Horror Technique: Shown Versus Implied

Recently on The Groovy Age of Horror, one of my favourite blogs, there was a very in-depth article that discussed at length the dynamic and persistent debate of what is shown in horror and what it means, how it can be significant, and how the medium can make a difference. It's very well-written and beyond my depth to explore here in summary, especially since such depth was reached in the article itself.

However, it did get me thinking, and this is a debate that will go on forever: is it scarier to show something or to suggest it?

I will go with 'suggest', but conditionally. It's more or less universally parroted that it's always scarier to imply things, and that's why popular horror icon H.P. Lovecraft's works enjoy a sort of universal acclaim for being eerie without typically being explicitly filled with exhaustively-described monsters; in Lovecraft's world, the horror is often implied with suspense built up around it, and that is what makes it so unsettling and disturbing.

A quote, perhaps paraphrased, and attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, Val Lewton, and various others, is 'there is nothing more frightening than a closed door'. In the proper context, it's true: there is nothing that is more frightening than the possibility that anything, anything at all, could be behind that door. It's not true in every single situation, of course. A great deal of horror depends on suspense, so if you're not doing horror or suspense as the genre, a closed door won't necessarily be scary. But this is something of a no-brainer.

Sometimes it works, even then. Imagine the audience's surprise when their candy-coated feel-good adventure opens a door to unleash...a horrific villain! It even worked in Star Wars; things didn't feel quite right when they arrived at the cloud city, and the door opening to reveal Darth Vader was genuinely striking and scary. Sometimes seeming dissonance with the ambiance can work very well. A closed door is scary, even if it is also hopeful. But most viewers are going to assume that something complicating or conflicting will lie behind it, because much of drama lies in conflict.

Much of the sense of fear in anything lies in the way a work is realised; if a work is not well-made, it won't be suspenseful. But quality is subjective, and so one person's abject horror will be another person's joke. This is yet another reason why what is shown tends to be subject to how it is shown, and how often. A monster design that is frightening to one person may be ridiculous to another. However, if the monster itself is built up within the narrative of a work and only shown after it has been built up and the audience drawn deep into suspension of disbelief, it will be much more terrifying than something just shown every time it does anything.

It lies squarely in the fundamentals of suspense. If we look at classic horror films, we see suspense as the key, the linchpin to successful tension of the audience. The scariest film I have ever seen in my life is Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. I was so frightened that I got shivers and my skin went cold. But it is psychological horror through and through, and suspense from moment one. There is no monster, nothing is particularly explicit, no grotesque visceral violence...and yet, it is utterly terrifying. It is a descent into madness where the audience is taken along for the ride, where eventually they are made to question everything around them, most of all their own sanity.

Halloween spends the first few minutes showing the audience a painstakingly built-up murder, through the eyes of the murderer. It is not a particularly graphic event, but it is made all the more horrific by the utter revulsion the audience feels -- and revulsion lies at the fundamental basis of much horror -- and the suspense and disorientation that is built around it. The killer, called 'the Shape', is very much the Boogeyman: he can seem to appear and disappear. He cannot be stopped. He cannot be reasoned with. Any motivation that is attributed to his actions is only done by his enemies in an attempt to rationalise it, mostly to themselves. He is barely shown, his actions are not lingered upon...and he is all the more terrifying for it.

The original Alien, while often also classified as science-fiction, is at its root a horror work. Much of that horror lies in disorientation, an inability to understand what the nature of the horror itself is, and why this is happening. Body horror asserts itself strongly, and in many ways, in my opinion, the concept of the self as source of fear is the basis of most fear reactions in horror.

To me, the most horrific thing that an audience can be made to do is to confront themselves. Most people have aspects of themselves that they find distasteful. For many, it is the dark side, the side that could imagine all manner of horrors that they have tried to avoid. The things they would never do, the things they would never say, the situations they hope never to be in...and yet they exist in the mind, and the possibility exists that they might. It is frightening to make the connection in one's own mind, much more frightening. It is easy to laugh or to dismiss a costume that you find silly or uninteresting, but it is much less easy to dismiss what your mind has shown you. In many ways, it is almost an accusation, a call to the audience to confront themselves, throwing open the doors and defences that have been so carefully crafted, to protect them from the aspects of their mind that they fear. They would like to deny that these aspects are there. But, even for a little while, they must confront them and accept their existence. That, to me, is horror.

Even if they aren't aware of what is happening to that level, they're aware that something isn't right. They feel unsettled. They may never understand that a part of the horror they feel is the horror at their own minds and what they can imagine.

This is yet another reason why being too familiar with the monster, antagonist, or what have you is also something that tends to weaken horror. If you become sympathetic to the monster, it is really not as scary anymore. If the monster becomes pitiable, even if it continues doing horrific things, it is more a tragedy than a scary story. Familiarity means that impact of an appearance is lessened.

Every masked slasher film has suffered from this, with some of the worst examples being when the mad killer is turned into some sort of wisecracking antihero that clearly the audience are supposed to cheer for, as he slaughters through the nominal protagonists. They cease being scary, then, and they become a more heroic figure, even if what they do isn't what most people would consider 'heroic'; they are champions of a sort, for the audience.

Even extreme acts of violence can become pedestrian if there is nothing to build up to their horror. Having explicit acts of visceral violence through a film is often nothing but a masturbatory gesture, and it builds up audience insensitivity. Just as in works where the world presented is thoroughly unsympathetic along with all of the characters, that acts against the whole point of horror. If you don't care, you won't be scared. If you aren't appalled by what you're seeing, or what's being implied, then you won't experience horror.

Similarly, it is easy to point out the differences between Alien and Aliens. The first is a horror, the second is a science-fiction action film. While there are suspenseful parts in Aliens and horrifying parts -- the latter of which are mainly when the audience considers the ramifications of what has happened in the colony, rather than anything being shown -- largely it is an action film. The creatures are not as terrifying as the original in Alien, both because there are so many of them (thus robbing it of its uniqueness and making it more understandable due to social context), and because they are seen much, much more frequently and clearly, as well as destroyed with far less effort and trouble than in the original film.

The Blair Witch Project was one of the most successful examples of horror implied rather than seen, and it was also among the most well-received...at least initially. However, largely due to social saturation and everyone knowing the film's secrets, people weren't as scared, the longer it was out. This isn't surprising; if you know you're not going to see a 'Blair Witch' going into it, you don't get the suspense up that it will happen. It's another case of the horror being unveiled and too familiar to the audience, rather than the suspense built up and the secrets kept, and it illustrates my point all too well: familiarity breeds comfort, which is the antithesis of suspense, tension, and horror.

It doesn't always work, I'll be the first to admit. Monster films tend to be the worst of them, because either they have a costume they know is goofy and just use the technique to hide, or they don't have a monster at all and try to build suspense in the hopes that no-one will want to actually ask the important question. Usually, there has to be some kind of horror present, even if only strongly implied. The most terrifying situations are ones that involve the audience, even vicariously.

The Cask of Amontillado is terrifying because of its situation, and the fact that the audience has come to identify with the victim. They have been brought into that world. The Whisperer in Darkness, similarly, builds up a suspenseful mystery that is made into horror in the last few sentences, when the reader realises that (through the protagonist's narration) they themselves were so close to that unspeakable horror and didn't even know it at the time. It's the same with stories like Pickman's Model.

When you get right down to it, it can just be said that suspense of the unseen is also easier to do relatively well, whereas suspense of the clearly seen is not. It takes great talent and great vision to have something seen enough to become familiar and still retain its feeling of terror. It does not take so much of that to make something barely-seen or unseen scary, because the audience has no way of concretely saying 'this isn't scary, and here's why'.

Being explicit can also disrupt the ambiance of a story. If a story is meant to be more lighthearted, action-oriented, or otherwise having a completely different mood built up from the beginning, throwing in something grotesque or explicitly horrific can completely disrupt the mood and create a dissonance that damages the work. It is one of the reasons why horror-comedy combinations tend to be either loved or hated passionately, and why the genre is so small; humour and horror are difficult to combine successfully because their moods are so discordant. Implications of horror work better in these cases since the full gravity of the situation may be delayed until a point in the story where it can be realised with more impact.

Ultimately, the debate will continue ever on. However, it is my opinion that implied, subtle horror tends to work better in most cases than more explicit, visually-shown horror. From practical considerations such as budgets and writer ability, to more profound considerations such as the confrontation of the self, I feel that the suggestion of horror is usually superior.

Your opinions may vary.

Hi, I'm Gay: A Writing Guide

Since Hollywood, comic books, and various other media seem unable to get it down, after a conversation with a friend, I thought I would offer a few tips on how to write characters who are gay. Things I say to do or not to do are just opinions and just rules of thumb, not written in stone and not unchangeable -- most important of all is doing what feels right and what reads right, and what seems to be most effective for the story and genre.

I may not be considered an authority on anything, I honestly don't know. But speaking as someone for whom 'gay' is a social label (one of several), I know what I like.

- If the be-all and end-all of the character is 'a gay guy', toss the concept out. Start over again and develop the character from the beginning. Sexual orientation is an important part of a person, but it isn't the sum total of any person's being. If you're just tossing in this character simply to be a gay presence, you should examine why you feel you want to do that and then ask yourself, who is this character? No-one is just a set of genitalia, to be defined solely by sexual preference. It is just one part of a whole.

- Gay characters do not have to be either irrepressibly cheerful or utterly miserable. In any world, but especially fantasy worlds and settings, consider the logic behind any circumstances where the character is discriminated against or treated poorly. Just because there is high discrimination against non-heterosexuals in this world doesn't mean it's going to be that way by default in any other. The best-known example of this clumsy treatment is Mercedes Lackey's writings, where the main character is a dismal gay guy. Don't feel you have to prove that 'gay' is a misnomer when it comes to homosexuals. It generally makes your work tolerable only by teenagers desperate for any identification, or by people who have absolutely nothing to do with the subject.

On the other hand, irrepressibly cheerful gay guys often come off as trying way too hard. We have problems like anyone else does. Even in a world where gay guys aren't discriminated heavily against, problems must exist. Bad days happen; we aren't always going to be rays of sunshine, as much as we might like to be.

A character can be convincingly mostly cheery or depressive, though. It's just that if a character's raison d'etre is ebullience or misery, they're going to come off as questionable. And if the readers come up with questions about the motivation behind the character's mood and those questions aren't well-addressed in your narrative, it's going to become weaker in their eyes.

- Don't throw in stereotypical health problems because you think it will be engaging to a gay audience. Chances are it won't. If you're not aiming for a gay audience and you throw it in anyway, chances are high that someone in the audience will, regardless, find it cliched and probably very, very presumptuous, or even offensive.

- Gay men are not all feminine, or in touch with their feminine sides. Some are more macho than heterosexual men. There is no such thing as a 'typical' gay guy.

This doesn't mean there aren't mincing camp queens around. There are a lot of them. But it also bears thinking about why these men act so iconoclastic to traditionally expected 'masculine' behaviour. Some act that way as a reaction to what they have been pressured into their whole lives, others because it is truly more comfortable for them. Why would your character act this way? If you don't know, you should think about it.

There's nothing wrong with queeny guys. It's just that they've been far overdone, sometimes in offensive ways, up to now. Some gay audiences will find them irritating and will question the motives of the writer. It is, in some ways, comparable to the presentation of characters of colour in roughly the first half of the 20th century; some of the situations and characters were true to life, but a good many of them were also written by an author simply mashing together stereotypes with little understanding of the reasons behind it, usually only including the characters due to it being a popular trend. Because of that, many of these portrayals are viewed as uncomfortable or even offensive today.

- Similarly iffy are the promiscuous party boy, the body maniac or narcissist, the diva...these have all been overdone. Proceed with care if you intend to try and present them again.

- Be very careful about using epithets. These are words that are offensive by nature. They are generally only permissible when trying to convey some message with the situation, or to teach a lesson. Most gay people will not be comfortable with the 'f' word -- the one that is generally only acceptable when referring to a cigarette. Similarly, don't use the word 'gay' to mean 'stupid' or 'unacceptable' -- many gay people take exception to this, and justifiably. If you don't understand why, simply insert one of your own social labels in there. 'That's so Jewish.' 'That is just the most Chinese-American thing I have ever heard in my life.' 'How black.' It's a really ugly misappropriation of a word by the ignorant.

- Gay people do not exist solely to dole out meaningful advice and life lessons to their heterosexual friends. It happens sometimes, but it's getting a little old for that to be the new standard role for any gay characters. The trope is called the 'magical negro' (and I'm sorry if it sounds insensitive, that's just its name) because of the prevalence of black characters being cast in this role for some time after trend shifts meant they could no longer be caricature comic relief. The same shift of trends seems to have landed gay characters squarely in the position of existing solely to give profound, life-changing advice to their straight buddies.

While it's true that many gay people do actually have a lot to say on the subject, most of the time the characters are not allowed any real lives of their own. Most gay characters still are never allowed to have actual relationships and are basically just accessories to the more 'acceptable' straight characters' lives.

- Gay people aren't all about sex any more than straight people are. Although it is a sexual orientation, that doesn't necessarily refer to sexual intercourse, but instead to sex as in gender. With any character, sexuality or lack thereof is an important part of the character, his or her motivations, and aspects of life. Many gay guys are more comfortable in a mature way with sex, as in sexual intercourse, than their straight friends, simply because it is one of the things that most gay men have to come to terms with during their own self-realisation. One of the only universal unifiers between gay men is a love for other men. Historically, one of the points of unity was the admiration of the male form and the male sexuality.

Many gay men have a more informed approach to sex, but that doesn't mean they're all sex maniacs, or even that all of them have sex at all. Similarly, however, it doesn't mean they don't. If you want to throw a gay character into your story but can't bear to think about him having sex, maybe you should consider whether or not you really can handle having him there.

- Gay men and straight women often get along well. However, that doesn't mean that they're interchangeable or that they experience the same things emotionally, sexually, or otherwise. They have many commonalities, but don't make the mistake many writers do and think that they are basically just the same thing in a different shape. They're not. Men who would rather be women (and vice-versa) are transgender, not gay. It is a very important distinction. Most gay men are happy to be men who like men and don't want to be women, and don't identify as female. Drag queens -- men who dress and often perform on-stage as female characters -- are not necessarily transgender either. In fact, they don't even have to be gay. There are plenty of straight guys who love to wear women's clothing and have absolutely zero desire to actually be female.

If you find yourself writing a gay male character as basically a woman with a penis, there's something wrong. If you find yourself writing a gay male character as endlessly admiring women and desiring to be a woman, ask yourself whether or not you might just want to write a transgender character instead, and do your research. It is a whole different, and of course beautiful, world. Just don't mix them all together and expect no-one to call you on it.

- Most important of all, develop your character organically. Develop his hopes and fears, his triumphs and his tragedies. Don't just fill him full of character flaws, because that tends to be nothing more than a handy way to attempt to cover up weak writing. If he's just a placeholder, ask yourself if making him gay serves any real purpose.

Saying that an otherwise unexceptional character is gay, for no reason other than to make him stand out, usually comes off as desperate and ultimately uninteresting. If the character isn't making an impression, saying that he is gay may win him some fans, but they will quickly give him up if he doesn't grow a personality as well. While it is potentially interesting for a character to have an unexpected sexual preference, ask yourself: what does this contribute to the story and to the character? Does it really have any role? Is there any real reason for it to come up? As someone who has been through many, many dates, I can say that just being gay does not make someone interesting, kind, engaging, deep, or appealing.


These are just my thoughts, and I hope they might at least give you a few thoughts of your own about writing characters who are gay and actual people too. The depth that should be developed with any character must of course be developed regardless of sexuality. That is just one aspect of many that can enrich characters.

And as always, I'd love to hear from any of you with thoughts or ideas about this topic. Let me know your approaches to characters and their sexualities as an aspect of their identities!