In a recent tweet, the D&D team posted a set of icons representing six types of horror (the icons were made by Trystan Falcone, a.k.a. Walnut Dankgrass of "C"-Team fame).
The genres, as described in other tweets, are, starting with the top row from left to right, Gothic Horror, Ghost Stories, Folk Horror, Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, and Body Horror.
Given the attention drawn to these six, I suspect that they'll be the focus of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft's exploration of the broader horror genre. Let's look at their descriptions (in tweets) of these genres and talk about some examples of stories that use these tropes and ideas of how to build them into adventures.
There haven't been tweets for all six of them, so I'll just go in the order that they've posted about them.
Dark Fantasy: "Dark fantasy is as much a genre of fantasy as it is a genre of horror. Dark fantasy refers to fantasy worlds where grim themes, nihilistic plots, or horrifying elements inform a fantasy tale."
The image accompanying this tweet shows a headless horseman. While most Americans would associate the Headless Horseman with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the trope goes back a long ways, tracing back at least to the Celtic myth of a monster known as a Dullahan, which looks like a decapitated man on horseback carrying his own head, but is actually a single monster.
Personally, I've always felt that Fantasy is just horror in which humanity (or a broader group of humanoid races) have the tools needed to stand up to the nightmarish monsters. The Orcs, Balrogs, and Ringwraiths of Lord of the Rings are all terrible monsters, but in that universe, the forces of good are ultimately more powerful, even if they must fight with their all to triumph over evil.
Dark fantasy, thus, lets you more or less leave the monsters as scary as they are in traditional fantasy, but reduces humanity's capability to defend itself from them - whether by simply not having access to high magic or because society is too dysfunctional to present a united front (A Song of Ice and Fire being a great example.) Dark fantasy also often has the would-be defenders of humanity be power-hungry and selfish, such as in The Witcher series.
Folk Horror: "Folk horror explores fears of isolation, superstition, paranoia, and lost truths. Seemingly idyllic communities, rural reclusiveness, forgotten traditions, and naturalistic cults all frequently feature in folk horror adventures."
European history underwent a massive shift with the arrival of Christianity. Not to imply that previous religious structures were all harmonious and wonderful, but the extremely thorough campaign of conversion across basically all of Europe rendered many of the old religious practices and beliefs taboo. Indeed, while some religious traditions incorporated other faiths into them (such as how the Norse faith likely assimilated faith in the Vanir gods after taking over a Vanir-worshipping people, and simply made them a kind of second pantheon in addition to the Aesir) a lot of monotheistic faiths instead turned the gods of older, conquered cultures into monsters and demons. Baal, a Mesopotamian deity who was meant to be a kind of heroic patriarch, became the foundation for entities like Beelzebub in Christian tradition - the demonic Lord of the Flies.
So, to an extent, there's a fear of past beliefs and traditions that one's own ancestors might have taken part in. There is also a certain colonialist fear - that, as conquerors, we don't dominate the conquered land as much as we think we do.
But there's also an element here that's more about the divide between the urban and the rural. It's far more difficult for bad people to hide their deeds in urban environments, but the remote and rural places of the world have the advantage of obscurity. I think the most obvious Folk Horror example would be The Wicker Man, in which a person we're meant to relate to - a city-living detective - is drawn into a remote place under the control of a pagan cult with murderous fertility rituals. More recently, the movie Midsommar has a similar premise, where a group of American tourists are drawn into a similarly murderous cult that dresses up its evil in a cheery "traditionalism."
Ghost Stories: "Ghost stories touch on the issues of human existence: the nature of the soul, the weighty fact of morality, and the burden of ancestry and history. Spirits represent supernatural justice, as well as grief and the need for closure."
Tellingly, "ghost story" can also kind of serve as a general term for any kind of scary story, aka horror. But to speak specifically to this subgenre, I think ghost story horror is often the most deeply personal. A ghost typically has some sort of unresolved business in the world, and surviving such a tale often involves uncovering the past.
There's a live show that the podcast Welcome to Night Vale had a few years ago called Ghost Stories (Welcome to Night Vale itself being a kind of intersection of cosmic, surreal, and dystopian horror undercut or sometimes enhanced by its sense of humor) that had a really touching point at the end - that in some ways, a ghost story is a hopeful one. We want our loved ones and ourselves to persist in some form after death. Personally, I found myself listening to that performance around the time my mother died of cancer, so it hit me very hard.
Ghost stories don't have to be tear-jerkingly tragic, though. In some ways, the existence of a malevolent ghost can mean a horrific escape from justice. Freddy Kreuger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series is basically a ghost, but death has made him far more unstoppable than he was as a merely mortal serial killer.
Usually, you can just kill the monster to survive in a horror story. But if the monster's already dead, that solution is harder to come by.
Cosmic Horror: "Cosmic horror revolves around the fear of personal insignificance. The genre is predicated on the idea of entities so vast and so genuinely beyond our comprehension that we cannot fathom their simplest motivations."
It's funny, because the aesthetics of cosmic horror are not always connected to the themes. Usually, when we think of Cosmic Horror, we have images of Cthulhu, or maybe The Thing, and often weird cults that always seem to involve tentacles.
I've often felt that Demons in D&D (specifically demons as opposed to other types of fiends) have a big overlap with cosmic horror monsters, which are also represented in D&D with things like Mind Flayers, Star Spawn, and Beholders, largely because they both seem associated with madness.
But in a way, I think that the madness inflicted by demons is more of an intended effect. While Beholders and Mind Flayers are generally given a Lawful Evil alignment, I think it might be more accurate to say that they're "none of the above."
Key to this genre is ignorance - you can never completely fathom what these things want.
It's hard to talk about this genre without mentioned H. P. Lovecraft, though the very thing that makes him a problematic writer is also partially what makes the genre a little harder to grasp for modern audiences. Lovecraft's horrible-even-for-the-1920s racism informed his notions of fear of the unknown. In a lot of ways Cosmic Horror fits a bit more with science fiction than fantasy, and I think that more optimistic sci-fi, like Star Trek, served as something of a rebuttal to Lovecraft's entire premise - rather than fearing the unknown, Star Trek suggested that we might actually find advanced peoples and entities that share or even exceed our virtues and values - and that finding them could be to humanity's betterment, rather than our downfall.
Still, just as we talked about Dark Fantasy almost having a dial you could turn to determine how horrific it is, we can dial down the optimism from Star Trek-style sci-fi to encounter beings that are alien both in origin and nature, and who truly don't see any value in human(oid) life. The Mind Flayers are a good example here - where they're really only interested in us to either create more of themselves or consume our brains.
Actually, to go a bit further with the Mind Flayers, the most cosmic horror part of them is that they seem to have this profoundly ancient empire, but no one has any idea how it came to be. The Aboleths - themselves cosmic horror monsters who pre-date the arrival of the gods - have 100% perfect memory of their entire existences (and even inherit the perfect memories of their parents) and yet they don't remember the Ilithids' rise to power - suggesting that the Mind Flayers somehow aren't even from the past, which implies that they might be from the future instead. (And what does that mean? Are these horrifying tentacle-face monsters the future of the humanoid races? Or something that will wipe them out?)
The two subgenres they haven't made an official tweet for are Body Horror and, oddly enough, Gothic Horror.
I've talked a bit about Gothic Horror before, but let's touch on these both briefly.
(EDIT: They've made their Gothic Horror tweet: "Gothic horror is about the terror within, not without. It shatters the illusion of humanity in a poignant way by holding a mirror up to us and saying: look at what we truly are, and look at what we pretend to be."
I think this description is interesting, in that it plays into more of the Poe-style evil within humanity, such as when you consider the narrators of The Telltale Heart and A Casque of Amontillado. Gothic monsters are dark reflections of humanity, but a monster need not inhuman in any physical way - it's the ravenous, murderous beast lurking in humans themselves.)
Gothic Horror, I think, is deeply tied to the Romantic Movement (Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as part of a "ghost story" contest with her husband Percy and Lord Byron, among others). To put it very simply, the Romantic movement was reaction to what was seen as the overly-cerebral Age of Enlightenment, trying to bring emotion and individualism into its narratives after a period in which even fantastical fiction was written in a meticulous style that mimicked the detachment of scientific literature (if you want a fantastic exploration of these styles, read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, which is a fantastic novel - just be warned that the first part of the book is meant to mimic that pre-romantic style because it focuses on Mr. Norrel, whose personality is profoundly pre-romantic.)
As I wrote in my earlier post, one of the major themes of Gothic Horror is the idea of humanity transformed. Whereas cosmic horror is about the totally alien, and dark fantasy often involves evil gods and demons and such, the monsters of gothic horror tend to be former people who have become monsters - the werewolf, the vampire. Mr. Hyde is what happens when all the good is removed from Dr. Jekyll. Frankenstein (Adam, rather than Victor) is, ironically, the reverse - someone who should have been allowed to become human, but whose humanity was denied to him.
But in any case, the monster is something like a human, but with certain inhibitions against evil acts removed (again, I think it's worth noting that Frankenstein's monster behaves more like a conscious human being who is simply consumed with a desire for vengeance against his creator, rather than being a totally soulless monster - he's also probably the most eloquent character in the novel, quite different from the Boris Karloff version.)
I think one of the potentially interesting things you can do with gothic horror is to suggest that there's something redeemable in the villain, even when there isn't - sort of crocodile tears. There's a moment in Curse of Strahd (Strahd being a 100% gothic horror villain) in which, after we burned the giant effigy of him that a group of evil druids were worshipping, he didn't retaliate, and just seemed kind of sad. It was a moment where, despite myself (and partially in keeping with my lawful good paladin's personality,) I wondered if there might be some way to reach the humanity inside him.
But the horror, then, is that that humanity isn't really there anymore.
Moving on:
Body Horror is sort of a weird concept for a subgenre itself. I'd argue it's more of an element within the horror genre that several subgenres make use of. Perhaps the most common example is the werewolf - often, werewolf stories focus on a protagonist who has become a werewolf, and has lost control of the human impulses not to harm other people, even if they are horrified by their acts.
But the transformation from human to wolf-like being can, itself, be horrific. The movie An American Werewolf in London is famous for its horrifying transformations scenes.
I guess if we're going to define body horror, it's the horror of one's own body being violated in some way - some unexpected transformation. Often, this transformation can be painful, but it's not even just the pain that's horrific - it's the notion that your own very physical form is becoming something unrecognizable.
David Cronenberg, the director, is probably the filmmaker most famous for his use of Body Horror. His remake of The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, presents the ongoing decay of Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle from 1980s-Jeff-Goldblum-handsome to horrifying fly-person, watching his human body fall apart piece by piece.
John Carpenter's The Thing blends cosmic horror with body horror - the monster in that is a multicellular alien colony that can infect people, and hides in plain sight, but when it is revealed, the body of those infected transforms into horrifying, shapeless monstrosities. While fear of the other characters potentially being The Thing is certainly part of the paranoid terror of that story, there's also the fear that, if a person doesn't know they've been converted until it's revealed, even you might find yourself suddenly transforming in these horrific ways.
Hell, let's look at another sci-fi, cosmic horror example: Alien. While the Xenomorph is mostly an external, predatory monster, the method by which it is brought aboard the Nostromo is pure body horror - John Hurt's Kane believes he's been lucky enough to survive an encounter with an alien, only for the newly formed young xenomorph to erupt from his chest, killing him. And let's not forget that the design of the Xenomorph was very deliberately made to evoke human sexual organs - after all, what's more horrifying than the parts of the body that we, you know, use when we're doing some very important social bonding/propagating the species turning out to be deadly threats? Like a lot of horror that makes the familiar and safe into the mortally dangerous, Body Horror takes it a step further to something that's beyond familiar, but is in fact a literal part of ourselves being the danger.
(Content Warning: I'm going to describe an injury I sustained as a child in the next paragraph.)
I think Body Horror is a very special kind of horror because the integrity of our own bodies is fundamental to our sense of health and safety. When I was six years old, I got in an accident in which I thrust my hands through a window, and the shards that fell sliced up my wrists (I feel very lucky that I still have total control over my hands, and that no major nerves were severed - I got a hundred stitches, to give you an idea of how nasty the cuts were). Looking at my own left wrist and seeing into the deep gouge the glass had cut, with exposed fat and blood, and I think maybe some muscle and blood vessels is one of the most shocking things I've ever witnessed. Today, 28 years later, my wrists both have large scars, and the left one is basically a big mass of scar tissue connecting various flaps of skin, even if time has smoothed it over significantly.
(Moving On.)
Body horror is kind of the fear of betrayal by the very thing you are - not even a trusted loved one, but your literal own physical form.
Anyway, I'm eager to see how the book will handle the use of these various genres. It seems Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has a massive amount of content to cover, between the gothic lineages, two new subclasses, what I hope to be an extensive bestiary, and descriptions of many different domains of dread.
I'm also eager to use these subgenres as kind of modular pieces to build domains of dread. I already have a vague concept for a domain built around the idea of doppelgangers, but I want to hold off on working too much on it until I've got the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment