Post by Salzmank on Jul 20, 2018 14:23:06 GMT
I have tried, thus far probably unfruitfully, to create some kind of descriptor or nomenclature for the kind of spooky story that I enjoy and that I write—which is not really “horror,” the gross and gory, and more the “pleasing terror,” as M.R. James called it, that I mention in the subject line.
I usually call it a “ghost story,” but not all of them include ghosts, and that’s the problem. I’m referring to what Dreyer meant when he said this: And I think I’ve found it in Russell Kirk’s term for the genre, a “ghostly tale.” Ghostly, not ghost, because it need not have ghosts, and tale, not story, because it conjures up a sense of the ancestral and the mystic, reaching far back in time and far deep into the depths of our souls.
I usually call it a “ghost story,” but not all of them include ghosts, and that’s the problem. I’m referring to what Dreyer meant when he said this:
Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another look. The light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them.