Inspired to Scare: Let Us in, Said the Senses

by Jeamus Wilkes —

“Let Us In, Said the Senses”

Inspired to Scare (ItS) is a bimonthly column by writer, artist, and actor Jeamus Wilkes. ItS is designed to help horror and dark fiction writers plant the seeds of inspiration and nurture its resulting creativity.

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Hello, my Fellow Writers. Apologies, I’ve been away from this column longer than normal. Autumn is here. Have a cup of coffee with me. Let’s take off our shoes and enjoy the warm rug beneath our feet. The stew’s aroma is drifting down the stairs into our study. The only light comes from a hurricane lamp on a side table and the glow of the fireplace, their cross-flicker subtle and pleasing without an annoying strobe. Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” is playing lightly in the background, its final act consuming the title character.

The five main human senses of sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing are here, and they profoundly affect our writing or any of our dark artistic ventures. I especially recall these in a first- or early-experiential sense.

During a 1976 California trip with my family, my seven year-old eyes witnessed ghosts waltzing in the ballroom area of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, and the image is forever burned into my memory. The holiday season night of the first time I had eggnog was the same night I heard my first ghost story, told to me by my grandmother, and now the two experiences are inextricable. My earliest memory of burning myself was when I was playing with matches with my brother (he was supposed to be lighting jack o’lanterns and was certainly not authorized in sharing any matches with me), and the pain was brilliant, new, and utterly terrifying. The first time I kissed someone’s neck was one Halloween night my freshman year in high school, and I remember how wonderful the smell was. One Halloween season in grade school, I was gifted a SPOOKY SOUNDS vinyl album, of which I remember every single second of its thirty-six minute playing time. 

Then, as childhood ends and crashes with very little buffer from adolescence, the senses are more acutely attuned to tragedy.

The smell of antiseptic and industrial alcohol and pine-scented cleaners in the hospital where my father lay dying in the third floor’s terminal wing is a sensory memory I will take with me until I go into the ground (and may yet experience it all over again with my own mortality in a new and freshly-terrifying fashion). The sight of rotting pumpkins on a neighbor’s balcony after first raising my eyes from a handwritten letter with some terrible, life-altering implications in its contents. The sound of a car crash two blocks away that killed three people. The taste of my last glass of red wine a day before vowing to never taste it again. Feeling my cats’ soft fur against my cheek as they are euthanized and their life leaves their small body.

Our senses are powerful, and work in concert to form this whole tangled bittersweet ball of experience and memory we must go through in this life. Some of us have one or more of these senses taken away during our life journey, or we may have come into this world absent one or more of them. 

If we use these senses in our fiction and creative work, it ups the emotional ante, and it will set our work above so much in the horror literature landscape. Too much horror fiction is heavy in its psychological and philosophical density with a sore lack of the sensory data to bring its storytelling heart home. Our senses aren’t just tied to our temporal line, they are our chronology, our lifeblood, our nightmares, and our hopes. Mental gymnastics and deep-thought posturing will get the reading eyes only so far before the senses demand something they can build an emotional core in. Besides, the most interesting and memorable works on psychology and philosophy often rely on analogies, similes, and metaphors chock full of sensory data.

The senses do not lie, even when they are breaking down. The next time we are in a place, let’s absorb its psychogeography by smelling, tasting, seeing, feeling (touching), and hearing it. It’s all there. And when we put it to paper, the leap to the uncanny, the weird, or the horrifying is not far. That isn’t pessimism so much as our cognizance that the sliding scales of pleasure, pain, good, evil, sweet, sour, bitter, harmony, and screeching are much shorter than we think.

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Further Reading:

Peyton, Doug. “The Five Senses of Horror.” Sideshow Collectibles, 24 Oct. 2018, http://www.sideshow.com/blog/the-five-senses-of-horror/. 

Guignard, Eric J., et al. The Five Senses of Horror. Dark Moon Books, 2018.

Billing, Richie, and fiction. “The Best Examples of the 5 Senses and Descriptive Writing.” RichieBilling.Com, 30 June 2023, richiebilling.com/writing-tips/using-the-5-senses-in-writing#:~:text=Incorporating%20the%20senses%20into%20your,out%20your%20most%20powerful%20few.