Tragedy horror!

I’m creating a name for a trend in horror that I’ve come to identify as something that I don’t like, and I’ll call it ‘tragedy horror.’

Tragedy horror is a type of story where the horror comes from the bleak and despairing conclusions. There is no happy ending for the protagonist, and all their toil has been for naught. Evil triumphs over all. Bad end!

That’s not to say that these stories are bad and that there aren’t fans who like these sort of tales. In fact, I’m dubbing this term tragedy horror because I feel like I’m practically swatting away truck-loads of horror stories that feature tragic endings, so I know there’s a market for these stories and critical acclaim to be had. It’s just my personal taste that makes me HATE these sort of conclusions.

I think tragedy horrors demand the audience have a lot of patience with the premise, but where I think that part which irritates me is that some stories want the tragic ending to be so much of an emotional gut punch that they won’t foreshadow that there’s utterly no hope for the protagonist. I can deal with the protagonist being utterly screwed. I love the 80s remake of The Fly. I enjoyed the pervasive sense of dread from Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. It’s just that I especially don’t like it when the patience a story asks of me to see a protagonist tantalizingly accomplish something meaningful gets revealed to be nothing more than to see extremely tragic and gruesome things happen instead.

I’m not bothered by the story ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.’ It delivers what it promised. I will however fume about a story where the protagonist accomplishes nothing but their own doom despite having held hopes and promises of a happy ending. I’m not sure if I’ll ever list these stories by name, so angered that I am by the mere concept of them as lying about what sort of ending the protagonist will get in order to amplify the emotional gut punch of them being doomed instead that I try my best to commit damnatio memoriae upon them.

I personally just don’t need anymore tragic endings. I read stories to feel good and for escapism. The novelty of a story where the good guys lose and bad guys win forever and ever is lost upon me. A lot of times I feel like these sort of stories aren’t as cleverly written as the creators think they are, and the deception involved in making the audience think that the characters might have a hope of finding happiness in life just instead makes me immensely irritated.

I personally think foreshadowing or heck, just clearly stating in the story’s blurb that there will be no happy ending would do a lot to get rid of my intense dislike of tragedy horror.

“But don’t you like horror movies? How can you read horror stories since so many of them feature cliffhanger endings where the bad guys promise to return?”

One: The villain(s) are defeated in older horror stories, and at least one protagonist manages to do so. This used to be a thing in older horror stories, to the point where Vincent Price once described horror stories as fantasies, but in current horror stories, not as much.

Two: The bad guy was still defeated, and that there is your hopeful, happy ending.

That is as much as I’ll rant here for my attempt to describe my term ‘tragedy horror.’ I hope it is apparent to you from my rant that I’ve seen too many horror stories where I felt like the ‘payoff’ was way different than the ‘promise.’