MSZ: Let’s talk a little bit about your storytelling techniques. There is a great thing you once wrote: “The epic is a vital genre for humanity.”
GDT: A lot of people think that in epics one character almost represents an entire race; the whole race is imbued in one character. Borges does that a lot. Borges talks a lot about a man who is “the” man that represents Argentina at a certain moment. In a strange sense, for me, I Am Legend is an epic because it really represents both the rise of a new civilization and the falling of another one, becoming a legend.
MSZ: It’s the microcosm that speaks to the macrocosm.
GDT: Yes. But the interesting part of that book, for me, was the fact that Richard Matheson brings the urban into horror, revitalizing it. This is not Transylvania; this is not a castle. This is the streets of an American city. What was really incredible is that I Am Legend is a very metaphysical book, in the same way that his The Shrinking Man is a very metaphysical book. The fact that somebody we have empathy with is not the winner, historically, and therefore they become the monster, the loser, the legend: “If you’re not good, the human will come for you at night.” I mean, there is a whole society of vampires outside, which he manages to show us are the antagonists. But at the end of the book you realize, “Holy crap! We are the anomaly. We are the legend.” That’s fantastic! I don’t think it’s ever been done in the movie versions.
The ending of The Shrinking Man is almost like Albert Camus. The final notion in the book is that you abandon yourself to the cold embrace of the cosmos. It’s . really fantastic.
MSZ: In that regard, two interesting things about Matheson are that he has a very strong belief in an afterlife—a very strong belief in a larger reality than the prosaic one—and in many of his books he uses himself as the main character and his family is the family in the book. He’ll often name the wife Ruth because his real wife’s name is Ruth.
GDT: Well, everybody does that. I mean, everybody that writes. Anybody that doesn’t do it, I don’t understand how they write. The same can be said of most everyone. Borges, certainly. And in a strange way—very, very twistedly—I think all the children in Dickens are sort of him in a shoe polish factory thinking, I deserve better. I think Mary Shelley is in Frankenstein big time, and so on and so forth. That is beautiful. Roald Dahl does it. H. P. Lovecraft more than anyone. And Stephen King.
The almost hyperbolic depiction of violence against children hearkens back to a tradition of children’s storytelling that is not afraid of the dark side.
King and Matheson are two writers I really love because they not only bring the urban and the suburban to horror, they bring in, brilliantly, family dynamics. This is interesting because horror, during the pulp years, was always about superlative characters: a professor, a reporter, an archaeologist. They were not regular people. Fritz Leiber does a little bit more urbane characters. But Matheson, starting with the family man in The Shrinking Man, is talking about the dynamics in a marriage, how they change. He becomes a child, a baby, and his desires are no longer acknowledged. He becomes a toy. The family dynamics in I Am Legend are gorgeous—how he loses everything, and how his best friend is every night outside of the house screaming his name. Matheson and King bring you people that go to the supermarket, fill their car with gas, take their children to school. And they put them in situations you can be absolutely scared shitless about.
MSZ: You mentioned Roald Dahl. He seems, in some ways, to be a spiritual relative of yours because, even in his writing for children, his work has enormous darkness.
GDT: Most of the great writers of children’s literature have a very dark side. Some of them are very repressive. Carlo Collodi is very repressive, for example, but I still love him. I also think Oscar Wilde and Hans Christian Andersen deal with a lot of identity issues, and they are present in a very dark and fascinating way in the tales. Strangely enough, both have these almost psychosexual dramas in their stories. Like Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” As a kid, I found it enormously sensual. I remember reading it and being vaguely disturbed and aroused as a kid. It really has a lot of strange images of snow, and it almost portrays death as an erotic goal, an experience. I mean, it’s really, really weird.
But Dahl, Saki—they all have something in common, which is that they create really, really great children’s tales that are really, really disturbing for parents. Parents often give children the Roald Dahl books thinking, Oh, they’re safe. But they’re full of great violence. I mean, The BFG? There’s more descriptions of ways to consume a child, and brutality, than anywhere else. It’s fantastic. And The Witches, where the witches sing something like, “Boil them, fry them, chop ’em.”
The reality is that kids are not bothered by these things. So I was sad that Pan’s Labyrinth didn’t get a PG-13 [it is rated R]. I think it should have gotten a PG-13 because the violence in the movie is part of the tale. As disturbing as it is, it is part of the flavor. We couldn’t get it. But, in my mind, Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie done from me to young readers, so to speak.
GUILLERMO’S MAINSTAYS OF HORROR
TO LEARN WHAT WE FEAR is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls. In that, it is no different or less controversial than humor, and no less intimate than sex. Our rejection or acceptance of a particular type of horror fiction can be as rarefied or kinky as any other phobia or fetish.
Horror is made of such base material—so easily rejected or dismissed—that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in this, our materialistic world.
But it is a fact that, through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable: Stevenson, Wilde, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Marcel Schwob, Kipling, Borges, and many others. Borges, in fact, defended the fantastic quite openly and acknowledged fable and parable as elemental forms of narrative that would always outlive the much younger forms, which are preoccupied with realism.
A display devoted to Edgar Allan Poe at Bleak House.
At a primal level, we crave parables, because they allow us to grasp the impossibly large concepts and to understand our universe without and within. These tales can “make flesh” what would otherwise be metaphor or allegory. More important, the horror tale becomes imprinted in us at an emotional leveclass="underline" Shiver by shiver, we gain insight.
But, at its root, the frisson is a crucial element of this form of storytelling—because all spiritual experience requires faith, and faith requires abandonment: the humility to fully surrender to a tide of truths and wills infinitely larger than ourselves.
It is in this abandonment that we are allowed to witness phenomena that go beyond our nature and that reveal the spiritual side of our existence.
We dislocate, for a moment, the rules of our universe, the laws that bind the rational and diminish the cosmos to our scale. And when the world becomes a vast, unruly place, a place where anything can happen, then—and only then—we allow for miracles and angels, no matter how dark they may be.
MARY SHELLEY (1797–1851)
Much like Matthew G. Lewis, who was only twenty years old when he wrote The Monk, Mary Shelley was painfully young—a teenager, in fact—when she first published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and into the monster and his tale she was able to pour all her contradictions and her questions—her essential pleas and her feelings of disenfranchisement and inadequacy. The tale spoke about such profound, particular feelings that, irremediably, it became universal.