New monsters, real characters, and let the old franchises finally rest.

Dani Soncasie on Horror: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | Features |

Dani Soncasie, the Missouri comic creator behind the vampire graphic novel Blood of the Forsaken, has firm views on what horror does well and where it lets itself down. In this guest post she sorts the genre into the good, the bad and the ugly. The good is range: grief, guilt, love and family, all handed fangs and claws. The bad is the straight slasher that swaps characters for buckets of blood. The ugly is the studio habit of hauling the same franchise out of the grave for one more sequel. It sits well beside our other horror features on what the genre owes the people who love it. Here is Dani, capital letters and all.

Horror can carry grief, guilt, love and family, and for Dani Soncasie that range is the whole point. Gore can sharpen a story but never replace it, and a genre built on new nightmares should stop digging up the same old franchises for one more sequel.

The Good

What I love most about horror is its ability to explore the entire breadth of the human condition.

People tend to think of horror as being about fear, but fear is only one emotion in an enormous toolbox. Horror can explore grief, love, anger, guilt, loneliness, desire, trauma, family, morality, survival, and all of the tiny, complicated emotions that exist somewhere between them.

And it can do it in incredibly entertaining ways.

You can explore grief through a ghost story. You can examine family trauma through generations of witches. A vampire story can become a story about mortality, identity, addiction, sexuality, loneliness or what it means to watch the world change while you remain the same. A monster can be an actual monster, a metaphor for something entirely human, or both at once.

That’s what fascinates me.

Horror gives us permission to take very real emotions and experiences and put them into completely unreal situations. We can exaggerate them, personify them, chase someone down a hallway with them, give them fangs and claws, or let them quietly sit at the dinner table.

And underneath all of that, we’re still telling stories about people.

I think that’s why horror has such incredible range. I don’t have to choose between exploring something meaningful and entertaining someone. I can do both.

Sometimes the best way to talk about something painfully human is to invite a monster into the room.

The Bad

I’m probably going to get some hate for this one, but I don’t particularly care for straight slasher flicks.

I KNOW. I’m a horror creator who doesn’t really like slashers. Come at me.

It’s not that I have a problem with gore. I write horror. Blood and guts don’t bother me. What bothers me is when gore and shock value become substitutes for everything else.

Too many slasher films, for me, feel like they’re trying to compensate for what they don’t have. Maybe there wasn’t much of a budget. Maybe the production isn’t great. Maybe the script is thin, the acting isn’t particularly convincing, or the characters exist primarily to provide the killer with something squishy to stab.

So the answer becomes: MORE BLOOD!

But if I don’t care about the person being chased, why should I care when you catch them?

You can show me the most elaborate, disgusting, technically impressive death imaginable, but if you’ve given me no reason to care about the person it’s happening to, I’m probably just sitting there thinking about how the prosthetic effect was made.

Give me characters. Give me tension. Give me something psychological. Give me relationships and motivations and consequences. Make me desperately want somebody to survive before you start trying to kill them.

Gore can absolutely enhance horror.

I just don’t think it can replace it.

The Ugly

REBOOTS. REMAKES. AND ENDLESS SEQUELS.

There. I said it.

Is mainstream entertainment completely devoid of originality?!

How many times are we going to reboot the same franchise, remake the same movie, resurrect the same villain, or drag some poor character out of retirement because somebody discovered there are still three dollars left in the IP?

And before somebody comes after me, I’m not saying there has never been a good remake, reboot, or sequel. Of course there has.

I’m talking about the RELIANCE on them.

Horror is supposed to be one of the places where people can take risks. It’s supposed to be weird! It’s supposed to introduce us to things we haven’t seen before. New monsters. New mythology. New filmmakers. New writers. New voices. New nightmares.

Instead, sometimes it feels like somebody walks into a studio meeting and says, “I’ve got an incredible new horror concept!”

And the response is, “That’s fantastic. But what if it were Halloween?”

NO.

Let new things exist!

There are writers, filmmakers, and artists everywhere creating bizarre, terrifying, fascinating new stories, and we’re over here digging up the corpse of another franchise to see whether there’s enough meat left on it for one more sequel.

At some point, the dead should be allowed to stay dead.

Especially in horror.

Actually…

You know what?

That’s probably exactly why they keep coming back.

Dani Soncasie

Dani Soncasie wants the dead to stay dead, which is a brave stance in a genre where the dead have agents, three-picture deals and a remake already pencilled in for next Halloween.