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| Credit: Pixabay.com |
The most current
horror story I’m writing is a haunted house one but the challenge
is in coming up with unique monsters. So far I’ve steered clear of
the vampires and zombies (unless you count attacking skeletons, which
I don’t because they don’t have enough flesh to be considered a
corpse). I don’t want to create any spoilers, but the monsters that
are cliché in this story are more so in high fantasy than in
straight horror.
For the past decade,
vampires and zombies have dominated the horror/sci fi scene. As with
many types of monsters, their popularity is a phase. Vampires have
been fading out in the last year or so. Although the two will be in
the popular imagination for years to come, like everything else they
are fads and fads eventually fade out. Aliens were a fad in the ‘90s
and early 2001s; pirates were a fad in the late 2001s through the
early half of the present decade. As much as I love zombies, their
popularity will probably be used up soon and the masses will probably
move on to other characters of interest. These could be demonic
clowns which seem to have been getting more of a spotlight horror
fiction lately.
Yet, for those of us
writers who specialise in certain monsters that have been
traditionally popular such as the undead or werewolves, we can still
put twists on their characters in order to prevent rehashing old
plots. But the challenge in writing about archetypal monsters such as
these is to come up with new ways of portraying them. Fairly
recently, comic books have been doing this by making the hero a
zombie such as in I, Zombie, or a vampire breaking the
stereotype of monsters as evil and victimising. But now this trend is
getting old.
The problem with
much horror, not just today’s but that of the past 50 years at
least, is that it caters to the more familiar archetypes like the
ones mentioned above. Which is a little ironic because the basis of
horror fiction is fear of the unknown, and so fear of the unfamiliar.
But Frankensteinian monsters, Dracula and Jeckylle-and-Hyde
archetypes have been done numerous times in both books and movies,
not to mention television. What’s so surprising is that, with the
fan cult following of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthullu character, that a
major movie hasn’t adapted that character yet. Though a movie based
on Lovecraft’s Mythos, The Mountains of Madness, has been in
the plans for the last two years at least, there seem to be very
updates on it.
An article at Wired.com,
entitled “Alright, Folks, It’s Time Horror Got Some New Monsters”
talks in great detail about the need for new fiends in fiction. It’s
a really good one and includes interviews with horror authors and
movie directors on the subject. I strongly recommend reading it.
So what monsters out
there in the mythical universe do you think deserve a chance in
books, TV and the big screen? Please leave your answers in the box
below.
Until next time . .
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