You Feed It Right, and It Can Be a Beautiful Thing: Reflections on Writing Horror

Six months after my return to horror fiction, I take a little inspiration from two masters of the genre.

Still from John Carpenter’s Christine (1983), based on the novel by Stephen King.

I’m trying to teach myself how to write genre fiction. The challenge getting in the headspace of the genre reader, to read more for story and character and less for style and ideas. After fifteen years or so of approaching reading like a literary critic, diving back into genre – mainly horror fiction, but also crime and science fiction – is making me read like a normie again.

And it’s not just reading. I’ve been devouring all kinds of horror movies to much the same end: attempting to unlock, as much as I can, the secrets of creating narrative terror. For me, this is the only way to do it; ready-made, Robert McKee-style plotting models never held much appeal. You see what’s been done well (and not so well) and you try to make use of it in your own work. There are no shortcuts, no ways to make it easier. We’re all, all of us, just fumbling our way around in the dark, in the end.

I watched John Carpenter’s Christine for the first time the other night. Though I read Stephen King’s novel in high school, I hadn’t given it much thought since then. It never made as much of an impression on me as, say, Misery or The Shining, possibly because the concept always felt a little silly. An evil car that kills people just doesn’t have the same conceptual punch as a psychotic fan holding you prisoner, or even a haunted hotel.

I really enjoyed the movie, though; it’s an impeccably made horror-thriller, and one of the better Stephen King adaptations. Much better than it has any right to be, in fact. Maybe, I’ve been thinking, there’s a lesson there for aspiring genre writers like me.

Christine, like many of the best Stephen King stories, is rooted in the familiar. The movie is populated with recognizable character types (the high school outcast, the school bully, the best girl) and tropes of Americana (rock and roll, drive-in movie theaters, high school football games, and, of course, muscle cars), but it makes them distinct enough to keep everything fresh. Because Christine lays the appropriate narrative groundwork, the story can move freely from the familiar to the strange without becoming predictable, and its more fantastical elements – the evil car elements – end up becoming easier to believe. In the end, the movie works because it’s not just a story about a haunted car: it’s a haunting story about specifically American obsessions. It’s just Arnie Cunningham and Christine; a boy and his car against the world.

All of these elements combined keep what may be a fundamentally silly idea from ever feeling silly. King and Carpenter take the material seriously, and they dare their viewers to do the same. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, coming as it does from two masters of the genre, but their sincerity feels bold today. In a cultural moment where mocking self-referentiality is so in fashion, it’s easy to imagine a winking, ironic, up-its-own-ass version of Christine, more concerned with poking fun at itself – “we’re making a dumb movie, and we know it’s dumb!” – than daring its audience to feel something. Irony would have been the easy path. But John Carpenter and Stephen King have horror in their bones, and they respect – and love, and understand – the genre enough to take it seriously. That’s what gives Christine its magic.

There are days when I get sick of fumbling around in the dark. There’s no reason to write, not really; no discernable reason to continue, no plausible reward. It takes a truly sick mind to sit down and do it every day anyway – a sick mind and grim determination. But I keep writing, and occasionally I even produce a piece I’m proud of. If you move around in the dark long enough, you’ll eventually brush up against something.

When writing, I’ve found, it helps to cultivate obsession. I keep hoovering up horror stories because I want the genre, its history, its tropes, its possibilities, imprinted on my brain. The closer it is to being second nature for me, the way it is for John Carpenter and Stephen King, the more assured I become in realizing my own dark visions.

Christine, in a weird way, feels like a validation of the work I’ve been putting in over the past six months. It’s a reminder that I’ve passed through the first phase of my continuing evolution into a genre writer, and a sign there’s real creative possibility there if I continue. The more I give horror, the more, it seems, that horror gives back. My love of the genre is the engine that propels me.

I’ll leave the last word to Arnie Cunningham:

Let me tell you a little something about love, Dennis. It has a voracious appetite. It eats everything. Friendship. Family. It kills me how much it eats. But I'll tell you something else. You feed it right, and it can be a beautiful thing, and that's what we have. You know, when someone believes in you, man, you can do anything, any fucking thing in the entire universe. And when you believe right back in that someone, then watch out world, because nobody can stop you then, nobody! Ever!