I am a student of horror. I love the genre in all of its forms. Literature, movies, spoken stories, and music; everything of the horror ilk holds my grim fascination. I've tried to pinpoint when this interest began for me, and was unable to do so. I suppose the earliest incident I know of took place a few months after I learned how to talk. My parents put me in my crib for the night, and were awoken an hour later by the sound of me talking. They went in my room to see if anything was wrong and found me standing in my crib staring at a corner of the room. I looked at them and scared them both by saying softly, "Man get you."

Now, the question I ask myself isn't "when did horror gain my fascination," but rather, "what is it?" I feel that if I was able to find some theme, some underlying thread that ties it all together, I could deconstruct the entire genre and gain a better personal understanding of it. Simply by finding the answer to "what" could lead to the answer of the ultimate question I ask myself: "Why does this appeal to me?"

For a genre to exist at all, it has to have some form of unity or cohesiveness binding all of its forms together. There must be an unspoken, underlying theme. The necrophilia present in Poe's poem, "Annabel Lee" must share the same message as Stephen King's murderous clowns, or Lovecraft's nightmarish dreamscapes. After actively looking for similarities in my mountain of horror novels, I think I decided on a theory: Horror literature violently exposes the myth of humanity's free will and the dominance of fate over our lives.

I am not saying that what horror exposes is truth. I do not believe that any more than I believe that chanting in front of a mirror will rouse the angry spirit of Bloody Marry. However, the chilling part of horror's theme is not whether it is true or not, but that it just might be true. It just may be possible that my free will doesn't exist. I tell myself that that's not true, but I also find myself trying to avoid mirrors when I'm alone in my home at night.

This theory came to me one night as I was reading Poe's poem "The Raven." Until then, I always considered horror's theme to be the fragility of human life. However, it occurred to me the speaker in "The Raven" is in no mortal peril. In fact, very few of Poe's speakers or protagonists ever die. Yet, Poe is considered a master of horror.

Why? How do Poe's stories tie-in with the horror genre? While it is true that most of Poe's protagonists rarely perish, they are left alive to be bound forever to something much worse than death. It is in Poe's portrayal of ill-fate gaining permanent dominance over his characters that he earns his title as a master of horror.

"The Raven" opens with the speaker brooding alone in his dark study. He tells us that he was reading books to try to forget for a moment his grief over having lost Lenore. It is possible that Lenore could have died the day before or twenty years in the past; that is left for the reader to ponder. In any case, the speaker is so consumed by grief, he doesn't even try to confront and overcome it. Instead, he tries to hide amidst his books for the briefest moment of peace. He tells us that he fails in this endeavor by using the word "vainly."

After the tapping begins, we see how the character starts to lose his control over the situation. The speaker goes to investigate the noise, assuming by logic that there must be someone out there. The speaker tries to gain a foothold in the situation (he's a little frightened by this point) by investigating. When his search turns up nothing, he is shaken further and is thrown more in the grip of the horrible event that is about to unfold. Furthermore, he is reminded again of his loss when he utters "Lenore." It was as if he was unconsciously hoping that upon his investigation, he would find Lenore waiting for him on the other side of the door. It's as if he was struggling very weakly against the unchangeable events in his life by hoping.

Upon his second investigation of the tapping at the window, he is gratified by turning up the raven. This the last active part the speaker takes in the entire poem. From this point on, anything he does or says is under control of the raven. He can shout, he can struggle, but he's not getting out of it. The raven has him the second he steps in the window.

After questioning the bird and receiving no satisfying answer, the speaker is led by his own misery into deciding that the bird is some sort of conduit through which he can hear news about his Lenore. This shows that he is a man who is controlled and ruled by his grief. The raven offers no clue as to why he is there, and yet the speaker's grief that is stronger than his own free will tells him to believe the bird was sent concerning Lenore.

The speaker then begs of the bird for some relief from his grief that enslaves him. First, he asks the bird, believing the raven to be sent by God, to give him something that will kill his memories of Lenore. Notice that he's not confronting his grief, but hiding from it as he was when the poem opened. This is another example of how he lets his grief rule him. The raven, as cold and unchanging as the passing of Lenore, of course replies with "Nevermore."

Then, he asks if the raven could offer him information about there ever being relief for him. Since he worded the question with a biblical reference, one may assume he means from God. The raven replies with "Nevermore."

The third question he asks is whether Lenore has achieved some form of eternal rest. The speaker hopes that if the bird answers his question, he could have the slightest bit of comfort. I found myself wondering whether the placement of this final question shows any insight to the character. I believe he doesn't care as much about Lenore's fate as he does his own. First he asks for forgetfulness, and then he asks for god-given peace. Only after his first two questions fail does he ask about Lenore's wellbeing. I believe that this means the power his grief holds over him is even stronger than the love he once had for Lenore. The raven seems not to care as he repeats himself for the fifth time in the poem.
I noticed how the raven's response never directly answers any of the speaker's questions. The raven is as unchanging and static as the death the speaker tries to gain relief from. The raven is cold, and soulless, he is a physical representation of the speaker's undying misery that he has been living with ever since Lenore passed.

The speaker stumbles upon this horrid fact by accident, while he's screaming at the bird to leave him in peace. Only then does the bird's response of "Nevermore" really hit home. The embodiment of his misery as the raven hits the speaker; it hits him hard. With that one word the raven says, "I am never leaving you, you are bound to me forever. Never again will you be free from either me or your loss." The speaker realizes this fate and resigns himself to it with the chilling final stanza. The last two lines:
"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/ Shall be lifted
-nevermore!"

The speaker's final resolution that he will be bound forever to his horrible fate made me realize the theme of horror and free will. I began looking for the same theme in Poe's other works, and found a connection in "Annabel Lee." While the speaker of "The Raven" is bound forever to the fate of grief, the speaker in "Annabel Lee" is not only bound to grief, but also to madness.

The fate of madness in horror is sometimes more feared than death. Madness is the intellectual death where the sufferer not only has to live his life with the nightmares he's seen, but also is unable to rip himself from the shock of those nightmares due to his insanity. Horror writers Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft were famous for their mastery of this theme. Poe is no exception.

I noticed two things right away in "Annabel Lee" that show how insanity has the speaker in its grip. First, the poem is written in a very sing-song tone. It sounds in the faintest way like a nursery rhyme. When I coupled that with the poem's subject matter, I felt a little unsettled. It's like the nursery rhyme the children sing in "Nightmare on Elm Street" right before Freddy comes to saw everyone up (One, two, Freddy's coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door...). I had a mental picture of a grown man sitting in the corner of a dark room, hugging his knees, and rocking back and forth while singing this poem to himself. It is not as bad as the mental picture I had later, in which the speaker was singing this poem to the rotting corpse he holds at night.

The second thing I noticed was that whenever the speaker says "Annabel Lee," it's written in capital letters. On tombs, the name of the deceased is written in capital letters. I took this to mean that this madman's soirées with the girl's body have been going on for so long, that by association he sees her name in his head as it appears on her grave. If he pictures her name in his mind in this manner, what does that say about his relationship with the girl? Does he really regret her loss as he seems to in the poem, or does he just pay lip service to that? In reality is his closest relationship with Annabel through her corpse? In short, is ANNABEL LEE more real to him than Annabel Lee?

The poem achieves its tie to horror through these points. It's horrifying because the speaker has lost all semblance of sanity. The fact that he lies down next to the corpse every night is not as frightening as why he lies with it. His actions serve only as a disgusting example of what insanity can turn a man into. If the reader assumes that before Annabel's death, the speaker was once a rational human being, fear conjures itself in the reader. The reader realizes this horror when he asks himself, "what if?" What if that seed of insanity lurks in you and you don't even know it? It's just waiting for the right time to come roaring to the service to take you over, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Therein lies the true horror of "Annabel Lee"

After recognizing the theme in these first two poems, it was very simple to see it in the story "The Tell-Tale Heart." Once I decided to believe that all horror shows fate's violent supremacy over free will, it is simple to see what forms ill-fate uses to bind characters to itself. In horror fate can take the form of grief, and madness as we've seen in "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee." It can also be present in death, danger, or irony (as is the case in many of the episodes of "The Twilight Zone").

In "The Tell-Tale Heart" fate works against the character under the guise of guilt. After killing the old man, the protagonist seems very calm and collected. It is not until the police show up that he hears the heart start to beat underneath his floorboards. The reader is then treated to an exposition of how the character's composure breaks down before he shrieks his confession to the police.

This story can be interpreted in two ways. The first is very much like "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven" in that the man hears the heart because a fate (guilt) stronger than his free will is gaining control over him. The presence of the policemen show the severity of what the protagonist has done, and guilt wells up in him. The guilt, coupled with the fact that the character is completely insane, cause the beating of the heart. Therefore, the sound is entirely in his head.

The second, more exciting interpretation is that there actually is a beating heart under the floorboards that he alone can hear. The angry spirit of the old man is getting his revenge on the protagonist from beyond the grave. I believe this ties into the horror theory through the idea that the past just might refuse to die. That at any time, something you've done that you regret will come back to haunt you. The protagonist is paying for his sins through jail time; but if the story were to continue, would the beating of the heart cease once they found the body? Or would the noise continue, following the protagonist everywhere he goes, never giving him a moment of peace? This is similar to the reader's fear of having to live in guilt and regret for something he may have done in the past.

Through these three pieces of literature, I can see the theme that encompasses all horror. Once I've deconstructed these works of Poe, it was easy to find the theme present in many other horror stories. Poe's works are excellent research matter into the realm of horror. But perhaps the strongest evidence I have for this theory comes from the classic W.W. Jacobs short-story, "The Monkey's Paw." The story shows the downfall of a family who possess a wish-granting talisman. The lines that drive home and conclude my argument come from this story.

"The paw had a spell put on it by and old fakir, a very holy man.
He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those
interfered with it did so to their sorrow."