The crunch of leaves and the hint of pumpkin spice in the
air signal that fall is coming. It may
bring less pleasant things like school and Ugg boots, but it also brings with
it a crop of scary movies. Seeing that I
wrote about a children’s book last week that was just scary enough for adults,
I’m continuing the trend by talking about the new adaptation of many a child’s
gateway into horror, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Those that have seen the movie may notice the visual
stylings of producer Guillermo Del Toro all over this thing, particularly with
the monsters that strike from their story book. And these monsters that might
have been born by a campfire or gestated in a dark imagination lead to
different monsters residing in books that frequent the adult section. This is
largely because they hit on some basic human terrors that show up in a lot of stories.
As we discuss these stories, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! Hopefully, you already
knew that.
1) Harold the Scarecrow: The coming of fall makes beginning
with our resident sinister, straw-stuffed shadow dweller particularly apropos.
Scarecrows are made to scare birds, animals not always known for their
intelligence, but there’s also something disquieting about the way Harold is
depicted in the film. It gets particularly disturbing watching him dispatch a
particularly rotten kid who went out of his way to abuse him with a baseball
bat when he was just a thing stuffed with straw.
Scarecrows and the general dark side of agriculture come up
again and again in folk horror, which deals with not only a dark connection to
the land but traditions that can be bloody. Nosetouch Press recently came out
with an anthology of folk horror called The
Fiend in the Furrows and are already working on part 2. For something more
clearly scarecrow-related, Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest deals with a town’s Halloween tradition of sending out
its young men to hunt a scarecrow stuffed with candy and evil magic. However,
as they hunt this scarecrow, the scarecrow may be hunting them as well. The
tale also has a coming-of-age message for one young man and a message for all
of us about following traditions blindly.
2) The Toe: It’s a ghost that wants its toe back. What use
does an angry spirit have for a decayed toe? Who cares? It’s her toe. The idea
of the vengeful ghost is one that shows up in classics like Hamlet (even if the titular character is
the instrument of the ghost’s revenge) as well as more modern tales like The Lovely Bones (not horror, per se,
but a haunting meditation on the afterlife, particularly for a life that ended
violently). The trope of spirits with unfinished business can be portrayed as a
goal for a paranormal protagonist, but that unfinished business can also lead
to some very angry spirits.
The Woman in Black
by Susan Hill has a spirit who will not rest until her story is told. Joe Hill’s
Heart-Shaped Box features a spirit
sicced on an aging rocker who simply wanted a dead man’s suit for his
collection. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story,
though, is almost horror metafiction, looking at the ghost not just as a spirit
refusing to die but as a recurring theme in our folklore, as is the short story
“The Forbidden” in Clive Barker’s Books
of Blood. For a real out-of-the-box entry, Thomas Olde
Heuvelt’s Hex has a very original premise about a ghost known as the Black
Rock Witch, who has weaved herself into the lives of the small town she has
cursed and a high-tech surveillance team makes sure the town stays quarantined.
Until that quarantine is broken and then the Black Rock Witch really gets her
revenge.
3) The Red Spot: The tale starts with the titular red spot
that grows more and more inflamed until it becomes apparent that it is much
more than a mere skin blemish. In fact, arachnophobics might want to steer
clear of this story. But body horror such as this has been the subject of many stories.
Clive Barker’s Cenobites from The
Hellbound Heart is a more extreme example of body modification but Franz
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis isn’t about
someone filled with bugs as discovering that they have become a bug. Body
horror can be about things living in your body, like Nick Cutter’s excellent Lord of the Flies riff called The Troop. It can also be about
realizing that your own body is no longer yours.
One of the greatest cinematic examples of this, which owes a
lot to Kafka, is The Fly, where Jeff
Goldblum comments about “an insect who dreamed he was a man” still bring
chills. Zombies will always be a big subgenre of body horror (just look at how
much The Walking Dead has saturated
all forms of media) and it will continue to be big as long as people fear the
notion of death and what will happen once their bodies move underground and
their new insectile tenants move in. Werewolves also undergo a frightening
metamorphosis, but they have been mostly starring in paranormal romances
featuring sparkling vampires. The Last
Werewolf features a werewolf ruminating on his early days as a lycanthrope
while Max Booth’s Carnivorous Lunar
Activities focuses on a slightly more reluctant werewolf.
4) The Dream (The Pale Lady): The story involves a dire
prediction that ends up coming true. Even as far back as Cassandra in Greek
myth, ill omens are a great source of horror, particularly when the protagonist
tries their best to change events only to realize that they cannot. Loss of
control of one’s body is frightening, but so is a loss of control of one’s
circumstances, where even if you try to change your destiny, your destiny barrels
down on you like a semi-truck with its brake lines cut.
Stephen King gave us two very distinct novels that talk about
fate as something to fear. The first is The Dead Zone, where a man discovers
that he can see the future, but he can’t always control what he sees, and it
still doesn’t do him too much good in the end. There is also The Shining. Young Danny Torrance can
see the future thanks to his Shining, but that doesn’t mean he can change it.
It doesn’t help that he is only five years old, and his parents see his visions
as a neurological issue, or a curiosity, or the desires of a frightened boy to
leave the very haunted hotel that they’ve found themselves stranded in for the
winter. Danny being too young to be listened to, to take any action that could
save him or his family, is what makes the fact that Redrum is coming all the
more frightening.
5) The Jangly Man (original creation inspired by different
stories): The Jangly Man’s refrain of “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker” links it to the
eponymous story found in the collection and Del Toro has admitted to being
inspired by “Aaron Kelly’s Bones,” a story about a dancing corpse, for its
design. It’s also safe to say that Del Toro’s own work inspired it,
particularly his penchant for using things that appear human but move in
unsettling, inhuman ways.
Look through the man’s film catalog, from the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth to the ghosts in Crimson Peak, and you’ll see beings
whose proportions lend them a truly alien quality. This is in part to some genius
hiring, such as Doug Jones, famous for bringing characters like Abe Sapien to
life on the big screen, and Javier Botet. Diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, a
genetic condition that gives Botet long, fine fingers as well as a uniquely
tall, thin body shape, he has played his share of aliens and ghosts. Jangly
Man, however, is played by newcomer and contortionist Troy James, who makes the
movements of the Jangly Man, as well as Baba Yaga in the new Hellboy remake, unnerving to see.
Though this is particularly disturbing visually, literature
has made use of this as well. Those who watched IT: Chapter One no doubt remember Pennywise the Dancing Clown,
emerging from an old refrigerator, his body and limbs unwinding, complete with
the popping of joints being snapped back into place, until he stands at his
full clown height and there are many instances in the book where he “flows”
into sewers and drains. D. W. Gillespie’s The
Toy Thief also has a very elongated body structure which it uses to sneak
around and steal much more than toys. Another trait that these monsters share
is their proclivity to darkness, whether it’s closets, sewers, or chimneys. And
let’s not forget the darkest place they hang out: the human imagination. The
seeds of these terrors were already planted by Scary Stories and those stories
like them.
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