October is my favorite month. The fires of autumn still hang from crooked branches. The sky is flooded with a crisp blue, unique to fall. It’s a reflective time plump with the magic fumes of decaying leaves. The world and I are more agreeable in October. Fear, mood and setting are recognizable more than any other time of the year. It’s the month of the imagination.
So, what scares you? Is “horror” really even scary? What’s worse, being scared or creeped out? Is there a difference? An orchestral stab, a “boo” moment, are they really scary? What is fear? Not what startles or grosses you out, but authentic guttural dread…
Adjectives associated with fear and darkness appear in a majority of the Gruntsplatter reviews I’ve seen, however, I never once set out to make a “scary” record. I don’t see dark ambient in those terms. The Suspiria soundtrack by Goblin. La-la-La-La… triggered more unease in me than any dark ambient record ever has. Whether anyone noticed or not, my records are social diatribes before they are horror shows. With Gruntsplatter I see the themes and fixation on the creeping dystopia as horrific, rather than horror.
Life when things aren’t right, unsettles me. A guy shouldn’t be singing witch lullabies over prog rock, it’s creepy. It’s not right. The movie Tideland is not a horror movie, but it got under my skin. Creepy, awkward, evocative and soulful. A window into something tragic and not right. Right and wrong are subjective obviously, but it’s those things more than monsters or killers and so many of the tropes of horror that creep me out.
The writings of Thomas Ligotti, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Mark Samuels, Richard Gavin and so many others that explore the wrongness in a wrong world, those are the contemporary voices of dread. I don’t worry about demons or serial killers. I worry about that guy on the bus that doesn’t feel right. I turn that thing sitting where it shouldn’t be into something diabolical. The dreams that scare me are the dreams of footsteps behind me from someone not concerned I know they are there. They are the voices in a house I thought was mine right up until I heard the voices. The stranger who says “see you later” and sounds like they mean it. The innocuous things that breach the facade of life.
I think about these things more, the more I write. “Weird tales” more than commercial horror speak in the tongue that resonates with me. It is the subtleties in life that can go unnoticed, the curious juxtapositions, and the quiet shifts in wind and shadow where the genuine unease lurks. Mystery before bombast.
It’s what I have always tried to do with my music, subtlety and detail. It’s what I hope to infuse in my writing. I think that aesthetic is as much me as anything.
That Tem can write about such personal, crippling fear with such freedom of ideas is perhaps my favorite quality in his inspired work. I don’t get a sense of self consciousness in the writing despite the self consciousness and, arguably, even narcissism of his protagonists. He goes where the trapped and paranoid mind goes.
