Flights of Fancy

I hate the change to and from Daylight Savings Time. Twice a year my body spends a week jet-lagged without moving more than a hundred feet from my current latitude. I understand the need for it by those not blessed to live in paradise with me, but that doesn’t make it better. At least I’m retired, so I don’t have to function in an actual job.

But I don’t do well with change anymore. That’s a young man’s game. One of the main reasons I started this blog was that Writing.com, my former writing home, rolled out dozens of changes for no reason other than that they could. Suddenly I found myself thrashing around like a noob on a site where I had been a veteran the day before. No problem. I make my own solutions.

What else has changed dramatically over time? Oh, here’s a candidate: Horror movies. Pretty smooth segue, eh? Now, I deal in printed horror here, a genre that I love. But horror in the modern era can be literary or visual, and I want to talk about the visual side this week. I grew up in the 1950s, the heyday of the B-movie, many of which were horror, some of that disguised as sci-fi, but horror, nonetheless. Some of my favorite movies were Forbidden Planet, The Killer Shrews, Day of the Triffids, Them! There must have been a hundred more between Saturday matinees and late-night TV, and I loved all of them.

And then they changed. The old-school movies featured a guy in a rubber suit, mostly, who was hinted at through most of the movie and revealed at the end when he was usually defeated or occasionally left hanging for a planned sequel. The change was incremental, with no watershed title to point to and say “here’s where it changed,” but if memory serves, it started in the late 1970s. The slow-burn, the psychological impact, the moments of terror were replaced by jump scares and grossouts. You know the scene. Somebody’s watching the spooky house in the dark and a hand lands on their shoulder accompanied by a discordant clang! and it turns out to be a cop or a buddy wondering what they’re doing out there. Grossouts? Let me recommend Saw or The Human Centipede. It doesn’t get any grosser than those! And when nothing else will move the plot, every director falls back on the tried and true trope of throwing a cat at the actor. The sub-trope, I guess, of the cheap jump scare.

Here’s what I mean in a nutshell. In The Killer Shrews (1959), an incredibly cheap production with a silly premise, the cast is isolated in a house on an otherwise deserted island off the coast of Texas. Outside the house, giant, ravenous shrews, created by the scientists within, own the night. They’ve eaten pretty much everything else on the island, and turn their attention to the occupants of the house. They’re digging their way in, the basement has already been lost, the people only have two guns, so they can’t just kill them all, and the suspense consists of them making a plan to get to their boat just offshore without being devoured in the process. A lot of this movie goes on inside your head: How good is their plan, will it succeed, will they hit a snag during the execution, will one or more of them die? If this movie were made today, it would be in HD technicolor with close-ups of the shrews dismembering everyone and eating them alive. There might even be a post-credit scene of the Coast Guard finding their boat and speculating about what might have happened. That isn’t horror, that’s disgusting. The challenge isn’t whether you can stand the terror, it’s whether you can keep from puking on your shoes. No, I’m afraid the B-movie monsters are a thing of the past.

When I tell people I write horror, their immediate response is often to ask me whether I’ve seen this or that horror movie, and they’re always astonished when I answer in the negative. That’s too bad. I like horror, but I consume it in written form these days. It’s hard to throw a cat at someone reading a book; authors have to create their scares honestly. You can describe some pretty gory scenes, but I’m creating the visual in my head, and I can stop that construction short of a grossout. And I do.

How about you? Do you like those movies whose only mission is to paint the screen red, or do you prefer your horror with a dose of subtlety? Care to talk about it? The doctor is in…