Part two…

We all know why we love the traditional archetypes of horror. They have become the creatures that each and every writer has tried to put a spin on (including myself), but every so often a writer comes along and creates a new monster that joins the hallowed ranks of the legendary.

Stephen King’s Pennywise, Clive Barker’s Pinhead, and his cohort of cenobites to name but a couple. Why have they stuck around in our minds and how can we learn from them? Well, I have a theory about that…

I think partly it is not only the fact that these characters (wisely) stay away from hackneyed quips that make the skin crawl. They are also richly drawn characters that do not solely stalk the darkness in search of nubile teens to kill. They serve a purpose and have their purposes served – sometimes by trickery, sometimes with a deal or even because they have to answer to bigger beasts than themselves, but never just for the sake of murder. Nothing as crass. There is always a reason to the violence and we wait for every delicious moment because in some strange way as much as we want to join the masses with the burning torches, we want to watch the villain succeed. We want to be close to the numbered beast, so what better way than vicariously through the art of words and our imagination so we can stroke it without having our hand bitten off… I digress. My point is because these characters are so believable that they live as real incarnations of our darkest fears made from flesh and bone (but not always).

There is more to it than that though…

Ever noticed with (most) memorable characters that they never truly have a beginning…that no single thread can be traced to another to lead you to the genesis of it all. Let’s take ‘The hell bound heart’ (Clive Barker) There is the best explanation of why these characters stay with us. Is partly with the history, woven together from several threads that make a cohesive yet mysterious tapestry.  From Lemarchand’s box to ‘The order of the Gash’ to the engineer and his cohorts. We get a thumbnail sketch of them all, but never in detail…and there lays the magic in its simplicity, but so many seem to neglect this very simple ideal – to explain the mythical is to make it mundane. It takes away the magic that we had been wishing for, it humanizes them all too much…however…at the other end of this spectrum we have Anne Wilkes from Stephen King’s Misery where there is no magic. We live in Anne Wilkes world of ‘Cockadodee brats’ and her world where swearing is the language of the devil, yet she has no compunction in breaking a fellows ankles…yet again we find ourselves at one of the pillars of memorable characters. The violence serves a purpose, even if it is self-serving.

She is scary as hell because she is human. She could be that person that serves you at the counter as you grab a cup of coffee, she could be that lovely neighbor that waves at you watering her plants as you pick up the morning newspaper…she could even be your relative.

This is what makes her memorable.  She has flaws; she has fears, and bleeds just like the rest of us but somehow seems immortal, a force of nature and still I circle around this observation and that is everything that these characters share in common. All of their violent acts are never for the sheer sake of it but with an agenda.

What do us get from all of this, why did we take this tour…? To come to the crux where it all meets and we have circled around the theories in the hope we may find an answer…

What separates these from the archetypes we see and read so often…they take us by the hand and allow us to come close to the fear that binds us, we want to reach out and touch the beast in the hope that we can understand and even conquer it. We never will, but we will try.

That is what makes them memorable. With that said, we have come to the end. So go forth, create the right creature or character, and take us all to those darkest corners we fear the most…