😨h, horror.
Oh, sure I loved Stephen King and Lon Chaney when I was growing up and I loved Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and yes of course I loved The Wizard of Oz which has its evil witches and mean come-to-life trees and oh the flying monkeys; but then in my 30's something not so scary gripped me: I stopped reading scary books and watching scary films. Isn't that odd? Yet, I still write horror. Why would this be so?
Oh, I do imagine the back cover bio blurb on my very first published horror novel will begin with, "Even though she hates reading and watching horror in real life, she loves to write it."
To the above, I could (natch) add, "especially late at night."
Over the years I have written horror both in poetry and in fiction. I ate Count Dracula for breakfast and Dark Shadows for my after school snack. Previously, when even younger, I enjoyed Scooby Doo and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
There are two films or TV shows (not sure which) I have been looking for all these years that I saw when I was probably around age 10: One is about a group of shipwrecked people who start turning into rocks until finally the last woman is standing, sitting in front of a mirror and pulls the front of her dress down off her neck and sees the stony formation growing on her neck and the other has something to do in the credits with High Noon and in the last scene an older women seems to be getting buried alive while a bunch of family members and "friends" are looking on and a young girl reaches down into the coffin and pulls off the older woman's wedding ring--or something like that. Like a distant dream, I cannot remember anything else, but it haunted me for years. Some people have suggested to me that the film about the stone people island must be Attack of the Mushroom People, but I did re-watch Mushroom People and it does not ring the same. If anyone reading this has an idea about the titles of these two films or TV episodes (such as from Twilight Zone or Night Gallery) please message me on my Facebook page(s) at:
https://www.facebook,com/bencivengo.mary
facebook.com/author.mBenci
Now I as an author will leave those in the depth psychology field to write about horror if they feel so inspired. I intend to finish the edits on my horror novels, not write about horror itself--in other words, I write horror, not usually about horror. However, I did include horror in some of the fairy tales such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "Ashputtle" in some of the library programs I did on fairy tales. The fairy tale program events were at The Sandusky Library in Sandusky, Ohio; the program was called, Beyond the Fairy Tale. You can find some of the talks I gave on the Sandusky Library YouTube page.
Finally, I think that the reason I write horror sometimes but do not like to read or watch it much is because I like the old-time horror that leaves things to the imagination more than the contemporary more graphically explicit horror.
This blog entry is copyrighted as all my other blogs are, so if you paraphrase or quote me, include the source. Copying the material of others without acknowledging the source is a very grave matter.
Mary Ann Bencivengo
