As part of my plan to bring back some of the very best of my archive of Why I Love Horror essays, I am welcoming Horror legend Linda Addison back. She is literally once of the most talented and best humans I know. See for yourself in this essay from 2022.
The floor is yours Linda....
Why I Love Horror by Linda D. Addison Horror: an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust.
There's two kinds of horror in the world, one is real-life horror and the other is fictional horror: poetry, stories, novels, movies, etc. I know that we're writing about the make-believe horror, but I can't leave out real horror because so much of what I write comes from my reactions and emotions about things that are actually happening in the world, the terrible things humans do to each other. One feeds the other and I suspect that’s true for many creators of horror work.
I love reading horror fiction and poetry written by others because of the tension it creates, and releases, like holding my breath and then exhaling, while being safe. No matter how intense the emotion invoked, I know that it’s not from something that will actually harm me. Similar to the thrill of a rollercoaster ride, it feels like I’m going to fly off the edge, I scream at the sensation, but ultimately I know I’m not in danger.
Growing up in Philly, I used to watch scary movies with my mom at night after my younger brothers and sister went to bed. Too often I would fall asleep before the movie actually ended, but I looked forward to those evenings. I think I was around 12 years old when I started watching "Double Chiller Theater". The movies didn’t give me nightmares, I was more curious about the adventure and the monsters, what created them? I fondly remember movies like Frankenstein, The Mummy, Forbidden Planet and Creature with the Atom Brain, to name a few.
While others found these movies scary, they were a lot less fearful than the life I was living in my house and neighborhood. These movies took me to places I’ve never seen and fed my active imagination. Escaping into movies and books not only helped me release some of the real-life tension, but allowed me to daydream how one day I might go to other countries, see things that were only in books. Dreams I didn’t know would ever be real, but that escape was a shadowy breath of fresh air for a thin little girl with strange ideas and images that she kept inside. I don’t know how much those movies motivated me, but I can look back and know they were important.
In high school and college I fell in love with the shadows and music in the writings of Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Kafka, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, John Cheever, Toni Morrison and Richard Wright. After college, I obsessively read Stephen King, Tom Piccirilli, Tananarive Due, Jack Ketchum, Joe Lansdale, Karen Taylor, Charlee Jacob, Marge Simon and others.
Once I was in control of my life, I felt safe enough to look at the real horror in my childhood. I began making up my own stories and poetry, not so much autobiographical versions of my past, but using the emotions of what I experienced when I wrote. In time, I began to see that my writing involved not characters as victims, but victimized, and discovering the power to come to terms with their fear and their victimizer.
Much of the horror I write (and read) now is a way to process my “intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust” at the awful things happening in the world as a result of humans behaving badly. I love writing horror because it gives me a voice to express my emotions, and I love knowing that others read my work and it invokes a reaction in them.
So I’ll continue making up stories and poetry that others can read and hope it shakes them up in the safety of their homes. Since we’re all connected, maybe my writing will touch some real-life shadow in others, so we can exhale together.
—Linda D. Addison, five-time recipient of HWA Bram Stoker Award®, including The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti, & How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, recipient of HWA Lifetime Achievement Award and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry.
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