Eleven Horror Stories with Happy Endings (Obviously, SPOILERS)

The other night, a friend of mine said I should've expected SOMA ending grimly because "it's Horror." It bugs me when people talk like that, because Horror doesn't have to end badly. It's actually dangerous to the genre if the endings are predictable. That's why the best Twilight Zone episodes challenge our expectations.

I've written before about not particularly liking either Happy or Sad endings. Sometimes an ending fits a particular story, and often Happiness is a surprisingly good fit for Horror. They're natural compliments to each other: go through the tumult of a scary story for the relief of an ending. It reminds me of Jack McDevitt once yelling at a WorldCon, "I'm not reading five hundred pages just to read the hero died at the end!"

Yet I love Horror, which feels more inclined every decade to end with everyone dead, or at best, doomed. So join me for a few scary movies that end well for the heroes. Maybe we'll learn something.

I'll even start with the most obvious entry so that if you've clicked here by accident, you'll only have the end of a hundred-year-old novel spoiled.

1. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)

Not Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which has a runtime more decadent than its costume design. But the formative vampire story for generations had the good guys triumph. It's an old-fashioned monster story: we find a monster, it scares us, and then we win. Life expectancy was lower in 1897, so endings went easier on us.

But seriously, read that ending. The evil sisters go down, Quincey and Harker shank Dracula, and Mina and Jonathan have a baby and live happily ever after. Stoker originally made their victory so overwhelming that Dracula's own castle died and fell apart.

Ultimately, Stoker decided killing the evil real estate was too much.

How Do You Segregate Fantasy and Horror?

An iconic Fantasy villain,
with his +1 cleaver.

From an early age I didn't understand most genre distinctions, and especially why stories weren't supposed to enter other territory midway through. This came to mind recently as I struggled over recommending Horror novels to someone who prefers Fantasy. John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, for instance, is technically Fantasy - it's got vampires burning in sunlight like any of a thousand Urban Fantasies. But it's widely recognized as a great Horror novel rather than a great Fantasy novel.

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?

Don't Write This: Fiction in Danger Zones

Senility as wish fulfillment.

I've already written a full review of Jo Walton's My Real Children, but I want to talk about something not in my review, and in no review I've yet read. The novel follows Patricia Cowan as she suffers a peculiar senility, forgetting most of her life, and then seeming to recall two different lives in high detail. Late in the novel, we see how the onset of senility hits her in both lives, and in one her lover dies. Patricia immediately hopes her senility will make her forget the death happened. This excited me. 

For the last two years of his life, I called my grandfather every night to make sure he had at least a little daily contact with a family member. He hated living in an old folks home, and was very demented on top of that. Our nightly contact made him remember me more than the other grandchildren, though there were still calls when he mistook me for his son, friend, and on one night, his mother. Living that intensely with a disability can stifle the way you think about it. It's easier to default to a somber, anodyne mode, both in avoiding conflicts, and in taking your mind off of things. It takes a different mind to see something so painful and be creative with it.

In reading that paragraph of Walton's novel, I wasn't offended. It was enlivening to read someone subvert our default thoughts of dementia, and simultaneously, tap into those desires, because in moments of weakness we've all wanted to forget things. In the moment, I could only compare it to FX's Archer.

I'm probably the only person to parallel My Real Children and Archer, but one of Archer's great strengths is its anarchic sense of humor. People mistake the show as dark, but it features the lightest hearted graphic tiger mauling I've ever seen. The series uses the drug trade, asphyxia fetishes, eco-terrorism, homophobia and the Oedipal complex as fodder for amazing character humor. It is neither didactic nor cynical; it's creative enough with its deployment of highly flawed characters to avoid offense while depicting the people themselves as intensely offensive. This is great for some audiences (like me), but also stifles how others think about creativity in danger zones, making them think it has to be transgressive.

Archer is often transgressive, as is most comedy about touchy subjects, because that's the easy edge for a laugh. But take George Carlin's early performances of The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. For the first six he's juvenile and profane – and then he hits "fuck." It's the beginning of life, he says, and yet it's something we use to hurt each other. Very rare for George Carlin, he isn't sure about his footing on a topic, and only has one joke, before saying he'll try to make a full bit out of it next year. He did, and the later versions have never been as interesting to me. That he's vulnerable and unsure about something so touchy, after being so flippant about the other touchy subjects is a haunting deviation.

As I've aged, I've become increasingly attracted to artists who can remain creative in danger zones. It seems either the hardest thing to do (plausible) or so risky to market that it's avoided (also plausible). Certainly if you botch your attempt at a new angle on pedophilia then you can offend a wide audience. But if you try, you might get John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and that scene wherein the pedophile Hakan rents a child prostitute, but is then so disturbed by how the boy is treated that he tries to give him enough money to run away. This foreshadows the compassionate angle Lindqvist later casts over the vampire/familiar relationship. The compassion of a pedophile in an otherwise uncaring world was so unexpected that it gave me goosebumps, where most vampire stories give me boredom. 

A predator in need of companionship.

These deviations stir me up. In most art you can get a sense of how touchy subjects will be handled; Grimdark Fantasy will probably slouch into rape, and a children's cartoon will probably avoid or didactically instruct about disabilities. Predictable paths are not always wrong, and often writing from a place of reliable sensitivity can avoid opening wounds. But I don't accept the failure state of attempted creativity in a danger zone as loathsome. My general reaction is discomfort for an author who probably knows they screwed up on something meaningful. It reads like seeing someone fall when both of us thought they should have flown.

Maybe I'm so attracted to these because I haven't figured out their parameters yet. There's a strong attraction for some people mired in what we don't yet understand. But to remain flexible with in writing about topics as tender as senility and pedophilia is too much for most artists. It's why most won't touch it at all. That might be why the few that can do it, even for a paragraph are so precious.