Anna Shabayev: "Dear Chuck Wendig: Oh the Horror"

Dear Chuck Wendig: Oh the Horror

By

Anna Shabayev

When confronted with strange new places or ideas, I think about interesting but fearful. I love it when in adventure fantasy books, such as The Hobbit, the party is traveling through the dark woods with a sense of danger but with eyes set on their goal. The woods are so strange that I would like to learn more about them, but at the same time I wish that the protagonist would quickly leave. For the sense of wonder and suspense in adventure, I like to refer to the beginning of a short film titled “Out of Sight,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxY-5-d9Uqo) which is about how a little blind girl loses her dog and explores a new environment. First, there comes the darkness and uncertainty of a new environment and the sense of being alone follows. However after this comes the curiosity to find out more. Beauty is found in these things, such as when the girl finds the metal bars to play music as she hits them. These elements of new environments and fear are used in other speculative fiction stories to get the readers’ attention.

But the best fears are the ones that aren’t described. The horrors never appear clearly and it is up for you to imagine what it is. One of my favorite examples out of the stories I read this year in my speculative fiction class was H.P. Lovecraft’s, “The Colour out of Space.” In this science fiction horror story, a meteor crashes next to a house which results in the surrounding land turning grey and being a luminescent color that the meteor was at night. The animals get sick and die, and eventually the people living next to where the meteor used to be got sick as well. However all of this happens without knowing what exactly this force is, except that it came from a meteor and is referred to as “the colour.” It is up to your own imagination on what hue the meteor is since the most description given is that “the colour… was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all” (H.P Lovecraft’s, The Colour Out of Space). There is this universal fear of the unknown. In “The Colour out of Space,” for example, it is heard that the horse was struggling outside and then the sounds stop, but the reader never knows what happens. It is up to the reader to decide how the “the colour” attacks and acts. I personally find these horrors to be the most engaging, as I find that while descriptions of a creature may invoke horror, that horror is boundless if it is left to the imagination.

I believe that the tactic of fear is most interesting when used in stories that question the system and push the rules. Psychological thrillers focus on the unstable emotional states of characters which is often unsettling to the viewer. Psychological thrillers are more impactful when it is known that it is possible. For example, while an alien attacking your house is very unlikely, there are real life examples of people with mental disorders such as mania.  Examples of movies that I find interesting in that way include “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Gone Girl,” “Se7en,” “Shutter Island,” “Fight Club,” “Taxi Driver,” and “The Shining.” These characters bring sanity into question such as in Taxi Driver when through the main characters eyes, society is corrupt and must be fixed. I love these types of stories because I personally study a bit of psychology on my own time and I love to see how the writers develop their unstable characters. I tend to find these movies intellectual and mind provoking.