The last few days I have been featuring the StokerCon 2023 team. Today I am turning the Why I Love Horror spotlight on to HWA Trustee, Brian Matthews who, among other duties, is one of the HWA's StokerCon organizing experts. He is the go-to guy for everything StokerCon [along with James Chambers who will be featured later this month], and he is actively mentoring this year's team.
Here is more info about Brian:
Brian W. Matthews is a writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. He's a member of the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers. His works include the supernatural thriller Forever Man series, as well as the science fiction novel, THE CONVEYANCE. His latest short story, "Temm the Riven," appeared in the iconic WEIRD TALES magazine. You can find him on Twitter at @BrianWMatthews and on Facebook at facebook.com/bwmatthews
Take it away Brian. And sign up to join us at StokerCon in Pittsburgh this coming June.
by Brian Matthews
When I think about horror, whether I’m reading it or writing it, I don’t think about what scares me (or better yet, what scares you). I wonder why—why do we fear a dark basement, or the loss of control over our bodies (read: zombies), or the black shroud of death that eventually settles over all of us? Why do they make our skin pebble into gooseflesh, or those tiny hairs rise on the backs of our necks, or our terrified hearts race? Why is horror so compelling to a large segment of the population?
Because horror isn’t about what scares us. Rather, it’s about how we are made to care enough to become scared. Without empathy, horror doesn’t exist. Without compassion, we cannot fear.
Horror teaches us something about ourselves by confronting us with the threat of losing that which we love.
Everyone loves, in one form or another. Some (or most, if you’re an optimist like me) develop healthy loves: the love of parents for their children; the love between two people who want to share a life together; the love of simply doing good for others. We form bonds so profound artists for centuries have tried to convey them in word or painting, in song or sculpture. We know what it is. We know how it feels. But it isn’t until someone or something tries to take them away can we fully understand how deep those bonds of love exist. That threat—or in some cases, the real loss—teach us about our humanity. We learn about our capacity for love and our capacity for pain. Horror does that by injecting us into someone else’s threat. We walk side-by-side with the protagonists—Danny Torrance in The Shining, Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, poor David Moran in Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door—as they face continuingly horrific events. We feel with them as they reach deep into themselves to address the shortcomings revealed by these horrors. We learn with them as they strive to overcome their shortcomings and deal with what life has thrown at them. And we cheer at their successes.
The world sometimes is a dark place populated with innumerable threats. We feel besieged on all sides by illness, violence, racism, poverty, homophobia, and now war in Europe for the first time in eighty years. Through horror, we learn how others cope with adversity. We see the bravery and resourcefulness of Jonathan Harker as he confronts Dracula. We experience the stone determination of Paul Sheldon to escape his psychotic captor, the obsessed nurse Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery. We see these people and we say, “Hey, if they can overcome those obstacles, maybe I can too.” Or it exposes to us the traumas others have endured that we may never experience. It puts us in their shoes. I challenge you to read Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home and not weep in sympathy at the plight of the main character, Mario. Not just at the horrors he’s faced to endure, but at the systemic racism and crushing income disparity that shoves him into terrible situations.
What I love about horror is it forces us to think and feel, to learn and cope.
And in doing so, horror makes us better human beings.
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