The Horror of Edition 8! Results!

Another edition comes to an end. We had a different theme this time: horror. Out of 8 entries 6 were eligible winners. Overall it was a successful edition! But the horror it gave us the judges to try and find three winning entries was unimaginable; for every entry fared so well in some elements or the other that it was a Herculean task to pick just three. But anyway, thanks to Leo and Jaishree, finally it’s done. And the three winners for this edition, and the judges for the next are

• Seema Gopalan
• Pankti Mehta
• Medha Kapoor

Individual feedback is given for each post so we would not repeat them here.

As for the general tips of writing horror, I feel I am not experienced enough to impart that. However from my reading experiences what I understood is: it is very important to differentiate between horror and terror.

            As far as I am concerned, I attach the word horror to the fear of reality. It’s the reaction that rises when faced with a logical crisis. There may not be an immediate solution available but at least you can decipher the context.

            Whereas terror, I feel, is the fear of the unknown. The kind of fear your mind can attach no logic to. It is the fear of something that is unnatural. It is stronger than horror.

            As an example, I take two famous movies. In the movie Se7en, the deaths are horrifying and gruesome, because whether severed heads or not, a psychopath is always capable of that. Whereas in the movie The Ring, the deaths are purely terrifying because you cannot imagine an earthy creature to be capable of distorting its victim’s face in such a way!

            To make it even easier, take two different situations in Harry Potter:

1. When Harry witnesses Voldemort’s return in the graveyard he is horrified: it is awful, shocking, dreadful, disturbing, disgusting.
2. When Harry is out there in the cave to find Slytherin’s locket with Dumbledore, he is terrified. Because of the anticipation of the unknown. It is his dread, his panic that is frightening.

Terror makes you think of what lies around the corner? Horror comes when you actually go round the corner and experience the wrong thing physically.

Once I understood this, I realized that when I try to write something of horror genre, my foremost objective should be to terrify. It’s the most difficult thing to achieve: to create the absolute sense of panic, to make one feel a fear so frightening that he feels numb. I feel a lot of subtle suggestions and implications in the prose are necessary to achieve this. While describing the setting is important along with vivid imagery of scenes and sounds, I think it’s best to leave it to the imagination of the reader than to give a vivid description of the scary thing itself. Describing a ghost or beast maybe horrifying but creating a mysterious sinister force that is beyond mind’s comprehension is terrifying. The trick lies in deciding where you will tell your reader in exhaustive details and where you will just give a hint and let him form his own opinion.

Writing horror is probably easier. Anything from paedophiles to brutal murderers can be passed off as horror genre of fiction. Horror mostly deals with the shock values of an unpleasant scene that you describe in a detailed manner. It’s fear but has a bit of revulsion in it too. For example in TF’s story the macabre he describes is a fine example that evokes a mixture of fear and revulsion.

As I told in my FB post in IFW I am not quite a fan of such horrors. Gruesome crime scenes, violence and blood gross me out so I cannot really opine on how to write it. But I’ll like to touch upon again on the book of M.R James that I mentioned. I have read just the first story so far. It’s called Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book.

In that story, James is obsessively detailed in his description. He establishes an immaculate setting in two or three first paragraphs: a French village and the haunted sacristan. He leads me to believe that the church is where the horror lies and does so with such intensity that it makes me very uncomfortable. But soon I am proved wrong by the presence of a seemingly innocent book and a particularly scary picture which he describes with his usual valour but then turns the dread, the horror, and the fear into an absolute terror with a singular sentence: ‘One remark is universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from life.”’

When the story ends a lot many things are still not clear. But James told just enough to keep me guessing. Though I can never be sure, I have a fair idea of the sacristan’s motives and have a reasonable doubt about whether or not the protagonist committed suicide in order to avoid a much worse fate.

If you can find it, I suggest you read it. It’s not very scary, I say eerie at its best, but it will definitely give you a basic idea of the mood setting. And that’s most important in a horror fiction.

Having said that, I feel I have horrified you enough with my gibberish. So I will take my leave now with a final note of congratulations to the winners and those who didn’t make it. It was not an easy edition to judge and from all the preceding mind boggling rants I think you can judge what a toll it has taken on my nerves. So for now this is it and all the best for the next edition, judges and participants.

(on behalf of Jaish and Leo)

Rajrupa.