Why I Love Horror
I'm a horror writer. My mother used to read them one after the other and I had always wanted to pick one up and start, mostly just for the feeling it gave me. I never realized what was inside those books with the scary, cool covers. Then my mom passed away when I was young. A while after, I found one of those novels, Pet Semetary by Stephen King, and I knew horror was what I wanted to do. She's probably looking down and waiting for my first story to come out.
I had read other books before, in my youth, of course. I really liked the ones where you could pick your own path to the ending. There was just something about horror. Names like Dean Koontz, Ann Rice and Stephen King created a certain feeling inside. I was at home with this feeling, as though it had been there all along waiting to be found. It's possible that dark mood could be attributed to my mother passing at such a young age. I just know horror, good horror, has that feel about it. There is room for the gory or B rated horror, too, but nothing like a really good scary book to let you escape in the pages, or on the screen.
Another reason I love horror is the what-would-you-do-when-pressed-with-a-moral-issue thing. It brings out the real side in a person, that side that most people don't want to see because they can't deal with it. You have to choose either saving the woman/man you love, or a parent, lets say. You analyze the situation and hey, you wouldn't have been able to make it to one of them anyway. But no. Lets push it to the next level where you do have equal opportunity to save either or. You're holding both by the ankles and know you have to let one go in order to save the other. What do you do? Ok, you picked that one, and you get to watch the other plummet to their demise off the side of a bridge. What is going through their head as they fall and see you getting smaller? What is going through YOUR head as that person with all the history and past falls and explodes into a bloody mess feet below? See? And that's not even the beginning of it. There are way worse scenarios that characters have had to go through.
Now you feel different about yourself. You swear you would have done it differently in that characters shoes, or maybe you say, "I don't know what I would have done in a situation like that." But inside lies the undeniable truth, whether you admit it or not. Some fear that reality--some accept it. Whatever the case, the truth is in there and deep inside you know what you would do in a situation like that. Some people can't take that truth. It's there, though, and there is no way around it.
It has been shown that a lot of people actually like to be scared. They get gratification from something different than the daily grind, something they don't understand. They get to explore death, macabre, or the supernatural from a safe distance. The better the writer or director does in showing the story/scenario, the more sucked in the viewer gets and the more authentic their experience. And that's what it's all about; because when my first novel comes out, I want it to be a book my mother would have been proud to read.
WCM
I had read other books before, in my youth, of course. I really liked the ones where you could pick your own path to the ending. There was just something about horror. Names like Dean Koontz, Ann Rice and Stephen King created a certain feeling inside. I was at home with this feeling, as though it had been there all along waiting to be found. It's possible that dark mood could be attributed to my mother passing at such a young age. I just know horror, good horror, has that feel about it. There is room for the gory or B rated horror, too, but nothing like a really good scary book to let you escape in the pages, or on the screen.
Another reason I love horror is the what-would-you-do-when-pressed-with-a-moral-issue thing. It brings out the real side in a person, that side that most people don't want to see because they can't deal with it. You have to choose either saving the woman/man you love, or a parent, lets say. You analyze the situation and hey, you wouldn't have been able to make it to one of them anyway. But no. Lets push it to the next level where you do have equal opportunity to save either or. You're holding both by the ankles and know you have to let one go in order to save the other. What do you do? Ok, you picked that one, and you get to watch the other plummet to their demise off the side of a bridge. What is going through their head as they fall and see you getting smaller? What is going through YOUR head as that person with all the history and past falls and explodes into a bloody mess feet below? See? And that's not even the beginning of it. There are way worse scenarios that characters have had to go through.
Now you feel different about yourself. You swear you would have done it differently in that characters shoes, or maybe you say, "I don't know what I would have done in a situation like that." But inside lies the undeniable truth, whether you admit it or not. Some fear that reality--some accept it. Whatever the case, the truth is in there and deep inside you know what you would do in a situation like that. Some people can't take that truth. It's there, though, and there is no way around it.
It has been shown that a lot of people actually like to be scared. They get gratification from something different than the daily grind, something they don't understand. They get to explore death, macabre, or the supernatural from a safe distance. The better the writer or director does in showing the story/scenario, the more sucked in the viewer gets and the more authentic their experience. And that's what it's all about; because when my first novel comes out, I want it to be a book my mother would have been proud to read.
WCM
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