mark mclaughlin
FOUR-LETTER WORD BEGINNING WITH `F'
Mark McLaughlin's fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared/are forthcoming in more than 650 magazines, anthologies, newspapers, and websites, including Horror Garage, The Black Gate, Galaxy, Black October, Gothic.Net, Space & Time, Writer's Digest, FilmFax, The Best of Palace Corbie, all three Bending the Landscape volumes, The Book of All Flesh and its two companion volumes, and two volumes each of The Best of the Rest, The Best of HorrorFind, and The Year's Best Horror Stories. Forthcoming appearances include Cemetery Dance, Dark Arts, Midnight Premieres, and In Laymon's Terms. Collections of his fiction include Slime After Slime, Hell Is Where The Heart Is, Motivational Shrieker, and At the Foothills of Frenzy (with co-authors Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Knight). Also, he is the co-author, with Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, of the poetry collection The Gossamer Eye, which won a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. Many of his works can be purchased at www.shocklines.com Visit Mark on the web at www.geocities.com/mcmonstrous
YOU DON'T OWN ME...
YOU HAVEN'T EVEN MADE A DOWN PAYMENT
Who goes there?
Ah, it's you.
You're looking well. I think you've lost some weight.
Come in. Sit down. Would you like something to drink? Wine? A gin-and-tonic? Wait there, I'll go rummage around in the fridge and see what there is to eat...
Okay, I'm back! Hope you like crab-cakes.
Let us talk once again about Fear, my friend.
Today's world is a place of marvelous opportunity, and we are all free to live our lives, pursue our dreams, play that funky music and rock the house.
At least, that's what we'd all like to think.
But we also know, everyone else in the world doesn't always agree with us. Sometimes others will refuse to cooperate, or will intentionally get in the way. Sometimes, others will try to control us, or hold us back--or worse.
Scenarios like that are common in horror movies--and in real life, too. That is why today's Fear is Coercion: being forced to do what you don't want to do.
Coercion is a very early, basic fear for all of us. Growing up, we all had to endure larger and/or stronger and/or meaner creatures (parents, relatives, babysitters, schoolyard bullies) forcing us to obey them. Some of those coercers may have used harsh words, threats of violence, or even violence itself to get us to see things their way.
Watch the TV news or read the newspaper on any given day--you'll find coercion on every page. Even in the comic strips! Sarge is always beating up poor Beetle Bailey, and Hagar the Horrible isn't afraid to throw his weight around. Nancy usually gets Sluggo to do her bidding, and who knows what kind of strings Lois has to pull to get Hi to reach his trembling hand into the job-jar?
An early movie featuring coercion is the 1936 production, Revolt of the Zombies. This creaky old black-and-white potboiler starts with a happy blast of what sounds like cartoon theme music. But then, nothing you see and hear in this movie is especially frightening. The zombies don't even look rotten. They're also referred to as robots and automatons--basically, they are everyday guys whose will is being controlled by mystical means. They've become mindless soldiers who stride implacably across Cambodian battlefields. Shooting at them doesn't stop them – cheap not-so-special effects reveal that bullets enter their body, but have no effect on them. They just keep moving, ever-onward. They exist simply to obey.
