Monday 31 October 2011

Dark Ideas

"Daddy, I had a bad dream."
You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness—it's 3:23.
"Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?"
"No, Daddy."
The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room. "Why not, sweetie?"
"Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up."
For a moment, you feel paralysed; you can't take your eyes off of your daughter. Then the covers behind you begin to shift…
- Bad Dream

There seems to be a subtle difference between terror and horror.  There are lots of horror stories, films, games and comics out there, rightly considered to be finely-tuned and crafted pieces of work.  But I can deal with horror.  The concept of werewolves, vampires, zombies, and the like can provide certain amounts of scares, for sure.  I loved the horror tales of Poe, Lovecraft, Machen, and the films of Carpenter, Dante, Miller and more.  But they don't always stay with me in quite the way others do.



I know that there are some stories that, once read, causes the sun of my mind to creep a little closer to the horizon, casting shadows a little longer, dimming the light of the world a little more.  "Graveyard Shift," or "The Faces," or "Day of Reckoning."  "The Wendigo."  "Sticks."  "Pigeons from Hell."  "The Statement of Randolph Carter."  "The Captain of the Polestar."   Half of Ray Bradbury's work and Roald Dahl's fiction.  There are films which can be frightening in ways literature cannot.  Night of the DemonThe HauntingThe InnocentsSuspiriaBlack SundayRingu.  Too many Hammer films and Italian horrors to name. In this age of the internet, meta-fiction can take strange and terrifying new turns. The SCP Foundation is responsible for more than its fair share of sleepless nights: The Stairwell, The Red Sea Object, A Ticket To Ride, The Hanged King's Tragedy, The Flesh That Hates, 13'' Chef's Knife, Cargo Ship, and the most terrifying interpretation of Bigfoot I've ever read.

But this idea I had...

I still don't know how the idea came to me. Perhaps it was reading all the alternate histories, fringe scientific theories, and crackpot musings coalescing in my brain.  Perhaps it was reading all those dreadful, horrendous horror tales that posited truly monstrous possibilities.  There are some stories... some things I've discovered, and I'm sure my life is a little bit darker having known them.  Once in my mind, they can't get out.  And sometimes I wonder if they should.

It's a shame, because this idea I had... it could be a pretty powerful short story.  But I can't write it, because I just know that it would be trouble.  People would be outraged, accusing me of any number of horrible, terrible things that aren't true - are they?  After all, my mind conjured the idea, surely I must be considered accountable?  Yet one doesn't accuse the horror author of murder, any more than one would suggest a mystery writer could solve crimes.  Still, this idea, this concept, is so psychologically revolting that I just don't know what to do with it.  It isn't a matter of gore, or obscenity, or anything like that - the source of the horror comes from the idea that everything you thought was so may not be what you thought... and that you were wrong.  Everyone was wrong.

Here's an analogue.  There's a brilliant sketch from That Mitchell & Webb Look which exemplifies a rough idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about:



This is about the most terrifying thing I could imagine: the idea that you're the bad guy.  Being someone who takes pride in his general being a nice chap, I've had few problems conceding when I'm proven wrong, or mistaken.  But there's something about not only being wrong, but being the bad guy, which is an existential crisis too far for me.  Of course, I'm not talking about simple human faults, like taking criticism too far or taking too much joy in someone's misfortune: I mean being the guy who joined a rebel cell, only to discover one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.  Or the soldier who signed up to defend his country, but ended up being a cog in a murderous machine.

This is the ultimate terror.  The fact that, despite honest, good people wanting to think there's no way they could kill another human being just because they were told to, all it takes is the wrong sequence of events to turn someone into a monster.  That someone can believe themselves to be above prejudice or all the -isms, but that assurance is all too brittle when forced.  That not even the people making those experiments are exempt from this.  We can try to lie to each other, that the Bathorys, Mengeles, Hamiltons, Shipmans and Breiviks are abberations, that there's some profound difference between humans and monsters.  It would be nice to think that could be true.  But just as men and women are capable of great, wonderful, saintly things, so are they capable of... others.

Happy Halloween.

7 comments:

  1. Like realising you live in a society where most of the clothes are made by other cultures children, dyed in colours that has entire villages poisoned, where most of your food are animals brought up in horror factories by underpayed farmers before shipped across the globe in a black cloud of exhaust fumes. Where we travel across the world to drop bombs and make war, or just sell the bombs and protest war. How mighty presidents can invade countries and throw them in to chaos; approve torture in the name of your safety.
    Trust me, we are the baddies.

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  2. see that ... Hillary Clinton laughing at the lynch of Muhammar Gaddafi, and these are the progessists and the democrats?

    Francisco

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  3. Like realising you live in a society where most of the clothes are made by other cultures children, dyed in colours that has entire villages poisoned, where most of your food are animals brought up in horror factories by underpayed farmers before shipped across the globe in a black cloud of exhaust fumes. Where we travel across the world to drop bombs and make war, or just sell the bombs and protest war. How mighty presidents can invade countries and throw them in to chaos; approve torture in the name of your safety.
    Trust me, we are the baddies.


    ARGH I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING

    see that ... Hillary Clinton laughing at the lynch of Muhammar Gaddafi, and these are the progessists and the democrats?

    I refused to watch the news about Gaddafi. Same when I heard about Bin Laden. Like Solomon Kane, I just feel a sense of immense sadness whenever one of these dictators or criminals is killed, though if it isn't out of pity for the deceased:

    "The trail ended here, and Kane was conscious of a strange feeling of futility. He always felt that, after he had killed a foe. Somehow it always seemed that no real good had been wrought; as if the foe had, after all, escaped his just vengeance."

    Gaddafi is dead, but even with all the atrocities on his hands and the knowledge that he, at least, cannot harm anyone again, his death brings me no pleasure.

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  4. I know you could be very sensitive about the Gaddafi question, since you're from Scotland and the tragedy of Lockerbie was blamed on the lybian regime, but you can't compared gaddafi and Bin Laden, the former create a sincretism of Islam and socialism and the latter was a mad integrist, in fact Gaddafi fought hard against the integrism in North Africa...

    ejem... sorry I forgot we are in a non political oriented blog

    Francisco

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  5. No, not at all, Francisco. Gaddafi has a history of anti-British sentiments even before Lockerbie (funding and supporting the IRA, the 1984 embassy shootings), so even after his apologising, his antipathy to Britain means I can't have much sympathy for him. That said, Gaddafi and Bin Laden were both very different, and I wasn't intending on comparing the two on anything but the broadest of terms.

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  6. if you prefer I can answer you by private to not over politized the blog but the Gaddafi regime, specially his heir, now arrested in Libya, Said al Islam, had got closer connections with the laborist party and even some royals, according to press, mainly after the liberation of the responsible of Lockerbie

    perfectly understood now the comparation between Gaddafi and Bin Laden

    Francisco

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  7. No problem. To tell you the truth, the Lockerbie affair is so full of inconsistencies and mysteries that I have my concerns about al-Megrahi being a patsy for a more sinister plot, but such is well beyond the bounds of the blog. Certainly feel free to send me an email/PM about it.

    ReplyDelete