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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.157.26.5
Posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - 07:26 pm:   

rings true?
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - 09:04 pm:   

Yes. I know what it's driving at.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 166.216.226.68
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 01:30 am:   

I don't.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.157.26.5
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 01:33 pm:   

(1) There is more potential for changing and blending horror images to appear on a plain garden table with nothing on it - than one already with an actual blood-stained human skull on it.

(2) The Ominous Imagination - that most human beings presumably enjoy or suffer (depending on how they look ait it) simply because of the human condition as perceived. Enjoy: diminishing the angst with spiritual Horror seen in both Horror and non-Horror (more effectively in the latter?) or Suffer: let alone the angst accrete without intevention from the Higgs boson of Horror.

(3)...

Brainstorming...
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.157.26.5
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 01:41 pm:   

Sorry for above typos: corrections below...

(1) There is more potential for changing and blending horror images to appear on a plain garden table currently with nothing on it – than one already with an actual blood-stained human skull on it.

(2) The Ominous Imagination – that most human beings presumably enjoy or suffer (depending on how they look at it) simply because of the human condition as perceived. Enjoy: diminishing the angst with spiritual Horror seen in both Horror and non-Horror art or reality (more effectively in the latter?) or Suffer: allowing the angst to accrete without intervention from the 'Higgs boson' of Horror.

(3)…

Brainstorming… (12 Jan 12)

TO BE CONTINUED HERE?
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Weber (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.66.23.11
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 03:12 pm:   

I can see where it’s coming from as well. I think.

As an example – in The Fisher King by Gilliam, there are a few really nasty moments. The man whose face is blown off by a gunshot in the bar and the attempted arson on one of the lead characters by a gang of thugs are the bits that stand out. In The Fisher King, they’re really shocking and quite scary moments. If they’d appeared in one of the Saw films they would hardly have registered.

Watching a horror film automatically programs us to expect these things and – because we expect it, it doesn’t scare as much. Watching a whimsical fantasy like Fisher King programs us in the opposite direction and increases the shock of these moments.
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Mick Curtis (Mick)
Username: Mick

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.179.35.191
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 03:41 pm:   

That's why, in my childhood, I loved coming across a supernatural story in an anthology of otherwise non-supernatural stories; those stories always worked best in the midst of more regular fare.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.126.164.88
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 05:01 pm:   

Ah. I understand now. It was just so random (as a soCal teen might say).

But then, of course, "shocking" and "scary" are different from "horror." Horror is the whole, shocking and scary are elements within the whole. Horror is a Ramsey story: shocking, scary, and other adjective moments (unsettling, disturbing, creepy, eerie, sinister, etc.) play against each other and the story's victim, until the whole envelops him/her like a blanket into its world. The sum-total of that whole by the end is: horror.

I think horror implies a world, a reality, a new ground of being. You can have a horrible accident, if that new world of/following the accident sweeps away the non-horror life/existence that preceded it. A horrible person is a statement of that whole person's being; as is a horrible place.

Death is the grand blank upon which you can have a non-horror take-away (your average clergyman's eulogy over the body), or a mos-def horror take-away (King Lear's final rantings over dead Cordelia). Either world view is valid in the absence of knowledge, and left with what we're left with... so society/ies have settled on non-horror merely to keep going sanely... and so on with many other things....
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 06:14 pm:   

King has made a career from this very principle. Create as convincingly normal a backdrop as possible and then throw in a monster.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 06:16 pm:   

Don't laugh, but as a lad I used to watch Coronation Street and there was one scene where a character died and they did this haunted house thing, with the windows rattling etc. It was very creepy simply because it was Coronation Street.

I think Ghostwatch's masterstroke was getting Parkie and Sarah Green - the guardians of 'safe' TV - to present.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 06:21 pm:   

Which is why some directors know nothing about horror when they try and get creepy, throwing every spooky effect they ever half-saw into the mix and getting an unpalatable mess, like a chilli laced with chillis on chillis on chillis (ie, only edible when pissed).
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.157.26.5
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 06:28 pm:   

Also non-horror per se can be more horrific than horror purely from its potential to turn nasty - like life itself? i.e. before it turns nasty. Even if it never turns consciously nasty through sudden instantaneous death.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 06:48 pm:   

Yes, witness this, Des: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV0Ai410TQY
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.126.164.88
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 07:08 pm:   

Also non-horror per se can be more horrific than horror purely from its potential to turn nasty - like life itself? i.e. before it turns nasty.

Yes, indeed, Des. But after it turns nasty, we see clearly the nastiness that was latent in the non-nasty - like a dim image or feeling, then the veil ripped away.

No pithier illustration of something disturbing lurking in the innocuous, suddenly erupting horrific, than in these 27 seconds:

http://youtu.be/MrYqba6Jj10
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 07:13 pm:   

Ha. Class.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.157.26.5
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 07:25 pm:   

That's very effective, Gary. That's the first time I've seen that particular Tale of the Unexpected. (Elizabeth Taylor is one of my favourite fiction writers (along with Elizabeth Bowen) - and that story, featuring Fur Elise, would also fit nicely into the Classical Horror anthology!)
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 07:26 pm:   

Which reminds me . . . I have an idea for that.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 07:27 pm:   

That episode crackles with sinister tension. So does Katherine Mansfield's story The Little Governess, which I know you love.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.126.164.88
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 07:44 pm:   

I'm certainly going to savor that episode, Gary (and others I can find there), later....

Finally, a use for this power-cable I bought to help facilitate when downloading things from youtube, putting 'em on my iPod, watching 'em through my TV... it's all complicated, probably borderline not-really-legal - but that's all neither here nor there, really....
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.13.180
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 09:17 am:   

When I started reading the recent updates to this thread I thought of something I saw on TV at the age of about nine (before we had a TV, on the TV in a flat where we were staying on holiday): a 1970s drama that included a scene of a man beating his wife with a cable and plug. Then I read Craig's words: "a use for this power-cable"...

I agree that horror focuses and mythologises the darkness that usually just hits us between the eyes from out of more or less nowhere, and as such makes it easier to take on board. Fear, loss and violence are inevitably part of our lives. The supernatural probably isn't. The challenge is, within the comfort zone of the genre, to strike a note of real fear that totally destabilises the reader. The ability to do that identifies the real talents of weird fiction. And just dropping in a bit of mundane horror of the kind that really happens (a road crash, a random stabbing, death during a minor operation) won't do it on its own. You have take that into the symbolic structure of weird fiction and make it resonate. You have to play music on it. For that reason, if you're going to be any good at writing weird fiction, there has to be a part of yourself that is alienated and strange. That's not enough in itself either, but it has to be there.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 09:44 am:   

Absolutely, Joel.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.157.26.5
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 10:02 am:   

Et Tuez, Joel.

One has be 'alienated and strange' indeed to be able to write about a sunny day without even a hint of darkness but leaves the reader feeling that darkness nevertheless.

I note the use of the term 'weird fiction' above. Is this in the overall sense of the contents of the VanderMeers' massive 'The WEIRD' book or, say, of the 'Never Again' (Horror?) anthology that called itself 'weird fiction' somewhere? Or something else.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.93.177
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 10:30 am:   

"a 1970s drama that included a scene of a man beating his wife with a cable and plug."

At age 9, oh dear. That kind of thing sticks. If it wasn't '70s drama, it was '70s health and safety adverts that scarred.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 01:08 pm:   

I remember a scene from some 1970s drama that had a really troubling effect on me as a child. This couple went into a bar and were sitting having a drink, minding their own business. He was a plain rather weedy looking character and she was a stunningly attractive blonde - they weren't talking and there seemed to be a bit of an atmosphere between them. Then this big strapping thug, who's been watching them, comes over from the bar, hands her his car keys, describes his vehicle and tells her he'll see her outside when he's finished his pint. The husband gets up to protest and the other guy squeezes his mouth shut and pushes him gently back down into his chair. She gets up and leaves with the car keys, your man finishes his pint and saunters out after her. Can't remember anything else about it but that scene really haunted me for some reason. It was the unspoken threat of violence and the unexpectedness of the whole scenario coming totally out of the blue. It made me angry, for the husband, and also strangely excited at the mystery behind their actions - I was very young.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.126.164.88
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 03:53 pm:   

Then I read Craig's words: "a use for this power-cable"...

Of course, I just assumed I didn't need to say, "beyond bludgeoning someone to death." But I guess I should have been more clear.

Horror is the weird that is another world, taking over: the alien world from without (e.g., Lovecraft), the alien world from within (e.g., much of Ramsey's work). I think of the opening narration from the 1980's antho horror series, "Tales From the Darkside": http://youtu.be/UnE3-0X-174 , which actually sums it up quite succinctly.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 147.252.230.148
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 06:04 pm:   

I think Ramsey summed horror up very well as "that with which we have not yet come to terms". Horror in non-horror is worse because you expect to see a compound fracture in an emergency room, but not at a picnic.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 06:13 pm:   

Yes, and comedy is the same. The more disparate the elements thrust together, the funnier. Just as bacon goes with eggs, some things go with others. But ancient Greek philosophy does not go with football*.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8

*Unless you're Albert Camus.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 06:17 pm:   

>>>I think Ramsey summed horror up very well as "that with which we have not yet come to terms".

I wrote an essay years ago about this, focusing on the delicate path writers tread in suggesting just enough. Too much or too little, and you lose your power over the reader. Ramsey and others tread this path well.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.119.70
Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 - 11:29 pm:   

The actor Robert Hardy describes being on a family picnic as a boy on an idyllic summer day when two planes collided above and rained horror down all around them.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 03:38 pm:   

Lockerbie-esque.

In Rose Madder by Stephen King, Rose Daniels finds a drop of blood in her washing machine. Despite the relentless horror she's experienced down the years, that simple image - the incongruity of it - changes her life forever.

Imagine a rose that sings.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.159.145.243
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 03:43 pm:   

Imagine someone who has had a completely happy, contented, uneventful life - then suddenly .... dies.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.126.164.88
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 04:43 pm:   

That's what's called a "black swan" event, Des. Used now almost exclusively in economics, it refers to suddenly seeing a black swan (a genetic abnormality) where one's only accustomed to seeing white ones; and the stark reality of it is sanity-accosting, but indeed it's there, it's real, it upends previous facts/data/realities, and it can no longer be ignored. Lovecraftian, in some ways... and death is the ultimate "black swan" new undeniable reality....
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.23.40.152
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 05:29 pm:   

Karl Popper used that, too.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.159.145.243
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 05:32 pm:   

photo
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.108.154
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 07:06 pm:   

"Karl Popper used that, too."

Orignially it was David Hume pointing out the weakness of Aristotelian syllogisms.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.159.145.243
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 07:13 pm:   

For any interested, I make several references to David Hume here in my RTR of John Travis' masterpiece: THE TERROR AND THE TORTOISESHELL.
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/the-terror-and-the-tortoiseshell- john-travis/
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.108.154
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 07:32 pm:   

It could be argued that the USA has had so many of these events that its mid-20th century view of itself is irreperably damaged: Sputnik, Vietnam, both Kennedys, Nixon, 9/11, [insert bathos of your choice here in this bit, I can't be bothered].

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