First up today, some long-overdue linkage: Matt Maxwell responds to my quibbles over his differing (and in my view, overly proscriptive) definitions of science fiction and horror. The difficulty in a debate like this is that so much of it boils down to what the Dude would refer to as “just, like, your opinion, man,” but I think I can locate where the disagreement really stems from:
Science fiction, and I’ll add the caveat “to myself”, doesn’t and can’t bring the scares like horror can. It’s not trying to, for the most part. Even the at best unsettling “Hey you old fogeys, what happens when we start jacking ourselves into computers and hacking off our limbs and replacing them with blenders” cyberpunk fiction of the mid-80s doesn’t scare. Can’t. Won’t….And sure, science fiction could address the span of human emotion, but it largely chooses not to. Then again, horror often doesn’t soberly consider the intersection of technology/politics/society.
Caveat acknowledged and reiterated on my own behalf, but this feels like saying something is a certain thing definitionally because it tends to be that thing practically. Even if we were to grant that sci-fi doesn’t aim to scare (which I don’t) or that horror doesn’t aim to elucidate intellectual issues (which, again, I don’t), isn’t defining them based on this recalcitrance like saying “comics aren’t about things other than superheroes” simply because most comics are about superheroes, at least as far as comic shops go?
I don’t know; I tend to be very generous with my genre definitions. I don’t see why Alien is less of a work of science fiction because it’s like Jaws or a haunted-house story, for example; on the horror front, you’re talking to a guy who classifies Deliverance and Eyes Wide Shut in that genre. This is not to say that I’m willing to include just about anything within genre boundaries–I’m pretty skeptical, for instance, regarding Aaron Weisbrod’s case for the spy comic Sleeper as horror (though I’m largely sympathetic to his larger argument that horror need not, and frequently is not, located in monsters). I said something similar back when Steve Bissette said that Maus and Jimmy Corrigan were horror–basically, while almost all great horror is bleak, not all things that are bleak are horror. This debate with Matt is sort of the flipside of that: Sci-fi is different than horror in that is defined largely by concept, not by tone. So within that larger framework, can’t you do pretty much anything?
Anyway, on with the quick hits!
Returning to my beloved Black Hole beat, here’s Time.com’s Andrew Arnold’s very lengthy, very effusive review of the book, tying it directly into the Halloween spooky-media season–a smart move for publisher Pantheon and anyone else who wants to see this book get into as many hands as possible.
Speaking of BH‘s Charles Burns, Rod Lott at Bookgasm reviews the new anthology The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror, which boasts a Burns cover. It also sounds pretty cool based on the stories included, from Lovecraft, Bierce, Blackwood, Machen and all the usual cosmic-horror supsects. (Sorry, Matt!)
Back here on Earth, sometimes real life is more horrifying than fiction: I’m sure you’ve all come across the story of the Delaware woman who hanged herself from a tree and was subsequently mistaken for a Halloween direction. I don’t have much to add other than “Jeeezus.” If this weren’t being reported in virtually every major news outlet around I’d suspect, as did Infocult’s Bryan Alexander, that it was an urban myth, but the fact that it took place in America as opposed to a European or Asian nation where English is not spoken and therefore facts are more difficult to confirm leads me to conclude it’s probably legit. Life imitates a horror-movie set-piece.
Finally, it can’t touch RetroCrush’s 100 Scariest Movie Scenes countdown, but it’s still pretty cool: this thread at College Bargain assembles a virtual parade of scary images from film and TV. They’re not all winners (the Crypt Keeper?) and some linkrot has set in, but there are a whole bunch of astutely chosen images up there, certainly enough to make your heart skip a beat once or twice. I’m most impressed by how off-the-beaten-path they got: I’m happy to see iconic images like the demon face from The Exorcist (added bonus: I showed the selection to a friend, who immediately confirmed that the Special Edition’s added glimpse of the face went on too long and killed the effect) and such, but including the masked Burger King mascot, the dogman from The Shining, Bilbo’s freakout from The Fellowship of the Ring, Large Marge, the chicken-chop from Willy Wonka, the Scarecrow from Batman Begins (I hated the movie, but even so I could see the horrific genius in the whole “Would you like to see my mask?” moment), and the woman in the bathtub from the TV-movie version of The Shining–a face-meltingly scary moment in an otherwise tepid production–shows a heterodox and sharp horror mind at work.
Oh, you want to know what my favorite image was?
