Posts in the "Horror: What Scares You?" Category

• I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts!

  Horror: What Scares You?

  What scares me? The knowledge that someday all three of my daughters will be teenagers at the same time. Gives me the willies like you wouldn’t believe. (The unseen might be frightening, but sometimes knowledge is too!)

  For the longest time, there was very little that scared me at all, not in any meaningful way. I don’t say that out of any misguided machismo or to try to sound like a badass. There just weren’t many threats I felt like I couldn’t handle. I’m sort of an idiot like that. During my teens and twenties, I could have actually benefitted from having a little more healthy fear—my sense of self-preservation was woefully underdeveloped. I routinely put myself in dangerous positions or played daredevil games–roof-riding on cars and dancing with trains. Now, part of this was because I knew those incidents would be fodder for fun stories later, even if they were told over a few beers rather than in prose. But the fact remains, there wasn’t much that gave me cold sweats or spine-tingling fright.

  But now that I’m a little older and have kids, now that I’m responsible for protecting and at least co-molding those three darling girls, I’m walloped by fears left and right, or at the very least concerns that are one tremble away from full-fledged fright. While I know that experience is the best teacher and you have to explore and challenge the world, and being sheltered and shielded fosters weakness instead of strength, there are days I really consider getting the permit from the city to build an inescapable tower in the back yard and locking the girls in there until college. (more…)

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• Unreal Horrors

  Horror: What Scares You?

  Horror- What Scares you?

  This was a surprisingly tough question. Probably because I don’t really “do” a lot of horror, as a genre. Mostly I just find it grotesque ( Slowly Lysander dipped the taste spoon into the child’s skull…”Mmm…The taste of innocence”, he crooned.), or ‘mean–spirited’ (“I am walling you up, dear brother, because twenty eight years ago, you lost my favorite hat and Ruined My Life!!”), or just too implausible to take seriously. Hello? Zombies? Don’t these people know anything about thermodynamics? If there was really something that killed people and then reanimated their bodies forever without fuel, we’d be rounding them up and installing them in our cars. (more…)

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• Oh, the Horror!

  Horror: What Scares You?
  

  Carol Wolf and Tay, "Best Boy" The Valley of Fear

  My big adventure in writing horror came when I wrote, produced and directed a horror comedy for Paw Print Studios. We’d decided on horror for our first film, since word was it was really saleable. (Unfortunately, everyone on the planet got that memo that year). When writing the script, The Valley of Fear, I kept hearkening back to the first play I ever wrote when I was a kid, The Five Murders of Cherryville Lane, and how I invented a family come to visit just to kill them off, one by one. So, The Valley of Fear morphed into a comedy, because it’s just hard to take that stuff seriously.

  

  The Valley of Fear poster

  A group of survivalists hold their annual competition in the same valley where, seven years ago their founder, Flinty McGraff, mysteriously disappeared. Whooooooo! Bad idea! Nine competitors fan out across the valley, to make fire, shelter, find food, and defend their site, little knowing that a shape-shifting monster is hunting each one.

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• What is this, a SAW movie?

  Horror: What Scares You?

  So this week we’re talking horror, specifically, what scares us.  Well, let me tell you–I’m terrified of beautiful Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Italian and Arabic women, 21-32, especially if they’re wearing bikinis, corset and boots, or belly-dancing outfits.  And if they come with alcohol and food, well, I’m reduced to jelly.

  (See, I get what’s going on.  This whole blog thing was set up by the publisher to create a SAW-like series where authors are subjected to whatever scares them most.  The posts before this one were meant to lull us into a false sense of security, so that we’d drop our guards and give them the murder method that would be most gruesome and ironic.  Ha!  Try to fool me…I’ve got them figured out.)

  I suppose I have a lot of things I’m cautious about, but not a lot that I fear.  I have faith in my ability to handle most things life throws at me.  Sharks in the ocean, snakes in unexpected places, really high spots with no handrails–I can be aware when in a situation where they might arise, and prepare accordingly.  I’m not a huge fan of pitbulls, either, because I get a palpable sense of menace from them (even the ones who are beaten down.  How many stories do I have to read and see about one finally snapping and biting off someone’s face?)

  So there are things about which I am cautious, things I don’t care for (with some grounding in reality and experience), but since this column is about fear, let me tell you what I really don’t like: chaotic evil. (more…)

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• Please send me a basket of kittens instead

  Horror: What Scares You?

  It appears we have reached the week where I have to fess up to being a complete wuss, because if there’s one thing I refuse to read or watch, it’s horror.

  I don’t know if I always used to be this bad, or if things stay with you longer as you get older, but I blame it on having a vivid imagination. No doubt this is a useful thing in many aspects of writing, but in this instance it does not serve me well. The moment you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes – the moment you start to empathize – that’s when the chill creeps in. That’s when you imagine the same thing happening to you, be it being stalked by a psychotic serial killer or an attack of surprisingly sized arachnids, and that’s when things start to linger. For the *insert-your-greatest-terror-here-please* is not content to rest within the pages of the book or the frame of the film – oh no. This is merely the beginning of its lifespan. After that, it will creep into the twilight hours and perch at the edge of your brain. It will loiter there for a while, testing, teasing. And finally, when you are on the verge of sleep, or have woken with that 4.48 psychosis, then the *insert-your-greatest-terror-here-please* chooses to spring, in all its full paranoia! It may disguise itself as the curtains, the shadow cast by the lamp, the dressing gown draped over the back of the door, the dust-chasings of the cat! However it chooses to manifest itself, you can be sure it’ll hang on for dear life. Say farewell to sleep. (more…)

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