The Revisitation: A Tale of Horror

Sometimes it's good to give your ideas a chance to develop and evolve. Other times it's good to have some one give you a little push. I'm definitely not trying to steal anyone's thunder, just sort of riffing off of some interesting ideas.

For starters my notion that four was better than three comes from Dramatica and the Dramatica theory of story which uses quads to describe story structure in increasing levels of detail. Here are the top levels:

• Situation (Universe) - an external state; commonly seen as a situation.
  
• Activity (Physics) - an external process; commonly seen as an activity.
  
• Fixed Attitude (Mind) - an internal state; commonly seen as a fixed attitude or bias.
  
• Manipulation (Psychology) - an internal process; commonly seen as a manner of thinking or manipulation.

At this level the theory is talking about elements that could be found in any kind of story: Non-fiction, Comedy, Drama, or Entertainment. Some genres like comedy or drama are seen as being intrinsic to the theory, and can be elaborated on:

• Situation Comedy - TV Sitcoms (I Love Lucy)
  
• Action Comedy - Slapstick (Three Stooges)
  
• Comedy of Fixed Attitudes - Comedy of Manners (Oscar Wilde)
  
• Comedy of Manipulations - Comedy of Errors (Twelfth Night)
  

There are a total of 16 genres created through these combinations. The genres that we generally think of as Genre fiction are lumped together as stylistic variations under Entertainment:

• Entertaining Situations - Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Musicals, Disaster Movies
  
• Entertaining Actions - Action Adventure, Suspense
  
• Entertaining Fixed Attitudes - High Concept
  
• Entertaining Manipulations - Mysteries, Thrillers

Beyond that, Armando Saldana-Mora in his book on screenwriting has refined these Dramatica categories so that the genres are defined a little more loosely:

• Genres Set In a Situation: Horror, Disaster, Road/Buddy, Police, Prison
• Genres Set In Activities: Action/Adventure (Westerns, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, War, Spy), Road, Buddy, Crime (Detective Stories, Suspense, Thrillers), Romantic Comedies, Social Dramas (Modern Epics, Domestic Dramas), Personal Dramas (Punitive Plots, Testing Plots)
• Genres Set in Fixed Attitudes: Social Dramas (Classroom, Courtroom, Psycho Dramas, Business Dramas, Holocaust Dramas), Love Stories, Erotica
• Genres Set in Manipulations and Manners of Thinking: Mysteries and Whodunits, Personal Dramas (Education Plot, Disillusionment Plot, Redemption Plot), Coming of Age Stories
  

So these make a little more common sense. For instance you can see where a Romance novel is a better example for an Entertainment of Fixed Attitudes (Obsessions), than the poorly defined "High Concept" (entertainment based on an inventive idea). I've also wondered if meta-fiction or experimental stories could also be included there, but that's a discussion for another day.

Back to Horror. In Saldano-Mora's scheme, Horror is limited to a terrifying situation or environment:

In Supernatural Horror (THE HAUNTING), the environment has no logical explanation. In an Uncanny Story (ALIEN), the situation is logical but still holds the characters in shocking circumstances. And in a Hybrid Super-Uncanny Horror (THE SHINING), the situation's nature is never clear.

Variants include the Gothic Story (FROM HELL), where the dark circumstances only beset the Main Character... And the Black Comedy (ONCE BITTEN) -- where only one character steps into the not-so-scary situation like a fish out of water...

That's OK, but the sub-genres seem arbitrarily chosen and the examples are a little off. There are probably better examples of an Uncanny Story than the movie Alien, and I wouldn't consider From Hell to be a Gothic Story. Black Comedy can mean many things to many people.

More importantly, they sort of skirt past the issue of what is "terrifying". What is the "horror" of Horror, what is the DNA of what scares us? So, inspired by Literacity, I've undertaken my own scheme based around the more standard Dramatica model.

In Dramatica every story has a set of well defined story points including, the Story Goal (the problem the protagonist is trying to solve), Requirements (what the protagonist needs to solve the problem), and Consequences (what will happen if the protagonist fails to solve the problem). There are also Forewarnings, Dividends, Costs, Prerequisites, and Preconditions but these are less important to the story overall.

To me, what distinguishes genres like Fantasy and Science Fiction from Horror is the emphasis they place on these story points. In Lord of the Rings, the goal is to destroy the ring before Sauron can take control of Middle-Earth. In Star Wars, the goal is to destroy the death star before it can destroy the rebellion. Both of these stories end in success. Evil is defeated and everyone is happy. Horror, on the other hand, focuses much more on the consequences of failing to reach a goal: corruption, mayhem, decadence, and madness. Damage to body and soul. There are other ways to fail in a genre story, but with horror the consequences are graphic, visceral, shocking, and irreversible.

By these terms I mean:

• Corruption of the environment or the body through supernatural transformation.
• Chaotic activities and mayhem.
• Decadent ideas based on morbid attitudes and obsessions.
• Psychological terror based on a character's descent into madness or based on the mind games of another.
  

Here's my original set with modifications:

• Failure of the environment (Situation)
  corruption (haunted houses, weird mutations zombie movies)
• Failure of action (Activity)
  violation (slasher films, torture) mayhem (Monster movies, Slasher Movies)
• Failure of the mind (Fixed Ideas Attitudes)
  decadence (morbid desires attitudes and obsessions; Phantom of the Opera Marquis de Sade, Gothic Literature)
• Failure of psychology (Manipulations)
  madness (psychological horror; think Poe and Lovecraft)

I think the two tricky ones are Fixed Attitudes and Manipulations, or Decadence and Madness. In my mind, one is cool and the other hot, one rational the other irrational, one philosophical and the other passionate.

A fixed attitude is a prejudice or bias that defines how one sees the world. It is a static point of view that can harden into obsession. In horror, this can be expressed through decadent attitudes about the world where normative morality is inverted or twisted: pain is pleasure, ugliness is beauty, evil is good. In Gothic stories, tombs and ruins are romanticized and characters obsess over dead lovers. Love and death are conflated.

In psychological horror on the other hand we have stories based on madness, mystery, and manipulations. Our manner of thinking becomes problematic leading us into errors in judgment and mis-identifications. We also make ourselves vulnerable to the mind games, misrepresentations and misleading desires of others. In Poe for example, the narrator of the "Tell-Tale Heart" is driven to confess his crimes by the non-existent heart beat, while in "The Cask of Amontillado," Fortunato is lured to his doom through the manipulativeness of the narrator. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is made terrifying through his ability to manipulate others.

Psychological horror can also extend to the way the author tries to manipulate the audience through twists and turns and shocks. This could possibly include everything from The Sixth Sense to Giallo thrillers.

The important thing to remember is that each of these categories focuses on consequence and failure where other genres strive for solving the problem and reaching the goal. Here's another snapshot:

• Success story of environment: Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Failure story of environment: Supernatural Horror

• Success story of action: Action Adventure, Suspense
  
• Failure story of action: Monster Movies, Slasher Movies
  

• Success story of fixed attitude: Romance
• Failure story of fixed attitude: Gothic

• Success story of manipulations: Mystery, Thriller
  
• Failure story of manipulations: Psychological Horror, Giallo
  

In other words, horror stories are hybrid genre stories in which the physical and mental traumas of failure are placed front and center.

Having gotten this far, I now see a lot of parallels between Horror and Drama. In Drama you have both the modern and the classical definitions of tragedy and failure. So what's the difference between Horror fiction and Tragedy? Perhaps Drama can be defined by personal flaws and failings that lead to one's downfall, while Horror represents the impersonal and the alien? Something to think about for the next revisitation.