It’s half past one in the morning and I’ve just finished watching Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. I went downstairs to get a drink of warm milk to help me sleep, and freaked out in the dark, running arch-backed through the hall to the kitchen in case someone was hiding in the living room.
Laughing at myself, I did an evil little barefoot jig on the tiled floor in front of the microwave while I waited for my milk to warm. Then I paused, momentarily aware that someone could be out in the garden, watching me dance, waiting for me to move into the light of the window where they could get a clear line of shot.
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
I collect my milk, return up the stairs to my attic bedroom, avoiding the darkness of my upstairs sitting room, and settle myself before the daylight glow of the computer screen. My eyes are blurred. I’m tired, but what will happen if I go to sleep? I imagine five knife blade fingers slicing up through my bedcovers. The story of the New Nightmare is still alive in my head.
In the Nightmare, Freddie has come out of his films into Heather Langenkamp’s reality. She’s the actress who plays Nancy in the other Elm Streets. It’s a horror writer’s horror. Wes Craven writes his script, and as he writes, his script becomes alive around him.
The most striking image of the film is not Freddie and his knives, or even the mythic evil of his chamber of fire and water. It’s the sight of Craven standing next to his computer as Heather looks on, seeing the words they’ve just spoken already written on the screen.
Horror writer’s horror. I think of Richard Laymon, a horror writer who narrates from a horror writer’s perspective. In The Stake, Laymon writes as himself. In a desert ghost town he finds a dried up corpse with a stake through its heart. He begins to write a novel about the corpse. He becomes fevered, obsessed by his narrative, and smuggles the corpse back to his house. The corpse comes alive when the stake is removed. He’s driven on by what will happen next, as all readers are. He is writing about writing about writing. And scaring himself pretty badly in the process.
So if you’re a horror writer, what are you afraid of? Nothing? Or everything?
