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(Note that I mention several movies, below, to use as examples. I touch on the endings of these particular movies, so watch for spoilers if you haven’t seen them and still plan to: Alien, Life, Drag Me to Hell, Dog Soldiers, Cabin in the Woods).

I find it exceedingly difficult to find new horror to watch/read.

See, my taste in horror runs down some very specific paths. I’m not interested in human-on-human horror, for the most part. Saw, Wolf Creek, any of that. I only tend to like supernatural or sci-fi horror, with a rare few exceptions. Give me It, or zombies, or a xenomorph. Jason only started to interest me after he rose from the dead.

So, okay, narrowing down the field. But there’s still plenty of genre-horror, so why do I have trouble?

It’s because I deeply, deeply dislike hopeless/frustrating endings.

What do I mean by that? I mean any ending where all the protagonists struggles accomplished nothing. Where it’s not only not a happy ending, but basically a nihilistic one.

For some people, that’s the point of horror, and that’s fine. For them. Me? It’s not just that I’m not fond of them, I find them deeply unpleasant on an emotional level.

Drag Me to Hell, for instance. I really enjoyed that movie, right up until the end, where the main character is… Well, it’s in the title. Nothing she did, nothing that happened in the movie, mattered a damn. Or Life. The alien gets to Earth, the final two survivors are about to die either due to the alien or because she’s tumbling helplessly through space, and none of their efforts, none of their struggles, none of the final plan accomplished one. Damn. Thing.

Horror doesn’t have to have a happy ending, of course. (Though I disagree with the premise that it can’t. Some of the best horror movies/novels have them.) But you can have a dark ending that’s still not too dark. Dog Soldiers and Alien both have only a single survivor out of a larger group, but that survivor lives because they succeeded in destroying the threat. I’m fine with that. But if they’d gone with one of the earlier ideas for the ending of Alien, with Ripley having her head ripped off and the xenomorph taking control of the ship, sending messages in fake voices? I’d have hated that movie.

Even Cabin in the Woods, with it’s "old gods rising to destroy humanity" ending didn’t bother me, because it still felt like the main characters accomplished something, were able to fight back against the people who put them in this situation. As I said, doesn’t have to be happy, but I don’t do well with useless/hopeless.

And this simply isn’t a question most reviews answer. You can’t read up on a movie, or a novel, and get a sense of whether the ending’s going to fall into my preferences or not. And even if I go searching and find the answer, it comes with much more detailed spoilers I’d rather not see.

So, yeah. If you ever wonder why I don’t watch/read/talk about horror nearly as much as I do other genres, despite the fact that my fantasy usually has a pretty dark element to it? This is why: Because I have trouble finding any that’s not a serious risk of just pissing me off and making me feel like I wasted my time, no matter how well done it might have been.

Do any of you ever find yourself realizing that you’re a fan of something conceptually, but not practically?

What I mean is, for instance, a conversation about horror movies at ArmadilloCon eventually turned to Pinhead and the Hellraiser movies. And I found myself putting into words something I’d thought about but hadn’t seriously considered, which is this:

I’m a big fan of the CONCEPT of Pinhead and the Cenobites (particularly in their original conception, before they just became run-of-the-mill demons in a Judeo-Christian hell). I think there’s an enormous amount of cool story and mood potential behind them, and I’d love to see it explored.

Yet I’m not actually a fan of any of their appearances. I didn’t much care for THE HELLBOUND HEART novella, and while I’ve enjoyed many aspects of the Hellraiser movies (especially scenes and segments and ideas from the first two), I’ve never actually enjoyed a single Hellraiser movie AS a complete movie.

The same is true of Lovecraft. I love Lovecraftian horror. I’ve used it in some of my work, and I sometimes go out looking for it. But I’m not really fond of Lovecraft’s own work. I find him a mediocre writer, and although I’ve read almost his entire library, I can only remember a handful of stories well enough to talk about them.

Or, for a different sort of example, exploration-based sandbox D&D campaigns. I find the potential stories and ideas enticing in the abstract, but I’ve never played in such a campaign that didn’t bore me, and I’ve had to quit every time I’ve tried to run one because I was very much not enjoying it.

Is this just me? Or do any of you guys–I’m especially, but not exclusively, curious about other creatives–find yourselves in the same sort of boat?

Okay, folks. The Dungeon Master’s Guild market/license for D&D stuff is a great opportunity and a lot of fun. I get why so many of you are eager to get material up there ASAP. But I hope you’ll accept a bit of free advice from someone who’s both a fan and a professional.

EDITING MATTERS.

You need to know how to put a sentence together, and you need to have your work read over by other people who know how to put a sentence together. I promise you–promise–that if you have obvious typos or overtly poor grammar in your product description, a lot of people are never going to even look at the product itself, let alone spend any money on it. There are many people who have already lost me as a potential customer based on a single sentence of their product entry, because it was so poorly written that I don’t trust them to be able to deliver a usable product.

Take your time and do it right.