It’s the end of the week, and after a long day of hard work, you’re preparing for the weekend. You can finally put all your worries away and just relax for a moment. There’s so many things you could do to unwind, but you choose to watch a movie. And what movie do you put on? A horror movie. You turn off all the lights and close all the windows. You bundle up in your sheets and turn on the movie, and once it’s done you’re terrified. You’ll spend the next few nights jumping at shadows, waking up in cold sweats and sleeping with the hallway light on...and the best part is that you’ll do it all again at the end of next week. Being filled with fear, flinching every time the final girl makes a move and screaming when the killer finally reveals themself. It’s fun, right?
The only question is: why?
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Different veins of terror exist within the horror genre. You have your slashers, your paranormals, your aliens, your monsters, and hundreds of other subgenres to get your heartrate up. Even the words “terror” and “horror” are up for debate as to what exactly they entail. One of my favorites is the “body horror” category.
Body horror encapsulates movies like The Fly, The Thing, Videodrome, and Eraserhead. Body horror books include Uzumaki and Tomie by Junji Ito, The Troop and The Deep by Nick Cutter, and so on and so forth. This subgenre intentionally shows the human body being broken down, often through mutilation or transformation. Due to the gory nature of these narratives, they admittedly aren’t for everyone. How Readers Allow Fear To Play With Them10/5/2021 “YE who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.” (Poe, 1850).
Full story here. Most people forget that they have as much power over fear as fear has upon them. The paragraph above is the opening of Shadow, by Edgar Allan Poe. The so-called master of horror. The first time I read this three-paragraph flash fiction, I found it was rather spine-chilling. But when I took a look from another perspective, my fear melted away. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short (NaNo for shorter), is meant to put you under a lot of pressure. It is supposed to have you tracking words and hitting seemingly unachievable goals. It’s not burn-out stressful, but it is often healthily stressful and equally rewarding.
It is difficult, productive, and often, a pretty big deal. For many of us, November is when we pen the project we’ve been planning and what we carry on, revise, edit, and rewrite for months. If you’re doing that 50k, it matters a lot — and what you do leading up to it does too. We are all very familiar with creatures like Zombies, Vampires, Banshees, Witches, and other similar Western monsters. The horror and even fantasy genre are filled with the same old mythical creatures. So it's time now to move past the same old, redundant monsters and get creative in your stories by exploring some new creatures.
Asian folklore is filled with many interesting and frightening mythical monsters. Here is a list of a few of many creatures from different parts of Asia. Horror is the genre that makes people squirm, scream and sometimes cry. It’s full of jump scares and creepy monsters, a lot of gore, ghosts and paranormal creatures or even some impossible killer who never dies. It’s the stuff of nightmares, and the only reason anyone could possibly want anything to do with it is because of the adrenaline boost fear gives us right? It’s fun to be scared of something without having to face any of the real danger that fear implies.
Of course, safe fear isn’t the only thing horror can give us. Categories
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