Love Creates Horror

I'm not particularly fond of horror myself, but Stephen King is a world renowned author in the horror genre. He recently came out with his sequel to The Shining, which was written when he was just 28 years old. Doctor Sleep, coming out now that he is 65 years old, is about Danny's character (the kid from The Shining) when he is grown up. He apparently works in a hospice as a care worker. There is a little girl who has the power of the shining, and a bunch of psychic vampires who want to kill her because they feed off of the essence of people like her.

In an interview, King stated that "love creates horror." By this, he is referencing that when writing a horror novel, making the audience absolutely love a character will make the entire idea a lot scarier than jump scares.  Jump scares are essentially becoming void as the audience matures more and more from horror films and movies. For example, in its hay-day, The Terminator could have been considered a scary movie, especially in the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger's character is being smashed by machines and still chasing Sarah Connor. However, watching it today, it is not nearly as frightening as it once was. The movie Alien is the same way. It is supposed to be a lot of jump scares and such. However, now it is not scary.

Contrast this with The Walking Dead. This show was not even shot to be frightening. However, over the course of numerous episodes you grow to absolutely love the characters. I remember sitting and watching in horror (a different context of the word, admittedly) as T-Dog, a personal favorite character of mine, was bitten by multiple zombies. In every episode of this show, I fear for the survival of every character (besides Rick, they pay him too much to kill him off) because not only are there zombies that could kill them, but also living people who kill survivors. In fact, one of the catch phrases on the posters and t-shirts sold is "fight the dead, fear the living." Basically, this show is 100% proof that by building love for a character, it actually makes the show or movie ten times more frightening.

So what does this mean? It means that jump scares are becoming less popular. They aren't as frightening as they once were, so the world of horror and scares is evolving. And the evolution helps with character development, which is considerably for the better.