The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “Death on the Nile”

When people ask me if I like horror, I usually say no, because they mean Elm Street and murderers that refuse to die and impalings and beheadings and disembowelings, accompanied by buckets and buckets of blood.

But it’s not really true that I don’t like horror—I love horror, just not that kind. I love stories where nothing frightening that you can put your finger on is happening, but the hairs on the back of your neck are still standing straight up, stories that don’t have any monsters or internal organs or sharp objects, that have instead a nice, friendly small town and a white dress and a ball of yarn, or an oddly deserted ocean liner crossing the Atlantic during wartime without any running lights, or a woman standing perfectly still, watching you from the other side of the lake.

Or a number you keep seeing—on an apartment door, on a taxi, on an airline flight.

You might recognize that last one. It’s from possibly the scariest Twilight Zone episode I ever saw. The woman on the far side of the lake is of course from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The ball of yarn and the white dress are from Kit Reed’s “The Wait,” and the deserted deck is from Between Two Worlds, the movie the heroine of “Death on the Nile” kept talking about when she was trying to frighten Lissa.

I saw that movie on TV when I was a teenager, and loved it (and not just because it was set in the London Blitz), but I had no idea what it was called or who was in it, so I had no chance of finding it again till I had the bright idea of asking at a science-fiction convention. (Science-fiction fans know everything.)

But even though I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, it had stuck with me all those years, just as “The Wait” and the Twilight Zone episode have stayed with me, just as the movie The Others and Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and Daphne DuMaurier’s short story “Don’t Look Now!” have, in spite of the fact that there’s not a machete or a drop of blood in any of them.

Or maybe because of that. I’ve always thought that slasher-type horror had the same problem as Victorian interior decoration, with all its cushions, knickknacks, whatnot cabinets, and ottomans, and its penchant for putting tassels and fringes and ruffles and lace on everything. They’re both wildly cluttered—one with tea cozies and doilies, the other with severed heads and psychopaths—so crowded that the terror can’t figure out a way to maneuver its way through.

But I also think it’s because the stuff we have in our heads is way scarier than anything H. P. Lovecraft or a WetaWorks special effects team can invent. The movie Alien was absolutely terrifying right up to the moment you saw the monster, and I’ve always thought the best thing that ever happened to Jaws was that they couldn’t get the mechanical sharks to work. They kept sinking and/or exploding when they hit the water, and that’s why they had to resort to the buoys, which were far more frightening, and the shadowy, undefined “something” under the water.

It’s that undefined something we’re really afraid of—the flicker of movement we don’t quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can’t quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we’re not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we’re going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can’t quite put our finger on and can only guess at.

That’s why death is the scariest thing of all. Nobody living has ever caught sight of it, and in spite of centuries’ worth of claims of hauntings and messages from beyond the grave, nobody has ever come back to tell us what it was like. And we not only can’t imagine what it’s like, we can’t even imagine how to imagine it.

But we keep trying. So we tell ghost stories about somebody coming to get your liver, and go to slasher movies, and read zombie novels, though none of them are really scary. What’s really scary is looking up at the clock on the wall of the railway station and seeing that it has no hands.

Or realizing that you’ve seen the people in the ship’s lounge before—right before they were killed by a bomb.