I was reading Stephen King’s The Shining as a teenager when I had the realization that good horror needs to be able to evoke the whole spectrum of human emotions, not just fear, to really…uh…shine. The moment when Jack wrests control of himself back from the hotel just long enough to tell his son to run, and Danny doesn’t, that part is what did it for me. I still feel a little tug in my heart just thinking about that scene (especially now that I’m a parent).
It was also King who first made me pause and consider the important place goodness holds in horror. I’m thinking specifically of Irv Manders in Firestarter. He sees a man and a young girl hitchhiking and it rings a little alarm for him, so he pulls over to talk and feel out the situation. He’s still not sure, so he offers them a lift and then invites them home for lunch so that he can gauge the nature of the situation without having to get any authorities involved unless he finds that he has to. He offers support when he learns that Andy is not harming Charlie, and he stands up to the government agents when they come onto his land to take these two strangers away.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is that Irv Manders does this without pretention, without any notions of his own heroism, without needing or even really seeming to want to be thanked. Irv Manders is one of the humble, normal, good people that speckle Stephen King’s work.
I think it’s so important to see this kind of goodness—everyday goodness, unspectacular and mostly quiet and there, in normal people who are just living their lives. Reminding people that this goodness exists in our fellows is important in any media, but I think it matters a little more in horror. In the bad and frightening times, that’s when it’s easiest to forget that this human capacity for goodness exists, and also when we most need to remember it.
Another kind of goodness I want to talk about in relation to horror content alongside the everyday goodness is the kind to aspire to. I only watched Twin Peaks for the first time about a year and a half ago, and it captured my heart immediately. There are a lot of reasons for that—it’s an absolutely brilliant show on so many levels—but one of the biggest reasons, for me, was the aspirational goodness of Special Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI.
Coop is not perfect, and he has made immoral decisions in his past—decisions which he knows were mistakes and learned from. Imperfect or not, though, Cooper is good, and in spite of his job he sees the goodness in the people around him first, and in seeing their goodness he inspires greater goodness.
I legitimately believe that if everybody watched Twin Peaks and then went about their lives asking themselves What Would Dale Cooper Do, the world would be a markedly better place.
It doesn’t matter that to some degree, in the end, he lost. He couldn’t fix the world, but he made it better by being a force for goodness in it. If Irv Manders and characters like him serve to remind us that the people around us all have the capacity to be good, Dale Cooper inspires us to find that capacity within ourselves and empower it.
I was recently talking about goodness in fiction with a new friend, and they pointed out an aspect of this that I overlooked, and which I feel chagrined to have overlooked, and this is the hard-won goodness. The goodness that does not come naturally to someone, for whatever reason, but that they find and work to nurture within themselves. And, again, the ability to find this kind of goodness in the midst of the worst times is incredibly important.
Now maybe it’s just because I’m preoccupied with the first three movies in this franchise and re-watch them once every year or two (and maybe it’s because I only recently finished that re-watching), but the first person who comes to mind for me when I’m thinking of a character who is not easily inclined to be good but who, after facing adversity and trauma, finds a core of it within herself, is Gale Weathers from the Scream franchise.
Gale is selfish and self-obsessed. She pursues the truth about a wrongful conviction not because it’s the right thing to do but because she’s pretty sure she can use it to make herself more famous. But when push comes to shove, Gale goes into danger and saves other people’s lives at great risk to her own safety.
And then, yes, she backslides. She lets the selfishness win again. She profits off of the tragedy and she alienates the people who had begun to care for her. That is, in my opinion, part of what is compelling about the goodness in her. Gale Weathers has to work hard to maintain that goodness. It doesn’t come easily to her. But it’s worth working hard for—even when she fails and has to start again, it’s worth it. Seeing her character development over the first three movies is one of my favorite parts of that franchise.
(I did not expect, when I started writing a monthly newsletter, that I would wind up comparing Stephen King and Twin Peaks with the Scream movies, but here we are.)
These three characters are so different. The way they are good, the route it takes for them to get to goodness, their goals and their impacts on the world around them, are so different. But they, and characters like them, and what they remind us of—especially in difficult times—are so important. Finding ways to portray goodness in horror is, I think, vital.
This blog post has been an excerpt from the May 2024 issue of my newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. If you dig it, check the rest of that issue out here!