The Season of Spooky: "Only Scare me Once" · 8:03pm Jul 1st, 2016
One of the hardest things to get horror fans to agree on is what counts as 'scary'. What frightens me out of my wits may leave someone else completely unbothered, and likewise what they count as terrifying I might refer to as "last Wednesday night at my place". It is very rare that a horror story is so good that it manages to capture all of the potential niche audiences at the same time. The same readers who made House of Leaves into a story so popular that I've actually made a guessing game out of how long it will take people to recommend it to me if I say I like horror stories might be a completely different group of people than the ones who did the same thing for The Stand or Misery. That divide is also present in readers of fanfics. While I've received several excellent recommendations from my previous Season of Spooky blog, it was obvious that the 'best' (or perhaps 'favorite') horror stories of my followers had some divergence between them. Some recommendations were more common than others, but the tone and sub-genre of individual stories varied wildly.
That brings us to perhaps the most infamous horror story written in this fandom, "Cupcakes", and the effect it has on readers.
I should note that I've riffed "Cupcakes"... sort of. I was barely there that week and spent most of my time and energy for the riff reacting to a poorly conceived fan sequel. Unlike many stories I've helped make fun of on the internet, however, I do not hate "Cupcakes". I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it, but as a story there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it and it makes for an inoffensive way to pass the time if you need your fix. If it had been included in an anthology of horror stories, I would not feel as if I had wasted money to read it. I would never pay money for it without some additional content, however, and for good reason.
"Cupcakes" is visceral horror, a sub-genre of horror that people will argue about the validity of from now until the dreams of Great Cthulhu end and he wakes up to discover that he was too late and Gandhi already nuked the world. Visceral or 'splatter' horror relies heavily on violent excess. In film, it's characterized by throwing enough buckets of fake blood at the camera to necessitate pulling out a firehose every time the crew needs to do a scene change. It is also often considered cheap, substituting fake blood and gore for 'real' horror. Not helping this poor reputation is a slew of poorly-made, poorly-conceived examples of the genre that serve as excellent ammunition for those who would like to shoot this poor genre and put it out of its misery for good.
I disagree with those people. Visceral horror may not be particularly frightening to me, but the aesthetic of torn flesh and blood does have its place, and in the hands of the right creator a slasher may be every bit as unnerving as whatever eldritch horrors the void has puked up lately. In some cases, a blend of atmospheric and visceral elements can elevate a story to a level it might not have achieved by only using one. Pet Sematary is at its most terrifying when Louis is slowly losing touch with reality and the reader is stuck along for the ride, but Church the cat disemboweling birds and rats and the aftermath of Victor Pascow's tragic accident are equally in service of the story. Viscera and gore are not the enemy. The enemy is poor application.
And for all the things I can say about "Cupcakes", good or bad, I cannot say that it has poor application of viscera. The electrocution at the end is, frankly, hokey, but only because it's come after several far more horrifying passages, from Pinkie's harvest of Dash's wings and cutie mark to a disemboweling that she's left completely conscious for. Pinkie's attitude staying bouncy and friendly throughout does a great deal to sell the story as if not frightening, unsettling.
That is, the first time you read it.
"Cupcakes" suffers from the same unfortunate problem just about every yandere story ever written runs into. If you're unfamiliar with that term, first of all, congratulations on connecting to the internet for the first time! I apologize for everything else you're likely to encounter here. Second and more to the point, a working definition that some anime fan somewhere may scalp me for because i really don't know my -deres that well. "Yandere" is a character archetype rather than a genre or subgenre of stories, referring to a character - usually female - who appears sweet, docile, and devoted to the object of her affection most of the time but becomes violent and unstable when she experiences jealousy.
The thing about the 'yandere' archetype is that it's a trick that can almost by definition only work once on any one prospective member of the audience because it relies on a subversion of expectations. The more you learn to associate the image of that cute girl next door who keeps walking home from school with you and offering you baked goods with a psychotic murderer waiting to happen, the less likely it is that you will be surprised or disturbed when it turns out to be true in the second act. This isn't to say that all stories featuring the 'yandere' archetype are bad, or that some aren't better or worse than others. It's just inescapably true that the archetype will never have the same impact on you it had when you first encountered it, and the story will need other elements in place to succeed in keeping your attention for repeat readings.
"Cupcakes" suffers heavily in this department. Once you know the 'twist' - that Pinkie Pie is a psychotic murderer who kills other ponies by lottery because the voices in her head tell her to - the story does not have much to offer. It's all the same song and dance - stab Rainbow, Rainbow cries, stab Rainbow, Rainbow cries, repeat until you realize that you're neither scared nor disturbed at this point and are instead waiting for Pinkie to get it over with already. This is not in itself the worst flaw a horror short can have - "The Lottery" is predicated on a twist ending too, after all. The difference is that without the twist, there's not much left to recommend it because rather than being a quick beat at the end, the entire story consists of twist. Rainbow Dash is drugged and wakes up to happy fun murder times. If you already know what Pinkie is going to do in what order, you really have no vicarious scares left to enjoy. There is no chase sequence, the story is from Rainbow's perspective so there is no insight into what is going on in Pinkie's mind, and the story is sadly lacking in the 'atmosphere' department since Rainbow is stuck bound to a murder bench for most of it instead of being forced to wander and explore Pinkie's rather macabre party cave.
The fact that "Cupcakes" opened the floodgates for the sub-genre of "member of the central cast is a crazy axe murderer" stories has not helped. If it were the only such story, maybe the novelty would have survived. But being the 'first' of something is not quite the same thing as being the 'best'. And while I would compare "Cupcakes" positively to "The Experiments of Twilight Sparkle" or "Sweet Apple Massacre", that doesn't make it the apogee of the genre.
Furthermore, that divide between what people find scary is very much at play here. Put bluntly, gore just doesn't scare some people no matter how much time you spend lovingly describing the pain of a knife wound. If the idea of being stabbed by a friend doesn't provoke terror in you on its own, "Cupcakes" is already fighting an uphill battle to convince you to feel the kind of disturbed paranoia it wants to evoke.
This leaves us with one horror story with a very confusing, sad legacy. "Cupcakes" is not a 'bad' story, but its reputation has not aged well. And that's nothing's fault but its own.
Of course, I'm picking low-hanging fruit so far. Talking about what "The Rainbow Factory" or "Cupcakes" do wrong is easy. So for the next installment of this, look forward to me picking on a fic that people seem to actually like for reasons I may never understand.
So, you're saying that Cupcakes has gotten stale?
I am moderately sorry.
4060697 No you aren't.
I still laughed.
4060697
FOME remains the best person on FIMFiction.
There are three kinds of horror, they say.
The first one is horror of the body. To put it simply, it's about someone getting cut up with a chainsaw, preferably while still alive but already helpless.
The second one is horror of the mind. It's when you know that just behind the corner, someone is getting cut up with a chainsaw. It is essential that you are helpless while this happens, because then you can be scared of knowing that you're next.
And the third one is horror of the soul. It's when you know that behind the corner, someone is getting cut up up with a chainsaw, you're next, and when they're done, this will all happen again and again forever, and that, by itself, is far more horrifying than the chainsaw, which you are kind of getting used to by now.
Most things that are called "horror" around here don't really go beyond the first, so I wouldn't call them particularly scary. :)
4060802
Damn it stop making me want to spoil all the plot twists in you-know-what-with-the-cicada-motif so I can explain how smart it secretly is!
Have you ever readHouse of Leavesby Mark Z. Danielewski?Sorry, that was a terrible joke.I'm afraid I don't have the stomach for visceral horror, or for most of the other genes that seem to dominate the scene at the moment. I'm much more the existentialist sort. It appeals to something in me that I can't quite define.
4060824
Well, you don't need to explain that to me, because I kind of know already. :)
That said, this is why I called "Shipshape's World" horror, even though it says it's a comedy: It doesn't actually end.
4060909 I KNOW YOU KNOW BUT DOES THE WORLD.
DOES THE WORLD KNOW.
THE WORLD HAS NO LOVE AND THUS CANNOT KNOW.
This sort of subjectivity is why only one horror film, The Silence of the Lambs, has ever won a Best Picture Oscar. You've remarked before on a relative lack of decent horror stories in the fandom, but I and others have impressed the fandom's critics and audiences with them, so I wonder if that doesn't mean horror may actually have an easier time in this fandom than elsewhere. Or perhaps there just isn't that much competition for eyeballs.
I'll be interested to see where this series goes next.
4061372 Eh. I'd think about that with a grain of salt. Best Picture is sometimes a legitimately good film, but Oscars tend to reflect the biases of the Academy more than they do the competing biases of general audiences - it's part of the reason why so many Actor Porn movies get nominated to that slot. Genre films in general tend to end up nominated only for technical awards or, if they have the misfortune to be animated, kicked into the "Best Animated Feature" ghetto. There are more politics than just divisions of who thinks what is scary at play here.
I mean, The Shining and The Exorcist have both massive critical appeal and success with a broad audience. If Silence of the Lambs broke through and they didn't, I think the answer lies more with a certain psychotic performance than with the relative divisiveness among horror fans.
As for your success meaning the fandom is a better vector for horror, I mean, I wouldn't be too quick to claim that either. The Academy may not have recognized it, but there were a shocking number of horror fans who jumped on The Babadook, and Steven King - whether you consider him a horror novelist or not - is widely perceived as one, and is a household name. Then we have things like Silent Hill... just because there are different threshholds for 'scary' doesn't mean that mass culture doesn't have immediate, recognizable touchstones for horror that are widely appreciated.
I'd say that while this fandom might not be the worst place for the spreading of horror, the kind of horror that tends to spread virulently - the 'face' of horror, if you will - is still sadly "Cupcakes".
I honestly think the scariest part of Cupcakes is the bit that's never explained: the lottery, why Pinkie is driven to follow it, and the fact that she's going to keep doing this unless you read one of the godawful followups where she's captured and put on trial. (If one is satisfactorily naive, one may also derive horror from "oh my god this is Pinkie Pie doing this", but the motif is so overplayed at this point in the fandom that you'd need to be a yandere-blind internet neophyte for it to have any effect.)
I think the people who shit on visceral horror as not being horror just prefer psychological horror. I've definitely seen good examples of the former, but you're right that there are far, far more poor ones. Then again, I know someone who thinks that poop jokes need a gore tag, so it's like food critics and spiciness.
4061497 The thing is that there are terrible examples of psychological horror out there too, but unlike bad visceral horror they're harder to make and less fun to watch or talk about, so they tend to end up erased in the popular consciousness.
Plus, there's a lot of bleed between elements depending on what you're talking about. Is Misery psychological or visceral horror? How about Hannibal, which is about a serial killer who eats people and the detective chasing him, but is shot/directed like a moderately less abstract Twin Peaks? How about Silent Hill, which is about being trapped in a town that reflects the anxieties of an individual back upon them - but which also stars Pyramid Head as its 'iconic' monster character? (And not Valtiel, which I consider a goddamn crime).
There's overlap in elements of composition, is what I'm saying.
4061488
You're probably right. I have some thoughts to unpack this subject, but they're examples of my own work, and I don't want to come across like a shill. So I'll go with a happy medium and spoiler-tag them.
You signed up to Fimfic just a few weeks after I ran Biblical Monsters, which was a runaway hit and the biggest Dark story of 2013. It was so big that in the latter half of that year, if you typed "biblical monsters" into Google, the first suggested extension was the name "Horse Voice." It has more votes and far more comments then the classic Glass Blower, which frankly blows my mind. More recently, my earlier Writing on the Wall edged past 20,000 views. That's probably more eyeballs than it would gave gotten if I had written it as original fiction and gotten it published (but don't quote me on that).
Why does this matter? Because before I got into this fandom, I thought almost no one out there wanted to read what I had to say, and I expected to get an audience in the dozens if I was lucky. My point is that if you want to tell scary stories and don't care that you aren't paid, you could do a lot worse than Fimfiction.
4061783 I mean, on the one hand I see where you're coming from. On the other hand, I think it's arguable that the story in question more or less is the FImfiction Silence of the Lambs, in that I think it has an appeal outside the niche and a pronounced one at that. There's also... well, PM me if you want to hear me natter, because I actually just read it and I have so many thoughts.
4060802 Horror of the soul is when you know that behind the corner is someone you have to cut up with a chainsaw.
4091567 But around my place that's Last Thursday!