The Use of Fear as a Prime Mover (No Guts, No Gory!)

A healthy amount of fear is good. It's when that ominous feeling of something going bump in the night goes from the nervous chuckle brought on by the imaginary to the sinking realization that the bump was made intentionally. It's when that healthy dose crosses the line into toxic territory. That's what I want to write about.

So, why write horror? In fact, why focus on things under the bed, hiding in the closet and sitting in the backseat of the car? The same reason amusement parks tout the ritual of perceived--and survived--death on a rollercoaster. You would think that, with all that g-force in the loops, the mind-boggling sense of falling uncontrollably and yelling to the point of decapitation (i.e., screaming your head off) would deter other patrons from boarding the ride. Nope. Instead, people line up and wait in the summer heat their chance to trick out their Limbic systems and say they survived.

One of my favorite movies came up in recent conversation. When George A. Romero unleashed Night of the Living Dead, he tapped into something. Until then, zombies were pitiful creatures who mindlessly followed the bidding of their masters. The Romero zombie wasn't so much mindless as it was single-minded of focus. And that focus was to feed on the living. A primal fear is that of being eaten; even worse, the concept of being eaten alive...and turned into one of them who, in turn, eat. The master wasn't some cheesy bad magician pulling the strings; the master was the compelling urge to consume flesh. Even more disturbing, by all logic a zombie, who is already dead, should have no need to feast. Supposedly, that urge is a leftover from what it did while alive: consume with little regard. Suddenly, the predators become the prey and are inducted into a crazy cult of those of like mind--or like-mindlessness.

The incredible thing is that the director did it on a shoestring budget with unknown actors and without much gore. Yeah, there was the scene when the couple perishes in the truck explosion and for the next couple of minutes, the undead are fighting over their viscera (no guts, no gory!). It's disturbing to say the least but a punctuated payoff of having sat in your seat for that long.

I don't think that a horror movie has to be full of splatter to be scary. Living Dead was a masterstroke of minimalism, served up in black and white. Of course, to top this, Romero returned years later with Tom Savini by his side to serve up eviscerations in living (dead) color. I have nothing against the sequels (to include the remake of Dawn of the Dead, featuring RUNNING zombies, which cause much debate over whether they should lumber or go about speedily) but the original is a masterpiece for a reason.

I grew up in a neighborhood where zombies were heroin addicts in the hallway and where a dead body could remain on the stairs for days before being retrieved. The monsters were real and life was rendered in full color with stereo sound. It gets no scarier.

The monsters in my books are usually creatures that can't help what they do. Be they zombies or gigantic cockroaches, they're only following the script written in their DNA. A human being has a will. When that will runs contrary to another's, monstrous acts may result. I like using the creatures as a catalyst for bringing out the horrific nature of people.