Even though I’m only just now getting around to reading the novel–well, I suppose “reading” as in listening to it on audiobook–one of my favorite horror stories of all time is Stephen King’s It. The 1990 made for television miniseries scared the hell out of me as a tween, and I loved it for it. There was always something about Pennywise, as portrayed by Tim Curry, and more recently by Bill Skarsgard, that really succeeded in both creeping me out and eliciting a delightful sense of terror in the whole killer clown as a villainous entity. I’d been unsettled by them before–Poltergeist jumps readily to mind–but this story really gave the trope new life in my imagination, and remains impossible to forget to this day.
I don’t know all of the lore behind It (hence the reason I’m listening to the audiobook), but I’ve certainly heard quite a bit of it, even without having read the notoriously doorstop-sized tome King wrote. I’ve been regaled with tidbits from the more cosmically inclined pieces of lore from the story by countless enthusiasts on YouTube. Friends who have read it have explained to me, in great levels of detail and with appropriate shock, the infamous group sex scene that has never been given life in the films. And I’ve heard, from friends, YouTubers, and internet boards at large about how It and its characters and settings connect with the rest of King’s larger dark universe. It’s fascinating stuff, and I plan to explore it as time and energy allow.
It’s no surprise to me that, at its heart, It is a story about consumption versus creation. Pennywise, as the titular It, consumes the children of Derry, Maine every 27-28 years before returning to its slumber. While It has no qualms about taking adults, It prefers children, particularly when they’re scared (the analogy of fear as a ‘sauce’ or ‘salt’ to the ‘meat’ that is the children). It consumes, then sleeps for nearly thirty years, then returns to consume again. Derry’s precarious prosperity seems tied to It’s existence, and even when Pennywise slumbers, It’s influence still manifests in subtle ways, which only seems noticeable to the town’s children.
Even the story’s heroes, the Losers Club, are plagued by the forces of consumption in their lives outside of Derry. Sure, they joined together as kids to defeat It, but once they moved on they forgot each other and their shared experience. They forgot about Derry, and It. And though they may have made prosperous lives for themselves, none of them ever managed to have children. The narrative suggests this is a result of It’s influence over them, even from afar, making Pennywise/It–already a consummate consumptive entity–a force that stops them from creating life of their own.
If It cannot consume the precious life you create, then you will not be allowed to create. Pretty dark stuff.
And it’s at this point that I tie that theme into my own life, and the lives of many artists, writers, creators, and humans at large. I learned a long time ago that, when people have free time, they basically spend it doing one of two things: creating, or consuming. Consuming food, consuming entertainment, consuming air, water, energy, and so on. Creation, while satisfying, is a lot harder to pull off, or at least do well: writing stories, painting, building, sculpting; hell, even cooking dinner is harder than eating it.
We rely on creators for the things we consume, and for many of us, having things to consume is all we need. There are a ton of creators out there, of many and various things, after all. But there are many of us who need more than to simply consume. Whether it’s a need to prove onself, or because someone has an idea or a thing they simply need to share with the world, there are creators.
For the past few months, I have not been one of them.
I’ve been caught up in the throes of consumption, and it’s not always easy to break out of them. For me, the poison tends to be video games, which are so very entertaining, but which also aren’t exactly good for encouraging moderation in their consumption. I haven’t written in this blog for several months, and have done little in the way of writing that wasn’t either directly related to my job, or directly related to video gaming. I have become obsessed with having the highest score, unlocking the latest reward, or getting the latest piece of shiny equipment for my characters.
All of which, aside from the straight objective of entertainment, serves no real purpose.
I’m not saying that entertainment in and of itself is a bad thing, but when you’re putting most of your spare time into it, it becomes an obsession. It takes you away from friends and family. It takes you away from creating–or in my case, writing. And ultimately, it can chip away at your soul. Your potential for doing other, greater, things is simply sucked away.
And I’ve finally started to feel that.
I’ve known it, intellectually, for some time. But knowing it and feeling the large swaths of time passing in idle bouts of doing essentially nothing are two separate things. The obsessive abandon you put into consumption of a particular thing eventually wears off, and you start to realize there’s more you could be doing, if you weren’t sinking all of your time, and energy, and passion into something that wasn’t already made simply to be consumed.
I’m not saying I’m kicking my video game habit. I’m not sure I’m strong enough for that. But I am saying I’m aware of it enough to be apprehensive. I’m trying to break free of it, or at the very least strike and maintain a healthy balance between my gaming and my creativity. I’m going to try to write more, though of course I can guarantee only that right now.
Hopefully this is the start of many more successive and regular blog entries. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a bigger chunk of my novel edited and ready for publication. Hopefully I can find the strength to leave behind the obsessions with which I distract myself from creating. Hopefully I can do all these things and much more.
Because hope, as Stephen King also wrote, is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And while that line may not be from It, It is also ultimately about hope, and its power (along with that of friendship) to overcome darkness.
So, as I continue to listen to It, I also have hope that I will continue to write regularly, and create regularly.
I don’t think it helps that my first exposure to these films was A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, where Freddy seemed particularly more vicious than I’d see in the later films (though the first classic one was also a pretty good horror film on its own thanks to Robert Englund’s performance). Not only was he killing people in their dreams once they fell asleep–a terrifying enough premise all on its own–but he was also possessing one particular teen-aged character once he fell asleep in order to do it. In any case, the terrifying, claw-gloved antagonist of this series would go a long way in making sure I resisted the urge to fall asleep as much as possible for many years. It probably helps explain why I’m such an effortless night-owl by default.I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to take Freddy seriously when they made him more of a clownish killer in the later Nightmare movies, but Wes Craven’s Final Nightmare did a good job of establishing how and why this character existed, and temporarily renewed my interest in him. I wish they would have explored that when they rebooted by series a few years ago, but unfortunately they didn’t, and I was left wanting for another good Nightmare film. Hopefully someday, someone with the right skills can come along and make Freddy frightening again.
This film, along with honorable mention Poltergeist, is no doubt responsible for more than a few people’s irrational fear of clowns, though I myself never succumbed to this. And with Tim Curry’s simultaneously comical and vicious portrayal of the character (or rather, the main physical manifestation of said character), it became one of the movies that came quickest to mind whenever I thought about things that scared me. A creepy… no, scratch that–terrifying clown, who you couldn’t even really kill, and who could psychically torment you across distances? A monster in disguise made to lure children to their doom? Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel.
I remember reading this series of comic strips during a week in October when I was around 10 or 11, and it was a harrowing experience to say the least. For a comic that had had a consistent style and premise, both of which revolved around the life and antics of a surly, lazy cat and his companions, this abrupt shift in tone and mood was unsettling from the get-go. The premise, that Garfield was in fact a lonely, starving cat who lived in a dilapidated and crumbling house, and that his actions with Jon and Odie in the warm, well-kept abode readers had come to know are merely the self-delusions of an individual suffering from starvation and extreme denial, left an indelible mark on my appreciation for Jim Davis to tell a good horror story when he wanted to.There’s an 
This isn’t the most famous of HP Lovecraft’s stories, and certainly suffers at times from his tendency to over-verbalize, but this first exposure to his works instilled in me both a love for the writer and a visceral sense of terror at this story’s premise. It mostly comes down to the central premise about the story being about possession, and the extremes of one particular entity’s willingness to take over the bodies of others, but there are other elements and themes of this story that creep me out as well. That this little gem of a horror story both begins and ends with the author’s imprisonment in a mental facility leaves the reader more than a little discomfited at the entire experience, which is exactly how you should feel when reading Lovecraft. Well done, Mr. Lovecraft. Well done.
In the last decade or so, there have been a slew of remakes of old horror films that have really driven home the scares. Not that the originals aren’t perfectly hair-raising on their own–I can recall more than a few of them keeping me up at night–but the sheer level of visceral terror involved in such films as Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween and Fede Alvarez’s 2013 reimagining of The Evil Dead just make it seem like the creators were really out to get moviegoers. There’s also no doubt that with the advances in movie effects, films such as these are ripe for an upgrade.
I pretty much couldn’t close out this list without mentioning Slenderman (a.k.a. the Slender Man), whose emergence onto the internet and into the collective consciousness of a generation has been both fascinating and horrifying to behold. The unnaturally tall, thin, blanked-faced character dressed in a black suit tends to stalk, abduct, and otherwise traumatize people, disrupting video feeds and often causing others to disappear without a trace. Having only graced the internet with his presence since 2009, Slenderman is a very new phenomenon that demonstrates just how powerful a well-conceptualized image and premise can be online.It’s Slenderman’s fame in particular that intrigues me, as he’s basically gone from a nonexistent thing that has no influence on the world to a nonexistent thing that now exists very strongly in the minds of others, and who very arguably influences the world in which he doesn’t exist, fitting the definition of an egregore. This is very evident not only in the number of stories, creepypastas, artworks, video games, and other multimedia in which the character continues to pop up, but also in the unfortunate 
Closely related to Slenderman is the web series 
Spidey Librarian 
