard, in finding the unexpected in the most unlikely stories and films.

Others disagree. They seem to want the expected, the usual. I have heard some people argue that for many readers and viewers, horror is comfortable, familiar, reassuring in its repeated elements and methods, but I find this hard to believe, if only because horror, by the extremity of its emotional impact, seems more likely to shock and unsettle than to comfort. Yet the repetitions, the rituals of Dracula and Cthulhu, Freddy Krueger and Jason, have always been more popular than LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, PERSONA, SECONDS, or FAIL SAFE. There would seem to be a pattern, here, of preferences in horror, of old things desired, of novelties avoided.

In the end, patterns count for less than personal tastes. Horror provides a field wide enough for everyone. Whether we choose to explore its length, or to sit quietly in one place, or to build fortresses and borders within this infinite realm, we choose for purposes that suit our own needs. The field itself goes on and on.

Great Director, Lousy Script: John Carpenter and "Cigarette Burns"

Click for a better jpeg, if not for a better film.

Twenty years ago, when I watched John Carpenter's "Cigarette Burns," I found it a disappointing mess. Having watched it again, I feel that I was generous in my assessment. I blame the script by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan, but I also blame Carpenter, who is too good a director not to have noticed how the script falls apart.

Yet even a failed story can offer something to think about, or in this case, writing mistakes to avoid.

1) Seven minutes into the film, the protagonist is given a clear view of something uncanny, of something perhaps even supernatural. His response? Nothing. He sees it, and walks away.

Under the circumstances, most people would ask, "What are you showing me? What the hell is THIS?" Smart people would run away, and want nothing more to do with it. Yet the blank protagonist seems untouched by this encounter, perhaps because the plot requires that he remain untouched.

This puts the emphasis backwards. In a good film like Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON, the protagonist, a skeptic, encounters hints of the supernatural, but as a rational man, he refuses to accept them as anything more than tricks of stage magic and psychology. Only as the plot develops does he begin to recognize the danger he faces. That the film shows the viewers, right from the start, that this is indeed a tale of the supernatural, does nothing to undermine the protagonist's movement from skepticism to alert awareness. In contrast, the protagonist of "Cigarette Burns," warned with immediate, direct evidence of something terribly wrong, seems like a fool.

2) When a story builds up the idea that something horrible is out there, waiting to be revealed, the pay-off should justify the build-up. For example, in THE SHOUT (hardly a favourite of mine), the Shout is presented as a terrible magical weapon, and when it finally comes into use, the film succeeds (for me, at least) in making its impact appropriately disturbing. That moment hit me, just as the moment when Mrs. Bates is finally revealed hit me, just as the "kennel" moment in John Carpenter's THE THING hit me.

In contrast, when shots of the legendary horror film at the centre of "Cigarette Burns" are finally revealed, they offer nothing that has not been shown in the story before this; they offer no sense of anything unusual or shocking. Indeed, they offer standard images that you could find in any horror film, so what was the point of that build-up?

No, "Cigarette Burns" is a mistake. I respect John Carpenter, I love many of his films, but this one serves only to warn the rest of us of what not to do.

M. R. James, "Casting The Runes," and NIGHT OF THE DEMON

Click for a better jpeg.

In 1977, I considered "Casting The Runes" one of the lesser stories by M. R. James. In 2025, I can see how wrong I was.

It brings to life two Jamesian principles:

1) If you can get away with silence, then say nothing.

"It is not necessary to tell in further detail the steps by which Henry Harrington and Dunning were brought together."

---

"After a judicious interval, Harrington repeated to Dunning something of what he had heard his brother say in his sleep: but it was not long before Dunning stopped him."

2) If the story forces you to spell out the details, then do it rapidly and clearly.

"The stories kept on becoming a little more terrifying each time, and the children were mesmerised into complete silence. At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park -- Lufford, I mean -- in the evening. Every child in the room could recognize the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn in pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered, and what it must have meant to the children doesn't bear thinking of."

---

"He put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being."

---

"'Ad he got a dog with him, or what? Funny thing: I could 'a' swore 'e wasn’t alone.'"

The results are lean and propulsive. The story stalks in, punches you in the face, then glides off into the dusk.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON, the 1957 film adaptation by Jacques Tourneur, transforms many set-pieces from the story into sequences equally powerful, and adds a few of its own (the children's party, the Hobart farm, the final confrontation at the train-yard). It also replaces one of the story's protagonists, Henry Harrington, with Peggy Cummins, very much to my pleasure.

The film also reveals its demon right from the start. Even though Tourneur had objected to this, I call it a strength: it shows the audience, right away, that the film's protagonist will be in serious trouble, that he is walking into a trap of his own disbelief.

This opposition between belief and disbelief, between superstition and science, was not a component of the short story. In the film it becomes a central conflict, but a conflict with nuance:

In "Casting the Runes", Karswell's intended victim is an expert on alchemical history, who rejects Karswell's scholarship as "perfectly hopeless". In NIGHT OF THE DEMON, psychologist John Holden is an American delegate to a conference on parapsychology, devoted, in part, to investigating and debunking the Karswell devil-cult. Primary investigator Harrington had died mysteriously; his niece, Joanna Harrington, believes that Karswell's magic is responsible. Karswell openly curses Holden, predicts his death right to the hour, and tells him that his mind will crack from sheer terror. Holden, rationalist and complete skeptic, calls it a bunch of nonsense... until he realizes that Karswell's game is a true manifestation of black magic.

Yet even though NIGHT OF THE DEMON revels in the supernatural power of Karswell, it ends with John Holden beating the curse by remaining a scientist. Harrington had died in panic, but Holden, calmly analytical, wins. (Joanna, too, stays calm and observant despite her belief in the supernatural: "John, he's terrified of you... He's lying... I saw it with my own eyes."). Even in the face of a clearly supernatural threat, the heroes keep their heads, and this makes all the difference in the fight against Karswell.

Much has been said about Karswell and the performance of Niall McGinnis. A vague, barely glimpsed presence in "Runes" -- stout, secretive and surly -- he becomes an arrogantly real person in NIGHT OF THE DEMON. This is one of the film's many triumphs, and I agree that Karswell steals the show.

Other thiefs are the cinematography of Ted Scaife, the low-ceilinged, shadowy set designs of Ken Adam (I love that Hobart farm!), and especially the music of Clifton Parker, in one of my favourite horror scores.

Another striking aspect of the film (also present in the short story) is that, for all its talk of devils and demons, there is no mention of churches or angels. Not even Indian scientist Kumar, a firm believer in devils, has anything to say about gods or divine mercy. At no point is there any suggestion that prayer or sanctuary will keep Holden from his fate; his only hope lies in cleverness and rationality, in beating evil at its own game. I admire this approach: with no belief in gods or in the supernatural, I can still play along happily with a film that respects my intelligence even as it conjures up a world of relentless, black magic monsters. In this, and more, NIGHT OF THE DEMON is a great respecter of its audience.

Marjorie Bowen, "The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes"

Cover by Helmut Wenske. Avon, 1975. Click for a better jpeg.

Along with crime fiction, historical fiction, and historical crime fiction, Marjorie Bowen wrote ghost and horror stories. Of the ones I've tried, my favourite has been "The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes," which I first read in Kirby McCauley's NIGHT CHILLS anthology from 1975.

Bowen has an intensely visual style, but her descriptions are often static, like illustrations:

"The house was built beside a river. In the evening the sun would lie reflected in the dark water, a stain of red in between the thick shadows cast by the buildings. It was twilight now, and there was the long ripple of dull crimson, shifting as the water rippled sullenly between the high houses.

"Beneath this house was an old stake, hung at the bottom with stagnant green, white and dry at the top. A rotting boat that fluttered the tattered remains of faded crimson cushions was affixed to the stake by a fraying rope. Sometimes the boat was thrown against the post by the strong evil ripples, and there was a dismal creaking noise."

While undeniably vivid, these images, at first, might seem better suited to the script of a stage play than to a short story.

When the characters appear, they, too, are described as if on a stage:

"There was no glass in the window, and the shutters swung loose on broken hinges. Now and again they creaked against the flat brick front of the house, and then Lucius Cranfield winced.

"He held a round, clear mirror in his hand, and sometimes he looked away from the solitary tree to glance into it. When he did so he beheld a pallid face surrounded with straight brown hair, lips that had once been beautiful, and blurred eyes veined with red like some curious stone.

"As the red sunlight began to grow fainter in the water a step sounded on the rotting stairway, the useless splitting door was pushed open, and Lord James Fontaine entered.

"Slowly, and with a mincing step, he came across the dusty floor. He wore a dress of bright violet watered silk, his hair was rolled fantastically, and powdered such a pure white that his face looked sallow by contrast. To remedy this he had painted his cheeks and his lips, and powdered his forehead and chin. But the impression made was not of a pink and fresh complexion, but of a yellow countenance rouged. There were long pearls in his ears and under his left eye an enormous patch. His eyes slanted towards his nose, his nostrils curved upwards, and his thin lips were smiling."

Bowen has a good eye, but not always a good ear. She often falls back on adverbs to compensate for weak verbs:

"'You have a very splendid painting swinging outside your own door,' said Lord James suavely. 'Never did I see fairer drawing nor brighter hues. It is your work?' he questioned.

"'Mine, yes,' assented the sign-painter drearily."

As the story develops, her few lapses in style fade into the background, while her visual sense remains up front:

"The bright dark eyes of the visitor flickered from right to left. He moved a little nearer the window, where, despite the thickening twilight, his violet silk coat gleamed like the light on a sheet of water....

"She cast off her long earrings, her bracelets, her rings, the necklace Lord James had given her. This slipped, like a glitter of purple water, through her fingers, and shone in a little heap of stars on the gleaming waxed floor."

Bowen maintains a tone of detached omniscience from beginning to end, which makes it hard to participate emotionally in the narrative, to feel as her characters feel, but her visual details compensate for a spectator.

In the end, I think she was right to keep readers at a distance, because the twists of her plot rely on detached observation. Allowing readers into the heads of her characters would have undermined her best moments.

To say anything else would ruin the impact of a story that not only surprises, but develops a mood of quiet eeriness that creeped under my skin years ago when I first read it, and one that comes back to me with each new reading.

Art Is Not Merely Representation, It Is Experience

More and more, I've begun to think that art, that all of the arts, are not necessarily mimesis, a representation of life, but extensions of life itself; not records of experience, but actual experience. Humans create art for the same reason that insects create hives, or birds create nests: it is a fundamental aspect of our nature, it is what we do.

People often dissect art in search of meaning, in search of instruction; when they find (or believe they find) this meaning, they use it to squeeze the dissected art into categories (horror, drama, romance, science fiction) in the same way that people stuff old shirts and jeans into boxes, and then press down on the lids of these bulging boxes to tape them shut. Yet by doing this, they shift their attention away from art itself to their ideas about art. For the sake of distraction, they ignore what really matters: the experience of art, in all of its troubling complexity, ambiguity, and living refusal to be paraphrased, explained, labelled, and forgotten.

(Many of these ideas came to me as I struggled with the stories and poems of Walter de la Mare, a writer who refuses categorization, who slips away from explanation.)

Walter de la Mare. Click for a better jpeg.