Why This Horror?

It’s a Lovecraftian question: why this un-penetrable (impenetrable) horror and from where did it arise? What does it do to the people who have knowledge of it, and what depths in their psyche spawned such terror? Students ask this question all the time, except they rephrase it: How come you have an interesting course that I can use for my liberal arts requirements? [What? Our other courses are boring? We don’t employ that riposte, but we have thought it.]

Avoiding the interesting-dull aspect which is not about literature at all, and more about the willingness to learn and grow, we put the blame on King and communication. “King!” say half the questioners. “He’s my favorite.” “King,” mutter the other half of the questioners, “he’s ruined good horror. One-plot-King.” Good teachers that we try to be, we follow-up on each line of thinking, asking for supporting details and noting that while King may or may not be everyone’s favorite writer, he’s certainly made the subset of horror more visible. He was also the impetus for creating the course.

The reader for our English 1 course has been for time immemorial (doesn’t this sound Lovecraftian?) Models for Writers. Faithfully, they create a new edition; faithfully we grumble about changing texts and the student grumble about not being able to resell their books. Consistently, they also grumble about many of the readings, with the general exception of King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Literature.” We want catharsis, King argues, and we also need the counterbalance of horror to keep us civilized. Our students anticipate that essay (What? A good read?) and were mostly disappointed that it was literary analysis rather than a rollicking bloodbath. “This is what we do in English 2,” we said, “we read good stories and then analyze them.” They sniffed. Their discussions though were eager commentaries on their favorite gore and horror, as they dodged the critique and analyze aspect of King’s essay in favor of the specific examples (body count, blood baths and rephrasing of villains).

That student enthusiasm was a major theme in our teacher-walk-and-talk discussions when Tom and I would argue our favorite readings and our current semester students. “We should have a course just in horror literature; the students would love it,” I said. But it was easier proposed than accomplished.

Department Approval

Offering a new course means meeting the many requirements the department, the school, the state have in place to safeguard quality of education and their own interests in education. We needed to balance our desire to offer a student-enticing course with the department’s desire to have courses fill, with our colleagues desire not to have our course fill at the expense of theirs, with the state regulating office’s edict to maintain standards and level of instruction.
Getting all these departments, divisions, and individuals to agree is not easy.
Our first task was to get discussion for the course onto the department meeting agenda. We were already full-up with talk of computer carts, classroom keys, enrollment, artifact assessment, how to committee the department, the Sunshine Fund, and training classes. The department spent forty-five minutes deploring the state of the hallways and restrooms, and trying to find a solution (physical plant denied any knowledge of dirt, or claimed they were understaffed). It took two months to get us on the agenda. Why did we need to be on the agenda? We needed to convince the department members to give us permission to develop the outline for a course. Once we had the outline, we were to come back to them for review and (we hoped) approval.
And we understood their points. Last semester, my teaching schedule was changed 7 times during the first week of classes. No instructor likes coming to the first class unprepared. No student enjoys having instructors switched out on him. The last week before the semester begins as well as the first week of the semester is a collection of cancelled classes, split classes (42 people sign up for a class; the size limit is 24), and room changes. We had all arrived at our classroom to find a note taped to the door telling us to re-locate to a room in another building. Adding a class to the offerings complicated an already stressed class master list.

How Can You Justify a Course Like That?

Like what? We learned not to call it HoLit, because then people had an even different impression. The argument came down to two prongs (similar to a pitchfork). Horror is scary and fun, but definitely not literature. There are enough courses, so why offer one concentrating on horror: the things that sane people want to forget and don’t acknowledge they have.
How could we justify it? The giants of macabery had a spot (if a denigrated one) in the regular texts. Most readers have heard of Poe, and Jackson, and even Lee (Tanith, not Robert). King’s doorstop books are made into movies. We’ve seen twenty sequels to the pop horror. Ergo: if it’s popular, then it’s not necessarily a school subject. Cotton candy has no place in the cafeteria vending machines.
Some of those were laid into our arguments for offering Literature of Horror. Our main argument though, hinged on the quality of writing. Many of the masters played with ghost stories and things a bit harsher, on the side. Name a literary great, and we could offer some seamier, seedier, and more troubling examples of his writing. Not war stories, not science fiction (the Sci Fi people were worried we would trespass and made us promise never never never to use Frankenstein). In her childhood and young adulthood, Edith Wharton was terrified by ghost stories; then she began writing them. Who hasn’t heard of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”; but then Jackson made split-career-writing into her personal labyrinth of mirrors and mobs. Lots of actors move between the horror and mainstream films, though some of them are typecast in their spookier personas.

Where are the Students? Who are the Students?

If we thought that the course would attract students who already lived horrific lives (abuse, divorce, no money, no time) we were mistaken. Our students were Midwestern scrubbed clean, fresh as the coffee-on-the-way-to-class could make them, and on the outside – ordinary. On the inside, once they began talking – and often they began talking before the clock hands moved to our designated start time – they were unique.
They reveled in blood and ingenuous ways to commit murder. Not the Vincent Price pendulum for them, though they analyzed its mechanics. Not the straightforward throttling or bullet to the brain: they’d seen enough of that in their early (crib? Toddler?) fascination of horror. They critiqued special effects and tossed comparisons on plot with the skill of professional reviewers. Why? They were immersed in the format, familiar with the canon of movies, and apparently buttressed from continual exposure. They analyzed plots and dissected characters with more sophistication than a college lecturer, before they rolled back to their own lives, “And then I barfed up supper. Not because I was scared, mind you, but because I was so tired and didn’t have the brains to go to bed instead of watching another flick.” They also took on some of the characteristics of the format, infrequently in appearance and often in its inflexible values.
“I wouldn’t let my child watch…” was one of their staples. “My child will not watch – until he’s – old, although when I saw it younger, courtesy my brother/sister/parents, I did just fine. But then again I had nightmares for a few years.” The caveat of, “When my child watches – for the first time, I’m going to be right there with him, keeping him feeling safe. But the lights will be out.”
King argues that one of the characteristics of horror is its old-fashioned morality. Good is good and shall be rewarded (or killed off nicely). Bad is bad and shall be condemned, to possibly rise again in a sequel. There are no characters who are humanistic mixtures of good and bad motives. Our students agreed, citing references (the pedagogues in us cheered), and added their own experiences. Stupid means early death. Blonde means hysterical, female, foolish, and early death.
Midwestern ordinary, yes – but with minds aglitter. Nick was on track to become a lawyer; Kerri wanted to work for a school in England – any school. Maybe she wanted ghosts and thought they were more plentiful there. Heidi was fascinated with the puzzles woven into horror stories. Julio compared the villains with contemporary dictators. They fought among themselves: best movie, best director, best presentation of the classic: vampire, Dracula, zombie. They argued their favorites, copied down the suggestions of others, and came to class two weeks later clutching books or touting movies.
There were a few exceptions to the normality of appearance. Dan Berkowitz had the most wonderful leather jacket, with chrome points on the epaulets. He was the one with the flame colored spray painted hair: strawberry gold at the forehead, red misted in the middle and black at the nape of the neck. Dennis wore shirts advertising the wrestling matches he had won, matches which accounted for his trouble hearing and his tendency to forget, he said. Livia had black-of-night hair and self-inked tattoos as well as earrings as elaborate as a chemistry equation. For most of them, the only sign of their fascination was a fanatical gleam in the eyes and a determined set to their mouth. No one was going to convince them that their favorites weren’t top quality horror.

Why Online?

Why online is a question that’s asked much less now, than it was two or five years ago. The short answer is, Our students want online courses. The longer answer is: space, students, taxes, freedom, flexibility, and our society’s continuing fascination with the (often) ease of communication that the internet offers.
Today for example, I communicated with someone in IL, MN, and CA, as well as several more-or-less snowbound friends in other parts of my own state. Students hunting for credits are not limited to their drive or walk time: the world is open to them. By offering a course online, the school is able to enroll students from across the world, and those students are able to complete their lessons in their own time frame: while some of us are working, sleeping,or having dinner, others of us are offering ideas to the class discussion boards; and we can reply to them once we’ve done up the dishes.
Online material means that no student ever again needs to worry about losing the syllabus: it’s right there, posted into its niche in the course. It also means that the school can free up a classroom for another group: we’re reducing the average classroom energy consumption. And it means that through a link to a movie clip, website, or other piece of information, the complete Internet can be made searched for enrichment material.

There are disadvantages to online courses, some people argue. We do not have that immediate community sense: we are not all in one room, catching the idea together, sharing a joke. The instructor cannot respond in real time to a question, unless that instructor happens to be online when the question is asked. And we lose the people-to-people focus.
Online courses mean that I need to write an explanation of what I would talk through in a face to face course. How much are students willing to read? How succinctly can I explain the points? How many examples should I use? Should I refer them to the text pages, or provide examples from classroom experience? I can’t gauge their understanding of the material by watching my students’ faces, and I can’t immediately offer another example if they look puzzled – at least not until we have video screens working on our computers – and then we’d need to make sure we had combed our hair before we sat down to work.

The proponents will say that while this may be true, we have greater resources, and – as I have experienced – students are likely to become as much or even more personally involved in online courses: they share anecdotes and experiences from their lives. They recount relevant material; they even share recipes they think we would enjoy.

Why this Horror?

It’s a Lovecraftian question: why this unpenetrable horror and from where did it arise? What does it do to the people who have knowledge of it, and what depths in their psyche spawned such terror? Students ask this question all the time, except they rephrase it: How come you have an interesting course that I can use for my liberal arts requirements? [What? Our other courses are boring? We don’t respond with that comment, but we have thought it.]

Avoiding the interesting-dull aspect which is not about literature at all, and more about the willingness to learn and grow, we put the blame on King and communication. “King!” say half the questioners. “He’s my favorite.” “King,” mutter the other half of the questioners, “he’s ruined good horror. One-plot-King.” Good teachers that we try to be, we follow-up on each line of thinking, asking for supporting details and noting that while King may or may not be everyone’s favorite writer, he’s certainly made the subset of horror more visible. He was also the impetus for creating the course.

The reader for our English 1 course has been for time immemorial (doesn’t this sound Lovecraftian?) Models for Writers. Faithfully, they create a new edition; faithfully we grumble about changing texts and the student grumble about not being able to resell their books. Consistently, they also grumble about many of the readings, with the general exception of King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Literature.” We want catharsis, King argues, and we also need the counterbalance of horror to keep us civilized. Our students anticipate that essay (What? A good read?) and were mostly disappointed that it was literary analysis rather than a rollicking bloodbath. “This is what we do in English 2,” we said, “we read good stories and then analyze them.” They sniffed. Their discussions though were eager commentaries on their favorite gore and horror, as they dodged the critique and analyze aspect of King’s essay in favor of the specific examples (body count, blood baths and rephrasing of villains).

That student enthusiasm was a major theme in our teacher-walk-and-talk discussions when Tom and I would argue our favorite readings and our current semester students. “We should have a course just in horror literature; the students would love it,” I said. But it was easier proposed than accomplished.