I think I should probably, despite my not having published either works related to this post, preemptively address certain concerns future readers may have with my works and how their endings are used well or not in the maybe horror genre.
First of all, this is a work in the horror comedy sub genre, a genre known for both scares and laughs and sometimes it’s gold, sometimes it’s not.
I wasn’t always familiar with the horror genre, my first real horror movie I watched was a double feature of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street, played on TV on Friday 13th oddly enough. Jason jumping out of the water scared the hell out of me and as a result I should probably mention I was a wussy pants until I was about 21 or so.
Round about when I was 21 I was cyberstalked by some guy who not only had some Charles Bronson Death Wish crusade against me and threatened to letter bomb my house. If Col. Kurtz said in Apocalypse Now that you must become a friend of horror, it’s safe to assume that because real world horror was knocking at my door, horror movies to an extent were finally allowed to visit my house in my brain.
I wasn’t a kid who enjoyed jump scares as a kid. I hated The Lion King as a child because I was frightened by the loud noises of the lions and as blasphemous as it is for me to say, Mufasa’s death for me inspired less tears of trauma as much as gaping sighs of relief. As a 21 year old man I was confronted with very real horror of my own era, and Freddy Kruger became somewhat less scary to a depressed insomniac who couldn’t sleep well even if he wanted to. I’m sorry Freddy. Maybe if I got to know you a little younger I would have been scared by you.
So a lot of the trolls associated with this fucker who threatened to letterbomb my house thought I was a wuss for not being able to handle due to my autistic audiosensitivity the Dolby sound of Flags Of Our Fathers when Clint Eastwood put that out, my manhood was on the line. I couldn’t let what was pretty much people in their basements on the other side of the world tell me I was less of a man than them.
So I did what any man would do. I took the Batman: The Animated Series villain template and turned my tragic past into motivation for revenge. Internet troll revenge, but still, I’d prove to them I was truly a man.
But how would I find out where such depraved, exploitive, most insane films cinema had to offer could be located? Some kind of… curatorial museum of cinema trash curiosity… something like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com OH THAT WORKS.
I blame Brad Jones most of all for not only causing me to despise my own government in Australia for banning films and video games via the OFLC, but enabling this roaring rampage of revenge I was having against douchebags on the internet. The day I watched his review of Caligula was where it all clicked, the Start Of Darkness as TV Tropes calls it. I hunted down the big three OFLC no-nos past and present I could find on legitimate DVD. I even found by chance an uncut copy of Caligula with the OFLC R18+ rating stuck on it by mistake, which I keep as a trophy of the nanny state’s failure to this day. I hunted down DVDs both depraved and gory left and right, Shocking Asia, Cannibal Holocaust, Salo when it finally got released on Blu Ray because the OFLC un-banned it, and I watched it without so much being offended, as the only boner I received being my imagining the Australian Minister of Communications, Steven Conroy, crying in a corner as even he could not prevent the corruption of my formerly innocent mind.
Ban me harder Senator. Harder… I’ve been a bad citizen. So very civilly disobedient, chain me up like the monster you know I’ve become…
Considering I was unfamiliar with horror movies and wanted to prove to random douchebag trolls I was neither a wuss or the lesser man, I didn’t so much start out with watching the rest of the Friday The 13th or Nightmare On Elm Street movies as I went all out to eleven trying to bombard my brain with such ultraviolence that I would feel nothing at all instead of terror when I witnessed the worst of the worst.
Logic had a hand in this, very… unstable crazy guy logic that went like this: “I’m squeamish and have no real experience watching the nastier kinds of horror movies, so Takashi Miike just seems like the right move right now…”.
I watched Takashi Miike and loved it, for reasons entirely unrelated to revenge for once. This wasn’t just gore, this was gore that was thought out properly rather than just slapped in there. Actual tension and suspense was present. Also, in regards to Takashi Miike, Miike-san I blame my sudden Danbooru searches of “milking” anime girls squarely on your tireless efforts to cram breast milk into Visitor Q and Gozu’s plot. You’re welcome.
So, back to my own work. I didn’t want to end up being accused of being a phoney who has no business writing in the horror genre, considering that Stephanie Meyer said in interviews she didn’t watch any horror movies because they were too scary. I’ll admit the idea of “being scared is fun” is still a bit baffling to me as a guy diagnosed with an anxiety disorder that turns everyday situations like missing the bus into what could be the most terrifying atmospheric horror ever made… but I want to earn that credibility.
Credibility I kind of lost when I first saw Hobo With A Shotgun at the Australian premiere and didn’t get it at first. I can’t reconcile how I saw Cannibal Holocaust first and yet this was what made me a fetal position curled up ball of fear, I still can’t. But I think it has something to do with me being in a really weird area of town for that time of night and I was in an unfamiliar situation where it was loud and people were laughing at some truly awful things… I wasn’t used to the idea that mean spirited violence could be funny I guess. At all. I didn't leave the theater because I wanted to see how it ended, and running out of that theater would invalidate all that I'd accomplished so far in my attempts to prove my manliness by standing the test of the goriest of cinema.
And having rewatched Hobo With A Shotgun in my own home which feels a lot safer than Newtown or wherever at midnight… I saw the appeal a lot more when I wasn’t surrounded by strangers who brought their dates to this kind of movie and kept laughing very, very loudly.
To this day, if I have spare change and I see a hobo, I will give it to him.
Which brings me to what I was thinking about. Horror movie endings.
I mentioned Brad Jones in this post but what got me really thinking about the approach I was going with in my own work trying to end a horror comedy properly was seeing Josh Langland's two part video on The Mist and how effective that ending was in conveying just how brutal Stephen King's horrific post-apocalyptic landscape could be. I always try and make sure that my endings feel right, whatever genre I'm writing in, and always make sure it's not too abrupt if at all possible.
I also like making sure if I'm writing a trilogy that the third instalment isn't disappointing to my audience. I have no idea who my audience is yet, because I'm not published, but I'm gathering the opinion that a lot of people think the third instalment of a trilogy is often kinda lame. Especially when Part Two of a trilogy features such spectacular carnage that the third part couldn't possibly live up to.
Like mine does. Without spoiling it, let's just say a lot of politicians die because of their complacency with their trying to weaponise a terrible curse for their own ends. Like, the entire Australian Parliament and US Congress at the same time. I changed the ending slightly because it didn't make sense.
The part where the media is portrayed as amoral and exploitative of said carnage in order to sell papers is kept in. The message is the same. The part where the old newspaper vendor gets shot by a robber soon after he says that nobody will care if the politicians died because "the paper only prints bad news!" - that stayed. The part that changed is actually very subtle and minor compared to my initial draft. The change was that instead of everyone on Earth being apathetic and hateful towards the dead politicians, they act like Not-Patrick-Bateman-From-American Psycho and like normal human beings, as in... people who wouldn't take the mass slaughter of their elected politicians lightly.
I changed this from the even bleaker ending where nobody cares that the politicians are dead because it doesn't make sense for every single person in America and Australia to act like Patrick Bateman. I saw the 9/11 footage on TV as a kid. I saw how people reacted to a building that did not even CONTAIN politicians being destroyed. And I don't think, that the American mind, the American homo sapiens, would ever, in all of their days just not care that every elected official, Republican or Democrat, is now dead because of some horrible ghost curse. They would call it for the act of war it pretty much is. My intention of this ending, in a horror comedy mind you, is that things get so heinous in both Australian and American politics, that the mass slaughter of politicians brought on by their own karma for trying to weaponise a terrible curse for their own ends, actually makes the standards of living for everyone involved better for the worst possible reasons imaginable. People start thinking about politics within the universe of the novel trilogy in terms of "You know what, things have gotten bad lately. I think we need to discuss what all this implies about long standing treaties with other nations we've taken advantage of for dodgy ends". The ending was never meant to be bleak and meaningless. It was meant to be bleak but impactful, the idea was to provoke change from the worst situations in this imagined world, and perhaps our own if I'm lucky. It's an ending that is black comedy, but remembers to be an actual comedy. The joke isn't that people died, the joke is "Oh geez, we let it get this bad before we actually did something? I gotta start reading the news again...".
And you know what? Considering that most people think the third in a trilogy after the really dark one is kind of a letdown... I think that gives me a lot of wiggle room to tie up loose ends that were ignored for the greater stakes at hand when the life or death stakes die down a bit so the characters start to notice how their lives have changed, for better and for worse.
There's a potential to subvert people's expectations from going from what they thought was gonna be lame compared to the second one to exploring real adult consequences of what's happened and what they've learned.
I also watched Little Shop Of Horrors: The Director's Cut on Blu Ray last night.
This movie also made me thing about horror movie/book/story endings a lot.
So there's been a big deal about how the complete, remastered Director's Cut of Little Shop Of Horrors that appalled the test audiences of the 80s finally saw the light of day. And having never seen Little Shop Of Horrors all the way through until long into my early twenties, since my music teacher didn't have time to show us the whole movie, I was warned somewhat how the Director's Cut was dark as shit, but I didn't know how far they'd go until I saw it.
I felt actual emotions I for years tried to desensitise myself towards to prove I was a real man.
And then I realised it wasn't feeling actual emotion that made me less of a man. That asshole who threatened to letterbomb my house and his troll cohort in their attempts to dehumanise me were hardly men at all. My reaction to this wasn't dead eyed apathy, it was a reawakening of myself to the beauty and magic of cinema. It was dark, but I loved it. It was like witnessing how art after twenty years in the dust bin of history, finally survived on home video in HD, despite the tireless efforts of Hollywood's focus groups to stamp it out.
To feel actual emotions during a movie is what's supposed to happen, or with any story in any medium. I'd progressed from feeling I had to be dead inside to allowing myself and the worlds I created and enjoying worlds others had created... as a good thing. And that's why I may or may not be qualified to write in the horror genre.
