The excellent Naomi posed the following interesting question in reply to yesterday's post:

I'm interested to know if people think the trend towards "safer" monsters is just a trend, or if eventually that pendulum will swing back towards horror again.

What do we think? I can see arguments either way.

As it stands, I have the suspicion that the horror element of, say, vampires is pretty played out for the moment. Once you've seen something parodied ad naseaum, or fluffied up, then it's kind of hard to get scared of it. It loses its shock value. Fear of the unknown is a staple of fiction, and if you know everything about the vampiric monster right down to its dress sense, that's not exactly uncanny.

Then again, things can be revived. Emily Bronte's Heathcliffe is a pretty scary guy. Romance has tended to smooth that kind of character into the misunderstood hero who can be redeemed by the love of a good woman, which is a long call from aggressive, wife-beating, miserly Heathcliffe. But Alice Hoffman's Here On Earth is an overt re-telling of the story, and her Heathcliffe character is still disturbing.

I think, fundamentally, it depends on individual writers rather than genre traditions. Single writers can always make exceptions to rules; any writer who's good will be in some way original, because there are infinite ways of writing well. But freshness in storytelling has a lot to do with it. If you're busy thinking about the entire tradition, then there's a lot of fuzz in your head. At cooking school I was told that a few flavours makes a tasty dish, but too many makes it bland, and there's a similar element going on when a genre gets too self-referential: everyone is imitating everyone, and the result is entropy.

I may just be arguing my own interests here: when I started writing Bareback, I'd read pretty much no urban horror or werewolf stuff, and I personally think that was useful: I could start with my own ideas and not worry too much about other people's. As time went on, I did read and watch as much werewolf fiction as possible, but it was the historical research that I was really interested in; other fictional renderings tended to be more like a weather-eye on the horizon, making sure nobody had done something similar enough to cause overlap. A lot of Internet chatters mention Laurell K. Hamilton when they talk about werewolf books, but I never heard of her until after the book sold and people started asking if my book was like hers (gap in my research there, never mind); I checked out Kelley Armstrong's first book when I heard of it, but only after I was well into Bareback and, seeing that it didn't overlap much, put it on the shelf and forgot about it; I enjoyed Terry Pratchett's renditions of werewolves because, well, Pratchett is pretty hard not to enjoy, but again, I didn't make much of a connection... The work I ended up thinking about the most was A True Discourse Declaring the Damnable Life of One Stubbe Peeter, and that was written in 1590.

So to my mind, the main issue was to avoid re-inventing the wheel, and after that, think about writing the story the way it should be written rather than wasting thought on how anybody else might have written it. The general point is that, possibly, if you want a scary take on a traditional story, someone up to their eyebrows in the tradition may not be your best bet.

Tangentially, I think one reason why people have tended to fluffy monsters is that some authors seem to feel the desire to rehabilitate villains; to present them as misunderstood, or glamorous, or sympathetic. The assumption appears to be that, by portraying a character as bad, the original author is being somehow unfair to them.

It's not an impulse I particularly share; you shouldn't go around wantonly accusing real people of evil, but fictional characters aren't real. An author giving a hateful portrait of, say, a miserly scholar may be displaying unfairness, but the unfairness that matters is the unfairness of their attitude towards real scholars that this portrait displays. The fictional scholar doesn't care. If you think that say, Bram Stoker was being unfair, then the people who deserve your sympathy are foreigners and the sexually unconventional rather than vampires: vampires don't exist enough to care what you say about them.

As well, while heavy-handed moralism is tiresome in fiction, moral judgements can be made. People make moral judgements every day; they influence every major decision we ever make. And it's hardly unfair to take a base-line morality like, say, 'It's bad to kill people.' Two-dimensional villains may be implausible, because real people aren't usually that simple, but that's an issue of competence rather than fairness.

Anyway, to get back to the point, I don't think every writer shares my attitude, though; some seem to feel an instinctive desire to champion the underdog, even when the underdog is at the bottom of the pack for biting the other puppies. But that instinct may have a lot to do with the fluffy-monster swing of the pendulum.

And writers who want to potray frightening things, in the face of fluffification, may decide to move on rather than de-habilitate. If you want something scary, rather than saying, 'No, Rice was wrong and Stoker was right,' which has an element of tick-tock to it, you might just decide to invent something else that's frightening. The scariest film I've seen for years is Ring, (Japanese version, thank you), and while there are fairy-tale elements to the story, the monster is definitely an independent creation. And that film scared me so badly I had to sleep with the radio on for two nights.

It does seem to be possible to make scary monsters scary again, but you need to make them unfamiliar. There's a theory, for instance, that the Alien movies are basically dragon stories: the poisonous, unkillable reptile that ravages the people with fearsome strength. They even have an element of the knight myth: both Scott and Cameron have Ripley don something like a suit of armour towards the end. But nobody had really tried to make dragons scary for a long time, and Scott didn't call the monster a dragon. As a result, it was pretty bloody scary.

Things need to feel somehow real in order to be frightening. They can either be good portraits of real things - Heathcliffe is fictional, but abusive men exist - or they can be imaginary creations so convincingly portrayed that we believe they're real. The more a monster is re-invented and played around with, the more we become aware of their fictionality.

At which point, there are two things to do: either come up with something new, or put the monster back into the box until we've all forgotten about it and will jump again when it pops out. And, of course, the third way, which is just write something really, really good. I'm always in favour of that.

I think scary monsters will always be with us, but vampires may need a bit of a rest before we're ready to be scared by them again. The pendulum may need to come to a standstill, then wait until some clever writer gives it a push.

What do y'all think?