And it’s interesting that the same “technology vs. magic” theme was in Dracula, which I know you didn’t create, but obviously had a lot of input on, with writing the first episode.
Yeah. I didn’t really think about it when I was doing Dracula, but there’s a similar theme.
Cole [Haddon, the series creator] . . . I don’t know what his religious beliefs are, but he definitely sees science and rational thought as being far superior to religion and superstition. I see them as two sides of the same coin. They often take us to the same places and to the same conclusions. An atheist can do a rational analysis about why murder is a bad idea; and somebody who is religious thinks, “Murder is a bad idea because you’re going to go to Hell.” I was reading up on true crime and trying to understand what would make someone into a sexual psychopath. I wanted to understand, how does a monster like that get created? We always wonder, Could I be like that? At the end of the day, I read everything behavioral psychologists had to say, and there were all these things like lighting fires as a child, a head injury, they’re brought up in a broken home where there’s abuse present . . . there are at least 30,000 people who fit that, but how come only four of them became serial killers? You might as well say serial killers go out and murder people because they’re possessed by a demon. I look at that as just as viable a premise.
Were you part of Dracula from the beginning?
No. I was a last-minute addition. They developed it with Cole. They got a green light, and they got it to Jonathan [Rhys Meyers, the series star]. Jonathan wanted to do it; once he wanted to do it, they got a ten-episode series order. There were a lot of producers; I think there were seven production entities I had to answer to. It was a juggling act. They hired me, when two other writers fell through, in desperation, because they were ramping up production. I got vetted very quickly and came in to run the show. And I really ran it by remote control—never set foot in Budapest, where we shot it. It was very frustrating, because I felt like the scripts were twenty-five percent better than the episodes. It was just about what didn’t get shot. It wasn’t because the networks were cutting anything. Or scenes that should’ve worked and didn’t because nobody knew what the scene was about. Like there was a scene where Mina is in the hospital and realizes that Lucy has had sex with her fiancé. And that scene is 100% subtext; it’s all played with a series of incomplete sentences and uncomfortable silences. To me, in real life, what we say is not nearly as important as what we don’t say; the truth is contained in what we don’t say. The only time we really tell the truth—the spiritual, emotional truth—is when our backs are up against the wall and we really have no choice. When I’m writing, it’s all about what people aren’t saying. It sometimes drives executives crazy, but once you sit down with the actors and tell them what you really want, they get it. And I was so happy because with that scene I was so terrified that they wouldn’t understand what was really going on. And I saw it, and the two actresses so got it—they just nailed the shit out of it. It was one of the finest scenes I feel like I’ve ever written.
So you were over here writing it, and they were over in Budapest shooting it . . .
. . . and a day later I’d get dailies, and I’d either be horrified or happy. The production was gorgeous, but there’s only so much you can do without a writer on the set. I truly believe that it’s critical to have a writer on the set. If you look at television, the average hour of television is costing three-and-a-half million dollars, so if you have two hours that’s seven million. And the average two-hour movie has a budget of seventy million. With television, for ten percent of the budget you’re getting (I think) eighty-five percent of the quality. And I think a big part of that is because film is a “director’s medium” and TV is a “writer’s medium.” So when the director and actors are playing blind man and the elephant on the set of a feature film because they don’t allow the writer anywhere near the set, on a TV show, you go in, you watch the blocking, and you say, “No, no, he wants this, and she wants that,” and they all say, “Oh! Okay, let’s reblock that.” To not have the writer present on the set of a movie is pure ego on the part of the directors—they want to pretend they’re the authors. The whole auteur theory just kind of destroyed film. The only movies with any real integrity are the ones that have a writer-director. With most movies, you watch them and you don’t really know what’s going on. They’re these big pageants, kind of like a fireworks show. You know, a fireworks show kind of has a story—there’s usually a beginning, a middle, and a end . . . but at the end of the day all you can really say is, “I think they started with red ones that were kind of like flowers . . .” You don’t really remember them two minutes after you walk out.
Horror in particular seems to have really moved its best work to television.
But horror’s almost impossible to do on television.
But things like Carnivàle and Dracula and American Horror Story have both more interesting ideas and even better production value than any horror movies lately.
But if you look at things like American Horror Story and The Walking Dead, they’re surprisingly not scary at all. You never feel your guts churning. You never feel that sense of absolute dread that you feel when you’re watching The Exorcist or The Shining or The Haunting. That sense of dread is the hallmark, the exemplar, of what you should instill in a reader. And you can’t do it if every seven minutes you’re being interrupted by an ad for Toyota. Dread is a sustained tone. You just can’t do what Polanski does in Rosemary’s Baby. You can kind of do it on pay cable, but you watch American Horror Story and it’s like, “We can get in a lot of gross stuff in little eight-minute chunks, we can get in a few shocks,” but you can’t do that kind of sustained tension that Hitchcock was a master of.
But what it offers instead is disturbing ideas, which is something that movies seem to have moved past.
Well, except for the Japanese, with Ringu. And Old Boy, for God’s sake. And then the French and the Spanish—The Devil’s Backbone is one of the best ghost stories ever shot. And Pan’s Labyrinth, certainly one of the best dark fantasies ever. Have you seen Martyrs?
Yes, I just watched it recently for the first time.
Amazing. It’s like an Olympic gymnast—it’s like, there’s no way he can spike that madness . . . and then he does. It’s like this exercise in nihilism, and at the last possible minute here comes this redemptive ending . . . but you don’t want to watch it twice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. More recently, in 2013 she debuted the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Author Spotlight: Desirina Boskovich
E.C. Myers
Maybe it’s just me, but there’s an air of wish fulfillment to “Dear Owner”—it’s a letter to all the insensitive people in the world who ignore or help create the daily horrors we deal with. What inspired you to write this piece?
The term “wish fulfillment” makes me laugh, but I guess it’s true, in a way. I’ve been living in crowded places for years now, and after a while it really begins to wear you down. There’s always at least one person nearby—usually several people—who probably don’t really mean to be assholes, but they don’t care enough to
be considerate, either. They have this casual entitlement, like they’re approaching the world with this mindset of “Yeah? Who’s gonna stop me?” By now I’ve had all the awful neighbors: the drunken brawlers, the meth-head partiers, the neglectful pet-owners, the hallway smokers. They do whatever they feel like doing, which makes everyone around them a little bit more miserable than they would be otherwise. It makes me want to move to the woods.
Anyway, “Dear Owner” was in fact inspired by real life, as I personally spent several months being rudely awakened at 4:30 a.m. by an inconsiderate engine-revver parked outside my bedroom window. (As I later discovered from some neighbors, said engine-revver was not just disturbing me, but everyone in my twelve-unit building. Like you said: daily horrors.) I’m typically an extremely even-tempered person. But rouse me from a peaceful slumber and I’m instantaneously filled with murderous rage. Like just complete, irrational, crazy-person rage, with an added dose of total despair. I also have sporadic bouts of insomnia, which makes it worse, because it can be hours before I fell back asleep. So what better way to occupy the restless tortured hours than with elaborate fantasies of revenge?
In real life, my problem was eventually resolved with a several polite yet persistent phone calls. But real life is boring.
I Googled the 1972 Ford Crew Cab Pickup . . . That is an interesting-looking vehicle. It seems to be shorthand to understanding the owner’s personality and behavior, from the protagonist’s viewpoint. Does that truck have any special significance?
It was important for me to distinguish the fact that this vehicle is being driven by choice. It’s antique, it’s iconic, and it’s not at all practical—neither easy to drive nor easy to maintain. For the owner of the truck, it’s a statement of identity, something he takes pride in. Not just a vehicle, but a precious possession and a weekend hobby too.
For me this is an important aspect of the story, because it presumes a lot more intentionality on his part—it gives him more power in the situation. If, for instance, he was driving a beat-up 1988 Honda Accord, held together with string and duct tape, this situation would have much different subtext. We’d think maybe he detests this coughing, sputtering, backfiring, exhaust-spewing vehicle as much as anyone else, he just can’t afford anything better. So he’d be infinitely more sympathetic, at least to me. Instead, it’s clear that for whatever reason, he chooses to drive this vehicle. Maybe it’s, like, this macho posturing; a purposeful way of taking up more space than he deserves. Like lavaballing, but on the road.
And it had to be a crew cab, or the final act of the story wouldn’t work. So that narrowed down the options considerably, as crew cabs don’t seem to be as common in older trucks as they might be today.
Finally, there’s just something quintessential about Fords.
Some of the most intriguing aspects of “Dear Owner” are that it has two victims, and the ultimate revenge and empowerment of the protagonist is to make her tormentor as powerless as she is. There’s no doubt that the owner of the pickup truck is guilty, but I found myself wondering about his story. As the author, did you imagine this story from his perspective? What’s his seemingly aimless life like?
Yes, I did. The point where I really began to sympathize with him came when we see his house: small, shabby, unkempt, the driveway overgrown with weeds. Suddenly I saw him—really saw him—and I felt nothing but compassion. Because I know how it feels to be depressed, and lost, and poor, where every day feels like an immense fucking struggle and it’s all you can do to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, keep moving forward. The story suggests that he’s drinking on the job, driving home drunk—which makes him less sympathetic in some ways, but at the same time I see someone who is just at the end of his rope. He doesn’t really care about anything, not even himself. The protagonist just wants some courtesy, but perhaps that’s too much to ask from someone who’s overwhelmed by his own daily struggle to survive.
And then all the little things that she does to fuck with him: these are just additional annoyances in a life that’s already practically unbearable. He’s used to bad luck, unexpected misfortunes, bad customers, unpaid bills. These are things he’s given up fighting. To me, the ending is almost a foregone conclusion, because both of them—but him, just as much as her—have been drowning for a long time already.
By the end of the story, my sympathy is almost completely with him. The protagonist sets up a test expecting him to fail. In her self-absorption and self-pity, she never even tries to really talk to him face to face. There’s also a strong element of classism and superiority in the way she views him; she thinks his lack of concern demonstrates contempt for her, and maybe it does, but she has always viewed him with contempt herself. She assumes he’s completely insensitive, but maybe he’s just drowning in his own pain. Maybe, even, he’s lost someone, too.
There’s a saying that goes, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” If either character had taken this idea to heart, the story would have turned out much differently.
The ending of “Dear Owner” is done masterfully—a surprise that both feels inevitable and packs a punch. How did this story develop from concept to its final version? What’s your writing process?
I’d been trying to figure out how to write an epistolary horror story for a year at least. I still have another idea that I can’t quite make work, but one day I will. Anyway, I think it was my unsuccessful scrapping with that idea that gave me the inspiration for this one; the approach and the concept just kind of came together. This story, like most of my short stories, was a vague idea that really happened in the writing; there were very few changes from the initial to final drafts.
At first, I was thinking about it as a sort of series of letters, whether answered or unanswered, escalating in tone and urgency. But then I decided that would perhaps become too repetitive and tedious, and it would be better to just write one long letter, referencing earlier ones. This approach made it a little easier to shape the narrative, I think.
One of my main preoccupations in my work has always been ambiguity—challenging my own original perception of the story without fully dismantling it, and constructing endings that can be read in more ways than one. This story was no exception. My goal was to create a character (the letter-writer) who is initially sympathetic, but whose behavior becomes more and more disturbing, until the reader is no longer sure where their sympathies should lie, who is the antagonist and who is the victim.
By the final sentences, this becomes a horror story from the perspective of the villain, a deranged killer who inflicts extreme violence in response to a relatively small perceived slight. But even villains are the heroes of their own stories. I think it’s always important to remember that.
What work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you writing now?
I am very excited about The Steampunk User’s Manual, forthcoming from Abrams Image in October. It’s a combination art book and how-to guide that I coauthored with Jeff VanderMeer (and a follow-up to The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer and S.J. Chambers).
I am also super-psyched for The End is Now, the next volume in The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. The End is Now will include the next installment to “Heaven is a Place on Planet X,” my contribution to The End is Nigh (and which you can read for free at Wired.com). In other news, another short story titled “The Witch and the Wolves” is forthcoming from Triptych Tales sometime this year, and Drabblecast will be producing an audio version of my recent Kaleidotrope story, “Tree, Fire, World.”
As to what I’m working on now, I’m plugging away at two novels. One is young adult science fiction (my four-word pitch is “1984 meets The Thing,” but I’m a bit worried because no one really seems to know what that means). The other is a kind of psychological horror story after the American Gothic tradition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German
parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers.
Author Spotlight: Tia V. Travis
Lisa Nohealani Morton
Can you give us a little background on “The Kiss”? What inspired you to write it?
I’ve always enjoyed film noir, vintage crime fiction, and the suspense, mystery, and horror radio shows of the 1940s and ’50s. I wrote “The Kiss” during the summer of 1998. I’d just moved from Canada to the San Francisco Bay Area where I married my husband and fellow writer, Norman Partridge. Frank Sinatra had gone on to the Big Casino in the Sky several weeks before I moved to the town of Benicia, across the Carquinez Straits from Martinez, where the martini was invented. This part of northern California is very beautiful and has a rich history. “The Kiss” evolved from all these elements.
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