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Saturday, July 9th, 2011 12:29 am
the point is that i don't have to look to know for sure
Today I finally got around to getting the ebook version of Stephen King's Danse Macabre, which is one of my deserted island books in the top five at least (along with The Stand, which always makes me feel a little guilty to include, as it feels like cheating; it's a hundred novels rolled into one, and I'm not referring to its length when I say that).
I read horror novels (sometimes), but I cannot sit through most horror movies; it took me most of my childhood and half my adolescence to understand and internalize this, but even with the entire Watership Down horror that still haunts me, I still didn't get a fundamental fact about my processing abilities. My friends would have a few nightmares; I'd go into obsessive thought circles that ended in insomnia for weeks and flashback on it for years afterward (again, Watership fucking Down, source of many bad nights sleep). There have been exceptions; I don't regret them, per se, but I rarely have the internal funds to deal with the price after. Being a grown-up is a conscious choice I make and takes a lot of work; I do not see the point of exhausting myself more than I have to when I'm not terribly good at it as it is.
Danse Macabre was magic. It gave me all the horror, intricacies of plot and circumstance, without the, you know, ongoing breaks with reality where I'm utterly convinced--not imagined here, I mean, convinced like I know I'm sitting on the bed--that there is Something There and its' not even I'm worried that it'll kill me; I'm worried more the problems with proof. I'll get to that.
(It's eleven at night; boy, do I know how to time these things.)
So Danse Macabre is like being a tourist, really, in mental landscape I'm aware is a terrible place for me to move to for any length of time. Every time though, he always reminds me of this story my family loves to tell about me and the lion. I don't remember this in any meaningful sense, so bear with me; I can extrapolate, however, as I'll be honest, not that far from me of now.
Apparently, one day, whilst surrounded by relatives in my grandparents' house, I suddenly became utterly terrified of the bedroom.
To give context; this was a normal, lower-middle class house, the bedroom was off the living room, the door was always open, when people socialized there we wandered from kitchen to living room to bedroom because my grandmother's family was very large and when they got together, it was that or homicide by crushing. When the door was closed, it was almost always for the value of the phone inside; it was literally the only place to have a private phone call. This being a period before now and before the advent of call waiting, you would sometimes get a busy signal. A relative (possibly my mother) came out one day irritated and me being me and aware adults who are irritated to do not take one out for ice cream or buy one new toys, asked what was the matter. And as it happens, the world ended.
You may be shocked to know I was not a quiet child. I was a relatively spoiled child as I was the first surviving grandchild and so, no one had ever though to develop some kind of way to protect themselves when I gained enough command of language to express pretty much everything I was thinking or considered, ever. No one knows when I spoke my first word; they have no memory of a time I wasn't talking. This is always said rather grimly, so I tend to believe them.
My silence apparently was loud enough to drown out an explosion; you'd think they'd be happy, but I'd conditioned my world quite thoroughly and there was no joy in the House of Jenn when the order of the world tumbled like that. Luckily, quiet was very hard for me, and also, terror is motivating; when warily questioned, I finally explained what my mother had told me.
The lion was busy. In the bedroom, as lions tend to be, and the goddamn door was open and we were going to die. I explained this so the adults who kept making up nonsense about why streets were bad to play in and pools were dangerous would get on this shit and protect me, since apparently this was like their thing and if it applied to everything potentially fun in the universe, then what the hell was going on?
(I suspect a lot of my childhood skepticism of dangerous was basically proved by this; if these people knew what dangerous was, then they'd sure as hell have done something about the lion.)
My mother knew my language; while everyone else stared at me blankly in shades of growing worry, she answered. "The phone line, honey. The line is busy."
You would think that would fix the problem; it did not.
It's not that I didn't believe her; I did. But the fact is, there was a lion as I conceived it, and while you can prove a positive--go look, no lion!--you can't a negative--there has never been a lion nor will there be one. Now, being older and armed with far more understanding of the world with which to scare myself, I think I conceived of the Schrodinger's Lion, which may not be there when I looked, but I wasn't always looking, and if the door was closed, there was no way to tell, and fuck me if I was opening the door.
This is the reason I have never in my life willingly cleaned under my bed.
See, I don't need to remember what happened to know the conclusion my mind drew once it had been alerted to the potential lion--at any time, there could be one, and while I could prove sometimes it wasn't there, I couldn't prove it was never there and never would be. I know this because circa age eight, I had a diary and you can pretty much see my lion issues peeking out every so often in the entries. When I became literate, I was not behindhand in seeing the value of talking with a sharpened number two pencil.
To prove my point, I raised a child who at age ten was in the garage with his BFF and it was dark and the BFF's dad came in and made scary sounds; BFF's dad was at the time my sister's husband and had no excuse for not seeing this coming. Child is very much my son; I armed him very early on with how to deal with potential lions.
Child grabs BFF without missing a beat and hurls him toward the voice. "Take him!" (And he also said something eerily Lovecraftian about a sacrifice, but I'm not willing to admit that Cthulhu may rise from my bathtub one day if my last cleaning spree in the bathroom is any indication.) Everyone tells this story with a lot of uneasy laughter, while I nod cheerfully, because hey, my parenting skills rock. I can't even open the door to check; Child, however, has a plan to deal with what happens if you do.
[Lovecraft is and remains my single attempt to attack the entire problem head on by writing it; it both worked and failed dramatically. I am not afraid of what I wrote or what I'm writing about when I write it; literally no effect on reading other people's work. And given time, I can even read what I wrote and badly unnerve myself; luckily, this is rare since its' hard for me to approach what I write as just a reader. So that was useful.]
Right, Danse Macabre--in the new foreword, Stephen King lists some of his favorite horror movies of the last fifteen years. I was pleased to see Blair Witch Project and the new version of Last House on the Left and 28 Days Later, of course Scream and--really interestingly--The Mothman Prophecies and Jeepers Creepers and Snakes on a Plane made the cut (along with others I'm less familiar with)--he gives a short version of why they worked for him in general and one of the things I like about his analysis of horror movies is he goes in already with the frame of mind to understand what he's watching. He goes over in more detail on the first two movies mentioned, but you probably are still blinking about Snakes on a Plane, which is the top number one movie I will never watch--I saw forty-five seconds of it once and have never gotten over it.
This is why I love Stephen King and why horror is art; he understands on a fundamental level that the art of invoking horror is actually fairly simple. Find button, stomp; you're done. He also gets, even more fundamentally, that while everyone has buttons, they are very individual with pressure variations, and horror is both individual and universal and where a lot of filmmakers get it wrong; you cannot scare everyone to death, but you want to get a wide swathe, so pressure is key and pushing too hard overclocks the lizard brain and you're just meh.
I truly love anyone, however, who gets that particular thing about the difference between terror (for me, The Ring, horror (things involving evil worms or snakes), and the gross-out (pretty much everything Hollywood usually mistakes for terror and horror and involves torture porn, see Hostel); gross-out movies kind of freak me out and I hate to watch (I can never unsee graphic grossness) but that's all they do in the end, and I don't want to watch and will possibly break your knee-caps to get away, but they won't sign a lease for me in the zone of terror-insomnia either. Watching the trailer for The Blair Witch Project means I will forever have certain twitches that will manifest around forests, trees, or people's camcorders or sometimes for no reason at all and will keep me up at night very possibly the rest of my life. The rabbits of Watership Down have lived in my head for years, after all. I prefer my current tourist status very much.
Looking at his movie list, it's interesting to see the variation not in quality, per se, but in execution--but more importantly, the one-ness of concept in them all; they depend on the audience recognizing the story being told is being told specifically to them. I've only actually watched one of the movies (maybe two) he's listed: I read the plot synopsis, reviews, and in-depth analysis of most of them because again, I don't want to live there, but I will always have my citizenship and I'm always tripping over the borders. Horror movies keep telling me that yeah, you were right; there are lions--wanna see? Well, obviously not, I do not want the proof; but on the other hand, it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who knows that proof either way has nothing to do with the existence of lions.
I read horror novels (sometimes), but I cannot sit through most horror movies; it took me most of my childhood and half my adolescence to understand and internalize this, but even with the entire Watership Down horror that still haunts me, I still didn't get a fundamental fact about my processing abilities. My friends would have a few nightmares; I'd go into obsessive thought circles that ended in insomnia for weeks and flashback on it for years afterward (again, Watership fucking Down, source of many bad nights sleep). There have been exceptions; I don't regret them, per se, but I rarely have the internal funds to deal with the price after. Being a grown-up is a conscious choice I make and takes a lot of work; I do not see the point of exhausting myself more than I have to when I'm not terribly good at it as it is.
Danse Macabre was magic. It gave me all the horror, intricacies of plot and circumstance, without the, you know, ongoing breaks with reality where I'm utterly convinced--not imagined here, I mean, convinced like I know I'm sitting on the bed--that there is Something There and its' not even I'm worried that it'll kill me; I'm worried more the problems with proof. I'll get to that.
(It's eleven at night; boy, do I know how to time these things.)
So Danse Macabre is like being a tourist, really, in mental landscape I'm aware is a terrible place for me to move to for any length of time. Every time though, he always reminds me of this story my family loves to tell about me and the lion. I don't remember this in any meaningful sense, so bear with me; I can extrapolate, however, as I'll be honest, not that far from me of now.
Apparently, one day, whilst surrounded by relatives in my grandparents' house, I suddenly became utterly terrified of the bedroom.
To give context; this was a normal, lower-middle class house, the bedroom was off the living room, the door was always open, when people socialized there we wandered from kitchen to living room to bedroom because my grandmother's family was very large and when they got together, it was that or homicide by crushing. When the door was closed, it was almost always for the value of the phone inside; it was literally the only place to have a private phone call. This being a period before now and before the advent of call waiting, you would sometimes get a busy signal. A relative (possibly my mother) came out one day irritated and me being me and aware adults who are irritated to do not take one out for ice cream or buy one new toys, asked what was the matter. And as it happens, the world ended.
You may be shocked to know I was not a quiet child. I was a relatively spoiled child as I was the first surviving grandchild and so, no one had ever though to develop some kind of way to protect themselves when I gained enough command of language to express pretty much everything I was thinking or considered, ever. No one knows when I spoke my first word; they have no memory of a time I wasn't talking. This is always said rather grimly, so I tend to believe them.
My silence apparently was loud enough to drown out an explosion; you'd think they'd be happy, but I'd conditioned my world quite thoroughly and there was no joy in the House of Jenn when the order of the world tumbled like that. Luckily, quiet was very hard for me, and also, terror is motivating; when warily questioned, I finally explained what my mother had told me.
The lion was busy. In the bedroom, as lions tend to be, and the goddamn door was open and we were going to die. I explained this so the adults who kept making up nonsense about why streets were bad to play in and pools were dangerous would get on this shit and protect me, since apparently this was like their thing and if it applied to everything potentially fun in the universe, then what the hell was going on?
(I suspect a lot of my childhood skepticism of dangerous was basically proved by this; if these people knew what dangerous was, then they'd sure as hell have done something about the lion.)
My mother knew my language; while everyone else stared at me blankly in shades of growing worry, she answered. "The phone line, honey. The line is busy."
You would think that would fix the problem; it did not.
It's not that I didn't believe her; I did. But the fact is, there was a lion as I conceived it, and while you can prove a positive--go look, no lion!--you can't a negative--there has never been a lion nor will there be one. Now, being older and armed with far more understanding of the world with which to scare myself, I think I conceived of the Schrodinger's Lion, which may not be there when I looked, but I wasn't always looking, and if the door was closed, there was no way to tell, and fuck me if I was opening the door.
This is the reason I have never in my life willingly cleaned under my bed.
See, I don't need to remember what happened to know the conclusion my mind drew once it had been alerted to the potential lion--at any time, there could be one, and while I could prove sometimes it wasn't there, I couldn't prove it was never there and never would be. I know this because circa age eight, I had a diary and you can pretty much see my lion issues peeking out every so often in the entries. When I became literate, I was not behindhand in seeing the value of talking with a sharpened number two pencil.
To prove my point, I raised a child who at age ten was in the garage with his BFF and it was dark and the BFF's dad came in and made scary sounds; BFF's dad was at the time my sister's husband and had no excuse for not seeing this coming. Child is very much my son; I armed him very early on with how to deal with potential lions.
Child grabs BFF without missing a beat and hurls him toward the voice. "Take him!" (And he also said something eerily Lovecraftian about a sacrifice, but I'm not willing to admit that Cthulhu may rise from my bathtub one day if my last cleaning spree in the bathroom is any indication.) Everyone tells this story with a lot of uneasy laughter, while I nod cheerfully, because hey, my parenting skills rock. I can't even open the door to check; Child, however, has a plan to deal with what happens if you do.
[Lovecraft is and remains my single attempt to attack the entire problem head on by writing it; it both worked and failed dramatically. I am not afraid of what I wrote or what I'm writing about when I write it; literally no effect on reading other people's work. And given time, I can even read what I wrote and badly unnerve myself; luckily, this is rare since its' hard for me to approach what I write as just a reader. So that was useful.]
Right, Danse Macabre--in the new foreword, Stephen King lists some of his favorite horror movies of the last fifteen years. I was pleased to see Blair Witch Project and the new version of Last House on the Left and 28 Days Later, of course Scream and--really interestingly--The Mothman Prophecies and Jeepers Creepers and Snakes on a Plane made the cut (along with others I'm less familiar with)--he gives a short version of why they worked for him in general and one of the things I like about his analysis of horror movies is he goes in already with the frame of mind to understand what he's watching. He goes over in more detail on the first two movies mentioned, but you probably are still blinking about Snakes on a Plane, which is the top number one movie I will never watch--I saw forty-five seconds of it once and have never gotten over it.
This is why I love Stephen King and why horror is art; he understands on a fundamental level that the art of invoking horror is actually fairly simple. Find button, stomp; you're done. He also gets, even more fundamentally, that while everyone has buttons, they are very individual with pressure variations, and horror is both individual and universal and where a lot of filmmakers get it wrong; you cannot scare everyone to death, but you want to get a wide swathe, so pressure is key and pushing too hard overclocks the lizard brain and you're just meh.
I truly love anyone, however, who gets that particular thing about the difference between terror (for me, The Ring, horror (things involving evil worms or snakes), and the gross-out (pretty much everything Hollywood usually mistakes for terror and horror and involves torture porn, see Hostel); gross-out movies kind of freak me out and I hate to watch (I can never unsee graphic grossness) but that's all they do in the end, and I don't want to watch and will possibly break your knee-caps to get away, but they won't sign a lease for me in the zone of terror-insomnia either. Watching the trailer for The Blair Witch Project means I will forever have certain twitches that will manifest around forests, trees, or people's camcorders or sometimes for no reason at all and will keep me up at night very possibly the rest of my life. The rabbits of Watership Down have lived in my head for years, after all. I prefer my current tourist status very much.
Looking at his movie list, it's interesting to see the variation not in quality, per se, but in execution--but more importantly, the one-ness of concept in them all; they depend on the audience recognizing the story being told is being told specifically to them. I've only actually watched one of the movies (maybe two) he's listed: I read the plot synopsis, reviews, and in-depth analysis of most of them because again, I don't want to live there, but I will always have my citizenship and I'm always tripping over the borders. Horror movies keep telling me that yeah, you were right; there are lions--wanna see? Well, obviously not, I do not want the proof; but on the other hand, it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who knows that proof either way has nothing to do with the existence of lions.
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TW for descriptions of horror genre
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From:Yes, this. And there's such a variation between what terrifies us and give nightmares, what scares us in a good way (scared, heart pounding, but able to sleep that night) and what just creeps us out and doesn't really work at all (the graphic grossness factor, the "torture porn" which does describe a whole bunch of Hollywood films really well).
Also, all that talking about lions and Watership Down has left me with childhood memories of my own. Firstly, that I watched Watership Down many, many times as a child and other than finding the glowing eyes of the rats extremely scary (I still don't like rats), I liked the film. It was only rewatching as an adult that made me realise how incredibly creepy it is in places. The second is of watching some ABC half hour kids show about a tiger than came out when the clock sturck a certain time at night, and being terrified of that idea. Despite only seeing it once, there are scenes of kids dancing in halls around that tiger that stuck with me as soemthing terrible.
...although, huh, a bit of a google search shows it was an adaptation of "Jandy Malone and the Nine O'Clock Tiger". I think I should re-read that just to prove it's nowhere near as scary as I thought.
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From:Also, here at Constrict we're all trying to figure out if this story proves you're completely sane or completely certifiable -- the voting seems to be evenly split.
P.S. -- try reading Song of Kali by Dan Simmons. Horror of the brain kind. You might like it.
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From:Stephen King in his foreword said that Blair Witch was the first movie he ever watched that he had to turn off half-way through it freaked him out so much. Too close to reality, which is one of the reasons I know I can't sit through it. Granted, he was also in the hospital from that hit and run at the time, but still.
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From:House of Leaves delicately straddles the line between fascinating and intolerable for me. I reread it every couple of years. I am never quite sure whether I like it or not, but I keep it around and come back to it. Oddly, if I regard it as an art installation in book form rather than a book, it is much less unsettling. I suppose my formal art training has made me more receptive to unsettling and disturbing concepts presented visually. Or maybe it has something to do with the different ways I process verbal/textual input and visual input.
I've found that I really enjoy Japanese horror games and manga, actually; the psychological aspect of the horror pushes the buttons nicely for me, while the setting is different enough from my everyday surroundings that I'm not looking nervously over my shoulder - it's not happening here. Instead of gore-shock, it also tends to emphasize the concepts of vulnerability and the unknown more heavily than Western horror.
If something terrible happens just out of sight, was it lions? Or something worse? Or nothing at all? The only necessary proof is that something terrible happened, and if you don't quite know what that terrible thing was, it's even scarier.
Please excuse my disjointed rambling. It's late. Early. Whatever.
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From:If something terrible happens just out of sight, was it lions? Or something worse? Or nothing at all? The only necessary proof is that something terrible happened, and if you don't quite know what that terrible thing was, it's even scarier.
That twanged something for me, but I don't know what, but oooh. The uncertainty principle involved. Yes. Exactly.
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From:... I probably shouldn't be having this conversation right before bedtime. Er.
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From:This, to my mind, is the most absolutely terrifying thing about the first movie adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House" -- "The Haunting" with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. You see nothing. Something is there. Something must be there, because something is holding Nell's hand in the dark, but it is never, never there when the lights come on.
The second adaptation, with Liam Neeson, is totally not even scary at all. What? Some fucking GHOSTS of MURDERED CHILDREN, are you kidding me? Pfah. The thing that has to be there but somehow isn't is WAY more frightening.
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From:"The Haunting", "Psycho", "The Spiral Staircase", and "Night of the Hunter" are my favorite horror movies; there are images from each that I can never get out of my head. (1. The bending door, and Nell staring at her hand; 2. Norman peeping at his first victim, and the first look at Mother; 3. The serial killer seeing Helen without her mouth; 4. The mother's hair, waving like seaweed, and the preacher popping up out of the darkness.)
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From:Psycho gave me the willies for quite a while, though it had enough of a resolution that it didn't prey on my mind too much.
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Do not read this comment if you don't want vague spoilers for the end of The Haunting
From:Ok.
Yeah, the resolution at the end of this movie is creepy as all get-out and may well give viewers lingering nightmares. I get chills thinking about it. The invisible lion sometimes wins.
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From:People stare at me when I talk about that, but seriously, I want to make them watch that movie first because seriously; I got more shivers from freaking Casper.
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From:The Stand is my all time favourite. And it is many novels in one. And there's so much there. But, in the end, my favourite bit is the chapter of "no big loss". Forever.
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From:I can't bring myself to read any of Stephen King's works which I realize is a total loss on my part. But IT and sewer grates. Someone apparently showed this to me as a young child, which I have blocked out of my mind, but I still do not walk over sewer grates and go near them willingly. And I really do not need something else to avoid so I sidestep Stephen King.
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From:BRB, LOLing 4ever.
ETA: Also, Watership Down is exhibit A in my case that animation is a medium, not a genre, and it is NOT all "kids' stuff." I wonder how many children have been traumatized because of clueless parents who saw the box and thought, "Ooh, bunnies!"?
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From:gotta go find my copy now, damn it...
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From:He's one of maybe the five people in the universe I desperately want to meet personally. I don't know what I'd say, though. I've thought about it and never come up with anything, because it's hard to explain how I read him not because I love horror--though I do--but because it's him writing the book and I know even if I don't like it, he's good enough as a writer that it doesn't matter for me, because I always enjoy it.
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From:And tonight will be fun. *shudders*
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From:I didn't like him when I attempted to read Christine when I was 14, so I basically ignored him for years. When I was 22, I got around to reading the Dark Tower series and there was just something about the way he phrased his imagery that I was deeply affected by his words and can't get some of them out of my head, even 4 years later. Usually, I can read anything even if I can't watch it - but I can't do that with the Dark Tower books.
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From:YES. Exactly. Thank you for putting into succinct words just why I love that man and his work, when I typically run in the opposite direction of horror movies. I agree, Watership Down was scarring. Dude, why do they do that shit to little kids?? I mean, it was a freakin' CARTOON. They're supposed to be safe!! Or at least, not so much with the in-your-face horror!!!
I love your story about your kid; my sister and I went to a Haunted House event a few Halloween's ago, and I found out that when faced with a chainsaw-wielding maniac, my sister will happily push me at said maniac and run in the opposite direction, screaming her head off.
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