# The problem with much of horror fiction



## AdrianBraysy (Oct 21, 2018)

Few horror novels have scared me. It seems like the horror genre is lacking in originality. Out of every tenth book I pick up, nine of them will be about one of the following: vampires, ghosts, zombies, wherevolves and creepy japanese girls with long hair.

Where's the originality among horror novelists? I just picked up a collection of mangas by Junji Ito, and the guy is just exploding with ideas. Here's just a small sample of what he offers: A family turning into grease and developing extreme acne that the brother uses to torture his sister with, a town becomming obsessed with the geometric shape of a spiral, baloons inticing people to hang themselves and so on... 

Are ghosts and vampires really the best thing novelists can offer? Am I just not looking hard enough? Good horror should, in my opinion, create an ambiguity of threat, feelings of absurdity, and a sense of being up against something beyond human understanding.


----------



## sigmadog (Oct 21, 2018)

Well, so much for my forthcoming novel about a creepy long-haired Japanese zombie vampire girl who gets bit by a werewolf ghost. 

Damn! I knew I should have added a dragon.


----------



## Guard Dog (Oct 21, 2018)

AdrianBraysy said:


> A family turning into grease and developing extreme acne that the brother uses to torture his sister with...



Never a tube of Clearasil around when ya need it.

And I'm way too old to find acne very scary anyway...

A family turning to grease scares you? Best stay out of any trailer parks in the deeps south then. ;-)

The fact is, I really like the old traditional horror movies... and any in that same vein that're done well.

I don't have much use for angsty teenagers with with a sun allergy/skin condition, and peculiar dietary requirements that've been passed off as vampires in the past decade though.

I did find the female werewolf in "Originals" rather appealing though... but not due to her ability to sprout her own fur coat. :devilish:

Anyway, I'm one of the folks that misses the "good ol' days" when monsters were monsters, and not just a plot device for some drama or the other that had nothing to do with horror.

Oh, and sigmadog... throw in the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, and ya might have a hit. :very_drunk:


G.D.


----------



## Sir-KP (Oct 22, 2018)

The ghosts mentioned are those that are 'friendly' enough to imagine because they are commonly used. Surely, every country and culture have their own local ghosts.

I'm not a fan of horror works, but what I feel is that those who consume horror works aren't exactly into horror and just want that scary, jump scare sensation. Hence the lite, overly used ideas being adopted repeatedly in the industry. I don't think this type of horror consumers would be delighted with Junji Ito's abominations.

I see creativity in horror is currently in the same spot as aliens in sci-fi (though alien sci-fi still prove to be more creative at times). Typically, aliens largely depicted as bipedal soggy humanoid with futuristic flair and equipments, large eyes, green blood, big head, smart, evil, cunning. And then their vehicle be like roundish with neon dots or slim stripe, blue fire jet, laser gun. Then the planets always either dry or have large glowing mushroom or coral inhabited with enormous insects or huge scaled ground quadruped or dinosaur-esque flying creatures.

It's just like that. I mean, who knows if aliens are also human but still living in stone age?


----------



## Guard Dog (Oct 22, 2018)

Sir-KP said:


> I see creativity in horror is currently in the same spot as aliens in sci-fi (though alien sci-fi still prove to be more creative at times).



 Speaking of horror and aliens, I've always thought that _Alien_ and _John Carpenter's The Thing_ were a couple of really good horror movies, as well as pretty good "sci fi" movies. _Doom_ is currently on NetFlix, billed as horror, but I only see it as a sci-fi/video game offering. And not a very good one. ( Sorry, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but it sucks. )

And no, I cant really think of any good books to compare them to, since I've only read the usual _Vampire_ and _Werewolf_ variety of those.


G.D.


----------



## Sir-KP (Oct 22, 2018)

Guard Dog said:


> _John Carpenter's The Thing_ were a couple of really good horror movies, as well as pretty good "sci fi" movies.



Oh yes. My favorite.


----------



## Guard Dog (Oct 22, 2018)

Sir-KP said:


> Oh yes. My favorite.



Heh... Saw that one at a drive-in theater when it first came out, with my first wife, "way back when".

Had both of us jumpin' out of our skin, and bitin' our own fingers tryin' to eat popcorn while we watched.

...and damn that's a long time ago. :icon_frown:



G.D.


----------



## AdrianBraysy (Oct 22, 2018)

Sir-KP said:


> The ghosts mentioned are those that are 'friendly' enough to imagine because they are commonly used. Surely, every country and culture have their own local ghosts.
> 
> I'm not a fan of horror works, but what I feel is that those who consume horror works aren't exactly into horror and just want that scary, jump scare sensation. Hence the lite, overly used ideas being adopted repeatedly in the industry. I don't think this type of horror consumers would be delighted with Junji Ito's abominations.



True. Maybe I'm a dying breed of horror fan. I remember being far more scared of books by Kafka and Sartre, than the average Insidious-type of movie. I enjoy the ambiguity of threat. Rather than feeling "oh crap! That was dangerous." I like to feel "I have no idea what to make of this, but it's messing with my head and making me uncomfortable." Case in point: Uzumaki.

https://graphicnovelreviewproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/uzumaki-1136536.jpg  a picture of a man who decided to turn himself into a spiral. That's far more creepy to me than the average ghost.


----------



## moderan (Oct 22, 2018)

In terms of commercial (Big Five):
J-Horror has a much different readership than the American or even the British versions do. The modern horror readership is looking for comfortable gothics with the occasional jump-scare (or 80s slasher fiction)...VC Andrews-ish stuff, or for insipid YA coming-of-age parables.
Literary horror of the type you describe is alive and well. Recent works by John Langan, Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, Laird Barron have reached the best-seller lists and are exactly in that vein of more imaginative and subtle horror. Even more imaginative work is marketed under the subgenre label of 'weird fiction', partially coined by an essay from WFA-Award-winner Scott Nicolay, who sought to distance the field from both mundane commercial horrors and latter-day Lovecraftianism. Weird fiction is also genre-inclusive and racially-mixed.
Go find books by SP Miskowski, Gemma Files, Mike Griffin, Craig Gidney, Victor LaValley, Caitlin Kiernan, Jeffrey Thomas, Nadia Bulkin, John Claude Smith...for a start. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. You're just looking in the wrong direction. The good stuff is out there. It's my field -- I know.


----------



## SueC (Oct 23, 2018)

This isn't really in the same genre as the others, but I think a good psychological thriller is just as scary and nail-biting as the more overt types.

I have talked about this one before, but the original _The Haunting of Hill House_ still evokes in me a sense of dread. I remember seeing it in theaters when I was a girl, and have just recently bought the book. The characters are a little different from the movie, but the idea of an evil house is still there and still unsettling. The book was written by Shirley Jackson in 1959, and Stephen King lists _The Haunting of Hill House _as one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century. In 2018, three of thirteen writers polled by The New York Times, identified this book as the scariest book of fiction they have ever read.

So, going forward, I think it might be more fun to explore the things that scare us in our every day lives. You know, things that go bump in the night sort of thing. Forget the vampires, ghosts and walking dead. Look in your closets, way in the back, where it's dark and creepy . . .


----------



## Phil Istine (Oct 23, 2018)

SueC said:


> This isn't really in the same genre as the others, but I think a good psychological thriller is just as scary and nail-biting as the more overt types.
> 
> I have talked about this one before, but the original _The Haunting of Hill House_ still evokes in me a sense of dread. I remember seeing it in theaters when I was a girl, and have just recently bought the book. The characters are a little different from the movie, but the idea of an evil house is still there and still unsettling. The book was written by Shirley Jackson in 1959, and Stephen King lists _The Haunting of Hill House _as one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century. In 2018, three of thirteen writers polled by The New York Times, identified this book as the scariest book of fiction they have ever read.
> 
> So, going forward, I think it might be more fun to explore the things that scare us in our every day lives. You know, things that go bump in the night sort of thing. Forget the vampires, ghosts and walking dead. Look in your closets, way in the back, where it's dark and creepy . . .



Yes, I find psychological horror far more effective than two-dimensional blood and gore.


----------



## AdrianBraysy (Oct 24, 2018)

Phil Istine said:


> Yes, I find psychological horror far more effective than two-dimensional blood and gore.



I think psychological and absurdist horror can go hand in hand. The reason I brought up Ito earlier in this thread, is because of his approach. He said in an interview, that what he likes to do it "taking something normal and looking at it backwards". This works very well for me.

We all know that vampires and monsters are supposed to be dangerous. But toothpaste? Your own skin? Geometrical shapes? It's when we begin compromising the perceived safety/neutrality of these things that our worlds start falling apart. I guess this is why haunted houses, although it has been done to death now, are an effective setting for horror, because "home" is supposed to equal "safe zone".

How it is written also matters a lot. If I just say "man becomes obsessed with plastic" that's not scary. But if I start describing the rising obsession, starting in a subtle way, such as picking plastic forks instead of metal, gradually leading to a point where the man wants to "become" plastic to ensure he isn't as biodegradable, you can come up with some pretty twisted, weird ways in which he could do that.


----------



## Terry D (Oct 25, 2018)

AdrianBraysy said:


> Few horror novels have scared me. It seems like the horror genre is lacking in originality. Out of every tenth book I pick up, nine of them will be about one of the following: vampires, ghosts, zombies, wherevolves and creepy japanese girls with long hair.
> 
> Where's the originality among horror novelists? I just picked up a collection of mangas by Junji Ito, and the guy is just exploding with ideas. Here's just a small sample of what he offers: A family turning into grease and developing extreme acne that the brother uses to torture his sister with, a town becomming obsessed with the geometric shape of a spiral, baloons inticing people to hang themselves and so on...
> 
> Are ghosts and vampires really the best thing novelists can offer? Am I just not looking hard enough? Good horror should, in my opinion, create an ambiguity of threat, feelings of absurdity, and a sense of being up against something beyond human understanding.




I don't see it. Since this thread was started I've been looking at some of the available lists of 'Best Horror 2018', and 'Best selling horror novels 2018', and haven't seen a single book about vampires, zombies, or werewolves. There are plenty of novels out there exploring, through horror, thoroughly modern themes.


----------



## moderan (Oct 25, 2018)

Terry D said:


> I don't see it. Since this thread was started I've been looking at some of the available lists of 'Best Horror 2018', and 'Best selling horror novels 2018', and haven't seen a single book about vampires, zombies, or werewolves. There are plenty of novels out there exploring, through horror, thoroughly modern themes.


#narrative.
It's far more important to look down your nose at things when you don't know what you're talking about. 
Best doesn't necessarily equate to best-selling because small-press is big in horror (and features a lot of short work) but yeah. Ted Grau's new one is awesome...also Orrin Grey's new collection. 
(plug plug)
Just by way of illustrating: 
This one comes out later this week and doesn't have a single vampire or zombie. It does have Orrin Grey, Kurt Fawver, and Danger Slater. Also Farah Rose Smith, John Claude Smith, and Jeffrey Thomas, all of whom regularly appear on such lists.


----------



## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

Personally I find that the best horror subjects need not be fictional at all, as the real world has plenty of terrifying things which are so terrifying precisely because they are real.

My personal favourite is disease. All the plague legends of old are all the more scary if you put yourself in the shoes of their anonymous authors, to whom pestilence wasn't some abstraction like it is for us today, but a very real fact of life - invisible, utterly merciless and ever-waiting to strike, one being absolutely powerless to stop it. What makes these legends scary is the realization that there are true stories behind each and every one of them, that their authors witnessed the ravages of the plague first-hand, being among the few to live to tell about it.

For this reason, I think that a good horror story doesn't have to be original in subject. Rather, what makes a good horror story is the source of horror being a real thing that any of us can imagine running afoul of. A good example is Stephen King's "Cujo" - what makes it an excellent horror piece is not, I think, the originality of the premise itself, but rather the sheer plausibility of the horror scenario itself, i.e., a friendly family pet being turned into a drooling, snarling murder machine by a deadly disease that is still very much active over much of the world.


----------



## epimetheus (Oct 28, 2018)

CyberWar said:


> My personal favourite is disease. All the plague legends of old are all the more scary if you put yourself in the shoes of their anonymous authors, to whom pestilence wasn't some abstraction like it is for us today, but a very real fact of life - invisible, utterly merciless and ever-waiting to strike, one being absolutely powerless to stop it. What makes these legends scary is the realization that there are true stories behind each and every one of them, that their authors witnessed the ravages of the plague first-hand, being among the few to live to tell about it.



That's an interesting one. In the past disease was all the more nefarious as they didn't have a clue what caused it. Not only has modern medicine made disease less likely to kill, it also makes it a known quantity. To be scary, to me at least, the disease would need to be in some sense unknowable as well as incurable.


----------



## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

With vision being our dominant sense by far, humans have an innate need to visualize their fears in order to overcome them. A wild beast or an enemy, no matter how vicious and terrifying, is still something you can see, and if you can see something, you can figure out a way to fight it. Disease defies vision, being invisible and intangible, and this invisibility and the sense of powerlesness that it instills is what makes it so terrifying to us vision-based creatures. I think it explains the persistent efforts in plague legends to personalize the pestilence, to give it a face so that it becomes at least a little less terrifying and the protagonist of the legend gets a chance to outsmart or otherwise overcome what would otherwise be a merciless and impervious invisible force.

The sheer instinctive horror that infectious disease inspires in people hasn't, I think, gone anywhere even in the present day when the cause of diseases is well-understood. I think the abundance of zombie plagues in horror fiction is just a modern continuation of the age-old attempts to personify disease. Zombies give the pestilence a physical form and face that the protagonists can battle and overcome, or in the very least avoid, as opposed to an invisible, shapeless force that just makes people suffer and die by the scores.

I think it's for the above reason that the 1995 film "Outbreak" was rated as the best "plague fiction" film, somewhat realistically portraying the profoundly demoralizing effects of an invisible and incurable plague stalking the streets of a small American town while the authorities are at a loss of how to stop it.


----------



## epimetheus (Oct 28, 2018)

CyberWar said:


> I think it's for the above reason that the 1995 film "Outbreak" was rated as the best "plague fiction" film, somewhat realistically portraying the profoundly demoralizing effects of an invisible and incurable plague stalking the streets of a small American town while the authorities are at a loss of how to stop it.



What about examples from literature? All i can think of is War of the Worlds, and in that case disease was our saviour.


----------



## moderan (Oct 28, 2018)

The Andromeda Strain. Both a better book than the cited and a better film than 'Outbreak'.


----------



## epimetheus (Oct 28, 2018)

I'll add it to the list that only grows.


----------



## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

Giovanni Boccacio's "Decameron" would be another recommended read. It gives a very detailed and graphic account of the Black Death in Florence written by a first-hand witness in the introductory chapter, the whole premise of the book being a group of wealthy youths hiding away from the plague in a remote villa and entertaining each other with the following mostly light-hearted stories to distract themselves from thoughts of impending doom. While it only touches on the plague in the opening chapter, it is the incurable and deadly pestilence that sets the tone for the entire book that follows, and gives a valuable insight into the minds of Medieval Europeans who had to personally deal with it.


----------



## MrTickle (Oct 29, 2018)

I find weird fiction to be a nice substitute for standard horror fiction. It's filled with a lot of atmosphere and makes you think more than conventional horror as it is more about what isn't shown, than what is. I always think horror works better when it comes from a psychological place rather than werewolves, zombies and so on.


----------



## AdrianBraysy (Oct 31, 2018)

epimetheus said:


> What about examples from literature? All i can think of is War of the Worlds, and in that case disease was our saviour.



There's "The Plague" by Albert Camus.


----------



## moderan (Oct 31, 2018)

Not to mention The Masque of the Red Death.


----------



## Terry D (Oct 31, 2018)

AdrianBraysy said:


> There's "The Plague" by Albert Camus.





moderan said:


> Not to mention The Masque of the Red Death.



_The Stand_, by King. Can't forget Capt'n Trips!


----------



## JustRob (Oct 31, 2018)

moderan said:


> The Andromeda Strain. Both a better book than the cited and a better film than 'Outbreak'.



While _The Andromeda Strain_ was about an alien pathogen that got into circulation but could apparently be destroyed, _The Satan Bug_ was about an indestructible man-made pathogen that had been stolen and could potentially be released by the thief. It was eventually recovered safely but that just left mankind back where it was before with a horrendous event just waiting for an opportunity to happen. Which is the better form of horror though, graphic descriptions of what does happen or implications of what could? Equally, does a man-made threat that cannot be overcome induce more horror in the mind than an alien one that can? 

_The Satan Bug_ was a novel written by Alistair Maclean and published under the pseudonym Ian Stuart originally. There was also a film version.


----------



## luckyscars (Nov 5, 2018)

AdrianBraysy said:


> Few horror novels have scared me. It seems like the horror genre is lacking in originality. Out of every tenth book I pick up, nine of them will be about one of the following: vampires, ghosts, zombies, wherevolves and creepy japanese girls with long hair.
> 
> Where's the originality among horror novelists? I just picked up a collection of mangas by Junji Ito, and the guy is just exploding with ideas. Here's just a small sample of what he offers: A family turning into grease and developing extreme acne that the brother uses to torture his sister with, a town becomming obsessed with the geometric shape of a spiral, baloons inticing people to hang themselves and so on...
> 
> Are ghosts and vampires really the best thing novelists can offer? Am I just not looking hard enough? Good horror should, in my opinion, create an ambiguity of threat, feelings of absurdity, and a sense of being up against something beyond human understanding.



I doubt you’re looking at all.

With the best will in the world, to disparage horror as an entire genre while simultaneously holding up the supposed originality of a manga makes no sense. There are more horror writers worldwide than there are manga artists probably by a double digit ratio...so the likelihood of more original contemporary horror being found in manga is virtually zero. 

The problem therefore seems to be not with the originality of the genre but with your (in)ability to find stuff you like? I find that hard to understand given the internet and the ubiquity of horror literature forums but OK. Either way, that makes this actually not a topic of discussion of the health of horror so much as you asking for book recommendations, correct?

You mentioned  - kind of - the type of horror you like. No expert in the field nor your personal preferences but I would check out a novelist called Jack Ketchum. I consider him an equally good writer and a far better storyteller than Stephen King and his work tends to be more humanistic than paranormal - he tends toward a particular focus on psychopathy - but it’s definitely absent of vampires and the like. “The Girl Next Door” is probably his most famous book, based on a true story, and “Off Season”, a personal favorite, about a cannibals who lurk near a resort town.  

Again, don’t understand or agree with your premise whatsoever. All I have to do is go to Goodreads and search horror and relativelg little werewolves, vampires, and actually no creepy Japanese girls pop up. Honestly I think the genre is probably more diverse now than it ever has been. But you’re entitled to your view. Good luck.


----------



## Markus21 (Nov 8, 2018)

Hi everyone. I think it is just popular nowadays. There are a lot of horror movies, horror novels, and even games because of more and more people like that genre. The most popular is about zombies and post-apocalyptic things:twisted:


----------

