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| Death. It is the grand bastion of all our terrors or the mother of horror. Or maybe it’s the mother of beauty like William Blake said. As horror writers, we are very well versed in sepulchral stock types--zombie, ghoul, vampire. They’ve been done to death (heh, heh) and particularly zombies and vampires, yet we can’t seem to get quite enough of them and the reason for this might be a good indicator of what truly scares us and what truly mystifies us: death itself. The act of dying, of being dead, and just what might lie on the other side of the funerary veil. These characters might not be very attractive, but they’ve beaten it, they’ve returned from the grave. Hollywood has turned zombies into rabid flesh-eaters, whereas folklore tell us they are more to be pitied than feared: living dead slaves working the cane fields. Again, Hollywood and the novels of Anne Rice (and her numerous imitators, as nauseum) give us vampires as brooding Byronic characters…attractive, erotic, fashion-conscious, disfunctional. But folklore tell us that vampires are noxious creatures?they bloat up like barrels after feeding, sleep in coffins filled with blood and maggots, stink of putrescence. They are a walking pestilence and there’s nothing remotely sexy about them. Though it is interesting to note that both the Byronic and folkloric types can be dispatched (in most cases) with a stake through the heart. And like fangs piercing the throat, a stake penetrating the chest has some very blatant Freudian overtones to it. So maybe there is some eroticism there. At any rate, death is, of course, the basis of all horror fiction. Regardless of how it’s packaged, it concerns only the dead and dying and the irrational fear of this. Let’s look at a particular aspect of death. One close to the black little hearts of horror writers. Premature burial. Being buried alive. A death-fear like none other. There is no one this cannot touch. Though we know and know well that in these enlightened times corpses are embalmed and no cataleptic can survive the horrors of the undertaker’s needle, it still haunts us. Waking in darkness. Cramped, cold, damp. Our knees strike an unyielding surface. When we lift our head, our face is smothered in downy pillows of perfumed silk… “the rigid embrace of the narrow house”, Poe said. First comes realization. Then horror. Then frenzy. In the soft darkness as air runs out, we scream and thrash and claw and tear. The silk shreds like crepe beneath our rending hands. But the casket itself, wood compressed by earth, does not. And our fingers go red with blood as we mutilate them in our madness, trying to scratch our way out. Horrible beyond words really. The ultimate nightmare. Any horror writer worth a damn really has to play with this theme, for it is universal and incalculably macabre. Poe did, of course, and many times: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Morella,” “The Tomb of Ligeia,” and “The Premature Burial” come to mind. And horror writers have been toying with it ever since and why not? It would be hard to imagine anything worse. Death. We know, like the boogeyman, that it can get us anytime, anywhere. We just don’t know when. Suspense. So now we know what feeds fear, what creates it. What its origins might be. We can catalog it under Adult and Childhood Fears, Fears Common to Both. We can give it sub-headings of Strangers, Pain, Death, Abandonment, Alienation, Insanity. We can touch on universal themes, archetypes, how our predecessors made use of them. And none of this, of course, even touches upon that most intimate of personal barometers--our nightmares. But you know yours and I know mine and there’s good fodder there as well. Regardless, I’ve said what I had to say and, though I imagine others have said these things more eloquently, I hope I’ve helped some of you understand the anatomy of fear as I see it. So do some soul-searching before you write your next story. Examine what scared you as a child, how those themes translated into adult paranoia. And then go out and exploit the living hell out of your personal demons. Don’t be afraid to pull up the roots of your own graveyard tree and examine what nourishes them. Hold that black earth in your hand and feel the graveworms in your palm. If you listen very carefully, they’ll tell you all you need to know about horror. |