What Scares You?

The other day I caught an ad on the TV for a new television movie (mini-series?) of The Andromeda Strain. The original movie, which I saw on television when I was twelve or thirteen years old, was one of the first things I remember finding really terrifying. (I was born in 1964, so far too young to see it when it came out in theaters in 1971.) Thinking about the nightmares I had after watching The Andromeda Strain prompted me to try to list the most outstandingly scary pieces of entertainment I can remember. So, in no particular order, here they are.

The Andromeda Strain, which I saw on TV in about 1978
Stephen King: It (1985?), The Stand (1978?), and The Shining (1977?), all of which I read the instant they came out
Alien, which I saw when it came out in 1979
The Exorcist, which I saw when it returned to theaters in 1982

Looking at this list, it appears to me either I lost my taste for horror by the time I was twenty or people just stopped writing things that really scared me. There's some outstanding "creepy" literature out there, but it doesn't seem to torque me the way those particular pieces did. For example, I truly enjoyed Robert McCammon's Boy's Life (which I read when it came out in 1991), which is modern Southern Gothic at its finest, and creepy in the extreme, but it didn't give me nightmares. Or Orson Scott Card's The Lost Boys (1993?), which I read as both a short story and a full length novel, and which is creepy enough to be sold in the horror section of many bookstores, but which is at root a three-hanky sob story.

And don't get me started on movies: what passes for horror on screen these days seems to be just gross.

(As an aside, Stephen King said in Danse Macabre (1981), his outstanding history of the horror genre--and I am paraphrasing from memory here--that terror is the finest emotion, but if he can't get that he'll go for horror, and if he can't even achieve that, he's not proud, he'll go for the gross-out.)

This has been on my mind lately for a couple of reasons as well as the new Andromeda Strain movie.

First, there's been a long discussion of "torture porn" on Dorothy-L, the listserv of mystery readers. The debate is over whether there's too much focus on the heinous acts of the serial rapists/killers who people many of today's thrillers, whether it's morally or ethically "right" to write such things and whether the flood of such books into the marketplace is healthy.

Second, publishing blogs and conference panelists all seem to be saying that the traditional mystery is a far harder sell than the thriller, and that the thriller should "push the boundaries." It should be "dark" and "edgy."

But surely I am not the only one who's suffering "fear fatigue?" I can't be the only one who enjoys reading books in which there's a hunt for a serial killer, but who skims (or skips entirely) the chapters from the killer's point of view, who isn't particularly interested in the graphic depiction of the dissection--or vivisection--of the victims? It's not "titillating", the way some Dorothy-L folk seem to think it's attempting to be, nor is it particularly horrifying. Shockingly enough, it's just...boring. Or sometimes manipulative. (And nothing turns me off a book faster than feeling as if the author is attempting to manipulate my emotions/reactions.)

Now, I know many of the other women of mystery are writing traditional mysteries, and our readers aren't solely devoted to extreme fiction, so I am probably standing in an echo chamber of sorts, preaching to the converted as it were. But still, it does seem to me that the constant desire to "push the boundaries," whether in terms of sex (writing romance? be sure it's erotic!) or violence (writing crime? be sure it's a thriller!) makes for less exciting reading rather than more.

How about you? What's really scared, thrilled, excited or titillated you lately? Or even not-so-lately?