October 2011
by admin on Oct.16, 2011, under Meta
Hello.
I am Mr. Welldone.
No, just kidding, it’s Kris, the author of Ichor Falls and Candle Cove, the reason why you found me. I know the site’s been dead quiet for a long while now, and I’ve been wanting to write more horror, but I have a problem. I can’t. I’m so meta about everything nothing scares me lately. No ghost, no unseen stalking spirit, no lumbering, stitched nightmare. I feel like I understand every trope.
As you may know, traditional horror/suspense/thrillers don’t do a lot for me — for example, the Scream movies or any of their ilk. I can’t get worked up about a guy with a bladed weapon, and the reason is, I know their motive. They want to hurt me, they want me to know fear as I die. I get that, I get all of it. So when he puts the sword through the door and it startles me, now I have to fight him, and it’s just brains vs. brawn, or brawn vs. brawn, and I’m gonna lose, and he’s gonna get me. The end. It just doesn’t inspire the same feeling of dread that an alien entity does, a completely foreign state of existence like something unknown from the depths of the sea, or a haunting. That’s why they scare me so much — because to deal with something, you have to be able to form a pattern. You have to be able to begin to understand them.
I understand a serial killer. He has to conform to the laws of physics; he probably can’t break in without making a lot of noise. And if he gets me, I guess he gets me. I die. Or I get tortured and then die. Misery is terrible, but it doesn’t frighten me; the unknown frightens me. The appropriation of innocence frightens me, like you see in Candle Cove. (If you want to read what I have to say about why I did Candle Cove and its meta legacy, here’s a blog post about it.)
And attempts to frighten me, other stories — there’s a lot of good creepypasta out there that does get me, but it’s also very formulaic. The ritual ones I never understood! How can anyone be expected to remember all that stuff? Who would even bother? And usually the reward is to be cursed and miserable forever. What? Really?
Anyone here watch Suicide Mouse? That meme? I haven’t heard the audio. I just watched the first five seconds and shut it off. Why, because it was frightening? No, because it was supposedly made in the 1930s, but the animation looks like it was done in Mario Paint. Have some pride for God’s sake. Do your job, scare people. Force them to imagine a little more, don’t lay it all out on a plate. People don’t stagger out of a screening of something and raise a gun to their temples. If they do, there’s a much longer buildup. Make me think about it! Haunt me with it, haunt the reader with it after the story’s over.
Anyway. My point is, I don’t know what to get scared by. Who’s seen something in the vein of horror I’m describing? Anyone? If I can’t… get creeped out, I don’t know how I can write more. I know it’s out there. Marble Hornets is excellent… I was a big fan of the Josef K Stories… I just need that consistency. That slow burn. Can you help me find it?
October 16th, 2011 on 3:28 pm
I wish I had something I could suggest. I also enjoyed Marble Hornets. Creepy as all get-out. Haven’t heard of the Josef K stories though, so I’m going to check those out. So thanks for the inadvertent suggestion.
P.S. The idea of ever having to swim in the open ocean for any reason at all absolutely terrifies me. Not having a clue what’s swimming beneath you, the possibility of some gigantic, previously unknown creature charging at you from the murky depths. I’ll probably never take a cruise.
October 16th, 2011 on 3:28 pm
I’ve had a similar problem for a long time and it’s one of the reasons why I stopped writing horror and switched genres. I can’t write scary things because I haven’t seen anything that truly scared me in years and I haven’t read anything scary in even longer.
The most I’ve been able to achieve is a feeling of unease, with movies like Paranormal Activity. Or just an overall tenseness with a movie like Buried. Not fear, but close.
October 16th, 2011 on 3:33 pm
Have you seen Antichrist by Lars Von Trier? Very scary film.
I would recommend it. Rent it (or torrent it), watch it late at night alone.
October 16th, 2011 on 3:33 pm
Hi! I’m a big fan of all your current comics and I was a huge fan of Chex back in the day. I just run into “Candle Cove” last week for some reason, and I have to say it creeped the beejeezes out of me!
I have to agree about the whole “slasher” movie genre, it make me jump in my seat when it’s done well, but I do not go to bed plagued by the fear of something hidden in the darkness out of my control. I think the last time I felt that was when I first saw “The Ring”, and that was like 7 or 8 years ago. “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” got to me too, but for different reasons; that was the whole “what if” fear.
What scares me now? Well… I’m not sure if this is gonna be helpful or if I’m just about to be smirked at, but: Sometimes I’ll watch “Ancient Aliens” on the history channel, or any othes conspiracy theorie show out there, and I will conciously suspend my disbelief and try to see what I would feel like if all that crazyness was real. If there really where alien powerful beings beyond ALL our understanding or control, who actually have such a vested interest in our planet, and in our history, as to directly get involved, in a way that creates religions and marks our species’s development so deeply. And that we’ve forgotten about them, they’re still there, but outside conspiracy theories no one gives it credit. Like the first appearence of “The Silence” in Doctor Who’s last season, they influence everything we do in a planetary level, and we have no idea it’s even happening, or why they do it, or where they’re gonna take us next.
I dunno, that kinda global loss of freedom and control, over this alien powerful creatures who hide in myth and in the dark, to do anything they want with us….. when I make myself buy it, even breefly, it scares the crap out of me.
October 16th, 2011 on 4:13 pm
Outright fear is hard to accomplish these days, but Amnesia The Dark Descent got pretty close in a couple of places. If you are however looking for a good creep-out and a right braintwister, go read House of Leaves. It’s the record of a man sifting through a manuscript left by his deceased neighbour, which describes in great detail a film that never existed, about a house of which the inside space exceeds the outside dimensions greatly. And the page layout is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I don’t get afflicted by terror easily but at one point I was seriously debating even getting out of bed to turn off the light after I put it down.
October 16th, 2011 on 4:43 pm
Did you read the old Dionaea House series from several years ago? That was my introduction to creepypasta and it still manages to creep me out.
http://www.dionaea-house.com/
October 16th, 2011 on 7:20 pm
http://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=22434
October 16th, 2011 on 8:36 pm
I’ve been enjoying Pseudopod, a short horror fiction podcast, for the past few years. There are a lot of good ideas presented, things that can be expanded on and looked at from different angles. Plus, the host is absolutely delightful. It’s entertaining, and worth a listen, if nothing else than for background noise to work to.
October 16th, 2011 on 9:51 pm
Don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to scariness. There’s a whole populace of people who like strange stuff and don’t care a whit if it’s a scary or not.
October 16th, 2011 on 10:30 pm
I always thought Candle Cove was neat. I never thought it was scary. By contrast, I’ve actually had nightmares inspired by “The Hirsch Camera (1870),” which I think is the most disturbing thing you’ve ever written. It gives me exactly the feeling of utterly alien dread you describe.
I’m not a big horror guy, but the most reliable trigger for me is the concept of the oubliette–any place where you are alone in the dark (especially in a small space) with no chance of anyone even remembering you’re there. I’m mostly afraid of what my mind would do to itself in those circumstances. That’s the repulsive part about torture porn to me, as well; I’m not afraid of movie gore, or even of pain (at least in the abstract), but when I try to think of how I’d deal with that kind of thing myself the answer is usually “well, go insane.”
I think you’ve talked about similar fears–not being afraid of ghosts, but afraid of what it would mean about you if you saw a ghost. I guess that’s the root of Lovecraft’s stuff as well, if from a different direction.
So if you want the slow burn, I’d suggest something in third person about the process of the protagonist losing their mind, hinted at via some unreliable-narrator techniques. “Twenty Minutes in the Dark” is a good example of this, though I think you could be a lot subtler about it. It doesn’t have to be about the character turning into a psycho killer; the revelation that this character with whom you’ve built some sympathy is severely ill with no idea is horrifying enough, because, dear reader, you might be too.
October 16th, 2011 on 10:59 pm
Two thoughts, neither of which will help you get back on the horror-writing track. Sorry.
First: Interesting to read about your… let’s call it “horror’s block,” in light of the launch of your recent humor-dissecting podcast. On the one hand, you’re attempting to peer behind to curtain, to see what makes humor work. On the other, you know how horror works now, so you feel like you’re done with it. Jesus, I hope you don’t get “humor blocked.”
Second: Probably a lot of other writers go through the same phases you’re going through now. At first, the imaginative stuff gets to you, the aliens, the ghosts, the H.P. descriptions of fear itself. Later in life, perhaps after the same writes gain a spouse and kids, different things become far more scary. Fear of not being able to protect their own, torture, a crashing economy. Makes me wonder what it would look like if you sorted horror movie genre by screenwriter’s age.
October 17th, 2011 on 12:06 am
I haven’t really read any horror since the last updates here until a couple weeks ago I found author Katy Towell. She has some work on youtube, plus a published novel.
October 17th, 2011 on 11:08 am
The scariest thing I’ve ever seen was about 10 minutes from what the third act of “Candyman”. I imagine it wouldn’t have been nearly as terrifying if I had any kind of context for the movie, but I just stumbled upon it on TV with some friends while we looked for crappy B-movies to poke fun at. One of the characters was a single mother, living in poverty with a dog and her infant son. In the last scene I saw before we changed the channel, the movie’s protagonist (under the influence of the titular Candy-man) had woken up in the single mother’s apartment holding a bloody meat cleaver. She stumbled around sleepily through a hallway for a bit before discovering the dog’s decapitated head, and the mother hysterically shaking a crib containing her child’s massacred body.
I couldn’t sleep for about two weeks. It wasn’t the images of the dog or the baby that did it (although they probably didn’t help). It was the unavoidable experience of putting myself in that character’s shoes, feeling the guilt of having irrevocably destroyed innocent lives and knowing I would have to face that guilt every day for the rest of my life.
That’s not an imaginary fear, like “what if you were chased by a guy with a knife and he could open locked doors and he’s already cut the phone line OH NO”. It’s exactly how I probably would feel if a kid ran in front of my car and I couldn’t stop in time. And I get a horrible black pit in my stomach just thinking about that. I feel like all really profound horror (for instance Lovecraft, and a lot of the stories on this site) makes us face everyday questions and problems that we usually try to ignore, just for lack of a rational way to cope with them.
October 18th, 2011 on 5:44 pm
For the experience of the unknown and pure dis-ease I always come back to the writing of Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti. Especially with Aickman, the feeling of not really knowing what is happening (or why) always brings the discomfort that I crave.
October 18th, 2011 on 9:39 pm
If you’re scared of the unknown, write about the unknown.
I know this is a wicked big oversimplification, but it works (for me at least). A story isn’t believable if it has no basis in reality, so to write about the unknown in a scary way requires that you at least partially base the story in something real. My favorite of the short stories that I wrote for college was essentially a fictionalization of a time where I was mugged: the whole story centers around the deterioration of the main character’s sanity during that awkward/tense/oddly silent stand-off between the mugger and the victim who’s life he is threatening. Except, in the story, instead of a mugger, it’s a monster (thing?), and the monster doesn’t say anything, and the monster expects the main character to give it his bones instead of his wallet.
Anyway, hope that helps.
October 19th, 2011 on 2:39 am
yeah. I dig.
when I was a kid I really loved the Wyoming Incident. it was a horror ARG on SomethingAwful put together by some fearsomely dedicated humans through a series of warped videos slowly disseminated over a period of months with a surrounding story full of menace and dripfeed mystery but without the whole silly overloaded ‘and he shot himself in the head’ thing.
when I try to go back to it, though, it doesn’t work for me. it’s like adulthood has imparted some kind of barrier between me and the obviously unreal that shreds my suspension of disbelief at the first opportunity. I loved Marble Hornets (the Slenderman-inspired video series) up until the moment when the dude in the kabuki mask showed up, but that inserted an element of (badly-designed and unimpressive) mundane threat into what up til then had been a work of incomprehensible alienness, and that ruined the whole fiction for me. it brought home the fact that it was just people inventing and telling a story. Thomas Ligotti was recommended to me as Lovecraft’s successor, but it turned out he was just another purple-prose scribbler with a few good ideas and no idea how to present them such that they felt real.
I dunno. I feel you, I guess is my point. I’ve tried to deepscare myself a few times recently and have found myself too sensible to buy into all the old eerinesses. lots of things make me mellowsad, but nothing I’ve met for a long while terrifies me.
October 19th, 2011 on 3:12 am
actually, if you haven’t seen it, the second half of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is loaded with menace. it’s not exactly fear, but it’s a sense of otherworldly wrongness that oughta stay with you for a while after. the whole movie’s awesomely worth watching. Inland Empire is dreamscape-nightmare as hell, too, but a lot more difficult to watch. his Eraserhead is prolly the best depiction of a horrible dream anybody’s ever managed in live action, but it draaags. you have to be in the late night mood to be hypnotized to get into it.
October 19th, 2011 on 1:42 pm
http://www.youtube.com/user/theLittleFears
http://www.youtube.com/user/Vicious516
but most importantly:
http://www.scp-wiki.net/
October 21st, 2011 on 5:55 pm
Here’s seconding Dionaea House, especially if you’re willing to keep digging around and finding the supplemental material for the story.
In a similar vein, Ted the Caver may serve your purposes:
http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/
I was always a big fan of the original John Dies at the End, which I’m sure you can still find on the web.
But really, none of that touches the actual problem. There’s tons of awesome, atmospheric, alien, genuinely creepy horror out there. If you can’t find anything to be scared by, it’s because you aren’t inclined to look for it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if that’s the case, don’t sugar coat it.
October 21st, 2011 on 9:04 pm
The SCP foundation is linked earlier, but maybe this is the sort of thing you’re looking for.
http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-303
The whole site is pretty good, but it can get a bit strange and it would be a lot to look through with as many projects as you generally have going.
October 21st, 2011 on 10:47 pm
I posted this on your mainsite as well, but this animation hit some points for me. Something about the mood, teenage shenans, and where it ends up really got me.
Fantasy
Directed by Jérémie Périn
http://youtu.be/6QFwo57WKwg
October 21st, 2011 on 11:11 pm
I suggest The Whisperers in Darkness
October 24th, 2011 on 2:40 pm
@nerdify. Reading your comment gave me chills. I’ve only had one fear my entire and its exactly as you described. Idk why either. I’ve never even swam in the middle of the ocean like that before.
October 25th, 2011 on 12:59 pm
Hmm…
What gives me the heebie jeebies is wrapping my mind around how small and insignificant we are.
There was a cracked acticle recently that got my mind reeling
http://www.cracked.com/article_19479_the-6-most-mind-blowing-things-ever-discovered-in-space.html
We think of scale in such small terms, we really only comprehend them in what we can relate to. We see the sun in the sky and we know it is “big” we know our solar system has planets that are big and would easily swallow our earth a hundred times over. But when your entire solar system is small compared to other celestial bodies or phenomena, that is what scares me, that and clowns.. fucking clowns.
October 25th, 2011 on 8:19 pm
Well, I was gonna suggest The SCP Foundation, since I hang around there all the time, but it’s been said. Josef K. is an amazing writer, and I’d say Quiet and North for what you’re going for. All of his stuff is good, though. Lovecraft is always good. At The Mountains Of Madness specifically. What else…A Colder War is neat, but not entirely horrifying until the later sections. Don’t try to archive-crawl the SCP wiki, that’ll end badly. I could post up a list of personal favourites if you’d like.
October 27th, 2011 on 6:34 am
Just wanted to throw this one out there: Try the short story “What’s In Alaska?” by Raymond Carver. That had seriously unexpected nightmare fuel for me and while it’s all subjective, Carver’s style is deeply unsettling. Most of the time it reads like “This American life” if it was filtered through David Lynch’s more sinister inclinations.
October 31st, 2011 on 4:02 am
Happy Halloween, Mr Straub! I wrote a short story last year as sort of an ode to the horror genre, which I feel may reflect the same sort of emotions you’re feeling.
You can read it here: http://denimtrousers.tumblr.com/post/12156647688/nail
Even if you don’t find it especially frightening, the whole ‘be careful what you wish for’ motif rings throughout. I hope you enjoy it!
November 1st, 2011 on 10:12 pm
Have you ever read any of Junji Ito’s stuff?
He can really do some things that are strange and brilliant and may just fit the rubric.
Here are a few stories in order of quality (in my assessment):
http://justmegawatt.com/images/comics/enigmaofamigarafault.html
http://justmegawatt.com/images/comics/glyceride.html
http://justmegawatt.com/images/comics/armyofone.html (this may actually fit your mold best)
http://justmegawatt.com/images/comics/thebackalley.html
http://justmegawatt.com/images/comics/longdream.html
None of them are terribly long. They all come in under 40 pages, I think,
November 2nd, 2011 on 2:32 am
The Lemon Blossom Girl scared the crap out of me. It’s just a lifeless little object that can’t possibly hurt anyone, but it lingers in your mind and your own thoughts hurt you.
I went on a field trip in 3rd grade and we saw an alligator snapping turtle inside an aquarium. It was about 3 feet long, but the tank was only 4 feet long, so it just floated there for our amusement. I felt really sorry for it because it was basically in a watery coffin and couldn’t even move, but it had people gawking at it all day long. Then a horrible idea crossed my mind- what if that turtle was actually a little kid who was deformed so he grew scales all over his body? He had tried calling out for help but nobody would ever do anything, so he went crazy and reisigned himself to floating there forever staring at the wall. It freaked me out so bad that 20 years later I still have nightmares over that turtle, and the Lemon Blossom Girl story was the only thing I’ve ever read that came close to that kind of horror. Thanks.
November 3rd, 2011 on 12:08 am
Try ‘The Mothman Prophesies.’ It’s a good film about alien entities that keep contacting a journalist in strange ways to warn him about disasters, but start to drive him insane. A lot of weird shit that doesn’t make sense, and while not malevolent, is goddamn terrifying.
November 6th, 2011 on 6:00 pm
I don’t know if this is your bag, but the man over at Pumpkinrot made a short film this year. Witches aren’t particularly scary to me, but holy crap, that foetus thing…*shudder* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgxCExPmsYk&feature=youtu.be
Also I just want to say that ‘Curious Little Thing’ and ‘The Stillwood King’ will stay in my mind forever as two of the spookiest things I’ve ever read.
November 10th, 2011 on 8:08 pm
+1 for Dionaea house. I’m not a fan of the sort of…conclusion, really, with the homeless lady. Makes it too mundane for me. The Caver stuff is also pretty good, but I pretty much want to beat my head against a wall every time some idiot goes “Huurrr…I think we should go back to the scary-ass place!”
http://www.creepypastaindex.com/creepypasta/psychosis
^ One of my favorite creepypasta. I think the character’s slow descent into madness is a beautiful “slow burn.” It’s much better in first person than the usual “then I found my friend and he looked emaciated blah blah”
I wouldn’t really suggest House of Leaves…to be honest, I felt it was more a love story than a horror story (maybe both?).
1408 (the short story, not the movie) is a good one from Stephen King. Not much of his stuff really scares me, but 1408 was fascinating.
I liked Silent Hill 3 because you play a fairly normal person who has no idea about what’s happening to her or why. It wasn’t as strange and lonely as SH2, but I had trouble sleeping after playing it (mind you, I was all of…8-10?) because of the fear that some day I would get plunged into that sort of hell and I wouldn’t have any idea why.
November 13th, 2011 on 1:28 am
The last things to send chills down my spine were the movies “Lake Mungo” and “Imprint.” Paranormal Activity is lame, especially compared to “Imprint.” “3 Extremes” was another well done movie. But I think you could definitely get some good ideas from this guy I’ve been checking out. His site’s called pumpkinrot.com and the stuff he posts is pretty interesting.
November 14th, 2011 on 5:45 am
If nothing else, reading the stories posted here (updated every wednesday and saturday, plus sometimes randomly other days) might inspire you. Or at least give you something to read.
http://terrortortellini.blogspot.com/
December 2nd, 2011 on 5:45 pm
Have you read The Ignored by Bentley Little? Truly one of the creepiest books ever written.
December 11th, 2011 on 8:12 am
Yeah, I get you. Horror doesn’t really scare me any more. I understand the reasoning behind it all. Makes me jump out of my seat sometimes, at the unexpected parts, but it’s more a spur of the moment thing than actually being frightened. And since I don’t believe in aliens (or anything for that matter), things related to that usually just make me laugh. Candle Cove was neat, by the way, but… kind of bland? Maybe I’ve read too many pastas.
Video games on the other hand just get me. Amnesia for example. It’s the suspense that sets my mind racing (though in the end I’m just “Whoa that was fun let’s do it again next time”).
And coming back to creepypastas, BEN was just the best. It was amazing, the entire construction was simply superb. The fact that it centered around my second favourite Ninentendo franchise, the Legend of Zelda, and without doubt its most whacked up game, Majora’s Mask, certainly helped. Same with Glitchy Red (a Pokémon creepypasta, call me childish if you will). Thinking about what may go on within the game, within the protagonist, what they’re thinking, how they feel, if that’s possible, without us knowing, it sends a chill down my spine. What when we abandon the games, start a new file?
However, these two are the only ones that live up to my expectations, so I don’t really have any other ‘recommendations’. Also clowns. I have this inexplicable fear of clowns. It’s awful. I can’t walk past one on the street. At all.
Pardon me if this turned out to be a whole essay (and yes, if you’re wondering, I’m an 18-year-old gamer, haha).
December 26th, 2011 on 6:35 pm
http://thebooksofsand.blogspot.com/
Something about these stories have always sent a shiver down my spine, even though there is no INYAFACE horror. Fantastic work, this.
January 3rd, 2012 on 10:24 pm
Anything by Ito Junji
January 4th, 2012 on 5:08 am
“House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s remarkably similar to Dionaea House, but in book form instead of online. It’s a multilayered beast that plays with the concept of a labyrinth in form and content. Dionaea House is really, really great if you read it before “House of Leaves.”
And I’m gonna second Mulholland Drive and suggest Lost Highway, another Lynch film.
January 17th, 2012 on 7:48 am
That terror abides. It waits, in the quiet places. At the boundaries.