The Useful Shadow Land of Horror Stories

As Halloween approaches, and I think about ghost stories and horror movies, I realize, with some sadness, that I am no longer the fan of horror I was when I was younger.  My interest in horror peaked around high school.

Why did it wane?  Starting from around 11 or 12 and going through our teens, possibly into our early 20's, we are between children and adults.  At those ages, we are too old to obey the rules of the adults around us without question, because we've begun to ask important questions.  Yet, in many cases, we have neither had enough experience of immorality in the world nor the mental space to reflect upon it to have fully thrown off our naïveté.  Thus, we live betwixt the naive, rules-bound, goodness of childhood and the dark life experience and thoughtful ethics of adulthood.  We have no word in English, at least that I can think of, that describes this age range more accurately than the ancient Greek word ephebe, so I'll use that.[2]

Horror movies allow ephebes to experience the shadows of evil without experiencing immorality directly.  It allows them to explore a dark landscape that adults try to keep them from being exposed to.  Perhaps more importantly in the maturing process, it allows ephebes to explore this shadow land on their own terms without a chaperone.

Juvenile fiction, at least that which is labeled as such, does not truly suffice.  Ephebes are no fools and the label marks this as a safe, adult-guided tour through shadow land.  How many teenagers to we hear, though, ranting and raving in whispers in the high school halls about the latest "teen" fiction horror novel rather than the latest Steven King novel or horror movie?  The thrill comes from daring to engage in stories that are out of bounds.  Only there can they truly explore shadow land on their own terms, possibly relying on each other to help them find their way, but never with the safety of an adult protector and I think this is appropriate.

Yet, ironically, if we were to interview film company executives, I would not be at all surprised if we discovered that most horror movies are targeted at 14 year olds.  While marketing departments may be ignorant as to why their research has put this age at the center of their target demographic bell curve, they may still know better than most of us that this age does indeed represent these shadow-exploring ephebes.

What troubles me is not this shadow land, but the thoughtlessness with which are culture too often creates it.  Take, for example, the slasher sub-genre.  While slashers will sometimes have preternatural antagonists, such as Jason or Freddy (who are neither the most original nor the most interesting ghouls to have been invented by storytellers), they too often have ordinary human murderers.  What troubles me about this is that by trading the ghouls and ghosts of old stories with human murderers, we yank our ephebes out of shadow land too soon to, instead, view caricatures of real murderers.  Worse, unlike real murderers, these caricatures typically have no motive whatsoever.  Slashers too often focus on the manner of the killings to create cheap and derivative chills and thrills rather than truly and profoundly exploring the shadows of immorality.  Shadow land is populated by shadows precisely because it is a land between the safe world of childhood and the dangerous world of adulthood.  It should not contain reality or even a caricatures thereof.  It should contain the smoky and warped reflections of reality.

Thrillers featuring psychopathic killers are often just slashers with slightly more depth, and I still find them problematic.  By having realistic sociopaths with terrible pasts, they may provide the reason behind their antagonists unforgivable and dreadful actions, but these horrific murderers are still fictional human beings.  However non-real fictional characters may actually be, they are meant to represent reality, not shadow.  These thrillers are adult, not ephebic, in their nature, in that they use realistic fiction to examine humanity rather than this shadow world so critical to the ephebe's exploration of humanity and of their own souls.[2]

Yet, these sorts of thrillers are not anything I've really wanted to engage in as an adult, either.  Why engage in such fiction when I can read about it in the news?  It's, ironically, because I'm an adult that I don't need an author or film maker to make a fake killer for me.  I'm mature enough to contemplate the implications for humanity of mass murders on my own.  That certainly does not mean that immorality has no place in stories for grown ups.  It simply means that I'd want something more in such stories than mere insight into the motivations of their immoral behavior, like food for thought about how we as a society could actually make things better, which these thrillers seem to always lack, because their makers would rather dwell on the horrible deeds of their antagonists than on a candid look at possibilities for social progress.  Thus, this sociopathic murder sub-genre of thrillers holds no interest for me and is one I think holds to use for our ephebes.

Thus, ghouls and ghosts are much more useful residents of shadow land.  The fact that they are not real actually makes them much better subjects for this sort of ephebic exploration.  I can't think of a single thing we learn from the sorts of human monsters featured in slashers and thrillers.  However, we have a great deal to learn from the fantastical monsters of myth and fairytale.

The Lernaean hydra grows two heads every time you cut off one, unless the necks are burned after each head is cut off.  There is so much in society that is really like this.  When we look closely at the true motives of human immorality, we find that real terrorists and mass murders (just to name two categories thereof) whether domestic or foreign, Christian, Muslim, of some other religion, or from none at all, do indeed have motives, however socially unacceptable, for their actions.  There are many such people.  Bringing only one or even a few of them to justice does nothing to stop the others.  Until we understand the root causes of this sort of behavior and stop it by, say, helping Christian leaders teach Christendom to love others rather than try to foment Armageddon or helping Muslim leaders teach the true love and morality of Mohamed rather than the violent destruction of the wayward and false Jihadist, we cannot even begin to solve the problem.

The Gestalts of terrorist attacks and mass killings might be described as metaphorical Lernaean hydras of the human world.  So, by encountering the Lernaean hydras of the shadow land through horror stories, ephebes can prepare themselves to participate in the adult world in which it will be their duty to try to help find solutions to the Lernaean hydras of the human world.

We might also consider the usefulness of encountering the Medusa in this shadow land, who brings death upon all who behold her until she beholds herself, of Snow White's stepmother, who does see herself, but is only motivated by jealousy of her stepdaughter, or of vampires who drain the life force of others, while having none of their own, and so forth.  I'll leave it to my readers to contemplate the utility of having such shadows in our shadow land.

What troubles me is that this shadow land is in the hands of corporate film companies and commercial writers who are primarily motivated by profit (do we have a shadow cognate of them, I wonder?).  It should be in the hands of our truest, purest, and most humanity-loyal storytellers, whether they tells stories through written word, film, or through some other medium, such as podcasts, or even in person, the old fashioned way.

We storytellers, of whom I would like to humbly count myself, even though my fiction has not yet been published, are the  priestesses and priests, the medicine women and medicine men, and witches of Story.  We, the true and pure, are the ones who can be entrusted with making sure that this shadow land is the best it can be for our ephebes.  This does not mean making it safe for them, for it should not be safe and they're ready for some danger, at least in the world of imagination.

It does mean that we are charged with knowing well the lore that has gone before, the myths, fairytales, and ghost stories of bygone eras and from around the world.  We are also charged with adapting these, as merged with our own dark imagination, to present shadows that are most needed to be studied in the present.  It is my hope that those purest among us will lead the way in this shadow making, with careful craftsmanship[3] and without ego.  Ego abuses this shadow land by making it a place to perpetrate our own immorality and this land, while it may not be real, is nevertheless palpable and real hurt can yet be done to those who enter it.  But, the careful consideration of the pure storyteller can overcome this sort of ego-driven abuse and ensure that our shadow land is populated with just what our ephebes need to pass from the light land of naive childhood to the mottled light of the mature world.

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[1] Although dictionaries may define "ephebe" as male, I do not use it as a gendered term.
[2] The thrust of this post is the usefulness of the horror genre to teenagers and pre-teens, but it is not meant to imply that this genre is not useful to adults either.  I've chosen to focus on this one particular aspect and how I think it could best function in society rather than exploring the entirety of the social and psychological implications of horror stories to everyone.
[3] I claim the term "craftsmanship" as non-gendered, since I don't know of a non-gendered English equivalent.