by
LV Barat
I have always loved watching films as a method of storytelling. They come in a close second to books. Sometime in my late teens, I gravitated towards what my dad referred to as “spooky” movies and horror films. I watched movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13th”. These “slasher films” kept me on the edge of my seat and got the adrenaline pumping. Curious, I began to analyze my reactions to this type of horror.
Horror is designed to evoke fear but I found slasher flicks evoked actual fear only briefly, for example when the protagonist walked down a dark hallway. The adrenaline would kick in and the fear would dissipate when the monster jumped out and attacked him or her. Then the inevitable blood and gore would splatter out of the mangled, violated body. The gore only evoked the feeling of pity for the character that experienced the deadly attack.
I concluded that slasher flicks had a certain formula: fear then adrenaline then pity/sympathy.
But these slasher movies were, in fact, my least favorite of the horror genre. However, I discovered my male friends to prefer this type of horror. The men seemed to like a quick resolution to a life or death situation that involved a battle and the chance to prove bravery.
The reason most slasher movies left me physically and mentally exhausted is because I felt fear only in brief spurts, followed by an adrenaline rush then pity. I remember seeing Jaws for the first time when I was young. The scene where the captain of the ship was chewed to pieces by the shark saddened me for days afterward. I even asked my father if the man felt excruciating pain.
The horror films that captivated my imagination moved along at a much slower pace and lacked gore. Rather, they invoked feelings of undeniable dread, of gloominess and an inescapable tragic fate that could never be resolved by a brief spurt of violence accompanied by gore. The formula I discovered for the aforementioned genre is: fear which never really goes away but develops into dread, suspense then doom.
I’ve selected three horror films to demonstrate this formula.
THE RING
The only blood in this movie is a nosebleed. The horror is mostly anticipated, with scenes of traumatized faces and jumpy camera shots of a young girl, her face obscured by long black hair. The plot revolves around a videotape that once seen will condemn the viewer to die in seven days after they receive an ominous phone call. A girl had been strangled by her mother and thrown into a well where she survived seven days. The last thing she saw was a ring of light at the opening of the well, hence the title “The Ring”. How the dying girl or her ghost imprints her experiences onto videotape is never explained. The reason she is inherently evil is never explained either. In one scene, the girl crawls out of a TV and kills a man just by looking at him.
For a week afterward, I found myself dreading the ring of my telephone. And to be perfectly honest, I did not turn on the TV, for fear of seeing a girl crawl out of it. This was the first and only time I had such a reaction to a horror movie. It simply scared the living daylights out of me.
THE OTHERS
Released in 2001, it tells the tale of a devout religious woman and her children who live in a mansion. One day, three strange people appear who desire work as servants. The woman, Grace, hires them but she is suspicious because they seem to work against her wishes and to be hiding something. Strange noises and happenings lead Grace to believe the house is plagued by ghosts. In the absence of gratuitous violence, the film conceptualizes the feeling of dread that something horrific will happen or has happened to the family. Grace is unstable, paranoid and controlling with her children. One day, Grace ventures out into thick fog and mysteriously runs into her long lost husband, returning from the front lines of WWII. The man is disoriented and traumatized. His apathy for his wife and children and his subsequent abandoning of them, only increases the feelings of impending doom. The foggy landscape, the haunted house with strange voices and noises, the old time Victorian photos of the deceased on their death beds, hardly support a narrative of aggressive violence or adrenaline-inducing suspense, but nevertheless the suspense is there and the plot development superbly conveys it.
This film is one of the few Stephen King novels made into a movie which I thought was very well done as far as plot development and visual aesthetic. Perhaps it was because the director, Stanley Kubrick, was so talented. While blood and gore made an appearance, it was kept to a minimum. We saw butchered twins in the hotel hallway and the protagonist, Jack, take an axe to a man’s head. However, compared to horror movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, or Scream, this violence was mild. The fear manifested in watching Jack’s slow descent into madness. He stares off into space, he types the same phrase over and over again, he hallucinates a conversation with a bartender and waiter, as opposed to battling raging monsters or crazed killers. “The Shining” was terrifying because of the speculation of how the growing insanity of Jack would manifest in his relationship with his family.
Those horror films classified as “spooky” stimulate my imagination to write but also draw and paint characters into life. The web of dread woven in these films present situations that must be suffered through rather than resolved with gratuitous violence.
Here is a short intro to my novel,
Eye of the Hawk. I hope it meets your horror mark.
One shapeshifter is worth a thousand armies.
In an epoch long forgotten, a spell was cast around the island of Jaanaar, preventing its people from leaving and anyone from entering. One lone man, a foreign shape-shifter named Hawk, trained by Jaanaarian Druids, is sent beyond this spell through an elemental portal with coded instructions he barely remembers.
To fulfill his destiny, Hawk must pass through a haunted forest filled with damned souls of the living and dead, where humans are crucified on trees. Accompanied by a Druid Healer who is eerily familiar, they are attacked by undead fiends and a ghost dragon who guards the forest.
In the Crystal Palace of Corvasa, Sillisnae, an Adept’s Apprentice, longs to become an Adept and possibly the mistress of the King. But her wishes are thwarted when she discovers her tutor is a traitor and the Fire Globe, an ancient relic possessing the essence of elemental fire, has been stolen.
To discover its location, Hawk joins forces with the Adept’s Apprentice to steal the heart of a bitter goddess, the only thing which can subdue the power of the Fire Globe.
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L.V. Barat discovers tales in the most unlikely of places: in the ancient spiritual literature of India, Greece, Scandinavia, Britain and Ireland. An extensive study of the occult in several different cultures led to an awakening of the power of myth in her mind. Myths are woven in the imaginations or collective unconscious of peoples worldwide and the connection to the archetypes can weave tales that inspire!
LV Barat has been writing fiction and non-fiction for twenty years. Epic fantasy is her genre of choice whilst some suspenseful mystery has managed to worm its way into her opus corpus.
She lives in the Rocky Mountains, the spine of North America. An enchanted place of glistening pine needles, massive boulders, jutting gray crags, stealthy red foxes and antlered elk.
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