This is the fifty part of a series on the cultural moment of horror
Horror is a genre that anyone can write.
Wait, what?
I mean, that–of all the genres of fiction (and we could have a long conversation about what counts as a “genre” and what fits where), horror is arguably the simplest to write and/or film. In an era when the quality of writing coming out of Hollywood is… questionable… to be generous, horror is a genre of fiction that the absolute worst writers and filmmakers can still do well enough.
In part, this is because horror really only has one defining feature: a monster. If you have that, anything else goes. Any genre, trope, format, setting, theme, character, etc can come into play. You want a Western? How about The Cowboy and the Vampire. Science fiction? How about Alien. Or better yet, Aliens. You like Amish fiction but want horror too? Pick up Amish Vampires in Space. The same goes with characters–they can be good (Hellboy), bad (From Dusk Till Dawn), chaotic (Cabin in the Woods), or any combination thereof. They can be politicians, astronauts, cavemen, businessmen, or plumbers. Throw a monster into literally anything and you’ve got horror.
This is good news for adequate or bad writers, because if you have a monster of any kind much of the writing takes care of itself. Just get out of the way and let the monster scare people. Want to set a book in the Mountain West and feature a ghost and call it Old Country, in one sense the quality doesn’t matter all that much. The monster does the heavy lifting for you. Stick a spirit in rural Idaho and see what it does–let it be scary, let it kill someone or something, and see what happens. Now Old Country is a good book and the quality is solid, but we can see where so much less is required of writers and filmmakers when dealing with horror because the monster does so much of the work.
All this to say, even not-great writers can crank out horror movies. Downright bad writers can still produce something salvageable if they just throw in some blood and jump scares. We’re seeing a renaissance of horror right now in part because apparently the vast majority of Hollywood’s writers today are not-great, and this is what they can do. It won’t always be that way, but that’s where we are and that’s why for now at least, horror is on the rise.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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