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How to write fantasy: What are we so afraid of?

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There’s something blissfully surreal about Halloween. I’m not quite clear on how a festival concerned with our departed loved ones turned into a monster movie turned into sugar shock, but I do love watching all of these little monsters gallivant about and demand candy.

I love monsters. I think every fantasy reader does. One might be forgiven for thinking there’s something charmingly anachronistic about them; a reminder of a more credulous time when evil things lurked just outside the ring of torchlight. Indeed, most of us over the age of eight aren’t really afraid of the supernatural. I’m not even sure that’s possible in a post-Scooby Doo world …

… and yet, the 2000s and 2010s may be the monster-iest decade we’ve had in at least a century. Vampires are everywhere and no G20 or OWS protest would be complete without its incongruous zombie walk. And the reason is simple: we may not be afraid of monsters, but we’re still plenty afraid of the things they stand in for.

Vampires
What are we afraid of? Sex.

Vampires are to our time what ninjas were to the ’80s. They’re on TV, they’re in movies, they’re in books. They run the gamut from villains to anti-heroes to brooding, tortured heroes. No longer content with ‘traditional’ depictions, we’re throwing a coat of glitter on them and having them parade about in sunlight. We are, no doubt, only a few steps away from a band of teenage vampires that live in the sewer, eat pizza, and bludgeon gang violence. In short, vampires have gone from cinnamon artfully dashed about to a heaping bowl of salt upended into our collective wheaties.

And nobody takes more blame for this than Twilight, which is frequently accused of stripping out everything that’s scary about vampires in order to indulge tweens who have just recently discovered fetishism. It’s to be expected. Whenever something blows up in popularity, the hipsters come out. I liked vampires before they were cool. When it was all about the scary monster violence, man. Now it’s all just tawdry sex.

The irony of all this is that Twilight is just carrying Bram Stoker’s torch. Vampires have always been about sex. Dracula, the prototype for modern depictions of vampirism, is essentially a sexual predator. He seduces the local womenfolk, nibbles on their necks, and turns them into his blood-sucking brides. He’s charming, urbane, glamorous, rich and a whole lot of other nice things, and if those nice things get you into his boudoir, it’s perdition for you – you’ll never be the same again. Dracula, in its obsession/repulsion with sexual themes and the oblique nature in which it references them, is an essentially Victorian work. Given that our societal outlook on sex has changed so much, it’s probably to be expected that vampires aren’t really at the top of the villain list any longer …

… and yet it’s interesting to note that the current vampire revival started with Anne Rice. Her books became popular in the ’80s, when the high-profile rise of blood-borne AIDS made sex scary again.

Werewolves
What are we afraid of? Anger.

Vampires may have gone all soft on us, but werewolves are old reliable. They still transform when the moon is full, and they still rampage about, eating everything in sight. While Twilight is apparently trying to throw a coat of glitter on them as well, I’m not sure there are enough furries in the world to make werewolves into a sexual thing.

The defining feature of the werewolf is a loss of control; he’s essentially a fuzzy Jekyll and Hyde, doomed to transform from a dapper doctor to a snarling beast. The werewolf is a rabid animal, a rock star one hurled whiskey bottle away from self-destruction. It lives simply to kill (and sometimes eat, although that’s typically not considered an important part of the mythos), and inevitably, the people likeliest to become the werewolf’s victims are its nearest and dearest. The werewolf can’t control itself. It’s every little explosion we’d like to take back, all the regret we’ve built up over a lifetime of accidentally killing and eating our husbands and wives.


Zombies

What are we afraid of? Mindlessness.

Zombies are in a strange place. They’re almost as popular as vampires, and even share one of their most common characteristics: the ability to propagate via the medium of chewing on the living. But where vampires still cling to a few shreds of dignity, zombies have exchanged self-respect for parody. They’re dangerous only through overwhelming numbers and tirelessness. Their shambling is easily outrun. There’s no need for silver bullets or garlic: they’re defeated through the low-tech application of blows to the head. They groan things like ‘braaaains’.

I guess we have to blame George Romero for this one. Dawn of the Dead and its sequels are the archetypal zombie apocalypse movies: plague of unknown origin, everybody wants to eat brains, plucky band of protagonists try to escape and are then forced to hole up someplace and hope they can wait it out. Except with parody. Romero’s movies were a commentary on mindless consumerism. There’s a reason why Dawn of the Dead was set in a shopping mall.

The mindless hunger of the modern shambling zombie (or its cousin, the speedy zombie of 28 Days and the like – a ghoul, in nerd parlance) goes back to the zombie origin story. Voudoun practitioners in West Africa and notably Haiti designed and applied – allegedly and quite possibly apocryphally – with a chemical treatment / sensory deprivation combo designed to convince people that they were in fact dead in order to break their spirits and turn them into the perfect slaves. Yes, this sounds mental, but how accurate the sources are isn’t particularly important where mythologizing is concerned, and there’s a very short leap from the perfect mindless slave to … well, the perfect mindless slave of capital. The exact nature of zombie stupidity changes with the depiction, but the core of it remains: zombies want to eat brains because they haven’t got any of their own, and they want you to be just as dumb as they are.

Ghosts
What are we afraid of: Collective guilt.

The ghost story is, in many ways, the least uniform of monster stories. Virtually every civilization we’ve got has some form of afterlife belief in its cultural playbook, and sheer volume makes it difficult to find ties between phantoms and spooks that go deeper than the fact that they’re dead.

Given that, it’s almost surprising how consistent western depictions of ghost activity are. The traditional formula is simple: a living person is wronged or has done wrong, and must now spend an eternity suffering for the sin. And if, in the doing, said ghost can terrify or kill a few tourists and their mangy dog, so much the better.

There’s an element of injustice to the standard ghost story. When a murderer is consigned to eternal haunting, well, that’s just Biblical. But when the ghost is an eternal victim, something’s gone badly wrong in the afterlife’s HR department. It’s not our fault that Old Man Murray kidnapped and killed thirty accountants, but try telling that to the crazy thing trying to brain us with flying ledgers. The ghost is the victim of circumstance, and we’re the victims of … well, ghosts. It’s the job of the living to atone for – or simply get the hell away from the result of – the sins of the dead, because the results of their actions remain with us.

And that sucks, because all we wanted was a spiffy new house.

Happy Halloween!

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