(no subject)

[darchildre]

This morning, I was listening to Matthew Good's Vancouver on the way to work. (Which, by the way = totally awesome.) And I thought to myself, "Gosh, I want this to be a movie. Or a novel." Then I thought about it some more and realized that no, I don't. Because what I would want is a synaesthetic experience, that same feel in a different medium, and of course it wouldn't work. I would want bleakness and emptiness and the feeling of grey abandoned streets and what I would get would be characters.

I have a problem with characters, sometimes. Mostly in horror. Because horror is the one genre that I don't read because of the people in the book. Horror, I read (or watch) almost purely for idea. But no, that's not quite right either. Horror, I read (or watch) for image. When I seek out a work in the horror genre, it's almost always because of a description that spawns an image or series of images in my brain. And I read (or watch) for that image, hoping that when I get there it will live up to the picture I conjured in my mind.

It almost never does.

Fortunately, by the time I realize that I'm going to be disappointed, I have been caught by the characters or plotline and so I end up thoroughly enjoying the work. But there's still that moment when I'm let down, when I almost wish that I hadn't watched it or read it, just so that I could still have that perfect untarnished image in my mind.*

(The only film I can think of that gives me the imagery I want is 28 Days Later. Not the zombie parts, but the bit at the beginning when Jim wakes up in the hospital and wanders through an empty and silent London, the music slowly building. The rest of the movie is great but that sequence is perfect.)

Most of the time, the tarnishing comes through character. Because, see, when I'm reading for that image, the characters get in the way. I have to filter the experience through them, have to watch from a remove that is often detrimental to that image I'm looking for. Even when I like the people I'm reading about.

Oddly, though, reading about horror seems to remove that filter effect. I keep rereading The Monster Show, for example, because it describes the films, conjures those images, but doesn't actually require me to deal with the characters or the plot. The academic discussion puts me at a further remove that purifies the image. That's probably why House of Leaves both fails and works beautifully for me. The Johnny Truant narrative is something that I slog through in order to get to Zampanò's Navidson Record. It's presented as a scholarly work, in which the narration is...dispassionate. The POV is that of an observer, rather than an actor. Thus, I can observe.

It's probably why Lovecraft and MR James work well for me, also. Because their stories are fairly light on things like plot and character, being mostly a series of very effective imagery, shuffled together in an order that makes a story.

...I have no actual conclusion to this post, other than that this is why I often like reading about horror a little bit more than actually reading/watching the works in question, and that the next time I tell you that I really want a song to be turned into a book or movie, you should tell me that I am wrong.





*Tangentially, I have much less of this trouble with radio horror. I'd say that's because it's not a visual medium but then, neither is reading. So, I don't know.