Spoookiness

Continuing a thread from Sunday’s Spooky Book (a.k.a. Classics of Horror Fiction) Club: We spent most of the time talking about “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. It seems that at that time, America and the west were on a cusp of discovery. In a sense, they were just learning how much they didn’t know. Travellers had been to the ends of the earth, but they hadn’t filled in all the gaps. Science was hardly new, but superstition still held sway.

At the time of the story, New Englanders had run trading expeditions to the south seas, but these were still as much adventure as commerce. Evolution was well publicised, but not well understood - there was still a lot of room for speculation. Mix them up, and you get a story that would have been horrifyingly plausible at the time. These days, it would be an effort to maintain suspension of disbelief, but it’s still a creepy story if you can.

In a way, Lovecraft was writing about the same thing that everyone else at the time was, but he was a pessimist. There were a lot of stories where adventurers went off to foreign lands and had all sorts of strange and dangerous encounters. I’m thinking about Alan Quartermain, Tarzan, that lot. Lovecraft (and others like Arthur Machen) just wrote adventure stories where the protagonists lost.

Lovecraft’s other twist was setting the stories in New England. It’s adventure when you go off to some foreign land and fight strange creatures. It’s horror when you go off to some foreign land and get killed by strange creatures. It’s extra-persistent, creepy kinda horror when strange creatures from some foreign land invade your home. “John Carter, Warlord of Mars” is an adventure. “War of the Worlds” is a horror story.

Now, any horror (or adventure) fiction is tied to the unknown: places or experiences at the edge, or just outside, human understanding. So where does this leave us now, after almost a century of exploration of scientific progress, a century of subatomic physics and archaological digs? Where are our frontiers? You can answer that part-way by looking at where the horror is.

A lot of it is inside the human mind. We know a lot more about it than we did a hundred years ago, but we still have a long way to go. You see a lot of horror about crazy people - serial killers, mostly. There’s also some work like “The Cell” which goes more literally inside the mind.

There’s also a lot of horror built around questioning our understanding. Do we really understand the world as well as we think we do? This plays off of the principles of scientific proof: It’s very hard to prove the non-existence of some thing or event. You can really only say that you haven’t seen it yet.

There are still physical frontiers: The bottom of the ocean or the depths of space. There are still remote corners of the earth. You still don’t know for sure what’s in the deep woods, or what you’ll turn up if you dig in the wrong place.

Tim Powers deserves special recognition for finding the unknown in the middle of cities, in broad daylight. He’s made a library of the strange and spooky by reinterpreting everyday life. His books are full of rituals you wouldn’t think to do, and couldn’t be sure if they’d worked after all.

There’s also camp horror - cheezy movies like the “Evil Dead” or “Dead Alive” series - which has pretty much given up on getting people to believe in it, and is just having fun.