The Horror Genre.

Wider Reading Coursework:

The Horror Genre

The horror genre is based on fear, predominantly visual, psychological and atmospherical. A very good horror may even be able to affect you physically, making you too scared to go to sleep, turn the light off or the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. ‘The Blair Witch Project’ uses suspense in the way that you never get to see what is actually following the students in the woods, making you use your imagination, which can be much scarier than anything you can see. It also sets the scene at the start of the film when they ask people on the streets about the woods, and when they all say bad things you now something bad is going to happen. This happens in a similar but different form in ‘The Superstitious Mans Story’.

At the start of the story it straight away sets William Privett up to be a bit strange, not in the literal sense, but in a way that he has a strange presence. The narrator says, and I quote:

“…if he was in the house or anywhere behind your back without you seeing him, there seemed to be something clammy in the air, as if a cellar door was opened close by your elbow”.

The Sexton (church caretaker) says that:

“…he’d not known the bell go so heavy in his hand for years – and he feared it meant death in the parish”.

This is like the towns-people at the start of Blair Witch; you are given the feeling that something bad is going to happen.

In ‘Silence of the Lambs’ after the killer, Buffalo Bill, takes a victim he puts a moth inside their mouth. Although William Privett was not murdered, a miller-moth flies out of his mouth when he is found dead in ‘The Superstitious Mans Story’.

The strange thing about this is the fact that he hasn’t worked in a mill for several years.

At that same time Philip Hookhorn (a towns-man) was at Longpuddle Spring and saw William there, and this was peculiar because William never went there, on account that that was the place his only son drowned as a child. So it could be said that the miller-moth that came out of his mouth could have been his soul or spirit escaping from his body. His spirit may have been out of his body earlier on in the story also, because his wife Betty could have sworn that she ‘felt’ him go past her while she was ironing, even though she never looked or exchanged words with him. Nancy Weedle, a friend’s daughter, also says that she saw William out at the same time. But Nancy saw him going in to the church on Midsummer Eve, and any “faint shapes of all the folk in the parish who are going to be at deaths door within the year can be seen entering the church”. The people who recover from their illness come out after a while. Notice the way that Betty ‘felt’ William go by her, indicating that the unexplained, clammy aurora that he seems to have could actually be his spiritual being. This story gives me the impression that you have to be in touch with your spiritual side, believing in ghosts and other strange phenomena.

But this of course was written in the eighteenth century, around the same time that Edgar Allen Poe wrote the poem ‘The Raven’, which features a talking Raven and angels. Nowadays with scientific knowledge and facts, and better common sense you don’t get many people finding supernatural stories believable, but the intended audience of the time would have been affected by it.

‘IT’ is a good horror film. It shows us that anything can have a dark-side, as the killer in it is a clown, which is usually a happy, entertaining character. If you look at it in ...

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‘IT’ is a good horror film. It shows us that anything can have a dark-side, as the killer in it is a clown, which is usually a happy, entertaining character. If you look at it in a certain way, ‘Night Fears’ is also like this, dealing with the other sides to the human psyche, but it has other factors that conform to the horror genre. The situation that his job as night watchman has put him in, all alone at night with a fire the only light available, plus the fact that he’s uneasy about taking the job, is something that is often seen in horror films.

You get the impression he’s unsettled with the job practically straight away, when it says just four lines into the story:

“Two days ago, when he first took the job, he was in inclined to suspect the light; it dazzled him, made a target of him…”

This shows that he feels vulnerable when he is alone at work, that the small source of light he has in front of him simply makes every where else seem darker. While walking around on patrol he find himself dozing off, but one time when he reawakens he sees that there is a person sitting on the barrier to his enclosure. He straightaway finds something unusual about the man, the fact that he did not hear him approach or sit onto the barrier. I feel that he didn’t hear him coming could have something to do with him dozing off slightly as he was walking. He reacts to his presence calmly, assuming that he’s a drunk, and tries to usher him on his way home. Then the stranger says the first thing that spooks the watchman. When he says:

“A fine night”, the stranger replies by saying, “Yes, but cold; it will be colder before morning”.

At this point the night watchman turns to his brazier, and he suddenly realises that his coke supply is not as much as the previous nights, and that it is running out. When the watchman tells the stranger that this is the reason for the lack of heat coming from the fire, he begins to attack him further.

“…how easily men forget? This coke of yours, I mean; it looks as if they didn’t care about you very much, leaving you in the cold like this.”

This statement strikes the watchman particularly odd as that thought had just crossed his mind, and eerily the stranger picked up on it.

The watchman tries to get that thought out of his mind quickly, by dismissing the strangers suggestion by saying that they probably just forgot to leave him any as they were rushing to get home. But then he contradicts himself by admitting that he doesn’t know his co-workers that well, and that he has a feeling that the one they call ‘Old Bill’ doesn’t like him, and it was Old Bill’s task to leave him the nights supply of coke. The watchman then reveals that he is growing impatient with the stranger:

“How I would like to push him off, the night-watchman thought, irritated and somehow troubled”.

The two of them carry on like this for quite a while, with the stranger bringing up problems like money, sleeping during the day and not spending time with his family.

With the problem of sleeping during the day the stranger says:

“People have done themselves in sooner than stand the torture”

This is an important part of the story as it is the first time that death is mentioned, and this is the main point you would when explaining why the night watchman killed himself. He thought that the blue blinds that his wife were making him would solve his insomnia, but this statement by the stranger even puts doubts in his mind about this, something that he once described as a ‘Sovereign remedy’.

Then the stranger starts to get personal when he starts talking about his family:

“What about your children? You won’t see much of them… they’ll grow up without knowing you… not that you miss them much… if children don’t get fond of their father while they’re young, they never will”

At this point I feel that the watchman is starting to lose it, as he doesn’t defend himself by saying how good the kids were, even though before the thought of his children and wife was the only this getting him through the night.

The stranger then suggests that he should find another job; maybe the stranger is after the job as night watchman and is trying to scare him out of the job.

The stranger seams to actually be taking control as the next quote shows:

“ ‘I was never brought up to a trade… fathers fault’ It struck him that he had never confessed that before; had sworn not to give his father away. What am I coming to?”

This sudden ‘control’ that the man has over the mind of the watchman strongly shows that the stranger was probably in his head all along, and that the doubtful side of his conscious has taken the form of this stranger. This, getting into his mind, by the stranger happens again as the watchman realises that he is soaked with perspiration:

“I shall get a chill, that’ll be the next thing… such an idea hadn’t occurred to him since he was a child”.

This indicates that the stranger is getting deeper and deeper into his thoughts, and has now got so deep it has reached thoughts that he had not conceived since he was a child.

The stranger then says:

“It’s a pity you’re under contract to finish this job”

As the night watchman did not mention anything about a contract, this is a pivotal moment if you are trying to understand who or what the stranger actually is, as it narrows it down to two possibilities.

He is either a man after the watchman’s job, as he has found out from somewhere that there is a contract involved, or he is the watchman’s imagination, and he knows about the contract from the watchman’s memory.

The night watchman soon after starts to walk and stumble around his confinement aimlessly, banging his own head as random thoughts start to go through his mind. Then one particular thought stands out from all the confusion, as he reaches into his pocket for his knife to kill himself. The stranger then turns around for the first time and sees the watchman dead on the floor. He then warms his hands on the brazier before crossing the street and starting down an ally and did not return. Just a few moments ago when I narrowed the stranger down to two possible things, I have now decided that the stranger was the night watchman’s conscious. I feel this way because I don’t think that it could have been a man after his job because of the fact that he went into the ally-way and did not return. If he were a real person this would suggest that he was a homeless man, and therefore would not be after a job.

The ‘Superstitious Mans Story’ is a story that requires you to believe in ghosts for you to really get the effect of it. At the time it was written it was common for people to believe in that kind of thing, as there was no way to prove that ghosts didn’t exist.

‘Night Fears’ how ever is a more recent story and is more of a psychological story, not telling you clearly what happens at the end and leaving you to make up you own mind.

In conclusion I think that ‘Night Fears’ is a more effective horror story as it is more up to date and in touch with my generation, as the idea of a psychological horror is still used even in the films of today.