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| An iconic Fantasy villain, with his +1 cleaver. |
I've asked this on Reddit today, and will ask the blogosphere as well: how do you segregate
Fantasy from Horror?
It's tricky for me as they often overlap. Horror is
classically defined by the emotions it inspires in the audience (dread, tension, fear),
whereas Fantasy is classically defined by things we believe to be unreal existing
in the story (dragons, magic swords, other worlds). The presence of zombies doesn't make something Horror novel: Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel has zombies and is alternately slotted as Comedy, Mainstream and Fantasy. You only get Zombie Horror by doing the right things with them, but if you write a Medieval world with flying wyrms, you can't escape the Fantasy label.
Herein lies the trick, because a genre about audience emotions can overlap with a
genre about items at any time, but people will still consider something Horror
rather than Fantasy.
I’d argue that Pennywise and Jason Voorhees are Fantasy
characters you could slot into a RPG system. Many of our scariest ideas as a
fiction-loving culture are intrinsically fantastical ones we still irrationally
fear in the right contexts. Paranormal Activity even has a magic system by
which its demon operates, though interestingly, it’s figuring out that system that
adds much of the tension to the early movies.
Yet works like Stephen King's Misery and Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho don't need any otherworldly justification. We know
Horror isn’t always fantastical, just as what we usually call Fantasy doesn’t
bring Horror to mind, even when Jon Snow is cornered by a wight.
So what makes you think of a favorite book or movie as one genre?
Counter est. March 2, 2008
Hmmm, maybe what we need to do is create a Horror/Fantasy genre. Where there are scares, but also fantasy creatures (like vampires and zombies.) I'm not really answering your question, am I?
ReplyDeleteDark Fantasy sometimes serves as a bridge between the two genres, though some critics dislike its borders. The opening of Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man, for instance, might as well be a Horror scenario, from which the adventurers later deliver us.
DeleteFor me, I think it's the end effect of the story. A horror won't have a cheerful ending, and all usually isn't right with the world again.
ReplyDeleteThe "end effect" is an interesting way of putting it. On Reddit I've received several responses suggesting that if the story wound up scaring them, that trumped any Fantasy content and shifted it to Horror. The notion of one genre having an emotional trump card makes sense, especially based in reader-experience.
DeleteYou're making me revisit the Horror movies that did have cheerful endings. Naturally victims of a werewolf didn't return, but it's interesting to consider how many of the Horror narratives with even relatively happy endings are older. To spoil a decades-old film, I always liked Silver Bullet's wrap-up, cheesy as that movie is.
I don't think of vampires as fantasy though. Most of what is classified as 'urban fantasy' is horror to me.
ReplyDeleteSome genres do blend well though, like science fiction and horror. (Think Alien and Event Horizon.)
I'd love a chat about biters. Vampires have more implausible or impossible traits than orcs, elves or dwarves. What is it about them that doesn't strike you as Fantastic? That they've existed primarily in stories not marketed as Fantasy, or something else?
DeleteIf I am afraid and it causes nightmares (or I think it might cause nightmares), it's horror.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the fourth Blood Price book by Tanya Huff causes me to have nightmares, but the others don't. So that one is horror and the others are UF.
But vampires are a traditionally a horror motif and lots of people put anything with vampires in the horror category. Including Twilight.