The Development of a Trope

By James L Hill

Vampires have haunted the mind for millennia. The Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans all believed in blood drinking demons, the precursors to modern vampires. Probably because blood is the one thing everyone recognizes as essential for life. It is irreplaceable. I was born with a fever, the doctors wanted to do a full transfusion, and my father refused. His reasoning, “no way you can take all the blood out of my boy and put it back in.”

This is the first trope of the vampire story, they need blood to survive. Working off this main idea, blood will reconstitute the vampire. They gain control of their victims through the blood. They slowly suck the blood, gaining power over the person’s will until one night they completely drain them. The victim dies to rise as a vampire and slave to their master.

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ALF – Alien Life Form

By James L Hill (aka J L Hill)

Alf was a comedy about a cat-chasing anteater-like alien. His name was an acronym for Alien Life Form. Scientists are seriously searching for extraterrestrial life. For various reasons, we want to prove life exist elsewhere in the universe.

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Horror – A Sort of History

By James L Hill

People have been afraid of the dark since time began. For good reasons, we don’t have the night vision of a cat, the hearing acuity of a bat, or the sense of smell of a dog. We compensate for our lack of physical abilities with our superior mental prowess. But that opened its own can of worms.

By the way, worms terrify people, usually not on a one-on-one basis, but n mass, they cause nightmares. It is our higher intellect that is the source of most of our fears. Some of those fears are ingrained in our DNA, part of our fight or flight survival response, like a bump in the night that raises the hairs on the back of our necks.  Others come from millennia of stories meant to shape our morality and make us better people, like bad things happen to bad people. Or shame on you if you do this, tell your children the monster under the bed will get them if they get out of bed one more time, even if you need peace and quiet. By the way, which will only cause more nightmares making you get out of bed to quieten the children again.

Armed with a basic idea of fear, we can talk about the history of horror. Horror can be broken down into three forms, natural, supernatural, and technological. Natural horror stories are understandable. We are not the most physically fit of the creatures on Earth. These stories build on primal fears, being hunted by some beasts, lions, tigers, and bears. Oh My!

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The Horror of it All

by J L Hill

There are two genres of writing that lends itself to every other, romance and horror. Every story contains a love story. But even more, every story has suspense and fear, the basis of horror.

You can dissect any story, be it sci-fi, fantasy, or romance and you will find suspense that moves the plot along. And a fear of not knowing what will happen next that keeps you reading. I am not a horror writer. I started out as a science fiction and crime author, but my two biggest influencers and favorite authors are Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. Both men include the five elements of horror in their stories, suspense; fear; violence; gore; and the supernatural.

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