With the advent of The Story SPOOKY Club’s Ghost Story Contest, I have been wondering what makes a tale spooky. Perspective seems to play a large part: I had a friend, veteran of the Korean War, tell me that after what he’d seen, horror movies/books held no interest for him. They were no longer scary.
Myself, I often find I write what might be classified as macabre tales. (I’m a wannabe Poe or Lovecraft minus the alcoholism and agoraphobia.) Not exclusively, but predominately, I write about ghosts, ghouls, and zombies. I don’t have an explanation, either. I wanted to write humor, it’s just that horror comes out instead.
The question of spookiness, however, still remains. What makes something spooky? Why do we write spooky things? Why are we drawn to ghost stories and the like?
I have a theory that answers none of those questions. It’s my opinion that scary stories are a type of joke. Bear with me. A joke and a scary story relieve tension: they both have an often uncomfortable building up of tension followed by a sudden release, which, in the case of the joke, is the punch line, and in the case of the scary story, some grim revelation. They follow the same basic pattern, and they perform the same basic function.
What say you?
* Is there a relation between jokes and scary stories?
* What’s your favorite scary story?
* What’s your favorite joke?
Tale Told 