Column by Jack Joslin
My friend, Phil, claims to be afraid of nothing. When I ask what he means, he says that “vampires and werewolves and zombies have become the new Pokemon. And I hate the Pokemonization of monsters.”
He has a point. I find that I too am no longer frightened by zombies, werewolves, vampires and all their monster friends. Their power seems to me diminished. When I think about horror — not the genre, but the sensation, that malevolent presence hanging like fog — I think of certain early twentieth century British authors: M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Dennis Wheatley, Arthur Machen, and William Hope Hodgson. By their words, infant Jack found true terror.
This is not to attack vampires, werewolves, or zombies. It is not to attack their defenders for their preferences. But something has gone. Once these monsters struck terror by plucking on the basic fears of the reader. Inevitably, we overindulged – after all, they’re pretty awesome. But no longer really terrifying. Now they have become, as Phil put it, Pokemon monsters. D&D manuals exist containing Cthulhu – Lovecraft’s Elder God, vast and transcendent – with a full list of stats like STRENGTH and INTELLIGENCE, each one dutifully numbered. You can even find said monstrosity in Nintendo games and beanie toys.
Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Willows” offers no such specificity as to the horrors befalling the main characters. Two men take a canoe trip down the Danube river, camping by the water. Plenty of horror archetypes are present: ominous warnings from a passerby, strange shapes moving in the foliage, noises at night as the two nervous campers tremble in their tents. There is something terribly wrong with the willows; something, moreover, that existed long before either of these travelers set intrepid foot into unknown territory. This scared me: that just outside our hermetic familiar world, under the veneer of “safe” everyday life, was something very real, elemental, and unknowable. Something that had existed forever.
This is not something confined to the horror genre. A classic of American literature hints at this very elemental terror. See how Ishmael finds horror in the whiteness of the whale in Moby Dick:
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