Season of Spooky: Rainbow Factory · 4:13pm Jun 19th, 2016
Horror is a niche market, but that niche is dedicated, vocal and has quite a few gurus willing to explain what does and does not make for good horror. Unfortunately, most discussion I’ve found online has offered advice for cinematic horror -there’s plenty of advice about making a good horror film or horror game, but not as much discussion out there about how to write good horror. I am about to (Mary preserve me) attempt to offer this kind of advice.
If the cardinal rule of horror storytelling in film is “it’s what the audience don’t see that scares them”, the corollary for written horror is that it’s what the reader doesn’t know that scares them. To be more precise, it’s what the reader doesn’t know all of that scares them.
Written horror is not much propped up by “things you don’t see” because written horror is necessarily a secondhand genre. You, the reader, are not actually ‘seeing’ anything that happens, you’re picturing it in your imagination as you read printed words in a book or projected words on a screen. However, your flow of information is also limited by both what the writer tells you about the time, place, and circumstances of the story, and how the perception of individual characters filters that information to you. It’s part of why written horror can make such memorable use of characters who have a skewed perception of reality. The unreliable narrator is a device well adapted to scaring or unsettling the reader.
Alfred Hitchcock’s famous illustration of how to create suspense consisted of two different scenarios built around the same set piece: a bomb beneath a dinner table. If a bomb beneath the table explodes and blows everyone there to smithereens, it’s a jolt but there is no suspense. If, on the other hand, you inform the audience that in fifteen minutes a bomb beneath the table will explode and blow everyone to smithereens, you have created suspense as they count the seconds. The presentation of information completely changes the reaction of viewer to what they are seeing. Written horror is built on tricks like these as well.
Good horror understands when and how to present information to the reader. It uses characters as a filter, magnifying traumas in their past and transforming them into haunting motifs in the present - think of Pet Sematary and the recurring image of “Oz the Gweat and Tewwible”. It builds a scene by giving the reader action without full context - think of “The Lottery”, and how the titular lottery’s nature and purpose is made clear only at the end of the story. More than anything else, however, good horror makes use of sensation and emotional response. “The Tell-Tale Heart” isn’t much of a story without the protagonist’s maddening screams as he hears his victim’s heart accusing him from beyond the grave of his crime.
“The Rainbow Factory” understands how to present and control information up to a point. The start of the story is the least-bad portion of the entire piece. Ignoring the use of song lyrics that ultimately have fuck-all to do with the plot we’re subjected to, “The Rainbow Factory” presents us with three key pieces of information: nobody knows what goes on in the upper floor of the weather factory, Cloudsdale residents are heavily screened for flight proficiency, and failures are kicked right out of Cloudsdale.
The problem is that the mystery here is both very easy to solve, and that the story doesn’t give the tension time to build before spectacularly failing all three of the central characters and shipping them off to exile. Each character’s reason for failure is also awkwardly set up. One fails because her wings break on thin air. One fails because he helps the downed pegasus, an action not stated to be a reason for failure. The protagonist fails because she glanced at the other two while flying and messed up. Each case builds no suspense because the first failure sets up the other two, and we aren’t given any real sense of hope that anyone might make it out.
Many sections of “The Rainbow Factory” that take place between the failure of the central characters and the climax should be frightening or unsettling, but aren’t. The most important of these is a scene where our protagonist and her friends are bundled into a chariot to be taken away into what they presume is exile. They banter with the drivers, who apparently know nothing about what is going on and talk like low-class workman stock characters. These drivers are less than intimidating. They fail to accurately convey a sense of menace or foreboding. They should have been cut.
Once the story arrives at the factory, however, the story does everything it possibly can to stop being even remotely chilling. In quick succession we are led through a factory pathway involving “exposed wires” and “steaming pipes”, details which would strike fear into the heart of any OSHA inspector. This tour is conducted by a character named Dr. Atmosphere, whose sole purpose is to laugh maniacally and do absolutely nothing to set the audience on edge or cast off guard for what will happen next. This, too, should have been deleted.
It gets worse once we arrive at the “pegasus device”. After one half-hearted attempt to reclaim any sense of horror involving a failed escape attempt, the story outright informs every pony present that they are going to be thrown into a blender and murdered because apparently that is how rainbows are made. What’s that? Why is Princess Celestia allowing this to happen? Why do they need rainbows? Does every adult in Cloudsdale know about this? How has this information at all been kept secret if they, as some characters imply, don't? What’s so good about rainbows that every worker in the Rainbow Factory approves of state-sanctioned child murder and organ harvesting? Why don’t parents of weak flyers just move away? Is there a pony Berlin Wall around Cloudsdale, keeping desperate political dissidents in and the prying eyes of hot-air balloonists out? Well, there’s a very simple explanation for all of this, you see, the story has just left it in its other draft and oh dear will you look at the time, let’s have some murders!
The climax of Rainbow Factory is meant to emulate a slasher chase, but it doesn’t understand how slasher chases actually work. They work on the sensation of palpable adrenaline and fear felt by the protagonist as she moves through a dangerous environment, pursued by a force she’s not sure if she can hurt or kill. There’s a constant sensation of “will she make it or won’t she”. The action is often broken up as the character attempts to hide, to fight back, to do anything to ward off her pursuer. As the audience, we are not supposed to be able to guess the outcome of any given part of the chase.
In “The Rainbow Factory”, of course, Rainbow Dash begins tearing apart pegasus foals as if they are made out of cotton candy - a detail that completely destroys the sense of characters having real, physical bodies that can be hurt, and thus negates the visceral horror built up earlier - and follows this up with a nice case of berserker rage as she chases Scootaloo through a factory for what feels like maybe ten minutes, unintentionally creating a comical image as she knocks aside factory workers (a detail actually mentioned in the story itself).
By the time the story has forced itself into a contorted shape to conclude, the note it ends on is as bizarre as it is unexpected: Scootaloo tells Rainbow Dash she has very pretty eyes.
Yes, it’s meant to be a reference to the fact that Dash has by this point painted herself with enough pony-juice to legally qualify as a blood bank, but even so: what?
To work effectively, “The Rainbow Factory” would need to dodge obvious worldbuilding questions raised by its premise, perhaps by putting more thought into its setting. It would also have to excise several characters who are meant to build tension but do the opposite instead. More than anything, however, it needed to capitalize on the terror of Scootaloo and her friends not knowing their ultimate fate as they are led deeper and deeper into part of a factory none of them had any knowledge of, to an uncertain future.
They should have been killed out of sight of each other - though perhaps Scootaloo could have managed to see the demise of one or both of her friends, which could have provided impetus for her attempted escape. The use of Rainbow Dash should have been forgone altogether- or perhaps, more intelligently, played as a twIst ending. Scootaloo escapes the bounds of the factory and is caught by Rainbow Dash, who calms her down, hugs her, and Scootaloo feels completely at peace… up until she feels the jolt of a taser, and hears the apologies of her surrogate sibling. “We’ve got to make quota, squirt.”
So how is “The Rainbow Factory” still a successful story, despite its fundamental lack of horror? Beyond the obvious hate-reading conversations - including this blog post - what drew the fandom to the story initially were likely two things. The first was that a pony horror fandom whetted on “Cupcakes” were drawn to surface level similarities between the stories. After all, they both feature a character from the series revealing a dark secret that compels them to take the lives of others in order to use their remains as ingredients, and both attempt to use visceral torture to build their final act. The second was the song the story based itself on - or perhaps the song was based on the story. I've received conflicting reports. Apparently the track is very popular, though I can’t say I ever saw the appeal. Then again, I can never hear the song without thinking of the story, so perhaps the waters have been poisoned.
And here is where we begin to really see the other things that keep the Triforce of Creepypasta around: their attachment to recognizable concepts that pre-date them, allowing for a pre-made audience and making up for their lack of positive attributes as works in their own right.
Well, I say a lack of positive attributes - but of course, that’s not entirely true. “The Rainbow Factory” is the worst of these three by far as a story. “Cupcakes” may be hated by large swaths of its readers, but nobody can argue that it does not understand what it is doing. So why the hatred? Does it deserve it? And what are its failings, if any, outside of a lack of commitment to the tone and message of the series it is based on?
Whenever I get around to writing the next part of this, the answer will lie in that most misunderstood and misused of the “-deres”.
That simple line with Rainbow and Scoots, is far scarier than anything is the entire story. How sad.
I do believe the song came first, and the story was based on it, hence the pointless song lyrics. It probably wouldn't be off-base to suggest that part of the story's popularity came from fans of the song, since this was when we had far, far fewer sources of music, and Glaze was way popular.
A simple change to handwave the necessity of baby murders would be to make it essential to the city of Cloudsdale itself.
Maybe the "pegasus device" is what keep the cloudstuff cohesive and whole, with Rainbows as byproducts. Maybe without the device nothing physical can stay on the clouds, whatever.
This way, you'd have a semi-plausible reason for ponies overlooking this: the pegasi are all kinda in on it, and stopping the practice would ruin a lot of people's lives.
4034106 I thought as much, but I keep getting conflicting information. I am also not a particularly good researcher when it comes to details like these.
Largely because between this and the riff i just participated in, I have spent way too much time over the past weeks thinking about "The Rainbow Factory". It is so, so bad.
4034240 I'd argue that you don't even need to make it necessary to kill children. You just need enough ponies to believe it's necessary. Leaving ambiguity as to whether or not they are actually correct enhances the sense of how warped Cloudsdale is.
4033777 D'awww, thank you! I tried.
4034791
I just heard yet another version of the song today, which got me thinking that it's a far better vehicle for horror than the story which filled in all the details.
One of my fondest memories of pre-reading for Equestria Daily was personally rejecting (and reviewing much less politely than you did, IIRC) Rainbow Factory from publication on the blog. Its unfortunate fame notwithstanding, at least I did what I could to stop it.
(Related: if you haven't seen it, the Rainbow Dash Presents series on Youtube made an episode secretly about Rainbow Factory that did an excellent job of both skewering the original story and respinning it into a black comedy plot that actually made some sense. It's also [YMMV] really, really funny.)
4060719 I'd actually encountered that, believe it or not. And loved it. Particularly given that the description of the van driver is actually interesting. I'd like to save that clip to share with writers to explain how to make physical descriptions of characters read well.
4034106
Yep, it was a song first and should have stayed that way. The song by itself establishes what the story doesn't in building a tone of menace and foreboding. We don't know what the Factory is or what it exactly does aside from produce rainbows. But from the heavy industrial instrumentals and dubstep, we know it's horrible.