The Monster Is Better Before You See It

There is something outside the window.

That is frightening.

There is a seven-foot creature outside the window with grey skin, black eyes, six fingers and a mouth extending vertically from its chin to its forehead.

That might be frightening.

But we have already lost something.

We know what is outside the window.

It is seven feet tall. It is grey. It has six fingers. Presumably, if sufficiently motivated, we could begin making diagrams.

The unknown has become a monster.

And monsters are much easier to deal with.

Before the monster

Horror has a peculiar problem.

Eventually, the audience wants to see the thing.

Writers want to show it too.

We have imagined the creature. We know what it looks like. Perhaps we've spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding what its teeth do.

There is an understandable desire to open the door and let everyone admire the work.

This is frequently a mistake.

Consider the moments before a monster is revealed.

Something moves at the end of a corridor.

A branch breaks in the woods.

Someone hears breathing through a telephone after the person on the other end has stopped speaking.

There is a shape standing beside the road.

At this point, the threat can be almost anything.

The reader knows only that something is wrong.

That gives the imagination an enormous space to operate inside.

Then the lights come on.

It has claws.

Ah.

Claws I understand.

Description creates boundaries

The moment we describe something, we begin limiting it.

This isn't necessarily bad. Eventually a story needs facts. But facts are hostile to certain kinds of fear.

Suppose someone reports seeing a person standing in their garden every night.

We don't know who it is.

We don't know whether it is male or female.

We don't know how it arrived.

We don't know whether it leaves.

We don't even know whether it is actually a person.

Then we learn that the figure is an elderly woman wearing a blue nightdress.

Our uncertainty has narrowed considerably.

Give her a name and it narrows again.

Explain that she died in the house in 1974 and now we're making excellent progress.

Find her grave, identify the traumatic circumstances of her death and discover that she can be banished by burning the nightdress and we have almost entirely solved the problem.

The unknown figure in the garden has become a project.

This is the danger of explanation.

Every answer removes a possibility.

And possibilities are where much of horror lives.

Your monster is better than mine

There is another difficulty.

I have one imagination.

The audience has thousands.

If I tell a room full of people that something enormous is moving beneath dark water, every person in that room constructs a slightly different version of it.

One imagines teeth.

Another imagines tentacles.

Someone who dislikes deep water may not imagine the creature at all. The water is sufficient.

All of those fears are working for the story simultaneously.

Then I show them the monster.

Now everyone has the same one.

Mine.

I have replaced a thousand private nightmares with a piece of creature design.

It had better be very good.

This is one reason suggestion is so powerful. It recruits the reader.

Give them a footprint that is too large.

Let something knock against the underside of the boat.

Have the sonar return a shape that shouldn't fit inside the lake.

Then stop.

The reader will provide an organism.

They may even be kind enough to make it frightening.

Evidence is often better than appearance

I am much more interested in what a monster does to reality than what it looks like.

A broken fence.

A missing animal.

A room that measures eleven metres internally despite the exterior wall being nine metres long.

A telephone call from someone whose body has already been found.

Fourteen place settings in a house occupied by thirteen people.

These are traces.

They tell us something has happened without giving us the comfort of understanding what caused it.

This is especially useful in documentary and epistolary horror.

A report does not need to say:

A terrifying creature entered the field.

It can say:

At 06:40, twelve cattle were recovered from the eastern enclosure. Thirteen sets of hoofprints exited it.

Now we have a problem.

Not a monster.

A problem.

Problems invite investigation.

And investigation is one of the most reliable ways of getting horror protagonists into places they should not be.

The edge of the frame

Cameras create an interesting version of the same effect.

The frightening part of an image is often not what it shows.

It is what it nearly shows.

A figure at the tree line.

Something reflected in glass.

A hand around the edge of a doorway.

A shape occupying six pixels in the background of an otherwise ordinary photograph.

The instinct is to enlarge it.

Enhance it.

Clarify it.

Identify it.

Again, this is usually a terrible idea.

The indistinct shape can still be anything.

The enhanced shape is Dave.

Poor Dave.

He was just walking his dog.

Uncertainty gives an image depth beyond its borders. It suggests that the photograph has accidentally captured part of a much larger event.

This is why something at the edge of the frame can be more disturbing than something standing directly in front of the camera.

One appears to have been photographed.

The other appears to have been noticed.

There is a difference.

The rule applies to sound

Sound may be even better at this.

There are noises human beings are extremely good at recognising.

Footsteps.

Breathing.

Crying.

Knocking.

A voice saying our name.

And then there are noises that are close enough to those things to be troublesome.

Footsteps with the wrong rhythm.

Breathing that continues too long.

Crying from somewhere no person could physically be.

Knocking from inside a wall.

Your name spoken in the voice of someone standing beside you.

Again, explanation reduces the effect.

If the characters discover that a particular creature mimics human voices to attract prey, the phenomenon has acquired a mechanism.

We understand it.

Perhaps we can test it.

Perhaps someone will eventually invent a device.

Before that explanation, however, the voice is simply impossible.

Impossible is harder to defend against.

But you do have to show something

There is a danger in taking this too far.

A writer can spend three hundred pages refusing to explain anything and call it ambiguity.

Readers are remarkably tolerant of mystery.

They are less tolerant of fraud.

If a story repeatedly promises revelation and then simply refuses to provide one, the unknown stops feeling frightening and starts feeling unfinished.

The answer is not necessarily to reveal the monster.

It is to reveal consequences.

We may never learn what lives beneath the house.

But we should learn what happened to the people who went down there.

We may never understand the voice on the radio.

But perhaps we discover that it has been transmitting since twenty-three years before the radio was manufactured.

We may never see the thing in the woods.

But every trail camera is now facing the same tree.

Mystery still needs progression.

The reader does not necessarily require an answer.

They require the unsettling sense that they are getting closer to one.

Knowledge changes the relationship

There is a useful point in many horror stories where the characters know enough to be afraid but not enough to understand.

I think this is often where horror is at its strongest.

At the beginning:

Nothing is wrong.

Then:

Something is wrong.

Then:

Something is here.

Eventually:

This is what it is.

Those are not equivalent stages.

The second and third contain enormous uncertainty.

The fourth converts uncertainty into knowledge.

Sometimes that conversion is necessary. Some monsters deserve to walk into the light. Some stories are about confrontation rather than incomprehension.

But once the creature is visible, the nature of the story changes.

We can see how large it is.

We can see how it moves.

We can learn what hurts it.

We can start discussing ammunition.

The monster has entered the physical world.

Physical things have rules.

Rules can be exploited.

Leave the door slightly open

The most satisfying horror explanations, for me, are often incomplete ones.

Give me enough information to understand that the characters have discovered something real.

Then leave one part that refuses to fit.

Explain the haunting.

But not the photograph taken thirty years before the victim was born.

Identify the animal.

But not why its tracks begin in the centre of the room.

Find the missing person.

But don't explain why they are still calling.

The final unanswered detail contaminates everything that appeared to have been resolved.

The case closes.

The paperwork is completed.

Everyone goes home.

And somewhere in the file there remains one sentence nobody can account for.

That sentence is still there after the monster has gone.

Sometimes it is better than the monster ever was.