Stuck in a rut much?

The other day, I saw a blog post where someone was complaining that they didn’t find vampires, werewolves, or zombies scary anymore. Their theory was that these monsters represent an external threat that we can neutralize, and that it takes away some of the fear. Well I think they’re wrong, and I could point to some stories in all three genres that have scared me. But there’s a whole lot more fiction featuring these monsters that are boring, and the real reason is, the monster horror genre is in a rut.

Some of you will say “Nuh-uh! I love these new stories.” Yes, but when you read one, are you scared? Are you ever really horrified? No. You get excited because someone is stroking your nostalgia boner, and this new story you love is just like that one story that did scare you when you were a teen. So what changed? Absolutely nothing, and there’s the problem.

Regardless of which monster you look at, writers fall back on a formula that will take the story to the same places we’ve always gone, reveal the same “secrets” we already know, and will resolve in the same ways we’ve seen over and over for more than three full decades. You have got to do something different to scare me.

You want an example? Let the Right One In scared me, but it wasn’t the vampire who did it. It was Hakan, Eli’s guardian. Here we have a “reluctant” pedophile who thinks it’s morally wrong for him to have sex with kids, but has no trouble murdering teenagers for Eli to drink from, all on the possible condition that one day Eli might let him have sex. Hakan sees Eli as a perfect answer to his problem, a child body with an adult brain. Guilt-free sex is what he’s after, and for this, he’s willing to murder slightly older children. That’s one scary monster, but he’s scary because he’s playing on real fears of the skeezy guy hanging out in the park. In a book full of monsters of various kinds, Hakan is scarier than a vampire because his motivation for killing is not to survive. He kills to bribe a vampire child for sex.

But the moment at which the book was scariest is Hakan pouring acid over his head in a suicide attempt. Here’s a guy I understand is a monster, and yet all the way up to the reveal, I was muttering, “Please, God, let him be dead.” That he lived was scary shit. I felt this fear for the worst character in the book. That’s the skill of a great writer, being able to generate pity for someone who doesn’t deserve it. Lindqvist is one of my favorite horror writers right now because he can scare me with any monster. In Harbour, his monster was the sea.It should be so huge and ambiguous that it has no effect on me. Yet there were scenes in the book so scary, I got freaked out and had to turn on all the lights in the aprtment.

Let’s compare Let the Right One In to the carbon copy vampire hunter stories. The vampires all have about the same lack of personality, and the same centuries-long killing streaks that strangely don’t leave behind trails of evidence for cops no matter how gory they get. The hero will win in the end, and while each story might find a different path to that conclusion, after reading 10-20 stories on the same theme, you really can’t be surprised or scared anymore. There’s no shock left over to feel for gore and dismemberment. You might still enjoy the story for validating your ideals that good wins out in the end, and it will still be well written. But the story being scary isn’t possible because surprise isn’t possible.

The same could be said for supernatural serial killers. I’m reading a story right now where the killer can get to anybody, anytime, anywhere. He can shut off security cameras with his mind, power down the lights in a store, and teleport inside to kill everyone before slaying his true target. The whole thing is boring. The problem is, once you’ve established in the first few chapters that the killer can do whatever he wants, you can’t build tension for anyone else in the book. It’s a forgone conclusion that they’ll die horribly.

I’m reading another horror story where the monster makes the main characters feel claustrophobia, and sometimes he calls their name. He’s able to manipulate computers and lights, and the impression given is that he can strike at any time. Yet 100 pages in, he’s still a faceless predator with no personality. The book isn’t helped by the main characters, not one of whom is interesting. I don’t care if they’re likable or not, but I need some motivation to feel for these people, and instead the story is taking the most boring, uninteresting people and facing them off against a monster that seems content to go “booga booga” and wander off to pester someone else.

This is not to say there aren’t some original takes out there, or that all horror is boring. But to scare me, you’ve got to get me out of the mindset that I’ve seen this before. You need to shake me up so that I can’t rely on my past experience to predict where you’re going with your story. You can’t do that if your story is a retread of someone else’s great idea.