Scary Fun

Esquire magazine—yes, I read it, I’ve been half in love with Charles Pierce for decades—recently ran a story recommending a series of thrillers currently on Netflix “that will get your heart racing from the comfort of your couch.” I duly checked them out, and came to Gerald’s Game, a 2017 American film based on Stephen King’s 1992 novel of the same title.

Well, Stephen King? That should tell you everything, right?

There’s something that draws us all to what I think of as “scary fun,” the novels we read at night that have us checking to make sure our front doors are locked, the movies that wake us from sleep several weeks after we’ve seen them, even the moments of something unexplained and a little frisson-charged happening in our daily lives. Like a roller-coaster ride at a fun-fair, fiction allows us to experience terror without it being real, without it having any lasting impact on our lives; we become voyeurs in horror, safe in the knowledge that it’s not true. (Which is why, of course, the best novelists and directors make it as real as possible, confusing fiction with reality so you’re never really sure which is which.)

There are some sound psychological reasons for doing this. These stories are the adult versions of fairy tales. If you’ll think back to your own childhoods, or those of your children, you’ll recall that fairy tales are pretty dreadful things, with children getting eaten in Hansel and Gretel or seeing their grandmother eaten in Red Riding Hood, children lured away (to where? to what end?) by the Pied Piper, a young woman falling into a coma, only to be awakened by rape (Sleeping Beauty), and so on… These are horrible stories! Why do we tell them? G.K. Chesterton has a clue. “Fairy tales don’t tell children that dragons exist,” he wrote. “Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” And that is the crux of this fascination with horror: somehow, in the end, everything comes round right again. There is justice. There is closure. The stories give us a taste of the violence and scariness that can be part of real life, but with a happy ending.

Scary fun.

So—back to Gerald’s Game. I watched the trailer for the movie—and, for sure, even that small taste of it got my heart-rate right up there, started my breath coming faster. I decided right away that I didn’t want to see the whole thing, that seeing the trailer was quite enough, thank you very much. I remember consciously thinking, I don’t like that sort of thing.

And yet at one level I do. I don’t write horror per se, but I do write about horrible things, traumatic things, and I also like to make those events and situations as real as possible. In other words, I write things that I wouldn’t wish to read.

What does that mean? Am I manipulating my readers? Living my own need for darkness through them? I don’t think so; no more so, anyway, than any other author seeking to evoke a feeling in readers.

I think it comes down to an issue of control. When I am reading or viewing a scene that is frightening, I have no way of knowing what will happen next; when I’m writing it, on the other hand, I do. I know whether things will turn out okay… or not. I like to distribute a little scary fun to my readers, to give them that breathlessness, that concern for characters they’ve come to care about, that edge of not knowing what might happen next. And I do it all from the comfort of my desk, where I know precisely what will happen next.

So perhaps this is a matter of being able to dish it out but not take it. I wonder if Stephen King reads horror. I wonder if there’s scary fun that haunts the evenings of filmmakers and novelists that causes them to make sure their front doors are locked when they read or see someone else’s haunted story. I wonder if we as artists work out our need for scary fun, not by consuming it, but by providing it to others. I don’t know the answer.

As for the movie… I think I’ve just shamed myself into watching it!