Posts Tagged ‘films’

Katniss vs. Zahara

Posted: March 16, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Writing
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I got The Hunger Games: Catching Fire on DVD on Friday and watched it this afternoon. If I were to do a review, I’d say it was a very good adaptation of a book I absolutely hated for a number of reasons. However, I’m not writing this post as a review for Catching Fire. I’m writing this post because, after I took the DVD out and went to make my dinner, I thought to myself, “There is such a difference between Katniss Everdeen and Zahara.”

And indeed, there is a great difference between the two characters. And I’m not just talking about upbringing, religious identification, and their experiences. I think the biggest differences between Katniss and Zahara is their access to choices in their lives. (Okay, there’s also major differences in character development, but since all three books of The Hunger Games are out and only one book of the Reborn City series is out, I won’t go into that lest I spoil something).

In THG, Katniss rarely has any sort of choice in what she can or can’t do. Except for certain memorable instances, Katniss follows a script that someone else wrote, whether that be the Capitol or someone associated with the Capitol, or District 13 and someone in the rebellion. Sure, the moments when she gets a chance to make her own choices are pretty momentous. She volunteered for the Hunger Games, she nearly committed suicide using poison berries, and she killed President Coin in an act of revenge. But other than those moments, she’s mostly dancing to the tune of someone else’s fiddle. And she’s either unaware of it or she’s aware of it and so pissed off about it.

Zahara, on the other hand, has a little more leeway. When I wrote Reborn City and started planning its sequels, I obviously wasn’t planning on writing about Zahara’s choices. But after she’s forced to join the Hydras, she does find that she has a bit of choice in the events that occur later on in the story. And those choices do end up affecting the Hydras in several ways, whether  it involve a gang war about to go wrong, or by a simple encouragement that changes the way someone thinks. And as the series goes on, Zahara will get to make more choices, some of which will have greater effects than the previous ones she’s made.

Why the difference? Well, I guess you’d have to ask the authors. In addition to wanting to create a story that was a commentary on both our addictions to violence and reality TV, Suzanne Collins also wanted (I’m assuming) to allow readers to relate to the feeling that our lives are not our own. We’ve all been there, had those moments when we felt our lives weren’t our own, where we felt like our lives are being directed by someone else. Maybe our parents, our employers, our teachers, our government, our spouses, etc. Basically we have to subordinate our lives to the needs or whims of others. This speaks to plenty of people, particularly teenagers and young adults who are constantly pressured to fulfill the wishes and pressures of the adults around them. I can only guess as to why Mrs. Collins wanted to weave that theme into her trilogy, or if she even realized what she was weaving in until it was already there. What is obvious that Katniss exemplifies that theme of lack of control over one’s life, and it’s part of why people identify with her.

With Zahara and RC on the other hand, the intentions were very different. I realized early on in writing a novel about street gangs that people in gangs or in slums or broken families or several other similar situations that they feel like they can’t leave the situations they’re in. This attitude, which seems to perpetuate itself over generations in a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy, horrified me. Imagine people who didn’t try to change their horrible lives because they felt that trying was impossible, that it would only lead to pain and regret. Where they were was where they belonged. Throughout the trilogy I try to fight that belief through the travails of Zahara and the Hydras, making choices and fighting for not only their lives, but also to live their lives as they wish.

So I guess this difference in opportunity and choice for Katniss Everdeen and Zahara Bakur really just boils own to the intentions of the authors when we were writing our stories. I strove to write about teens fighting against a world that oppresses them and tries to control them, while Mrs. Collins seems to have written a story about a world where, among other things, the lives of others are maddeningly not their own.

It’s interesting what the intentions of the autor can do for a single story, isn’t it?

That’s all for now. Tomorrow school starts up again, so I’m heading to bed to get ready for the big day. Goodnight, Followers of Fear, and have a great week.

Creating That Dread Feeling

Posted: March 4, 2014 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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Recently a fellow horror author and blogger I admire brought up a good point about horror, one that I’ve made in countless other posts. The point that he made was that a lot of horror out there is actually pretty terrible because of an over-reliance of gore and gross-out elements (blood, knives, etc.). Real horror is made not by grossing people out continuously over the course of a horror story, but by creating a feeling of dread, that feeling that something bad is going to happen and that it is going to get worse. That feeling builds and builds, until (hopefully) the reader is scared stiff by ensuing events.

Creating that dread feeling is difficult, to say the least. Like I’ve said in previous posts about terror (and I’m not yet convinced that they can’t be the same thing, depending on the circumstances), it’s one of the hardest parts of creating a good horror story. Creating that feeling takes time, precision, keen insight, and skill, cultivated over years and years of practice. It’s why plenty of would-be horror writers and filmmakers just opt out of trying to use terror in favor of just plain old blood and guts and gore as a so-so substitute. And when that doesn’t work so well, they add in sex as well (don’t believe me? Watch the Friday the 13th remake in all its crummy filmmaking and see how much dread there isn’t and how much sex and blood and gore there is. And no, I’ll never stop harping on how bad that film was).

Here’s an exercise that can help authors of all kinds visualize creating that dread feeling for your story: close your eyes and imagine yourself in a dark, dank, eerie hallway. This hallway goes on for some length, so far that you may not be able to see the very end. And it also takes many twists and turns, so that doesn’t help. As you walk down this hallway, you get the strange feeling that something horrible is going to happen just around the next corner or right behind that table or from that ceiling lamp with the crackling bulb. And as you get farther along, this feeling that something bad will happen grows and grows. Sometimes the places you think something will happen prove to be harmless, but other times you are correct and you’re only just able to get away with your head still on. Even so, you continue on, even though the feeling of ill-boding keeps growing, and you wish you could turn back or even just stop and stay where you are but you can’t, those aren’t options. The only option left is to continue on, reach the end with hopefully all your body parts still attached, and find a safe room located at the end of the hallway.

That hallway is your horror story. And it can be as long as it needs to be, have as much furniture under which monsters can hide as needs be, and have as many twists and turns as needs be. You just got to find a way to create that feeling of ill-boding, which is the feeling of dread that all the best horror stories are able to create. The exercise above is meant to help give people an idea of how creating that terror and dread can happen and to give them something to work with if they need help or practice creating that dread.

I hope that helps in some ways. Also, if you want to check out some books, TV shows, or movies that do a great job creating that feeling of dread, I highly recommend Stephen King’s IT, The Amityville Horror, and the first two seasons of American Horror Story. They do a very great job with creating dread in the reader/viewer. Trust me, I was afraid to go to sleep after I encountered one or two of these titles. They’re that scary.

All for now. I’m going to try to get some of my own fiction written and full of that dread feeling. Goodnight, Followers of Fear.

Two Models Of Using Terror

Posted: February 14, 2014 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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See also: The 3 Types of Terror

As a horror writer, one of the biggest challenges I face is building terror in a story. As Stephen King said on Facebook not too long ago, terror is “when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”

Creepy! Anyway, I’ve been thinking of different ways authors utilize terror in their stories, how they manage to insinuate that terror element into their work and look for patterns. Based on those observations, I think I’ve come up with some answers, and I’ve put those answers into two models for using terror, which I will talk about below.

The first model of using terror is called the Uphill Model. In this version, you slow ramp up the strangeness and terrifying aspects of the story, starting with small, subtle cues but gradually introducing more overt signals until the wrongness of the situation is so obvious that at this point you can introduce the horror aspect (aka the vampire or the demon or whatever’s meant to creep us out in the story) to the sound of terrified squeals and screams (especially if you’re in a movie theater). A good example of this model would be Samson Weiss’s Curse, one of the short stories from The Quiet Game. The story starts out with small things that are out of the ordinary (a stalker at a rally, maybe some trouble sleeping, a voice or two), but things escalate and become more obvious as the story goes on until the villain of the piece is revealed, in all his horrifying grandeur. I also used the Uphill Model in The Loneliest Roads, one of my more recent short stories, which is currently going through the editing process and may be submitted to magazines soon. This is a good method to use for short stories, especially since it requires a steady but quick escalation in order to keep the reader interested and scared. However, the method requires precision in measuring out how much terror you should use and in what ways. Too much or too little terror used too soon or too late will work against the story, and actually turn readers away. Writers need to be cognizant of this when using this model.

Bad movie. Great example.

The second model is called (quite appropriately) The Seismograph Model, because there are moments where there is intense moments of terror followed by lulls or smaller spikes of terrifying elements. A wonderful example of this is Stephen King’s IT, where there are moments where the strangeness of the situation is very high followed by moments where the amount of terror is low or non-existent. Usually during the spikes of terror there is also a lot of accompanying horror and Gross-out, the other two types of terror. During the lulls, authors generally use this time to work on character development and to expand on the situation the characters find themselves in, as well as to maybe show the characters in more casual settings or enjoying life without threat of something evil. This model is helpful for novels, especially longer ones where there are plenty of run-ins with the great evil of the story before the actual climax takes place and it requires a bit less precision than the Uphill Model, though it does require some skill to do it right.

Let me just say that these models are not perfect and that they don’t apply to every horror story out there. They are simply frameworks to examine a story and maybe to help shape your stories while you are writing them. There may be other models out there that I’m unaware of and have yet to discover, and if there are, I doubt any story out there fits any of these models perfectly. Like I said, the models are tools of examination and reference more than actual models to be followed.

Anyway, I hope as time goes on and I work on new short stories, I hope to be able to use both models to some degree and to use them effectively in my stories. I think that if I can, I might be able to write better stories and further my career as an author. That’s the hope, anyway.

Do you use any models when writing? If so, what?

Oh, and while I have your attention, I have some announcements to make. First, I’ve included links to the book trailers of my various books on the pages above. So if you want to see the book trailer for a novel or a collection of short stories, all you have to do is visit the appropriate page and click on the link. Makes more sense than having to scour YouTube or this blog for the correct video or post, right?

Second, I’d like to announce that I’m starting work on a new collection of short stories. By that, I mean I merely plan to write a new collection that includes some old, unreleased work and some new work that I’ve been looking forward to writing. I’m not sure when this collection will be ready, when it’ll be released, or what I’ll call it, but when I do get around to all that, everyone here will be the first to know.

And finally, I’ve created a new page on this blog, entitled Interviews. The page contains both interviews with other authors and interviews with characters from my novels. It doesn’t have much on it yet, but I plan to add more interviews for both authors and characters as time goes on. I’m especially looking forward to adding more interviews with other authors: those are a chance to help out friends with new books coming out, meet new authors and get a chance to know them, and to possibly expand the number of people reading my work. We’ll see what happens, but I hope only for good things.

Well, that’s all for now. Tonight’s Buckeyethon, so I’ll be offline until I get home after a 12-hour dance marathon, followed by a 6-12 hour nap to catch up on my sleep. See you guys Saturday evening, when I write a post about how awesome Buckeyethon was and what happened while I was at it. Happy Valentine’s Day, Followers of Fear.

The 3 Types of Terror

Posted: January 18, 2014 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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I came across this post by Stephen King on Facebook the other day and I thought it’d be interesting to write about. The post goes like this:

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…

Words of wisdom from the King himself.

When I read this, it struck a certain chord with me. I realized that a lot of horror writers and filmmakers can easily gain an understanding of the first two, but it takes a long time to get into the third type, and an even longer time to gain a mastery of it. For example, there are a lot of films out there (of varying quality) that utilize Gross-out and Horror. They have serial killers, they have vampires and demons, but they’re kind of low on terror. The Evil Dead films and many bad slasher flicks are prime examples of this (I’m talking to you, Friday the 13th remake). Even I had trouble with this early on in my writing career. I could easily write a story about vampires or demons that had plenty of blood  and fight sequences, but I was lacking in the terror department. Even worse, I rarely thought about including the terror factor, and when I did I didn’t really do it as best as I could.

But at that age though, and in that point of my development as a writer, all I thought I needed was a monster, someone’s life in danger, and the rest would take care of itself. I learned later on that adding terror to the story is a process, something that has to be consciously done before you can go about actually adding it in unconsciously. This is something I’ve had to comprehend with lately and which I’ve been working on with some of my latest stories. With The Loneliest Roads, I tried to put in a sense of unreality and strangeness even before my protagonist entered the limo, and slowly heightened it once she got into the limo. with some of the short stories I’m planning on writing now, I’m looking for ways to increase that terror without seeming silly or absurd. And in future novels, I hope to add that factor in with more skill and precision than I have in the past.

Perhaps adding terror in is the most difficult part of horror writing because, as King said, it’s the worst. It’s what really makes a horror story memorable to those who read or see it, and the thing about it is that it’s often an underlying element in the story, something that’s a factor in the scary elements of the story but rarely the main element. That goes to the Horror, which usually causes in one way or another the Gross-out. But the Terror? It’s what hails the coming of the horror, what prepares you for the jumps and scream the Horror will cause. And getting someone prepared for that can be really difficult, all told.

Although I’m still trying to get mastery of all 3 elements, I’m hoping that in the future I’ll be able to get a better handle on them, and to do that I just have to keep writing, to keep practicing and see where it takes me. As I write, I learn, and hopefully I learn how to tell scary stories much better than I have in the past. It’s an ongoing process, but I feel it’s one I must take part in. Wish me luck.

And for those horror writers out there, how do you deal with the 3 elements listed above? Do you have any advice on utilizing any of them? What?

(Don’t say “limit Gross-out” though, because I’ve already figured that one out. Too many horror films rely on Gross-out as it is, and it’s annoying after a while.)

100 Ideas!!!

Posted: January 6, 2014 in ideas, Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Reflections, short story, Writing
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I’ve mentioned this before on my blog, but I keep a list of ideas for novels/comic books/films/TV shows/etc. on my flash drive. And over the past semester, that list grew pretty damn lengthy. In fact, I had more ideas than I did in any other semester. And tonight, I got my one-hundredth idea for the list! And having just typed that, I wonder how I will ever find the time to write all of those stories. I probably won’t, but it’ll be fun to try.

Anyway, the idea for number one-hundred came to me quite by accident (apparently that’s how all the best ideas come). I’ve previously announced that before I get back to working on Laura Horn, I wanted to do some short stories. And before I decided to do those short stories, I decided to take one last look at one short story, maybe see if I could spruce it up a little and possibly publish it on WattPad (I’ve published one or two things on there since I got an account on that website. More on that to follow in a future post). The story in question, Resurrection, is about a man who is brought back to life through advances in science, but something goes terribly wrong and his resurrection isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That story has gone through several different drafts and incarnations, and I thought I’d give the latest incarnation a look over to see if I could make it better. When I looked over it though, something occurred to me midway through the short story. There’s this one scene when my main character encounters a religious leader who is more than a little upset about this resurrection. I was going to have my protagonist call him an old fart, but with the years he’s been dead, the protagonist is over ninety years old. He should be calling the preacher a stupid kid.

And that’s when it hit me. A short story was too short to tell this story. It had to be expanded, to go into a novella or even a full novel! Resurrection had to be resurrected in a new form.

God, that was a bad play on words.

But that’s beside the point. Here is the point: the last time I trotted out Resurrection and sent it to a friend, he told me that it was an interesting concept and that it could be expanded into a novel or into a film. Oh, that sounded nice. The thing is, I couldn’t figure out how to expand it into a novel, and I didn’t have the time to write a screenplay. And even if I did have the time, I wouldn’t know how to go about getting a screenplay sold (though I might try in the future, when I have the time). But at that single thought on how the main character should think about the preacher, I had an idea on how to expand the story into a novel. I stopped looking through the short story, went to my Ideas list, and recorded Idea #100.

My idea is alive! ALIVE!

I don’t know when I’ll be able to write the novel version of Resurrection, mostly because I have a few other projects that take priorities that take place before it. However, I’m sure it won’t be too long before I get around to it. I like the idea, and I don’t want to be working on this story on and off for several years. I don’t want to do that at all. I really want to write this story eventually and do it sooner rather than later. For now though working on it just won’t be possible, so instead I’ll just leave a few hints as to what we can expect from this future novel:

–some of the themes will include aging, adjusting to a changed and changing world, and death and dying.

–the technology aspect will make Reborn City jealous (then again, the point of RC was never the technology, but whatever).

–the resurrection, though scientific in nature, won’t be plagued by problems of the scientific realm.

–and finally, I may release each finished chapter of this novel, once the book has been heavily edited, on WattPad or on my blog. One of them.

I also hope someday to get to many of the ideas I’ve written on that list. A lot of them I feel are really great ideas, and I would love to write and share them with the world. So the hope is that I can get a good number of them written over the coming years, and that as each novel (or in the future, if God is willing, each film or manga or TV series) is released, there will be someone willing to check it out and read it, maybe even a lot of someones. I think that’s why I keep writing, even if I haven’t exactly been super-successful yet. It’s because I know that each story could potentially make someone happy, and I’m still writing fot hose people. Hopefully we’ll find each other someday and they’ll enjoy what I’ve written for them.

That’s all for now. I’m going to take a break and then get started on an original short story. I’ve got close to seventy ideas for short stories as well, so I need to get some of them out of the way. Good night, Followers of Fear.

2013 In Review

Posted: January 1, 2014 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Reflections, Writing
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Happy New Year!

As always, WordPress sent me an email letting me know how my blog did this past year. This year, my blog was viewed enough times to fill the Sydney Opera House about four times. That’s great…but I wish I was good enough to fill the Sydney Opera House just once! Honestly, where do they get these statistics?

But I digress. The point is, another year has come and gone. And to quote Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That sums up just about every year I know, but it’s pretty accurate. A lot happened this year to me, including two of my books getting published; I moved into an apartment with a friend and learned some more of the tribulations of the adult world; I was accepted into the study abroad trip I’ve been aiming for; I started my third year of college; I began writing and then administrating for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors; and a whole lot more that I won’t put on my blog but were important nonetheless.

All in all, a crazy year. Sometimes all that was going on threatened to bury me, while at other times I felt like I could do anything. I had my highs and my lows, like anyone else. But I managed to get through them and I came out stronger for it.

Reborn City

And now for my new year’s resolutions: I resolve to be a better writer. I resolve to get more people interested in my work and even in reading it. I resolve to finish Video Rage (probably happen in the next week or so), get back to Laura Horn and finish that up (shouldn’t be too hard, considering how quickly I tended to write the chapters), finish the final draft of Snake (hopefully sometime in the next couple of months) and publish it by the end of the year (I hope), write a whole ton of original short stories and publish some of them (fingers crossed on that one), start whatever novel will end up being my senior thesis in the fall and maybe a few other projects. I resolve to improve my craft and to help others improve their craft in my own small way. I resolve to grow this blog and Self-Published Authors Helping Others Authors. I resolve to fulfill my dreams of being a successful novelist.

I resolve to be a better person. I resolve to work on my personal flaws and try to improve. I resolve to be a good student, a good scholar of English and History, a good roommate, and a good worker. I resolve to be good to my friends and family and love them as much as they love me. I resolve to go to Europe for my study abroad trip this summer and learn as much as I can on World War II and the Holocaust. I resolve to keep my grades up. I resolve that my conduct in life is exemplary.

With any luck, you’ll be reading about a guy called the Snake soon.

I resolve to read a lot of books, see a lot of movies, and binge on too much TV. I resolve to keep my bank account in order. I resolve to eat healthy and stay healthy. I resolve to…are you still reading this list? If you are, you have the patience of a monk.

All in all, I plan to make 2014 better than 2013. So this year, my Followers of Fear, I wish you luck and I hope we get to share a ton of great experiences together. Happy New Year!

Turning Away From Franchises

Posted: December 30, 2013 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Writing
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I was just informed that JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books (as if I need to elaborate on who she is, but whatever) is writing a screenplay for a spin-off movie of the Harry Potter series based on the fictional Hogwarts textbook Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, with the possibility of many sequels. Not only that, but she’s okayed a play to premiere in London’s West End that will explore Harry’s early days with the Dursleys. This, plus the amount of involvement Rowling has in the development of the website Pottermore and various other projects and books related to the Potterverse, points to one thing: Rowling, who wanted to get away from Harry Potter, has come back to him to turn him into an even bigger franchise than he is now.

Now here’s my question: why? Is it because the lackluster response to The Casual Vacancy and the early reveal that Rowling was the real author behind The Cuckoo’s Calling called attention back to the boy wizard who’s name is synonymous with Rowling’s? Did she make a bad bet in stocks and she needs the money? Does she actually want to revisit this magical world (it’s a great world, don’t get me wrong, but I got the sense at some point that she wanted to move on with her career)? Or, God forbid, is she actually selling out for the money?

I guess I’m a little peeved about all this. I love Harry Potter. JK Rowling was the one who got me into writing stories in the first place, HP left an indelible mark on my writing style, I’m a proud member of Slytherin (according to the Pottermore sorting quiz for houses), and I geeked out as much as anyone when the last book and films came out. But perhaps what’s really getting me is that Rowling’s turning her beloved franchise into one of the mega-franchises we keep seeing cropping up all over the place today.

This is something along the lines of what some franchises are going for. I say TOO MUCH!

Everywhere you look, Hollywood producers are looking to make the next mega-franchise, the next Star Trek/Star Wars/Doctor Who/Avengers, something with a main body of work that’s accompanied by tons of additional work of varying canonical status but brings in a ton of money no matter what. Once Upon a Time has its own accompanying novel and a spin-off TV show, The Avengers has a TV show to go with it now, Terminator is doing a reboot/prequel/sequel film with a TV series to go with it, and now Harry Potter has jumped on the bandwagon! As if 8 films, several video games and board games, memorabilia and a theme park, almost all of which came into being because of the films and not the original books, weren’t enough! Now Rowling’s got to go and add in all this prequel and spin-off stuff.

Look, I’m not saying franchises are bad, and I’m definitely not saying we should do away with mega-franchises. I’m a total Sith Lord and Whovian, among other things. But some works are just fine without having a million different products that make up the Expanded Universe and a million more products in merchandising! The seven HP novels and the supplemental books that JK Rowling wrote for charity purposes were wonderful. Isn’t it enough just to have those and all the crap that came with and after the movies? Why do we need all this supplemental stuff that will give us an initial thrill but in the end won’t really add to the Pottermania experience?

If Reborn City or any of my other works were to get famous (and I try to have faith in that, especially with RC. After all, it’s a dystopian science fiction novel with heavy YA themes. I hear that’s popular these days), I would be choosy as to how I continue these stories, especially in other formats. Snake and Laura Horn both have sequels planned for them, while RC is the first in a trilogy. Several other ideas I have for stories have the potential to become franchises. Will I make them into that though? Probably not; sure, some of my stories like RC have the potential to have their worlds explored in other stories and formats. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do that, or let someone else do that. Sometimes it’s just best to leave a story as it is, and not constantly expand upon it, especially if it’s with the intent of making a huge profit.

Yeah, don't expect an expanded universe with 12 different trilogies, a Silmarillion, and a spin-off book series, TV show, or comic book series. Probably won't happen.

Yeah, don’t expect an expanded universe with 12 different trilogies, a Silmarillion, and a spin-off book series, TV show, or comic book series. Probably won’t happen.

At least, that’s my take on the subject.

Thanks for reading my rant. If I post anything else in the coming days, I promise it won’t be as full of ranting as this post was. Have a good night, Followers of Fear.

How To Quickly Take Out The Scary Element In Your Story

Posted: December 29, 2013 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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(The following post may contain spoilers for several movies, TV shows, and books. However, these movies, TV shows, and books all came out several years ago. Some before I was even born. So if you read ahead and you haven’t seen any of these movies, TV shows, and books despite their availability…well, you’ve been warned)

As a horror writer, I use a number of techniques to keep the terror in a story at its most present and powerful in order to keep the reader enthralled in the story. At the same time, there are a number of ways I could very easily lose that terror element. This post is dedicated to one of them: revealing the villain and everything about them too soon.

Let’s take the movie Friday the 13th for example (the original, not the crappy remake from 2009). In that movie, we don’t find out the identity of the killer until near the very end of the movie, when it is revealed to be Mrs. Voorhees, Jason’s infamous mother. And even after she is revealed to the audience, we don’t know much about her or her motivation until she tries to kill protagonist Alice. Then we know why she’s killing everyone, but by then we’re too terrified to really process that fact. We’re just like, “The old crone’s got a knife! Run!”

Another example is the original Amityville Horror, which did not reveal the nature of the house and its hauntings until later films. So when you see the first film, you are thrust into this maze of nightmarish strangeness that keeps you terrified wondering two things: 1) what the hell is going on? And 2) what the hell is going to happen next?

An even better example than these two is The Blair Witch Project, in which the antagonist is never really revealed. All you get is spooky noises and some weird happenings around the three main characters. This lends the film a very intense element of fear of the unknown, which would be replicated in Paranormal Activity, Slender, Entity, and several other films that utilize found footage as a storytelling technique.

Some films however reveal their villain way too early, and thus cannot utilize fear of the unknown in their stories. Sometimes this can ruin a movie to the point where it’s no longer scary or fun to watch and you end up thinking to yourself “Why am I still watching this?” One example is 28 Days Later. Now I know there are a lot of fans of the movie out there, but one of my biggest problems with it is that the villains were revealed very quickly and that I felt I knew everything about them before the movie was even ten minutes in. From that point on, slow pacing made it hard for me to stay interested and I ended up stopping the movie after an hour.

Another film that suffered from lack of suspense and fear of the unknown is most of the sequels to Nightmare on Elm Street. In the first film, we’re really terrified. We don’t know why these kids are dying, who’s killing them, how they’re being killed. All we know is there’s an evil man killing these kids in their sleep, and that somehow translates over to the real world in a very bloody fashion. The sequels though feature the same villain and he’s killing in the same fashion. Loses a lot of its scare when you know exactly what’s going to happen, you’re just there to see how it happens, if they can scare you when they do it, and what joke Freddy will make right before he kills his victims.

Of course, revealing your villain or too much about them isn’t always a recipe for failure. In Stephen King’s Misery, we meet antagonist Annie Wilkes very early on in the story, yet she’s able to terrify and disgust and chill us very easily. Of course, that might be Stephen King’s magnificent, if somewhat strange, storytelling at play, but it is possible to reveal your villain early on, even let us know all there is to know about them, and still tell a scary story. You just have to be prepared to find some element to replace that mystery and fear of the unknown (and for God’s sake, I hope it isn’t excessive sex or over-the-top gore).

What do you think of using fear of the unknown in horror stories? What are some other examples or exceptions you can think of where keeping the villain hidden until the right time or revealing them too early made or ruined a scary story?

“Why Young Girls?”

Posted: December 19, 2013 in ideas, Living and Life, Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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Yesterday I visited my advisor’s office in the English department and discussed doing my senior thesis in the fall. Normally I would talk to her about this after spring semester had started, but I wanted to get a jump on things before I was busy with homework from five different classes. Plus I had the day off yesterday so I thought to myself, why not?

During the course of our meeting, I was outlining what I’d like to do for my senior thesis, mainly to write a novel. For this novel, I chose five different ideas for stories from the list of novels I keep on my flash drive and gave a brief synopsis of each one to my advisor Ruth. Around the third idea, Ruth noticed a trend with two of the stories I’d mentioned: they both involved young girls as protagonists in the story (one was a story based on Alice in Wonderland, the other involved demons). She then asked me, “Why young girls? Why are they used so much in horror?” To my surprise, I realized I hadn’t thought of it much, and at that moment I didn’t have a very good answer for why, when children are used so much in scary stories, young girls are more dominant than young boys (notable exceptions include Danny Torrance from The Shining and six out of seven protagonists in Stephen King’s IT, the two boys from Monster House, and Hansel from Hansel and Gretel).

And guess what? The question’s been bugging me since that meeting yesterday. So between writing, work, applying for scholarships, and my household chores, I thought I’d take a moment to examine why young girls are more dominant in these sorts of stories. First, we need to examine why children in general are used so much in horror stories:

1. Children are very innocent creatures. It’s the most obvious reason, but it still needs to be stated. Children are very innocent human beings. They still believe that good usually wins against evil, that bad guys get beat up and thrown in jail by superheroes and cops, and the world is a safe place where they are loved and are protected from evil, at least until they’ve been warped by some of the harsh realities of the world. In horror stories, that innocence is tested and sometimes completely broken by the events of the story, whether it be monsters under the bed, abusive parents/teachers/bullies, or whatever else you may be using as the antagonist in a story.

Even the man/child/sponge has more imagination than most adults.

2. Let’s face it, kids are more imaginative. As we grow older, we tend to think less in terms of the fantastic and more in terms of what is real and reasonable. But as children, we really believe in Santa, the boogeyman, fairies, aliens and ghosts with little doubt that they are actual, concrete beings. This means that kids are usually the first to come to the realization that something evil is at work. They don’t realize it through any leap of logic or reason, but through gut feeling and belief. This is also usually why they are more likely to survive than that one guy in every horror film who insists with fatalistic stubbornness that there’s a logical reason for everything and then when they realize something’s up, they still insist on handling it themselves as men, even if it leads to their heads getting bitten off.

3. Kids are dependent on others. Until sometime between ten or twelve, children are dependent on adults for most of their basic needs, and even when they start to become independent, they still require a good portion of help from adults. When in a horror story, most likely a child can’t recieve help from an adult because they’re less likely to be believed by adults. This means they’re basically adrift in a metaphorical sea that wants to kill them painfully and mercilessly. How they survive without the security of an adult is something that keeps the reader drawn into the story.

4. Children are also not as resourceful. Or to be more specific, it’s rare for children to have access to the knowledge or tools they need to defeat the enemy of the story. They wouldn’t know how to set up a trap for a mutant monster, or how to draw a vampire into the sunlight without being totally obvious of their intentions, or even how to set a windigo on fire with nothing but a set of matches (which they shouldn’t be playing with anyway). If the characters are adult, all they need to do is get out their smartphone and Google “How to make a molotov cocktail” or “how to set up a tripwire alarm system”. Kids wouldn’t even have a smartphone, and even if they did they probably wouldn’t know what to Google. How do they survive with nothing to really help them? That is another draw of a horror story.

Look at that face! You know that hotel gave that kid some big therapy bills.

5. Children are easily influenced. Lastly, children are easy to influence, for better or for worse. Has anyone seen Friday the 13th Part IV? Right at the very end we see just how the events of being around Jason have influenced and hurt little Tommy, who will be dealing with his issues for the next two films. A horrific event can stay with a child for a very long time, corrupt their innocence or make them aware of their own abilities. Either way, the events of the story will stay with the child likely throughout their lives. From what I hear, the Overlook Hotel certainly stuck with Danny Torrance (I haven’t read Doctor Sleep yet, though it’s on my reading list).

Okay, so we’ve established why children in general are used so much in scary stories. But still the answer of why young girls are used in the stories has still to be answered. Often, like Carol Anne from Poltergeist, they are persecuted and kidnapped by beings we can’t really understand. Or, like Samara from The Ring, they are the stuff of our nightmares. And occasionally they are both (anyone watch The Exorcist recently?).

This morning I spent some time trying to figure out and I think a lot of it has to do with socialization and the roles we assign to the female gender. In other words, what we expect from young girls and how we believe they should act, behave, and think are why young girls are so popular in horror stories.

Please note that the suggestions I’ve listed below are for fictional girls and are just based on my own reading and viewing of many different horror novels, comics, TV shows, and movies. There may be several stories featuring girls that are the exact opposite of these reasons, I just have yet to be exposed to these stories. The reasons I’ve listed do not necessarily apply to real girls either, as I’ve made clear below. Here are the reasons I was able to come up with and which back up my beliefs on gender roles making female characters popular:

1. Fictional girls are more prone to sweetness, harmony, and nonviolence. Most boys when they’re young like to get wild, scrap a bit, use their fists and compete with each other through acts of physical prowess and aggression (when my cousin was younger, you could not stop him from acting like this). Young girls though are often portrayed as preferring to be friends rather than fight. They like doing cute stuff and they don’t like to get their hands dirty or do anything too wild. The only exceptions I can think of are Beverly Marsh from IT and my sisters, but then again my sisters are from my crazy family, so go figure. So since these fictional girls are less likely to use their fists and more likely to try to harmonize, they’re at more risk for whatever evil is after them in the story.

2. Young girls have yet to enter into the realm of maturity and sexuality. A lot of criticism with horror comes with how it sexualizes its female characters (please see my article Sex and Horror for more on this topic).However young girls have yet to reach that stage where people begin to see their sexuality. There’s an innocence in this lack of sexuality that young boys don’t get from their ignorance of sexuality, though that might have something to do with the fact that, like I said, a lot of women in horror are defined by their sexuality, whereas men don’t usually receive this sort of sexualized image no matter what age they are.

3. It’s adorable when young girls cry. Because of the pre-assigned roles that differentiate between boys and girls, at some point boys are taught that crying is not a manly thing to do, so they stop crying if they want to retain whatever form of manhood a young boy can have. On the other hand, it’s considered okay for girls to cry throughout their lives. And instead of pitying these girls or questioning their maturity like we would with boys, our hearts go out to the girls and make us want to hug them. This contributes to the popularity of young girls in horror stories.

And if these points haven’t hammered home my belief on gender roles playing a major role in the popularity of young girls in horror, here’s my final point:

In the end, the princess mentality takes a toll.

4. Young girls want to be princesses. It’s no understatement that plenty of girls in our Western society want to become princesses when they grow up and have a handsome prince rescue them from evil so they can live happily ever after, and our media perpetuates this to no end  (even Once Upon a Time and Frozen couldn’t leave this cliché out of their storylines, though they both do something rather original with the trope in each their own way). In horror stories, typically it’s up to a female character to either rescue herself from her predicament or to let a strapping young man save her and then sweep her off her feet. With young girls, that choice isn’t always available, and often the writer will write the story so that we wish for someone to come and save the little girl, while holding us with baited breath to see if she will be saved by a dashing prince…in the case of horror stories, most likely an older male relative with an axe or baseball bat.

So the reason why young girls are so popular in horror stories, as I’ve listed above, is that they fulfill certain gender roles that we’ve come to expect and work nicely into not just the plot of the story, but certain preconceived notions we unconsciously have in their minds. However, not all young girls fall into these roles. Beverly Marsh from IT plays a big part in stopping the demon clown when she’s a little girl by being the more aggressive fighter of the Losers Club. Coraline from the book of the same name is able to release the souls of the eaten children and save her parents all on her own. And even creepy Samara coming out of the TV is an exception, as she doesn’t fulfill any traditional roles, not even the one about needing saving. She’s the freaking villain!

Yeah, don’t mess with her.

So I think I’ve answered the question Ruth posed to me yesterday in her office. I’m not sure it’s the best answer or the right answer, but it’s what I was able to come up with. If you have any ideas about why young female characters are so popular, examples of girls who buck the trend, or any other points relevant to the discussion, please let me know.

Also, in a somewhat related note to children and horror, I finally watched the film version of Battle Royale. It was actually much better than I expected, almost as good as the novel. However there were a couple of creative choices I disagreed with, and that’s why it’s not on equal footing with the book. I also won’t see the sequel, because apparently it’s not based on the original story, its anti-American message goes beyond criticism of America to full-on attack mode, and nearly every reviewer who’s seen it has hated it, apparently.

All for now. Write on you later, Followers of Fear.

Review: Frozen

Posted: December 12, 2013 in Review
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A friend of mine and I went to see this movie today. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and we thought it’d be a lot of fun to see. Turns out it was: Frozen is definitely a lot of fun to watch, and it’s definitely not your average Disney movie.

Frozen tells the story of two sisters, Princess Elsa and Anna of Arendelle. The elder sister Elsa has the power to control ice and snow, however a childhood incident where Anna is injured causes the royal family to erase Anna’s memories of Elsa’s powers and to try and shut up Elsa’s abilities in the hopes of controlling them (all it seems to accomplish though is a rift between sisters and giving Elsa low self-esteem and a terrific fear of people. However, when Elsa takes over the throne, things get out of hand, culminating in Elsa accidentally causes a blizzard in summer and ends up retreating to the northern mountains to use her powers without restriction. Anna goes off after her sister to save the kingdom and repair their friendship with the help of a very stubborn ice salesman. Meanwhile, a scheming duke tries to get his way with the kingdom, and there’s an even worse schemer in the dark.

The musical numbers are wonderful and fun, and the animation is excellent (though I’m still a bigger fan of traditional animation. I’ll never stop watching anime because of it). The voice acting is wonderful and the plotting is very good (unless you’re the Doctor, you won’t see some really interesting twists near the end of the show that will leave you going “No way!”). And you can really feel the emotions between the characters, especially between the sisters and between Anna and ice-salesman Kristoff.

But the best part of the show (if you’re an adult, that is) is seeing Disney play around with the usual tropes and clichés in Disney princess films.  In some ways they’re still stuck in the past in terms of women’s portrayals, but in other ways they’re managing to advance (I’d go into detail here, but if you see the movie, you’ll get the idea). They also play with the whole idea of Prince Charming, and finally, they explore the meaning of the word freedom. In fact, I think the theme of the movie would be love and freedom, and what those words mean.

There’s only one problem with the show. Well, it’s not a problem, really. More like they left room for a sequel. And if there is a sequel (and they may do a sequel, given the success of the film), it might be really bad. In fact, it would probably really bad. I’ve never seen a good sequel to a film about a princess (and I’ve seen one or two in my time).

All in all, I give Frozen a 4.8 out of 5. It’s a lot of fun and I recommend it for you and for the kids. I might have to check it out when it comes out on DVD…and I’ll definitely have to check out the soundtrack. Even if there is a bad sequel someday.

By the way, before my friend and I went to the theater, we watched the movie The Thing at my place, which takes place in Antarctica. And here in Columbus, it’s regularly around or below freezing. I’m just wondering, does that make us gluttons for punishment or what?

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