Horror Beyond the Jump Scare
We are rolling up to the Halloween season again, and we all have certain expectations of what it means to be scared based on our experiences and the norms of popular culture.
Much of this expectation comes from movies and the use of the jump scare trope in horror.
We are all familiar with this trope.
In a moment of calm, the lone teenager is walking down a hallway towards safety (and the viewer) and suddenly the monster pops into the shot behind the unaware teenager. Or the hero has put an axe through the monster’s head and leans over to check the body and the monster suddenly comes back to life and grabs the hero’s hand.
But for me, a jump scare is not the deepest kind of horror. There is another kind that travels deeper and sticks with us longer. A more resonant horror.
So read along as I parse out the differences in these two types of horror and recommend five works – from short story collections to movies – that move at the deeper level of horror.
Two Kinds of Horror
Horror is not an act but an emotion. In fact, it is one of the three primary genres that leads to a physical transformation, a bodily reaction.
Jump scares are adrenaline hits. They cause a surge in the body as we experience the unexpected shock, a rush, and then the surge is over. A chemical reaction begins and then ends. Because the jump scare is at that surface level, it allows for the return to stasis. We experienced the sudden scare, then the final girl wins, and we return to normal. In some ways, it is a primal fright reminiscent of something coming towards the campfire at night or of the moment of the hunt where do not know whether the beast will win.
Even within these jump scare-based movies, there is often a coda at the end of the movie that suggests that deeper level of resonant horror. This is that familiar scene at the very end, when the story is resolved, the character is far away from the monster, credits may have even rolled, and the monster flickers back to life. In some ways these scenes are marketing cheats to tell the viewer that the monster is not quite dead so expect another movie in the series.
However, this resonance, this idea that the horror exists in us beyond the work, is what I want to explore in the next type of horror.
Deeper resonant horror does not travel at the surface level but instead lodges itself into our being. Unlike jump scares and the adrenaline, it makes us ask deeper questions, about the nature of reality, or our place in the world. It creeps us out and fills us with lingering dread.
Often with this resonant horror it makes us question whether what we think is real is actually real. It makes us question not only perception but also sanity. This resonant horror does not travel at the level of skin or muscle but goes deeper to bone and breath and essence. After we are finished with the movie or the book, the horror does not melt away but rather gnaws, a black mold, a slow burn, walls disintegrating.
We are stained by the fear.
This horror often is more clearly expressed in the subgenres of horror: weird fiction, body horror, cosmic horror, psychological horror, or folk horror.
So let’s explore examples of this resonant horror.
Five Resonant Horror Recommendations
A Different Darkness and Other Abominations by Luigi Musolino (Short story collection)
This short story collection by Italian writer Musolino is best described as unsettling. The tales are set in what we think of as modern day Italy, with normal people living their lives – going for a run after work, driving a truck, going to the supermarket.
But Musolino uses those familiar instances as a starting point to give us glimpses of a world of darkness that could exist in our world – whether through a broken reality or a plunge into madness. The despair that he creates lingers long after the last page is read.
Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud (Novella)
From the author of North American Lake Monsters (also made into a series on Hulu), Visible Filth is a novella embedded in Ballingrud’s collection Wounds. Similar to Musolino’s work, Visible Filth starts in a familiar world, an alcoholic bartender in New Orleans picks up a cell phone left after a brawl in the bar. From there we move from the known world to the terrifying unknown.
Strange text messages, a horrifying video, an online rabbit hole. All of this is a trajectory of a downward spiral into something maybe darker than insanity.
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager (Novel)
This novel from Apocalypse Party press is a wild ride. It is the story takes place in a small town in New England and centers on outcast teenagers abusing a hallucinogen to cope with a series of suicides in their community. The book explores grief.
But the novel moves beyond that into the strange with a fractured narrative style. Perspectives shift, time and space shift. Like a hallucinogenic experience, the reader is brought into spaces where reality and time blurs, where anchors are lost between life and death.
The Thing (Movie)
John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of the all time classic science fiction horror movies. Released in 1982, it is the story of a group of Antarctic researchers who are hunted down one-by-one by a shape-shifting alien.
The deeper horror from this cult classic surfaces on several levels. One level is the body horror where the Thing can assume the shape of dogs and humans and other hosts, but in ways that are malformed. The Thing manifests as living nightmares. A dog with tentacles, sprouting a second head, bursting with a flower appendage. A human head that separates from a body and runs around on spider-like legs.
Beyond the body horror, the deeper horror might be the paranoia that infects the crew like the virus. Blair’s paranoia after learning that the alien life form could assimilate all life on Earth in a few years. The paranoia as they test each other’s blood. The early paranoia of where is the Thing grows to the growing paranoia of who is the Thing, all the way to the last scene of the movie.
Thirty some years after first seeing The Thing its impact was still strong in me when I wrote my novella Skin, a re-imagining of the story in a medieval fantasy setting, The Thing with swords.
Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature (Audiodrama)
My childhood was not only filled with consuming books but also listening to radio dramas like those found on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Recently I’ve begun exploring podcasts and audiodramas, and one of the ones I’ve been enjoying is Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature.
The premise of this audiodrama is that it is a series of recorded lectures from a course exploring recently discovered literature from Anterra, the most ancient known human civilization.
As it is with most things weird and horrific, the story begins almost in a mundane, too normal way. We feel that we are listening to a lecture in a college classroom with professorial mannerisms and language. The sound design makes us feel like we are experiencing real life.
But then strange elements begin emerging as myths and culture of Anterra are explored and the sinister and unnerving move from the myths to the classroom and the world of the professor. The horror in Modes of Thought feels always close and always just out of reach, like a growing sense of dread, for that moment when everything will suddenly be revealed.
Let me know what you are reading this spooky season and what you are really enjoying. I am always looking for new books to read (as well as movies to watch and audiodramas to listen to.) Connecting with other readers and writers is really important to me.
