Quite unexpectedly, my recent writings on the redeemable demons trope ruffled a lot of feathers. It also occasioned some rigorous discussion. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the sympathetic devil meme and the rationale behind it.
At the height of the controversy, the gracious hosts of Silence and Starsong had on Isaac Young, the gadfly whose tweet kicked off the debate. And they were kind enough to let me join in.
Thanks again to the hosts for letting me throw in my two cents, and to Isaac for being a good sport about me stealing some of his limelight.
I hope everyone has a holy and salutary Advent, and I’ll see you on Monday.
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That discussion was very interesting. A lot of the topics that came up were things that I have thought about a lot.
A few thoughts regarding some topics that came up during the discussion:
Someone asked whether Lovecraftian horror can be blended with a more hopeful or redemptive worldview. August Derleth (a friend of Lovecraft and co-founder of Arkham House) attempted to do this. His stories set in the “Cthulhu Mythos” (a term invented by Derleth) introduced the idea of benevolent Elder Gods who opposed Cthulhu and his ilk. Many of Derleth’s stories feature Deus ex Machina endings in which an Elder God shows up just in time to save the protagonist. He essentially reimagined Lovecraft’s mythos in a way that came closer to his own Catholic worldview, with various beings functioning in opposing “angel” and “demon” roles. However, Derleth’s Cthulhu Mythos works are controversial in Lovecraft fan circles, with some liking them but others feeling that they are inferior and fail to capture Lovecraft’s sense of cosmic dread.
There was some talk about how much modern horror provides no catharsis and seems to gloat in the triumph of evil. This is one of my criticisms of a lot of modern horror as well. Those parts of the discussion reminded me of a horror formula that I’m very fond of, which Sam Raimi developed in the 1980s.
Raimi said that he watched many horror movies in order to figure out the basic rules that all good ones should follow, and came up with the following three.
1. The innocent must suffer.
This means that if only evil or unlikable characters are harmed or terrorized by the villain, it’s not true horror. You must show the innocent suffering to horrify the audience and make them root against the villain.
2. The guilty must pay.
This means that after seeing the innocent suffer, the audience is filled with a burning desire to see the villain pay for what it has done, and the protagonist should get to deliver a cathartic payback.
3. You must taste blood to be a man.
This means that the protagonist should have a sort of coming of age story in which, by enduring the villain’s evil and rising to meet the challenge brought by the villain and dishing out violent but righteous vengeance, he symbolically grows from a boy to a man.
He also said that he and the Coen Brothers had discussed the idea of a fourth rule (“the dead must walk”), but that he wasn’t entirely decided on the matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrj5oQtodCc
I have noticed that many of my favorite horror stories (including “Dracula”) more or less follow this formula.
Even some of Sam Raimi’s non-horror movies follow these rules, with “The Quick and the Dead” following not only rules 1-3, but rule 4 as well. The innocent suffer at the hands of Gene Hackman’s character, but he pays for it in the end (rules 1-2). Russell Crowe’s character starts out as a pacifist but accepts that he must “taste blood” to end the evil of Hackman’s character (rule 3). Sharon Stone’s character seemingly dies, but then is revealed to be alive (rule 4).