What draws us to the heart-pounding, adrenaline rush of all horrors? That which scares us ever increasingly fascinates human kind, be it a movie, story, or electronic medium. We are drawn to that breath-snatching shock like a mosquito is drawn towards the light of the death-zap. Except unlike the insect, we can come back for more. And we do, over and over again. It's there, the scare, but we continue to walk through the haunted maze voluntarily. Are we simply immune to the function of the amygdala in our limbic systems? No, probably not. We just like to be scared.

I have collected three basic answers from the creators of horror in the written form. These authors discuss with us how they were introduced to horror, how it has affected them, and where they believe it will bring them.

• How were you introduced to the world of horror?
• How has the horror field affected your life?
• Where do you see the horror field in your life in the years to come?

Mike Purfield

Mike E. Purfield is the author of Stereo Sanctity and Dirty Boots (due from Scrybe Press in 2005).  He has shorts in print and on the web. Voice all complaints at: http://www.mikeepurfield.com

1) I was introduced to horror at an early age through television. My earliest memory was seeing Gargoyles on television and numerous 70's movies. A cult burning in a barn at the end credits of a film also comes to mind.

2) Not badly as obsessions go. It does dent my cash when I fulfill my DVD and book collections. As far as how people see me: Yeah, they think I'm weird, but that's ok, I think they are weirder. Normalcy frightens me. I have never experienced violence or hate because of my interest in horror; guess I'm lucky.

3) Probably the same it is now, maybe the change of making a living in horror or sharing it with my children.

Stephanie Simpson Woods

Stephanie Simpson-Woods lives in a small town in North Carolina- population count: squirrel. When she isn’t writing books or shorts, she’s stabbing people with needles and pouring urine into tubes. For more info visit her website at http://www.stephaniesimpsonwoods.com.

1) His name was Freddy and he was damned hot. No. Scratch that. More like fucking charred. I was just a kid, who switched back and forth from MTV – before it became a shitfest— to whatever channel had something scary on it. I was sucked into the lives of screaming victims and murderous madmen by the turn of a button. I fell in love with fear.

As I got older, my Dad started buying me books, mostly stuff he was familiar with like King and Saul. I realized that I didn’t have to channel surf to get my fear fix anymore. It was merely a page turn away.

2) It hasn’t really. Horror has always been in my life and my mind has endlessly slithered through gutters. The only difference is that I am able to contribute to it, add my own dark thoughts and fucked up scenarios. I’m no longer an observer, but a provider.

3) I don’t know. Dionne Warwick and her psychic super friends won’t return my calls, and I broke my magic eight ball when I tried to drink the ink. I do know what my goals are- and that’s to have the opportunity to make as many people as possible fall in love with fear, just as I did.

Mike Arnzen

Michael Arnzen is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Play Dead, 100 Jolts, and Grave Markings. His website, http://www.gorelets.com, is a popular stop for horror fans worldwide.

1) Growing up in Amityville, NY, I was surrounded by it. My father used to take me to horror movies and cover my eyes during the scary parts (in fact, I wrote a memoir about it recently published at reallyscary.com). That, coupled with all the attention to The Amityville Horror -- when the "true story" first came out as a book -- got my curiosity going, and I found myself watching every scary movie on TV and every book I could get my hands on. I distinctly recall reading Jaws (shortly before I saw the film) and was enthralled. I've been living in it ever since, but I knew not to just focus on the movies as a fan...there's a whole history of horror stories, and I go out of my way to study them all.  The darkness has been with us forever. I like being a part of it with my writing.

2) When you associate with the dark side, you become an outsider. But to me it's more of the perspective of the comedian, rather than the outcast: you become a detached observer who knows to distrust the status quo. The longer you stare into the abyss, the longer that abyss fills you up. So horror has colored my viewpoint on everything -- I see the potential nightmare in mundane everyday events and I understand the abject terror of everything grandiose I see on the news. You'd think that so much morbidity and concern with death would poison me, and maybe it has a little bit, but thinking this way keeps the little dramas and pains in perspective, keeps my sense of humor, and helps me to appreciate -- with surprise and wonder -- that I still live, relatively undiseased. 

3) Horror is so much a part of my worldview, that it'll haunt me forever. I've been writing horror stories for a long, long time so the older I get, the more truth I see in the fiction.  But I also have gotten a thicker and thicker skin, and so I'm rarely satisfied by the films I see or the books I read. So I write my own. They might not always be classified as horror, per se, but so long as I'm writing, I know it'll reflect my viewpoint on the world.

Nancy Jackson

Nancy Jackson's work can be seen online, in magazines, and various anthologies. Visit her site http://www.nancyajackson.com to keep updated on her work.

1) Around the time I was four I remember hiding behind the back of the couch and catching glimpses of horror shows my parents watched. Until I got caught and sent back to bed. Those few minutes of twisted, sick images stayed with me, I always had nightmares, and then one day I started writing them down. Most of my stories are just that...my nightmares. 2) I've learned a lot from my fears, what drives them, and also I've expanded my interests in horror from subtle to the extreme.

3) I see horror being a prominent role in my life, as a writer, editor, and reviewer.

Mike Philbin

Mike Philbin has been experimenting with horror themes and structures in his writing since day one, some time round about 1985 to be exact when Dreams & Nightmares of New York launched a new gore version of their zine with one of his submitted pieces, he had a number of pseudonyms in this early period; Michael Paul Peter, Jane Louxis, Vierland Brecke. For the last ten years or more Mike has been writing under the keyboard name Hertzan Chimera and has given the world books such as Szmonhfu, Animal Instincts, Spidered Web, and the Him+Chim+Her books. In August of 2004, Mike killed off the Hertzan Chimera keyboard name and will continue to write under his own name - his auto-biographical THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HERTZAN CHIMERA is out soon on Cyber Pulp Books.

1) Nature Programmes.

Unlike other horror-genre writers, I don't merely lift populist themes from the genre I work in. I look outside the genre. And nature programmes have always held a morbid allure for myself, as they do for many people. Survival Death Voyeurists as I call them. In nature, all the arbitrary human morals we use to govern how our people behave are abandoned. An animal thinks nothing of downing aging prey or prey straight out of the womb (umbilical cord still dragging behind it). I used my research into these natural urges to theme many of the short stories in my oversized paperback Animal Instincts - by transferring this animal hunger onto the human characters in the stories a new world of amoral brutality, psychedelic scenarios and passionless murder evolved of its own volition. Think of zombies, they're not scary - they should ONLY be considered as an exercise in hydrodynamic flow management, how can you evade them? You'll never have enough bullets. No point shooting them. You'll never successfully pull off enough head-shots anyway, the human body panics too much and most of the bullets you'll fire at a wall of zombies will miss. Better to manage the flow. And Vampires, why are they considered scary? There's nothing less scary than a beast with whom you'll fall in love, whether you want to or not. At that point it doesn't matter what they do to you or your physical body, you will be in enthralled ecstasy. The elements of horror, as we've been force-fed them, go against all logic and if this were real life, we'd have other really interesting concerns that we'd consider horror or horrific. Nature has to survive, and that's the true horror we all face. 

2) Prejudice, anger, derision, offers of lynching, jealousy, hatred, stalking.

I have very strong opinions about what the horror product 'should' be and this has earned me few friends in the franchised horror product schoolyard. All writers of horror, thriller, drama, adventure stories (because of the material they consider in their work) are serial killers with a physical OFF switch. They have to put themselves into the heads of their maniac creations. It's so easy to put a knife in someone's eye, that's not the point of horror. The point of horror is to make people feel revolted and oppressed and angered in some fundamental way - one has to get under the skin of the reader. You do this by breaking moral boundaries; as I did with the Animal Instincts collection. You do this by breaking accepted narrative structures; as I will do with my forthcoming Yôroppa novel. You do this by mixing up the genres; my forthcoming Jane's Game novel is considered too erotic for the horror playground, too horror for the purist sci-fi field and too sci-fi for the erotica 'connoisseurs'. The horror writer has to expect to be hated, loathed, derided - for only when he can achieve this status of ogre can his art mean anything to a populace sucked dry by the corporate franchising of the horror ethos.

3) Evolution or Revolution.

There has to be evolution in what we consider to be modern horror - otherwise the old beast we're flogging will start to stink so much no one will approach it. Already horror is marginalized to the point where any new horror film is generally regarded with derision by the reviewers, those who would consider themselves critics of serious cinema. Horror has forgotten how to frighten the audience, it's using the same loud-noises and exploding heads on an audience who is saturated with this sort of imagery. A revolution has to take place in the minds of the writers as well as the readers - I see far too many writers writing for an 'audience'. Fuck that. Write YOUR HORROR, your book. Don't bother writing some piece of tat that appeals to a target audience when you can write something of real personal and historical value. Think of the future. Forget the present. One of the worst symptoms of this stale horror malaise is the sneering sarcasm that infests the majority of heroes in these romping horror adventures - they care nothing for life, so why should we care for them as characters. Take Harry Potter - I can't understand why this series of films is so popular, there is no empathy for the characters at all - they are cardboard cut-outs shitting lines from their prefabricated arseholes. The audience has evolved but the genre stagnates. The audience will rebel and this rebellion will happen very soon. Empires stagnate at their peril.