**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will
take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory
to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or
that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no
responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly
odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said,
don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh,
and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**
Welcome back to hell. Or… my blog. Whatever. Yesterday, I
did entries 10-6 on this series, and you can read that by clicking on the big
happy face.
Remember the happy face. You might need it as we go through
the last five. I will… of course, I don't handle this kind of horror
particularly well either. But it's there if you do need it.
5: DO Focus on
Your Concept
I teach a short story class with another author, and one of
the things we both try to drive home is the importance of your idea. Especially
in speculative fiction (Including horror), the idea needs to be solid. You need to know what your idea is, and you
need to know it well.
Again, internet horror comes in to drive home a point that I
would make anyway. It is a singular concept that sells most written internet
horror. Jeff the Killer, for its many flaws, hinges on a well-traveled concept:
the consequences of your actions may be larger than they appear. Smile Dog:
misery loves company. Candle Cove: perception may lie. One concept, and
everything builds around it.
4: DO Have
Passion
No one has perfect execution on every part of a creative
project. It's fucking impossible, in fact. Even if someone actually produced
exactly what they had in mind, someone else could hate it. Look at Van Gogh's Starry Night. It's a master piece… but
some people think his paint was laid on too thick. Because of that, they not
only dislike Starry Night, but
everything Van Gogh painted.
You know what people respect, though? Whether or not they
like something, they want to see you go balls deep into it. Even if they don’t
like what you've produced, they can then see that you, as a creator, were
passionate about it. And if they do like it, then that will help them love it.
I'm not going to run through specific examples of this one.
Internet horror is full of missteps, things that could have been done better or
had more time given to them. But you know what? The genre is still successful,
and the people doing it are still passionate. And that is a testament to the
creators, in my opinion.
3: DO Shirk off
the Genre Shackles
… or at least wiggle around in them a little bit. Horror is
a breeding ground for monsters and aliens and magic. I love all those things. I
love them done and I love them redone. But I also love it when some creator
throws caution to the wind and goes outside of their purview. Or, at the very
least, takes the access road running next to what's "normal."
The best example I have of this is a fairly popular series
on Youtube called alantutorial. It's not supernatural. It's not particularly
scary, in the traditional sense. But it is one of the most unnerving
experiences I've had with fictional media to date. To sum it up, alantutorial
is the web series of a man with unspecified developmental issues. He makes
tutorials on ridiculous things no one would need a tutorial for (Such as
crushing a can with wood.), or just makes incorrect tutorials. But he loves it.
It's his passion, and damn it, he's going to do them.
As the series progresses, he seems to love the tutorials
less and less. He has some traumatic experiences. He becomes destructive, and
eventually, his caretaker (We assume his brother from context clues) locks him
out of the house and bars his windows shut. This is a man who really can't take
care of himself. And the ensuing abuse that follows Alan is not any easier to
play witness to.
The series isn't scary because there's a monster after you,
ooga-booga. It's scary because there's a… depravity to the kind of person who
would do that. It's scary because we know
this isn't all that fictional – this sort of thing happens all the time when
someone with one of any number of mental disorders, learning disabilities, et
cetera becomes "too much" for their caretaker. It's especially scary
if you know someone who is reliant on
another person for so much of their wellbeing.
Alantutorial is entirely fictional, thankfully (As a side
note, Alan Resnick, who was behind it, is brilliant. Check him out.), but it
feels a little bit too real. Even when it's clearly going over the top, you
can't help but feel dread for Alan in that situation.
Now, it's not the only piece that does that. A lot of horror
feels maybe just a bit too real in certain places. Sections of a lot of these
indie horror shows online have a lot of realism to them. I can't make too many
recommendations because the more realistic they get, the harder it is for me to
watch them. As the whippersnappers say: it's too spoopy for me.
2: DO Embrace the
Unknown
Not knowing is the basis of all fear. What's in the dark
that I can't see? What are the motives of this thing? Why is this guy avoiding
the moonlight? What's going on in my dreams?
But often, those questions are answered. That's totally
valid, don't get me wrong. But I tend to lean with H.P. Lovecraft on this one:
the not knowing is worse than the knowing. Or, as I've heard it many times: the
audience's imagination will come up with something ten times worse than you
ever would have created. Something unknown and not seen can't be ruined by
substandard description or bad effects or a lack of budget or any other
problems. In the mind of the reader, that terrifying fill-in-the-blank can be
the scariest thing in the world.
Again, it's not the only way, but it is a way, and it's one that the internet horror crowd has taken to
heart. I'm going to point you back at the SCP Foundation. Redaction,
Expungement, and Black Boxes are key components in many of their pieces.
SCP-087 does something awful if you send more than one person. SCP-447 does something with dead bodies that's too
horrible to detail out. And then you have SCP-231, which is one of the most
heavily redacted entries in the project. And Procedure 110 Montauk to control
SCP-231, which is so horrid you need special clearance to learn about it. That is the power of the unknown. A few
clues, some information skirted around… and the audience's imagination, now
their own worst enemy.
1: DO Twist the
Unoriginal
Internet horror, as I kind of hope I've shown, is… vast.
There's a lot of it, and a lot of it interconnects somehow or another. But more
than that, a lot of it comes from seeing it, hearing it, reading it. When
Marble Hornets hit the scene, suddenly another half-dozen indie horror shows in
a similar vein started… and flopped.
Because we've all
seen Marble Hornets, too. You can't just remake it with your characters. You
have to do something that's actually original with the idea.
I love riffing on ideas. I love squishing two or three
disparate things together. It's actually one of my favorite ways to create new
fiction. But when I do it, my first question to myself is: what's the angle?
Where and how am I approaching this to bring something fresh to it? That's unfortunately
harder to find in the wild. What comes immediately to mind is the channel StanFrederick. After you've watched some of the other similar shows online, find
that one and you'll see what I mean.
But by now, I've started you down the rabbit hole, or you've
already been there. So what did I miss that twists the norms around? Let me
know so I can tap into the new veins of horror even deeper. And stay tuned for
the top 10 DON'TS we can learn from
internet horror, too.
Voss
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