Before we get to day's post, don't forget that tonight, I am moderating a FREE, Virtual Horror panel. Details here. It will be recorded and available after the event as well.
Now on to today's Why I Love Horror invitee.
For the rest of this month, I have posts from people who are major volunteers for the HWA. People who have stepped up in a variety of ways to help our organization and better the horror community.
Today I have one of the StokerCon 2023 Co-Chairs, Michael Arnzen. Sign-up for StokerCon 2023 in Pittsburgh from June 14-17 is live. And yesterday, Konrad Stump and I had our first Librarians' Day planning meeting the the StokerCon team.
[More soon, but LD is 6/16 and will be $75 for a full day of CE, including lunch and free books. Also, since we are in PA, we are working to get you all the CE credits you need.]
Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. His books include Grave Markings, Play Dead, Proverbs for Monsters and 100 Jolts. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999. See what he's up to now at gorelets.com
Here is Michael Arnzen on why he loves Horror.
Why do I love horror?
Well, the word “love” means a lot of different things. I “love” pizza, but I’m not going to have a torrid affair with it, for instance. At least not fresh out of the oven.
Even the classic Greek philosophers couldn’t quite define the word, but they did come up with seven variations on the concept that I think pertain to my “love” of horror. So let’s explore!
1. EROS
Horror is hot.
And not just in that “Cenobites look really hot in leather” kind of way. No: I am inexplicably drawn to the genre in a very physical manner because I find it the most aesthetic genre in the room wherever I might be, on a guttural, instinctive level. I can’t help myself, and neither can horror, which flaunts its gorgeous gory self more brazenly than any other genre. It’s threatening in its seduction, with all its slitty vampire eyes aglow, its drippy tentacles curling back into the shadows in a deadly, flirty come on.
My attraction is compulsive, physical. If I’m at a book shop, the black covers are catching my eye. At a multiplex, the posters with blood and fangs on them are sending me to the ticket counter. Goth fashion makes me gawk. And don’t even ask me what happens when I enter a Halloween store. I’m the guy bouncing from shelf to shelf, aisle after aisle, touching the pointy bits on the costumes or fingering the spiderwebbing, clutching all the big bags of candy like they were fluffy pillows, sniffing all the pumpkins and fondling all the skeletons and just grinning widely like a madman.
2. PHILIA
Ah, Philia -- the loving bonds of friendship. Horror and I are buddies, and we go way back.
I bet you do too. Were you like me, when you were growing up, haunting libraries and reading nooks with the latest Stephen King paperback or Tales of the Unexpected comic? There are a multitude of us loners, all conjoined to the same stories.
Horror media becomes like a pocketbook portal into a world where your people live. You can tell who belongs in our tribe and who doesn’t, by the way they dress, by the way their eyes light up or shut down when you start talking about werewolves or tarot cards, by the things they chuckle darkly about with a knowing glint in their eye. The home of horror is large, diverse community. Fear is a universal language -- and perhaps this is why some of the earliest, most successful silent films were horror movies: because the feelings that the genre conjures connects us all.
I love horror because it helps me find my people. And when I find them, it’s like I’ve gone home.
My bookshelf is a line up of old friends.
3. STORGE
“Storge” is not a Norse god. It’s a word that applies to the love a parent and child feel for each other. It’s that feeling you get when hanging out with people who share your very DNA. It’s the love shared among a community of like-minded souls. And in that sense horror IS a family, as much as it is a genre, isn’t it?
I often reflect on how lucky I was to have horror fans in my actual family growing up, too. Sure, there were prudes in my family, but most of us were creepy and kooky and we liked it that way. I think back to my uncle Chris, who had blacklight posters of Universal monsters on the walls of his bedroom whenever I came to visit. And I think I discovered horror comics magazines, like Eerie and Famous Monsters, as well as some of the black humor of MAD magazine, in his room, too. Even more, I think of my father, a DIY musician who would experiment with sound bytes long before hip hop came along, only he was sampling TV interviews with Charles Manson for his tracks, intermixed with creepy guitar licks. He also loved the horror movies back in the early 70s -- but my mom didn’t, so he would take me to these R-rated features in her place. Whenever anything too outrageously gory or dirty would appear on screen, he’d cover my eyes out of a repressed Catholic guilt... and leave me to imagine what was happening while everyone in the theater was screaming. I think the seed for writing horror was planted in my brain then, because I was filling in the gaps from one moment (a woman walking down a flight of stairs with her robe falling lower from her shoulders with each step) to another (a body on the floor at the foot of the stairs, neck cracked, head resting in a puddle of blood).
Now I’m a published, Bram Stoker Award-winning author. But I didn’t get here on my own. Authors are like an extended family for me. I can remember attending an early World Horror Con, after I’d sold my first book (Grave Markings) to Dell/Abyss, making small talk at a party by nervously telling Dennis Etchison that I loved his work and had just sold my first novel, but had only a week to turn around revisions. I thought he’d say “that’s nice” but instead he patted me on the back, handed me a drink and laughed. “The hard part was writing and selling the book,” he assured me. “Nothing is easy, but editing is easier and you’ll make the deadline because you have to.” And he was right. I remember Steve Rasnic Tem editing a short story for one of my first anthology sales (for a book called High Fantastic, with sf/f/h tales all set in Colorado). He told me to cut the last line of the story: and that most stories can stand to have the last line cut, because the author can’t resist the urge to “wrap it all up” in a little bow. I think of that lesson EVERY TIME I end a tale. I storge Etchison. I storge Tem. I storge my writing teachers and the many authors who have passed along their wisdom to me, or helped me feel comfortable at the table, like old friends. But even if I never met these people in real life, I would have learned so much just from reading their books. A genre is an education, and we storge each other when we partake in it, like freaks at a family gathering.
4. AGAPE
Agape is not just the way your mouth opens up when you’re shocked. It refers to altruistic love -- a universal love for your fellow man; it’s what you feel when you give to charity, or return a stranger’s lost wallet to them, or any random act of kindness.
How does the horror genre relate to Agape? Isn’t it about tearing people open and making your fellow man choke on his own entrails?
Wellllll...I used to think so. I used to think that movies like Night of the Living Dead were all about how awesomely terrifying zombies can be, or how movies like Jaws were all about how awesomely terrifying psychopathic sharks would be. And then I grew up and realized these were all stories of survival. Tales of testing human survival in the face of extremes. Sure, not everyone survives -- and good riddance, usually, to those who don’t! Sometimes the sole survivors are the ones who benefit from a character’s sacrifice in the name of agape (I am thinking of other films my Dad took me to see: The Exorcist, where Father Karras cries “take me” and leaps to his doom, martyring himself to rescue the MacNeil family, or The Poseidon Adventure, where Gene Hackman leads his flock of survivors on an upside-down cruise ship to safety only to drown himself so they can survive in the process).
Often, the survival in these stories is only temporary. Yet the plot is all about trying -- struggling in the face of doom, fighting in the face of fear, often in a manner that serves others above one’s self alone. Horror reminds us of the core truth that death is inevitable, that mortality is human, but also that human courage in the face of dark fate is really what matters, and sometimes sacrifice can be worth it.
5. LUDUS
Ludus is playful love, like the thrills you get out of flirting. Love for its own sake. And horror of course has such delights to show us. I don’t really need to say a lot about the thrills of horror here... anyone reading this far knows what they are... but one of the things I adore about the horror genre is that it is absurd and doesn’t care what you think about it. Horror belongs at the drive-in theater as much anywhere else. B-movie kitsch is part of the fun. I honestly don’t think the other genres get to just play the way that we do. I mean, sure, other genres have their “cosplay” events and what not, but we OWN costuming and even have our own annual holiday to just play “trick or treat.” And though we have plenty of A24 thinkpieces, we also have alien clowns (Killer Klowns from Outer Space) and killer tow trucks from Detroit (Maximum Overdrive). As a writer, I know I’m doing it right when I’m cackling with mad glee at my keyboard, too, steering a story idea in directions that feel naughty and bold.
6. PRAGMA
Pragma is the joy we find in getting things done, often in teams. I think of it as the pleasure of service.
How, you might be wondering, does horror do THAT?
Well, there’s the functional pleasure of horror, which works as a catharsis. It allows a reader or film viewer or gamer to get the icky stuff out of their system. Pragmatically, the genre is serving us the way that dreams -- yes, nightmares -- do: they allow us to enjoy the taboo without censorship, to let loose fearlessly. In a slasher movie, we are slasher and victim alike!
Horror also serves mankind because it allows writers to say things (and readers to think things) that not only are we usually not “allowed” to say, but also to say things that other forms and genres simply are UNABLE to say. I mean, that’s what art does, but horror is the most libertine and liberating of all the arts: it’s the only genre where the unexpected is TOTALLY expected, where weirdness is the norm, and, really, where anything goes. This is what I love of the genre most of all: the freedom to write about whatever I want through the dark lens of dread and disgust.
7. PHILAUTIA
Philautia sounds dirty, doesn’t it? The term means “self-love” and it’s the most intimate and personal of them all. To love yourself is difficult, actually. Because our psyches are full of self-loathing and guilt and punishment and pain. These things mess us up time and time again. As Ru Paul famously puts it: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
Horror validates our human fears, and I think reading it and reminding ourselves of our universal vulnerabilities is a kind of self-love. Horror stories confirm that we aren’t alone in our anxieties, and not crazy if we’re paranoid; that sometimes, as in the movie, Get Out, the world really is out to get us.
And for us authors of the strange, horror allows us to make our critiques of society, of religion, of government, of our parents, of anything, vicariously, through our monsters and villains. Writers benefit from tapping the vein of their own fears to bleed onto the page, too.
Because if you can’t SCARE yourself, how in the hell you gonna scare somebody else?
I love horror because it lets us do this to each other.
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