Horror & Humanism
In the original draft of Stephen King’s Misery, Paul Sheldon was supposed to end up as the cover of the Annie Wilkes edition. According to King himself, he thought his readers might not be happy to see the protagonist they’d stuck with through the events of the novel being turned into a book jacket so he changed the ending.
This perfectly illustrates the crux of all horror writing. Horror is, at its grisly heart, the story of things we don’t want to happen. It is meteors falling from the sky to crush civilisations. It is cancer in the lungs of our loved ones. It is strangers deciding that they no longer want to share the world with us because of something, or nothing, that we did.
Horror, then, must trend towards having downbeat endings because how can a story that ends the way we want be horrible? Much as Jim surviving the events of 28 Days Later softened the original ending, any horror story that ends in hope ends its horror.
But horror is harrowing. A real horror story is a test of endurance. It challenges us. It offers us a possibility of hope and closes its hand when we try to take it. No, I’m sorry, but they aren’t going to make it. They’ll try. You’ll wish for them to survive, but they won’t. The prognosis is bleak.
Perhaps that’s why horror stories aren’t really horrible anymore. We struggle with the idea of watching a movie or reading a book full of awful things we don’t want to see. Characters we care about become our sisters, our mothers, our girlfriends, our best friends. Or ourselves. We don’t want to see anything bad happen to them but the world, and horror stories, are cruel.
There is only one solution. We cease to care.
We populate horror stories with people for whom we cannot care. Pointless, insipid people. Caricatures of everything we hate about the world we had no choice but to be born into. People who walk differently, talk differently, vote differently, who think and drink and write and read and #differently to us, which in itself is a crime because we are perfect, aren’t we?
It’s a horror story. We are feeding ourselves a steady diet of murder. We are developing appetites. We have a favourite flavour. An emotional underclass we wouldn’t even consider human anymore. Like ‘being annoying’ was an offence punishable by death.
We used to watch hangings because society had deemed these people worthy of death and we were really just making the best of a bad situation, honest. Now we watch slasher movies. Or the stains people leave behind when they fall from buildings. That sickness finds a way out one way or the other.
Maybe it’s better to care. Maybe it’s better to be horrified by a horror story. Because the real tragedy is when we are unmoved by suffering.
Should we really ever be happy seeing someone turned into a book jacket?
This perfectly illustrates the crux of all horror writing. Horror is, at its grisly heart, the story of things we don’t want to happen. It is meteors falling from the sky to crush civilisations. It is cancer in the lungs of our loved ones. It is strangers deciding that they no longer want to share the world with us because of something, or nothing, that we did.
Horror, then, must trend towards having downbeat endings because how can a story that ends the way we want be horrible? Much as Jim surviving the events of 28 Days Later softened the original ending, any horror story that ends in hope ends its horror.
But horror is harrowing. A real horror story is a test of endurance. It challenges us. It offers us a possibility of hope and closes its hand when we try to take it. No, I’m sorry, but they aren’t going to make it. They’ll try. You’ll wish for them to survive, but they won’t. The prognosis is bleak.
Perhaps that’s why horror stories aren’t really horrible anymore. We struggle with the idea of watching a movie or reading a book full of awful things we don’t want to see. Characters we care about become our sisters, our mothers, our girlfriends, our best friends. Or ourselves. We don’t want to see anything bad happen to them but the world, and horror stories, are cruel.
There is only one solution. We cease to care.
We populate horror stories with people for whom we cannot care. Pointless, insipid people. Caricatures of everything we hate about the world we had no choice but to be born into. People who walk differently, talk differently, vote differently, who think and drink and write and read and #differently to us, which in itself is a crime because we are perfect, aren’t we?
It’s a horror story. We are feeding ourselves a steady diet of murder. We are developing appetites. We have a favourite flavour. An emotional underclass we wouldn’t even consider human anymore. Like ‘being annoying’ was an offence punishable by death.
We used to watch hangings because society had deemed these people worthy of death and we were really just making the best of a bad situation, honest. Now we watch slasher movies. Or the stains people leave behind when they fall from buildings. That sickness finds a way out one way or the other.
Maybe it’s better to care. Maybe it’s better to be horrified by a horror story. Because the real tragedy is when we are unmoved by suffering.
Should we really ever be happy seeing someone turned into a book jacket?
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