Dark Narratives Inaugural Issue

The new and improved newsletter, now with way more super sleek content!

Hey guys, welcome to this, the inaugural issue of Dark Narratives, the catch-all horror newsletter straight from the brain of T.L. Bodine.

In This Issue:

• What’s in my radar? A news roundup of creatives doing cool things.

• “Does The Dog Die?” The Ethics and Considerations of Killing Animals in Fiction (a deep-dive essay)

• New Podcast Alert! Shelter & Warning is a monster-of-the-week podcast doing deep dives into monsters of all kinds.

• From now until June, the SFWA is waiving its membership fee for Black writers. So if you’re a Black writer with a qualifying publication, take advantage of this to save yourself a few $$

• The Book Dad is offering a scholarship & assistance package for WiHM to support a lucky woman writer on her next project. Prizes include a marketing package, editing services, financial aid, etc.

• Rodney V. Smith is cooking up some great YouTube content, including a “first chapters” livestream, author hang-outs, and a little birdie told me he’ll be hosting discussion panels in the future too. Go subscribe now so you can get the updates!

Warning for discussion and sometimes detailed descriptions of fictional death and harm to animals and children. Some of the deaths mentioned may also be spoilers for their respective stories. Tread carefully!

A dog exploding in a frat-house microwave in Urban Legend. A cat sliced in half by a window guillotine in The Collector. A horse leaping to its death in The Ring. Horror movies aren't shy about torturing, dismembering and killing animal characters -- and they're not the only ones. How often does the dog die at the end of what should be a feel-good story about man's loyal best friend? How many of us are still traumatized and betrayed by the likes of Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows?

Many people are so bothered by depictions of animal death that they'll avoid media with it entirely. An entire website, DoesTheDogDie.com, was invented just for this purpose -- so people who are sensitive to seeing animal death on screen can avoid movies that will upset them (it's since spread to being used to track a number of other triggering things, like sexual violence).

Even in horror, a genre known for its guts and gore, animal death is a step too far for many people. So what's the deal? Why is it more upsetting for some people to see a dog die than a person? Why do animals die so often in these stories? And if you're a storyteller, should you kill your four-legged characters or buck the trend? Let's dig deep and find out!

Why Do We Care So Much?

Why do storytellers keep killing animals in their fiction? Well, in simple terms -- because it's effective.

If the point of storytelling is to elicit an emotional response in your audience, an animal's death certainly does guarantee a reaction. And that's not just my opinion: science actually backs me up on this one! A scientific study researched the ways people respond to news about human and animal death by describing the same scenario -- a deadly beating -- but swapping out the identify of the victim: an adult human, a human child, an adult dog, and a puppy. The result? People were least upset by the story when the victim was an adult human. Human child was the most upsetting, but by a narrow margin; puppy and adult dog were close behind.

What gives?

Researchers noted that one common thread tying it all together is the impression that animals and children alike are "innocent" and deserve or require more protection. It's easier to imagine a fellow human being killed, in other words, because it's easier to believe that the person may have deserved it or at least brought it upon themselves. We don't hold animals to that same set of expectations. When a dog is beaten by an abusive owner, we rarely hold the dog responsible or ask why it didn't run away; we accept that the dog is a simple, helpless victim.

There's a lot to unpack there regarding society's views towards victim-blaming, and I'm not going to get into it today -- but rest assured that it's a well-known phenomenon that complicates a lot of human rights causes.

And it also makes killing animal characters a hot-button issue for a lot of people. When I ran a poll for my Twitter followers -- predominantly horror lovers -- the responses lined up pretty closely with what the scientific study displayed:

Pets and Kids as Victims in Horror

If we're equally or more upset by watching the fictional deaths of kids and animals, why are the animal lovers seemingly so much more vocal about their preference? After all, the OG trigger warning's site was "does the dog die," right?

Here's the thing: Animals die a lot more often in fiction than kids do, and their death is often handled in a way that's a lot more cavalier. I would argue that if kids were killed on-screen as frequently and casually as animals, people would be significantly more outraged.

I posed this question to my writer's group on Discord and a few recurring themes came through in the answers:

• Violence toward animals is so commonplace that it feels like a cliche. If you see a dog or cat in a horror movie, you can almost always expect for it to die.

• Animal death is sometimes played for laughs or treated casually in a way that child death never is. I can think of several stories where animal death is a punchline (like the cat in Boondock Saints) but I can't think of an analogous child death.

• Some people in real life have a cavalier attitude about animal welfare or treat animals as expendable, which makes it harder to watch fictionalized animal violence because the lines blur more.

• Child death in fiction is still uncommon enough to be shocking when it happens.

One thing I thought was interesting as I delved into this topic was the issue of grief and proximity. People who are parents are significantly more likely to be upset about children dying in fiction because they spend a lot of their waking lives worrying about losing their kids. And of course, it's understandable that anyone who has lost a child could be deeply upset or even psychologically harmed by watching or reading about child death.

But pet death is something that every pet owner has to face at some point, and most of us have faced it multiple times. Seeing an animal die on-screen can remind us of our own dead pets, and remind us too of how lonely grieving for a pet can be. Because many people view pets as expendable, it's hard to find emotional support after losing a pet. There are no established cultural rituals surrounding pet death. No one is going to bring you a casserole. There is some justification for bitterness here, which -- coupled with the relative immunity of children in fiction -- certainly explains some of the "I'd rather the kid die than the dog" sentiment I've witnessed in the discourse!

So What Does It Mean? Should You Kill The Pet Character?

Now I'm going to do that frustrating thing instead of giving you a straight answer and tell you, "It depends."

Pros:

• Because people have such high pathos for animal characters, killing one can have a tremendous emotional impact on your audience. Think of the dog in I Am Legend for example; both the book and the film leverage the dog's death to great effect. If you want to make your audience really sad or upset, killing the pet can definitely do the trick (but beware it may be viewed as manipulative, and the audience doesn't always enjoy that).

• Pet death often appears in stories as a warning or ramp-up toward child endangerment or death. We see this in The Babadook and Pet Sematary, for example; by serving as a proxy for the child, the pet death can ramp up the tension.

• There is an element of realism. Many serial killers get their start by torturing, killing or mutilating animals. Including this plot point in a story can help to establish the trajectory of a character's development toward cruelty and murder.

• Killing an animal can serve as a "moral event horizon" for an escalating conflict. For example, in Stephen King's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, we see the visitor turn from nuisance to genuine menace when he threatens the main character by killing his cat and leaving it as a warning. (King uses a similar threat again, a dead cat in a mailbox, in Lisey's Story). Killing the family pet is one way to make it clear that you mean business.

• From an in-character perspective, it often makes sense to kill the family pet, especially a dog that might attract attention. The dog is the first victim in Funny Games, for example (another film where animal violence also ramps up to child endangerment). Of course, as a creator, you're the one who decides whether the family has a dog in this scenario or not; you can choose for the family not to have a dog instead of giving them one and killing it for practical reasons.

Cons:

• Animal death just isn't shocking anymore. It's such an expected horror trope at this point that everyone will be expecting it, so your animal death will be sad rather than shocking or scary. If shock value is the goal, you'll want to invert expectations. For example, the home invasion in Don't Breathe has a dog character who survives, which is the first of many plot inversions that make the movie interesting. If you have a story with both a pet and a child, killing the child but leaving the pet alive would certainly be shocking and subvert expectations (it might also piss off your audience, but at least it would be different).

• You run the risk of alienating your audience. Depending on who your target audience is, the risk of some of them walking away in protest over a dead cat may exceed the reward of adding a body to the death count.

At the end of the day, I think there are still some valid reasons to consider killing a pet in your horror story. I kill a cat in my novel THE HOUND, for example, and I stand by that decision despite it being one that has gravely upset my readers. But the death serves a clear narrative and thematic purpose beyond shock value. And that's what I would caution anyone else to think about as well: Are you killing the animal because it drives the story forward in an important way, or are you killing it because an animal feels like an expendable character? If it's the latter, I'd urge you to reconsider. Science and my own informal polling suggests that killing a pet in a story is just as serious as killing a child (if not more) -- so you should give the decision at least as much thought as you'd give the choice to kill a kid in your story.

Thank you so much for reading! This month’s blog topic was chosen by my Patrons. Interested in choosing future blog topics and getting early access to my posts? Subscribe today: https://www.patreon.com/tlbodine

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