Spiders on the Tongue
Crying "spider" in a crowded theater
A couple of writing business details, one from which I will attempt to hang an anecdote.
Please check out my recent appearance on The Burial Plot podcast, with the talented and always delightful Joy Yehle and Brenda Sue Tolian! The podcast was fun because the conversation was so wide-ranging and free-wheeling, and because the hosts are so good at their jobs. So much knowledge of the genre on those microphones! The link to the podcast is here.
At any rate, we spent quite a bit of time talking about theater, and specifically horror theater. It’s a pretty uncommon genre, and one I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Horror in the movies is common, horror is common in books, but try to think of a successful horror play. Dracula, sure, but after that? Macbeth, maybe. Sweeney Todd. After that, I’m tapped.
Back when I was in college, as a Theater major (and as an aside, it may be a useless degree in terms of getting a job, but the Important Things I learned have stuck with my my entire life), I remember seeing a Sam Shepard play (La Turista, I think) about tourists who become ill in a foreign country. At one point, during an exorcism, a spider crawled out of one of the actor’s mouths. It was just a plastic toy spider he popped into his mouth when his back was turned. But the effect was electric—truly frightening—and that moment has stayed in my mind for decades.
In some ways I’ve been trying to recreate that effect ever since I started writing horror. It’s not a cheap scare, it’s quite well earned: it works because of the incongruity of seeing that spider in the mouth of a real human, in the context of a real situation, on a stage in front of you in real life. I suppose it’s a jump cut scare, initially, but the shock, and the after-effect where you try to figure out what is really going on, contains so much more.
Theater seems like the perfect platform for the horror genre, using the immediacy of the stage to tap into elemental fears, trying to bypass the conscious mind to earn scare. Every Halloween we see it work: live Haunted Houses everywhere. That’s theater, whether it’s labeled theater or not. Surely that dynamic could be turned into something you could do on a stage.
I just submitted a treatment for a horror play to a theater out in San Francisco (the Candlehouse Collective). Honestly, it’s not that good, I’m still trying to crack this particular nut. But the idea stays with me, that spider on the tongue, and how to recreate it. It’s almost like there’s a real spider on my own tongue, and I’m trying to figure out how to scrape it off and get it on the page, still alive.
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Mooncalves is now out as an e-book. One of the best stories I’ve ever written is inside that anthology (Edge of the Forest). A ton of other great writers are included in those pages. Steve Rasnic Tem is the big draw, though you might recognize the name Daniel M. Lavery from the pages of Dear Prudence on Slate (he’s on Substack as well).
It’s a good anthology. You can buy it using the button below.
Peace.