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I often write on this blog about what makes a good scary story. However, it occurs to me that part of the problem the genre faces is that horror, at least, that brand of horror which I prefer, derives from the unknown and the unexpected. And when you take in a work that you know and expect to be frightening, you will expect to be frightened, which makes actually being frightened less likely.

One way around this, of course, is to disguise the horror. Place it within the context of another sort of story. This mixing of genres is quite common nowadays, and that’s a good thing for this purpose. As I’ve said in the past, two of scariest things I’ve seen in video games are Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and the cemetery in Jade Empire, neither of which are actually “horror” games.

Another way is to begin the story by using familiar tropes of the horror genre, so that the audience expects a conventional horror story, and then switching things up somehow so that the frightening part comes from a wholly unexpected direction. But this is easy to say, and very hard to accomplish.

The last solution I can see is to take the audience expectation of horror and run with it. By that I mean use the sense of inevitability about it to your advantage in heightening the horror. This might be why the film The Omen works so well. The scary thing about it is that the events of the film have already been prophesied, and sense of inescapable doom weighs upon everything.

(This film also does a good job messing with the viewer’s expectations. For instance, there is one character whose death is foretold early on in the film. During the film’s second half, this character is several times put in obviously contrived, dangerous situations–e.g. wandering alone into deserted catacombs–and yet he survives them, defying audience expectations.)

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I’ve long wondered who one compared people one didn’t like to before Hitler, and Brian Palmer of Slate has provided the answer:

 “In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, many Americans and Europeans had a firmer grasp of the bible than of the history of genocidal dictators. Orators in search of a universal symbol for evil typically turned to figures like Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, or, most frequently, the Pharaoh of Exodus.”

Makes sense, I guess. But, as I’ve said before, if the Bible was their reference point, why would they not have used the Devil himself?

(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan)

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Do you ever think about how strange some social customs are? For instance, the practice of tipping the server at a restaurant. There’s no reason why restaurants couldn’t simply build the correct compensation for the server in to the price of the meal. In fact, sometimes they do. But we nevertheless continue the practice most of the time, even though it is not only inefficient, but also places the server at the mercy of the customer’s whims, which may be quite ungenerous or unfair.

There are other criticisms of tipping on economic grounds, some of which you can read about here. (The Wikipedia article also cites this rather good article on the matter.) It’s not a big deal, of course, but it strikes me as a very unsatisfactory way of compensating people. But nobody really thinks about it much, commonplace as it is.

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William Bennett argues that “men are in trouble”.   He argues that young men are not achieving like women are, and he places a great deal of emphasis on the need for young men to spend less time playing video games. His closing statement:

 “The Founding Fathers believed, and the evidence still shows, that industriousness, marriage and religion are a very important basis for male empowerment and achievement. We may need to say to a number of our twenty-something men, ‘Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married.” It’s time for men to man up.'” 

Of course, there is such a thing as too many video games. Is five hours a day too much time? Well, I suppose it depends on the person, and on the games. And I will say that I don’t think my playing Fallout: New Vegas has hurt my career so far, unlike the fallout from his playing in old Vegas hurt Bennett’s.

As for “getting a challenging job”, getting any job is easier said then done in this period of low aggregate demand. And why “challenging”? I would have said “lucrative” or “rewarding”, but that’s just me.

But my real problem with this article is his command to “get married”. I have no problem with marriage. In fact, I think marriage is a fine and wonderful thing. But I don’t think you should flatly order people to go “get married” just on principle. At least he ought to say something like “find a nice girl and” first. Otherwise, it sounds like getting married, no matter to whom, is good enough for Bennett.

It seems to me that people shouldn’t treat “getting married” like a goal, except in the sense of getting married to some particular person. If you treat it like getting an achievement in a video game, you–and your spouse–are probably in for a bad time of it.

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Pundits have been using the word “populist” a lot in connection with the recent “Occupy Wall Street” protest. This Atlantic article by Derek Thompson asks: “What Should a Populist Movement Ask of Washington?” Well, here’s my answer to his question.

Perhaps the most famous populist in U.S. history, William Jennings Bryan, wanted monetary stimulus to combat the depression that existed at the time. In Bryan’s time, the “fiscal hawks” we are familiar with in Congress had the authority to also be “hawkish” on monetary policy. Today, however, the Federal Reserve exists, and it provides a stimulative monetary policy.

But we still have fiscal hawks. Read Paul Krugman‘s commentary for an expert explanation of the problem, but the short version, as I understand it, is that the Conservatives are restricting growth by opposing fiscal expansion.

So, what Populists of today should ask for is almost the same thing the Populists of yore asked for: economic stimulus. Only they must ask for it from fiscal policymakers, not monetary policy makers.

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As I’ve written before, one problem I see in horror movies, novels and such is the tendency to over-explain everything, to try to tie up the loose ends in the story. This is a problem because it robs the horror of that most terrifying attribute mystery.

It’s understandable why this happens, though. Works in most other genres are better if you tie everything together neatly. For example, I find there is something immensely enjoyable about watching all the plot threads tie together in comic novels like the “Jeeves” books or A Confederacy of Dunces. In a good humor book, even seemingly trivial elements have a role to play in the story, and the result is to tie them all, humorously, into a funny situation. Similarly, in a mystery story, the big payoff requires Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or whoever to explain everything at the end. Failure to tie things up neatly is a huge flaw.

But the horror genre is different. You must not have that kind of effect in horror, to preserve the uncertain elements, to preserve the sense of fear that must exist for the reader.

I was thinking of this as I was re-reading Robert W. Chambers’ “The Yellow Sign”, which along with his “The Repairer of Reputations”, makes The King in Yellow my favorite weird fiction work ever. As I read, I realized that Chambers was doing things that in most other genres would be unforgivably vague, and render his story incoherent. For example, the principal characters are explicitly noted to be Catholic, yet how this matters to the story, I can’t really say. It doesn’t really seem to be an important element. This would be a problem in most stories, but here it just adds to the wonderfully bizarre feeling of Chambers’ world.

(“The Repairer of Reputations” also has many similarly unexplained elements, perhaps even more, all of which Chambers miraculously made to “work” together.)

Perhaps all this is obvious to most people, but I had never thought of it this way before; that perhaps what is a flaw in most genres can be a good thing in others.

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It’s always, ah, interesting to read the ultra-conservative blogs. For instance, I see Robert Stacy McCain (no relation to John) linked to this piece on “Women on the Left” at a site called “Alternative Right“.

The author, Alex Kurtagic, makes two basic arguments–the first, particularly, is a very basic argument, in much the same way that an abacus is a very basic supercomputer. This argument is this: liberal women are less attractive than conservative women. This argument is (a) not true and (b) irrelevant to the merits of the ideologies. It’s this sort of thing that gives internet political discourse a bad name.

But I’m not here to tell you that our conservative friends oftentimes say ridiculous things. You already know that. What I want to get to is Kurtagic’s other point, which is that the change from women being housewives to getting jobs is bad. He says:

“[W]hat the Left has done for women is trade one form of slavery for another… 

Some women certainly enjoy sacrificing everything for a remunerative career, and some even achieve those careers, but they comprise a minority. Most women, like most people, work only to pay the bills, and only tell themselves they enjoy their work because that is the only way they can stand it: most women, like most people, are bored by it and spend their weeks longing for the next weekend and dreading the following Monday.” 

Well, amazingly, I think this is probably true. It sounds plausible, anyway, which is more than you can say for the other claim. But I doubt it was because “the Left” is secretly a misogynist conspiracy and more of a case of poor estimation on the changes in wage rates over half a century. And of course, the fact that women asked for this freedom suggests they thought it was preferable to the current “find a man” model of the time.

The really interesting thing, though, is the quite devastating critique embedded in this article of capitalism and its effects on workers. It’s a pretty tough, but fair, in my view, assessment of the way business treats its employees. And yet, for all that, if somebody as mainstream conservative as R.S. McCain is linking to it, it likely means it is approved of by the free-market, supply-side crowd, even though I gather that “Alternative Right” is a site dedicated to pushing “social conservatism”.   Or, to use my preferred term, it is a site for nationalists.  (Kurtagic hints that laissez-faire capitalism is a flavor of liberalism, implying that it is bad.)

I bring this up only as one more data point demonstrating the incredible contradictions between the two wings of the Republican party.