Horror: An Attitude, Not a Genre
What scares you? Skip over the boring answers: debt, unemployment, in-laws. You aren't actually scared of those things. You just worry about them. At best, they're doorways that lead to the things you're really frightened of -- loss of control and/or luxury.
Spiders? Sure. Everyone's scared of spiders, right? Snakes, too, probably. Hornets. Cockroaches, maybe. But are you really, really scared of them? Would you lose sleep over them? If you think about them too much, does your heart stop a little as it tries to crawl into your ribcage?
What about the sound of blood dripping on linoleum?
What about reaching out in the dark to pet your cat -- and touching something cool, damp, and sticky?
What about waking up with the taste of rotting meat in your mouth?
Yeah. Any of those things would probably scare me, too. The unexplained has a knack for that. Of course, it goes away -- the thing about the unexplained is that, eventually, it's either explained or ignored. The novelty wears off: witness the slow and painful death that the X-Files has been suffering these past few seasons.
How about killing someone in a fight -- and finding out you liked it? How about biting your lover in a fit of passion -- and not being able to let go? How about giving in to your most perverse craving -- and realizing you don't feel guilty anymore?
Loss of self-control. Fear of the self -- now that's fear. No one can scare us more than ourselves. No one. Sure, if a guy were to break through my picture window here right now and wave an axe in my face, I might feel a bit pretentious and take that back. But that's the fear of the immediate. If I lived, it would go away. What would remain would be the fear I'd subject myself to -- reliving the instant when the axe flashed into sight, playing out alternate scenarios in my head, maybe worrying that I'd wished the whole thing on myself with all this talk of fear and horror and whatnot.
Horror isn't about zombies and vampires and things that go bump in the night -- not exclusively, not as set dressing. You can't simply drop a couple animated skeletons into a fight scene and make it frightening. Horror is a mood, and moods have to be set.
Now here's the good part. What's scarier? The spider sitting in a glass box
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