horror vs. dark fantasy

[scalem X]

I'm sorry to start topic about genres, something which usually depends on flavour instead of on convention.

But here he goes:
How unsettling does your dark fantasy story have to be, before it crosses into the horror border? How much blood has to flow?

I have not yet read many (not to say none) HP Lovecraft, but I can't imagine someone calling it real horror. I wouldn't know about dreaming that Cthulhu came and ate you, but if you disagree, no problem.

Can certain scenes make your story cross the border? If anyone of you have read Clive Barker's "The Yattering and Jack", then maybe you can solve my problem. Is the story horror? In general it didn't frighten me all that much, but on the other hand it does feature a demon and he does suggest torture and in general it radiates that horror feeling (being in my opinion some sort of parody on other stories of say a poltergeist).

Any thoughts on this?

[asher marquering]

i haven't read the story finished, a friend of mine has it (part of the books of blood series) but it seemed like horror to me (i think there was a gory cat killing that got to me) with parts of comedy and fantasy

but my understanding of dark fantasy is a fusion and balance of both genres so as long as u balance your graphic blood spilling scenes with those of fantasy nature it should stay dark fantasy

to me HP Lovecrafts work combines fantasy, horror and a bit of sci-fi but to me it would be dark fantasy

ok thats my 2 cents worth

[j. d. worthington]

I think this is another case of something that is going to be near-impossible to define, in part because "dark fantasy" grew out of "horror" and "fantasy" in the modern sense, and both of those originated as part of "fantasy" overall....

Part of the problem is confusing horror with bloodletting. A good tale of the sort doesn't have to have any bloodletting (which is not to say one that does have such isn't a good horror tale... simply that it's not a particularly useful criterion); the horror -- as with HPL -- is the worldview expressed, one where the implications leave no ground for comfort. Thomas Ligotti is an excellent example of this; all his work tends to be a slice of genuine nightmare, but there's seldom much in the way of gore. Rather, he levers your world out of joint and gives you a glimpse into the abyss... then makes you realize the abyss is all there really is; the rest is illusion.

I think the closest one can come at this point to defining dark fantasy with any sort of rigor is that it is something with a horrific intent, but which relies on recognizable fantasy tropes from such things as the epic, heroic, or sword-and-sorcery fantasy... something like Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, Moorcock's Elric or Blood, quite a bit by Tanith Lee, etc. Horror, on the other hand, need not contain such elements. Essentially, I'd say dark fantasy is sort of a special branch of horror itself in intent; whereas in incident it is more closely allied to the heroic or epic fantasy....

[scalem X]

It's indeed part of the books of blood series, but the story itself is not really scary and it made me wonder.

Is all supernatural horror with the exception of gore in fact dark fantasy?

I have the feeling that the term dark fantasy has been sort of a trend and that in fact a lot of stories that would be called horror a couple of years ago are now called dark fantasy, because they skip on the scaring and the gore.

[j. d. worthington]

I'd say that's not too far off the mark. I'd call it more of a marketing strategy than a genuine difference in genre. An awful lot of the classics of the horror field would, these days, be called "dark fantasy"... an enormous amount of Blackwood would come close to that classification (even though there's none of the reliance on what are now traditional fantasy tropes), because there's very little "scare factor", more an eeriness or nightmarish quality. The same would go for most of Machen, a fair amount of Dunsany, several tales by John Buchan....

[andrew.v.spencer]

I think we need to diferentiate between supernatural horror and huma horror.

A vampire would be supernatural horror, a slasher human horror.

Supernatural horror, is, I think a sub set of fantasy in that it involves fntasy creatures (vampires, werewolves), and/or some sort of magical supernatural power. Dark fantasy has some of the gore and outright aim to scare/chill/repulse but uses other creatures and /or settings. A good recent example of this is Tim Lebbon's Dusk and Dawn novels. A classic dark fantasy is (in my view), "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

Though the line between supernatural horror and dark fantasy is very blurred,
I'm thinking of Clive Barker and Feist's "Faerie Tale."

[lin robinson]

HP Lovecraft: horror or dark fantasy?

Anybody know of any paying magazines that like this sort of thing? Not the dripping gothic imagry so much, but stark, psychological creepout?

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by lin robinson

HP Lovecraft: horror or dark fantasy?

Anybody know of any paying magazines that like this sort of thing? Not the dripping gothic imagry so much, but stark, psychological creepout?

You might check out the requirements for Supernatural Tales, as well as looking at the sites for Tartarus Press, Ash-Tree Press, and The Ghost Story Society for links to magazines looking for that sort of thing:

Welcome to the Tartarus Press

Ash-Tree Press Home Page

The Ghost Story Society Home Page

[lin robinson]

Thanks, J.D.

[Nik]

Um, I accidentally wrote one very-dark fantasy, but if I had not deliberately toned-down the gore, grief and terror, it would have been an out-and-out horror.

The very few people I've trusted to read it *swore* I'd included several truly graphic 'Horror' scenes. To their surprise and dismay, I was able to say, 'Show Me' and prove their imagination had filled in the sordid gaps...

IMHO, it would have been *much easier* to write as 'Horror'. Under-stating was very, very hard, but the only way I could or would tell it. Yet, tell it I must...

There I was, filling in at the front-desk on that quiet Friday afternoon at our sleepy MidWest FBI Field Office when a curious old couple wandered in. She was tiny, weathered nut-brown, with back yet straight as a ram-rod, eyes as sharp as a shrike. He was tall, rake-thin, wrinkled and bent by a life-time of stoop labour.

She poured out the terrible tale of a grand-child tricked and trapped in nightmare. It seemed implausible, but she had a detailed, logical answer to my every question. Then I turned to the patient, silent man...

And, yes, that's when I woke with a yell, scrambled for paper and pen. That tale was definitely a 'Wake Screaming And Write To Be Rid'. Until I finished and there-by 'exorcised' it, I got nightly flash-backs to rival the victim's...

D'uh, some inspiration I can live without...

[j. d. worthington]

LOL... Oh, indeed. I've had the experience. It's been a while, but I recall one tale I worked on that came out of something like that, except that it was a first-person narrative, and in the dream I was that narrator... and he was, shall we say, a less than savoury person.....

Great story idea, and some very effective stuff there... but being in that man's head for the time of either the dream or the writing is something I did not find particularly pleasant......

[the_faery_queen]

i consider myself a dark fantasy writer, not a horror writer because:
myu story is in a fantasy setting, not this world (and i consider horror something set in this world)
and because, while dark stuff happens in my story, it's not the main point of it. i think of horror as written to shock and scare. that's the point, my stories have a lot of dark stuff in it, my novel in particular (human sacrifce, people torn apart) but it's not that frequent and it's part of the story, not THE point of it. im not trying to scare people, im not trying to horrify them, it just happens my hero sees a lot of bad stuff.

i also think that dark fantasy is often more creepy/supernatural, while horror is more gorey. i have demons and monsters and things that lurk and the odd bit of blood and death, but the horror i've read/seen tends to have a lot more gore and so on.

i guess i would say that the ringu, original, (for example) is dark fantasy (cos it's scarey and creepy as hell, but not all the way through)
while something like saw or house on haunted hill or some cannibal film is horror because it's a more constant fear with more gore

so yeah, i guess that's how i define it. horror is constant and the main purpose is to scare
dark fantasy is macabre and creepy, with the horrofic bits sporadic and part of the story, rather than the point of it

[j. d. worthington]

I think that's part of the problem; we've come (once again) to confuse terms. Horror and terror and repulsion have all become intermingled, to the detriment of the entire field, frankly. Going on older definitions -- the ones that actually did define the differences (Burke, Radcliffe, Poe, Birkhead, Varma, Raillo, etc.) -- I'd say that "terror" is that where the intention is to expand the reader's emotional state... what Burke and Radcliffe would call "the sublime". Fear (or terror) is a part of that, because it is part of the emotional complex emerging from a realization of something so tremendous... something that overpowers by sheer awe and majesty, which may be terrible (in fact, it usually is, along with being awe-inspiring in the sense of giving one a feeling of almost unlimited possibilities... like the contemplation of the vast unknown of the universe, or of the potential of a spiritual realm about which we really know nothing -- nor can know).

"Horror", in its truest sense, relies on a somewhat cruder effect, but not necessarily on gore and bloodletting. Varma described it well when he compared terror and horror by saying it was like the difference between sensing something awful in the dark and stumbling across a corpse. Horror is more concrete, and usually more physical; though it can be an unseen thing where one senses something awful and menacing that has a feeling of something ugly, disfigured in some way (physically or spiritually)... say, the phantom in "How Love Came to Professor Guildea", which is unseen and is, in fact, the spirit of Love... but mindless love... love bereft of reason, sense, intelligence. That inspires both terror and horror... and even repulsion.

And that's where we start getting into "repulsion" or "the gross-out", which relies on the physical plane alone. I'm sorry, but that which relies on such mundane things is simply easier to do, and doesn't leave a lasting impression. It's closer to pornography than to art, as it goes for a baser, coarser approach... usually the bases and coarsest possible. I'd suggest reading Frank Belknap Long's "The Space Eaters" for a good discussion of this. As a story, it has terrible flaws, but his discussion of the differences here, and of why they work in different ways and why one is much more powerful to the imagination than the other, is really quite good.

This is why I tend to use "terror tale" rather than "horror"... because horror has, for most of the last century, been debased into something relying on the lowest common-denominator: our fear of physical injury or death. Whereas earlier writers such as Bierce could use such, they usually used it as a means to address the much more terrifying idea of psychic damage or displacement... something which rips away the illusions we hold so dear and makes us realize that our view of reality is a pitifully inadequate hodgepodge, which we use to shield us from the truth of life and our position in the universe. Now, it has come closer and closer to the sort of meretricious "pornography of violence" so criticized in many of the pulps and earlier comic books... and rightly so, to a large degree. Where I do use the term "horror", it is because of the recognition that that is the umbrella term used these days, to cover all sorts of things, from what can also be called "dark fantasy" to "splatterpunk" to the ethereal nightmares of Ligotti, to such things as "Silence -- A Fable", by Poe.

Frankly, though, I'd say "dark fantasy" began as a marketing ploy, and has gradually taken on a life of its own, as people began to write stories that they thought were in that vein... a vein that, originally, didn't really exist as a separate thing; it wasn't even as distinct as the Gothic was when it began... and that became rather a confused grouping of tales itself, from the "explained Gothic" to the "supernatural Gothic" to the "New Gothic" to "American Gothic" to....

But "dark fantasy" remains, I'd say, a term that has never had its parameters defined; therefore I'd say it still remains a subset of horror, which itself is a subset of fantasy (when it involves any supernatural or preternatural phenomena). We've yet to have a Burke or Radcliffe to give some sort of genuine theoretical structure to this little offshoot, while the entire concept of "the weird tale" has itself become so jumbled and confused that, at this point, labels used for marketing is really all these things can be.....

[scalem X]

Indeed JD. I'm so happy that you come up with arguments that include terror. In fact I started this topic, because I was about to write a story for an anthology and I feared the storyline wouldn't have been the right genre. Now that I inquired, they described horror pretty much as terror in my opinion.

think of the following:
a terrifying sound
a horrifying sound

terrifying would be more like a wolf's howl, while horryfying could be something like: "splatter". Like JD says: the moment you see it, the terror becomes horror.

The ambiguation (is that even a word), well the searing ambiguity of the genres is not really a problem, unless you as a writer get asked to define your story or have to read submission guidelines that just state a genre.

[j. d. worthington]

You know, this reminds me of what is, if I remember correctly, supposed to be the shortest ghost story: "Sitting alone in his house one night, the man felt a hand on his shoulder." (Or some variant thereof.)

Now, that pretty much says it all. That is terror... to be sitting alone (not thinking you're alone, but be alone) and to feel a hand on your shoulder. For that moment, at least, terror is the result. The next moment it may be resolved into any number of things: if you see a disembodied hand, it may remain terror; if you see a rotting corpse attached to the hand, or a gore-spattered corpse, it would likely be horror; if you realize it's not a hand, but an animal or somesuch, it may turn to hilarity. But for that moment, it is terror. It's that moment between, when you're dealing with the unknown, the suspected, where the imagination is working at its height, that makes it so powerful.

Or, to quote Anne Radcliffe:"'They must be men of very cold imaginations ... with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one ; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?'"