Topic Research: Urban Legend Horrors
Urban Legend Horrors
Looking back on my choices for storybook topic research, I found myself most interested in urban legends that were focused on the aspect of horror. I skimmed through a website called Snopes for more stories. I had heard of this website before but never took the time to see what it's all about. I love how easy it is to gain fact checks on really chilling things, even more so when it's proven to be true.
I came across three stories that are centered about a common thread that I deem the most fear-striking component of all:
Oblivion.
The first story was a fact check on the accidental burial of live people. The title alone struck me, as one of my biggest fears is to wake up six feet underground with no one to hear my screams, destined to die of suffocation. It's actually proven that accidental burial isn't unheard of and there have been hundreds of cases. This solidifies my requests after death to be stored in the mortuary for as long as possible before being cremated. Oblivion is present in three ways: the proposed dead, the family of proposed dead, and the medical officials who proposed death. All parties wouldn't fathom of being oblivious that the declared dead would be still living. It's hardship enough when it comes to death, then imagine how all parties feel if they discovered their loved one, or patient, or themselves are awake in a coffin under tons of earth.
The following story was the Climax of Horrors. I couldn't figure out how I thought about the title at first. I skipped over it a few times because the lack of context pertaining to the story both annoyed me and intrigued me. Many of the titles on Snopes are set up like a News article. They give direct titles with a good clue on what the context is. This gives you the option of viewing things you're interested in quicker than skimming a vague title to determine if it interests you or not. However, with a notch up from boring like this story, it's a nice curve ball story. I like this style of website and would like to incorporate a similar style of my own.
Now, aside from just the website layout. I am so glad I decided to read through it because...wow. This is an extreme case of two-sided fear. You either have the suspenseful horror movie with twisted drawn-out plots--and then there's the immediate, all-consuming fear. The fear that happens when you're in a sudden life-or-death situation like waking up to a house on fire. Or you find out your mother died. This story tells a 1946 version where a man comes home from a long trip to New York and asks a servant how is estate was. The uneducated retainer begins to tell him that nothing much happened except for his dog dying. The man was immediately distressed by this but the servant continued to lay on the mishaps in immense crescendo. He starts with the least important mishap all the way to his life as he knew it being over! It's imperative the time setting of this story as it instills the oblivion the man had endured during the trip, being minutes away from home to shatter any normal expectation. Had it been modern day, the police would have notified him by cell. This horror story is a hybrid of suspended, all-consuming fear.
The fear of oblivion is the entire point of the last story. In "Aren't You Glad You Didn't Turn On the Lights?" is a legend of a roommate returning to her dorm with what she thinks is her roommate asleep. She keeps the lights off so as not to disturb her, but when she wakes in the morning she finds her murdered roommate with the note of the title. What begins as a innocuous narrative finishes in a one-word shock. The readers can conjure their own hypothetical question. One most popular might be: "Was the murderer there with the living roommate?" A stomach-pitting climax as the conclusion with a relatively tame story throughout reminds me of the Netflix show "Two Sentence Horror Stories". There are endless ways of adding that frightening time bomb.
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