A Horror Paradox

Not all storytelling devices work. How many police procedurals came and went before Law and Order and all its stepchildren? Any buddy comedy story has Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the Marx brothers looking on with either affection or not-too-carefully-hidden cynicism. Still, where a police drama or locked room mystery or light family series can get away with different formats, the more fantastic storytelling media have lower expectations going in, but are held to higher standards. A mystery lover might jokingly gripe about how Adrian Monk, Jessica Fletcher and Grandpa Holmes always manage to solve the mystery, but they don’t often have the vitriol in their statements that a science fiction or horror fan will often employ when discussing it.

Fair admission time— a lot of the bitching I hear comes from sources that legitimately know of what they speak, being artists in the fields. Writers, producers, cinematographers, actors, make up artists—the people who SHOULD know. But that’s not the paradox I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is how a truly disturbing, uncomfortable story on the page when performed as the wrong kind of audio or worse, video, it loses all the effect. You want the right kind of audio adaptation? War of the Worlds. The Audible versions of Salem’s Lot, It, and Pet Sematary. The LibriVox version of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward–hey, it may be free, but the reader has some talent and inflection. On the other end, Audible has collections of the complete works of Poe and Lovecraft, where the reader not only has a tone flatter than–no, not going with THAT analogy, flatter than a sidewalk. The guy also constantly mispronounces things. A Scottish story has him talking about Edin-bor-off. Wax museums are run by Madame Two-sod. A supposedly professional recording with things like that—again, if it were something based more in reality, you could let it pass more easily. It’s jarring, it reminds you that it isn’t REAL, and that’s the death knell for a fantastic production.

The 1970’s version of The Dunwich Horror with Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee tries to skirt the line between the hidden world and the material, but it’s a line that’s crossed too often. Corman and Price’s The Haunted Palace does it better. A lot of classic horror film relies on showing the reactions to the whatever-is-scary. The latest Colour Out of Space shows just about everything, but it manages to keep you uncomfortable in the Massive Invasion of Evil Magenta. It’s what it DOESN’T show as the characters descend into their fates that makes it work, along with a too-grounded narrator. The Weird exposed to the harsh light of Exposure becomes the Mundane. Lovecraft, Stoker, Poe–their best stories are hidden in the shadows, and film productions, especially these days after the bright red wash of the later Nightmare films or even the Alien series starting with the third. Audiences said they wanted to SEE things. Halloween for me—the holiday, not the movies—has always been about imagination, about the fantastic both light and dark that our minds can come up with. A lot of Lovecraft’s work is Unnameable, Indescribable, but throw a face on it, and it’s too easy for the human mind to wrap it in the familiar. The paradox is we want to see what scares us, but then it doesn’t scare us any longer. The alien, soul rending horror becomes Ted.

~ by Sean on October 29, 2022.