For the first essay in the "Why I Love Horror" series, I thought I'd start with the newest author in my planned schedule, Elizabeth Lynn Blackson.
Blackson is just starting out as a published author. Her debut novel, A Girl's Gotta Eat, is available from LuLu.Com.
I think that sharing the thoughts of new voices is often more helpful to you. Why? Because you can look at her thoughts without having any preconceived notions of who she is as a writers. You can elaborate her as any other fan.
And so we begin the Why I Love Horror parade for 2022. The first of many.
Remember you can access every "Why I Love Horror" essay I have ever published with this link.
Why I Love Horror
By Elizabeth Lynn Blackson
Where did it begin? In 1977, I was six years old, and we moved from a very rural area to a small city within broadcast distance of Cleveland. I fell in love with the Saturday Afternoon Mad Theater with Superhost, where I first saw Godzilla, Frankenstein, and a myriad of Vincent Price movies.
In 1982, I was 11 years old. Showtime and HBO would occasionally have free trials, and I watched a Halloween horror movie marathon, culminating with Cat People, The Howling and finally Alien. I was merrily stuffing my face with nacho chips and cream soda, then I threw up when Ian Holm’s head was torn off.
And yet, I was hooked.
My sister and I would sit out on our front porch, passing a Stephen King novel between us, taking turns reading a chapter each, and scaring the hell out of each other.
In middle school, when I was a jaded, angsty teen, my English teacher introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe, and ‘Hopfrog’. And those dusty ‘required reading’ assignments sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the source novels for the Universal monster movies I fell in love with years before, and the stories upon which the Vincent Price movies were sometimes based. And it was glorious. The texture of the language, rendered somewhat foreign by time, lent it a different flavor. I understood how the stories endured.
I’m sure ten thousand psychology students have written ten thousand papers on why people love horror. I think, for me, it was two-fold. As a visual media, it was free adrenalin. The buildup, culminating in the moments of brutal, explosive release. I wonder what my pupils would look like, if someone watched them while I watched horror? Wide, like a predator with all my wild fight-or-flight systems engaged. Amped up on a cocktail of survival hormones, with my heart pounding in my chest.
As a written media, it was the creepy sensation of a thought that crawls into the back of your mind, and lays a thousand eggs, like a spider. The vicarious experience of countless unexplained encounters that leave you queasy and uncertain as to the true nature of your world.
I love horror, because it digs up all the fears planted in me from my earliest days in church of God and the lake of fire and eternal damnation, and the thousand paths one might slide into darkness, or fight against it. I love the stories horror can tell about morality and corruption. It allows for cosmic justice. It allows for a world where you are insignificant compared to unfathomable powers, and it allows for a universe with no hand on the rudder of fate whatsoever. And each of those comes with its own kind of horror.
I love horror because it intersects with my love of comics. When the hand of Bernie Wrightson conjures forth an image that calls to mind the old print plates of a thousand past macabre tales, or the blood-drenched horror of pre-code comics, the golden era of gore. I love the art of the old EC comics, and the shivers of fear their images could conjure. I love how their art style can be twisted to invoke a sort of insanity, or wrongness to a tale like we see reality through an intentionally distorted lens. I loved curling up in a pile of comforters and reading scary stories by flashlight, because we all know that thick blankets keep out demons and werewolves.
In my late twenties, I read multiple ‘Goosebumps’ books to a young pre-teen boy, and I remember the joy I felt, sharing that creepy vibe. It was like passing on the tradition of telling ghost stories around the campfire, and relit those memories of reading horror with my sister.
I love that horror is so often a story of very visceral struggle for survival, against terrors of the real world, terrors of the supernatural world, and our own personal demons.
I love that horror can be used to discuss real world issues with a veil, separating that true trauma. That valve of release it gives us,to vicariously feel emotions we may not have processed. Stephen King once said that writing was his therapy. I feel much the same. When journalling wouldn’t dig out the demons of my past, I turned to the metaphors allowed by writing fiction. I dragged my demons into my stories, and picked fights with them. I love horror, because it allows me to process those literal nightmares. It allows me, every day, to prove myself worthy of being the final girl.
I love horror because it digs at the root of human fear. It is mutilation and blood, and phobia, tragedy, and injustice. It is the dark half of the year, when days are short and things die off. The cliche isn’t ‘It was a bright and sunny day’, but ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’ Horror is the unknown. It is our fear, and that is a primal, core emotion. Horror is the genre that allows us to point our mind’s eye into the darkness, and with a trembling hand holding an unsteady source of light, to shout ‘who goes there’? Horror is the genre that gives an answer to that question that you didn’t want to know. I love horror, because my messed up mind has a ravenous appetite for the answer to that horrid question: ‘what is the worst thing that could be going bump in the night?’
I love horror because as an author, it is the kind of story that easily pours out of me. Writing horror feels extremely natural to me, as close to ‘effortless’ as anything could. I have had the great fortune to have several short stories and now my first novel ‘A Girl’s Gotta Eat’ published by ‘Tales of Wonder and Dread’. I suppose it would be classified as Urban Fantasy/Horror. I participate in a writer’s group, and in those meetings, we write for two half-hour sessions. In every single session I’ve attended, I’ve produced a short story of about 1700 words. Those stories have always been horror, and I can only manage that pace because horror flows easily from me.
I love horror, because it can give a personification to loss. The thing that steals our loved ones can be given a face and a name. And if we are very, very lucky, we might be able to vanquish or banish it.
In the end though, I love horror because it feels like a reminder. You could face a grizzly end at any moment. The future is not a guarantee, and life is, usually in a less dramatic way, an inevitable march toward death. The skull, practically the sigil of horror as a genre, is the reminder that we are mortal, and life can be fragile and tragically brief. Ancient moldering tombs practically scream for the Latin inscription ‘Memento Mori’. Remember, you must die.
I love horror because it reminds us that life is fleeting and precious.
I love horror because it teaches us that when you die, something will find you delicious.
Delicious!
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