The other night, my girlfriend had a bad dream. Not a nightmare, exactly, but a bad dream. In the dream, she was watching a twelve year-old girl and her younger brother dangling in a truck off a cliff. The truck fell into the water. The truck plummeted nose first to the bottom of a river below. They escaped, but the rapids were pulling them down and away, so she tried to push him back into the cab through the back window. A desperate effort to save his life. The back window had been broken into a gaping maw. The truck itself was pushed over and over into the riverbed. The little boy was chewed to bits while his sister watched in horror. My girlfriend found this upsetting, but not frightening.
It’s not that her dreams don’t ever scare her. A while back, she had a dream that she was in a city at night. The city was made up of rundown brownstones. Streetlights glinted off of puddles from recent rain. Each building was spaced by an alley way. As she walked along the street, she began to whistle a tune. From across the street, her whistling was returned with humming. She looked over to see who was there. She saw a young girl, no more than 7 or 8, in full Victorian dress with a hat pulled down low, hiding her eyes. My girlfriend stopped whistling. A sense of foreboding came over her and she hurried along. The humming of the ethereal song continued. It was like her scent had been caught. The next alleyway she saw the girl again. The girl stood perfectly still but was noticeably closer. My girlfriend suddenly knew that the girl wanted to hurt her, torture her, draw her death out over years. She began to run. In each alleyway on both sides of the street the girl came ever closer. More and more desperately my girlfriend ran, until the girl was at the entrance of the alleyway across the street, and the alleyway right in front of her loomed. Then she awoke, frigid and sweating.
The big difference between these dreams is that she felt more involved in the story of the girl, because it was her that was there. The river was strangers that she didn’t know. She felt like she was just watching a movie with the strangers. This is an advantage novelists have over filmmakers in creating horror. The visceral gore only goes so far in creating emotions. So often it never goes far enough to create horror, just trigger our gag reflexes. Film does try to emulate the protagonist of some horror, by focusing on a single character as the story progresses, but written fiction can put them even further inside their head, into the primordial pockets of fear that reside there.
Always make sure that when you write horror, it scares the shit out of you too. I have to go change my underwear now.
A Daily Dose of Zach 