Stephen King Ars Poetica on Horror

Danse Macabre, he views Lovecraft as a major impact in the field of dark horror fiction writing and also acknowledges the fact that King himself considered him as a major source of inspiration, which was embedded In his style of writing. When he reminisces about how he got Introduced to the genre, he states that his first pick of the countless texts happened to be one of Lovecraft’s short stones. King mentions, that although many consider this writer as a hack. hat could be clearly seen from his writings is that “the man himself took his work eriously*’ (Danse Macabre 1 17), Based on the excellent horror works that Lovecraft produced, Stephen King shares the belief, that the most powerful horrors could only work, if the reader felt the weight of the size of the universe and the contradictory size of one individual, and these works implied such not mentioned forces so powerful, that they could “destroy us all If they so much as grunted In their sleep” (Danse Macabre 80).
This, as a matter of fact, Is the basis for all xenophobic tales and serves as a basis tor creating the scary atmosphere and which Lovecraft efers to as ‘cosmic fear’. We have established that a working piece of macabre is one that has the ability to create a connection with our feeling of fear. However, this cannot stand by itself and it is the writer’s responsibility to portray these embodiments.
A great amount of imagination is essential from the reader’s part for the piece of horror to work, King however looks at imagination both as a blessing and a curse (Danse Macabre x), since people with a massive Imagination are the sanest, most down-to-earth people, they are clear on the dangers posed on our everyday Ilfe rom almost any direction. King refers to this phenomenon as ‘seeing in darker spectrums’ (Danse Macabre x), which is a healthy outlook on the world, healthier than the so-called ‘ostrich policy’, where one acts as if the problem is non-existent.

That is why he Jokingly mentions readers of horror as ‘sick, but lively puppies’ (Danse Macabre x). Accepting the fact that threats are all around us one makes it easier to go on with life, since this can be viewed as accepting our mortality and not being clouded by delusions of Invlnclblllty. However, merely reallzlng the dangers Is not ufficient, one has to watch out not to go to extremes: because neither could work, both ends of the extreme reject something vitally important to our everyday life.
That is why it is Imperative to find a balance between reality and imagination. And since readers of horror have a pretty stable mindset despite the topics they are reading about, we can agree with King when he calls readers of horror saner the average person (Danse Macabre Why Horror Is Needed To some extent every person needs horror In their life according to King. He believes that by exposing ourselves to unreal and fearful scenarios through different media, e exert a therapy that is most beneficial to our healthy mindset.
King mentions in his foreword of his short story collection Night Shift, that many view the love of horror as an unhealthy obsession. He calls it ‘slowing down and looking at the accident’ syndrome (3), because people are curious by nature, always looking for stories and answers, even though they may not find one. And when the time comes that one has to Tina tne answer, It may not De solved alone.
I nat Is wny Klng says tnat norror fiction is a ‘safety valve, a kind of dreaming awake’ (Danse Macabre x), which means hat it is used to let pressure out, since as he says ‘the world of our normal lives looks ever so much better when the bad dream ends’. We take refuge in make-believe terrors, we know evil is lurking around and seeing it come to life reassures us of the fact, that we are not paranoid and there are other people out there who think alike about the dangers in our everyday lives. It is a battle one has to fght with a real life emotion by oneself.
But a horror fiction can only work if the reader is personally touched. ‘They grope into our subconscious minds, and find the things so terrible we annot articulate them and confront them’ (Danse Macabre xi), which is in Stephen King’s opinion a definition of horror of good quality and what every artist should strive to achieve when creating a tale that was meant to scare. By stimulating our ‘psychological pressure point’ (Danse Macabre 86) as he calls it – usually in connection with our own mortality – writers might be able to evoke the type of fear that King is trying to describe.
This however has to be done not on a direct level, but with the use of symbols in the horror piece. The writers strive to create a dream-like tmosphere in hopes of illustrating or recreating the nature of their problem in the reader’s mind. Dreams are volatile forms of coping, unless it hits the ‘pressure points’, the impact might not be as deep and it might be forgotten in a short amount of time. As King puts it: [A great horror story is] one that functions on a symbolic level, using fictional (and sometimes supernatural) events to help us understand our own deepest real fears (Danse Macabre xi).
He emphasizes ‘understand’ here and avoids saying ‘know’, because if one is introduced to it without actually having the roper background explained; one would lack the ability to confront it or would not be able to come up with a plan to tackle it. Only supernatural elements, however, make it harder for the reader to exercise their suspension of disbelief; another essential tool has to be integrated, which is none other than realistic elements. In his book King mentions, that he particularly remembers a movie, which had a great impact on him: The Blair Witch Project.
Since it is a movie, it has visuals to work with as well as music, and although it was made with a small budget, it looked and it felt eal, according to King. Although in the movie itself there is not much action and we do not see the witch, Just by placing it in a very realistic environment, it made the film believably true, further supporting the idea of realism as a ground for suspense. But making a good horror is hard, since the genre and the audience are constantly changing in the sense that new topics need to be introduced every once in a while.
Horror writing is a very volatile and delicate form of art, says King, and it is in constant need of innovation. What worked once may not work again, “catching ightning in a bottle”, revisiting the same ideas may wear out after a time (Danse Macabre xii). As time passes the object of people’s fears are changing, while at the same time it stays the same on an instinctive level, that is why horror writers need to invent new ways to make us fear the unknown and to let us indulge in its dark atmosphere.
Horror works on two levels: ‘gross-out’ level, meaning the distasteful images and the horrid monsters in the tale, and on a more potent level, describing horror as a kind of dance, a slow rhythmic search for our deepest level of emotions, he simple and brutally plane hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller (Danse Macabre 218). I nls Is Daslcally slmllar to wnat LovecraTt was trylng to explaln In nls essay, tne instinctive fear that has been present since people exist.
So we can conclude that the definition of a real danse macabre is when the creator of a horror story is able to unite the conscious and the subconscious mind with one potent idea, usually with a dash of realism and an equal amount of supernatural used, so that the readers can still rely on their suspension of disbelief. Is Horror Art? We have established, that for a good horror to be written, many elements have to be in place. And that raises the question: is horror a form of art.
Although this is a yes- no question, the answer to this is not as simple as it looks like. Not every piece of this genre can be viewed as a form of art, because several elements have to work together to create a good horror story. King goes ahead and claims that since it was composed like a piece of music or painting, and it was looking for something that would predate art: phobic pressure points (Danse Macabre 18), then we can safely all horror an art form. This point of view might be a bit biased; King himself admits that he is an avid fan of the genre.
He does agree with the fact that some narratives are not as well thought out as they should be, but he does not mention that by doing so, they are failing to fulfill their primary purpose of introducing readers to their own fears. Carroll on the other hand has a more critical approach on the subject: he agrees that it might as well be an artistic genre, but generalization of it should be avoided (38). He calls horror a “concept with fuzzy and perhaps developing oundaries”, which basically suggests that it does not require a tight definition.
We could try and categorize horror by how well it exerts the phobic pressure point idea. Most works are able to find the so-called national phobic pressure points – which as the name suggests, is not aimed at the individual, it is experienced on a grander scale -, most successful pieces of horror media always plays upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people, fears often political, economic, and psychological rather than supernatural. In connection to this phenomenon King entions the time, when the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out.
The motion picture had come out at the time of the Red Scare, when people were afraid that their close friends or even relatives might be communists. The movie tells the story of an everyday American little town, with everyday American people who are slowly being replaced by pod-people, who look and act like the switched humans. We can see the parallelism between the two and although Finney, whose book was the one that got adapted into film format, claimed that the story itself was written ithout any intent of a political undertone.
But because of the timing, it has emerged as one of the most well-known horror tales. Another example of well-timed symbolism that has affected big audiences would be the emerging of the zombie culture. Taking a look at the historical overview, we can determine that this fad has been gaining ground since the terrorist-scare in America. The image of ruthless, animalistic, seemingly unstoppable beings that only know how to kill and hunt people without remorse would be exactly how the American government tries to depict errorists.
We can agree that applying pressure on the national phobic pressure points work, still, King raises an interesting paradox about the issue: it is a generally accepted idea that negative emotions are usually associated with ‘mob instincts’, when in reality these are what drive wedges between individuals, and then we are lett alone wltn our Tears, ana In Tact tney ao not unlte us. Yurtnermore ne asks wny we need make-believe horror when there is so much real horror going on in life (Danse Macabre 27).
Or putting it another way: why people need stories of isintegration, Just to, by outletting our pent up emotions, bring them back to a constructive state again. The answer is right there in the question, to help people cope with the harshness of reality in the form of entertainment. this feeling of reintegration, arising from a field specializing in death, fear, and monstrosity, that makes a danse macabre so rewarding and magical… that, and the boundless ability of the human imagination to create endless dream worlds and then put them to work” (Danse Macabre 28) – explains Stephen King why he chose this particular media to express himself.