The BLAND Corporation

What place for horror? This article does a great job of listing possible reasons why some people enjoy the genre, and it even does this coming from a non-horror fan perspective. But of course, as a horror fan, I feel like I need to comment :) There's something that, I think, Rick 's article doesn't emphasize enough, something paradoxically sympathetic to his sensibilities that he misses about Horror, because the genre's odor is, to be fair, rather strong. But before I get to deep stuff I also must acknowledge that Horror is trashy in a way other genres don't seem to be. Sturgeon's Law is universal: 90%+ of everything is crud, but somehow the stereotypical Bad Movie is a Horror one. Indeed, it may well be that it was around Horror, or around Horror-infused fare like certain SF films of the 50s, that the "So Bad It's Good" style of movie enjoyment sprung up. There's material enough in the "So Bad It's Good" concept for another

If there's anything true of art in general, it's that any rule beginning with "don't" should be broken on occasion. Art should engage the soul, the conscious soul even, and nothing better for that than the occasional thing that's just that bit out of place, that bit unexpected. Conform to every rule you heard and what you produce can be consumed automatically. It's when the rules fail that consciousness kicks in. So in that spirit, treat the following "don'ts" as guidelines, and even break them-- but make sure you know what you're doing ;) For what follows is a list of magical powers which, if let loose on a plot, stand a good chance to render it hole-y. And the list is by no means exhaustive: feel free to argue for more items to be put on it. To give a flavor of the disruptive nature of magic, let's look at an example that will NOT kill a story ... but which, the character who suggested it argued, would kill society. NaN. Invis