NUTS & BOLTS: Interview With Writer, Filmmaker, Playwright John Patrick Higgins
By Tom Joyce
As a novelist, short-story writer, filmmaker, playwright, and theater director, John Patrick Higgins has explored the art of story-telling from many different perspectives. In this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts, he discusses the counterintuitive similarities between horror and humor, and gives advice for authors who’d like to try writing for the stage.
Q: Can you discuss the intersection of comedy and horror?
A: You’re in the audience for a horror film and, the moment after the jump-scare, the sharp intake of breath, you hear … laughter. Comedy and horror are physiologically linked — you shake with laughter, you gasp, your throat contracts. It’s involuntary. These are primal reactions, and only comedy and horror share this power. The grammar is similar. Both use a pull-back-and-reveal technique. You think you know where you are, and suddenly the floor is gone beneath your feet and you’re freefalling. The reveal is key to both horror and humour. Horror has punchlines. They can burst through your chest.
On the page, it can be a tough sell. There’s suspicion of humour. People think it’s mucking about, being silly, but writing comedy is deadly serious. You need surgical precision, you need pared-to-the-bone economy. To elicit laughter from somebody when you’re not in the room with them, when you are, in fact, an abstract row of squiggles pressed into wood-pulp, and attempting to conjure a physical imperative in the reader is difficult, and the same obviously applies to horror. You’re sparking a distant shiver in someone you’ve never met. Robert Bloch called horror and comedy “opposite sides of the same coin.”
Some of my favourite writers are both horrible and funny. Saki’s cold-blooded and spite-filled stories often nudge into a kind of horror, a toe dipped into the weird. Saki remains funny even as the architect of a peculiarly pitiless comic universe. Robert Bloch’s great, pulp horrors for E.C. comics have the specific format of jokes and, I suspect, he often reverse-engineered entire stories from bad puns. (I may be projecting. I’ve definitely done this!) Roald Dahl’s stories are masterful contes cruels, and his tales have the cool precision of a joke and are intended as such. Several of M.R. James’ stories are waggish and jocular, and why wouldn’t they be? They were written to impress rosy-cheeked undergraduates at Christmas parties. And am I the only person to find Robert Aickman funny? Shirley Jackson’s a hoot.
When I started writing short stories, and they were — mostly — horror stories, I made them funny. Ridiculous scenarios, screeds of satire, screwball back and forth dialogue, jokes at the expense of the characters in the narrative voice! No one published them. I got baffled replies from editors. What’s this supposed to be? Why are you doing this? They were horrified, which might be an irony.
Publishers, and the horror content they sought, were serious-minded. Everything was dark, performatively grimdark as though worrying, that seen through a certain prism, stories of ghosts and vampires and zombies might seem silly. The last thing they needed was someone coming in, opening a window, snuffing out the guttering candles, and letting the cold light of day in on everything. (Also, my stories weren’t very good. That could be another reason why they passed.)
Over time, I decided to rinse the problematic humour from my work. I wrote a horror film for Disney, already quite a funny thing to do. They loved the pitch and greenlit the project in the meeting, so the director and I retired to our respective garrets and wrote a treatment. They loved that too. So, buoyed and confident, we wrote a full script. They hated it. What we’d pitched was a cross between The Witches of Eastwick and Murder, She Wrote: golden, autumnal, New England prettiness, underpinned by malign, old magick. Suspiria with picket fences and clam chowder. It was witty and full of delicious set-pieces and, importantly, exactly what we originally pitched. They hated it. “What are all these jokes?” they cried, “Why is it silly? This isn’t what we wanted. We wanted misery!”
As we were contractually obliged to write four drafts, we stripped it back. It became gruelling, humourless, terse, full of bad relationships and bad feeling. The ending was a total downer. They loved it, of course. Then they all got sacked, and the film never got made. That’s Hollywood.
I removed the jokes from my short fiction too, and people started to publish it. I wrote quiet, nasty stories. No sentiment, no pity. I enjoyed the bloodlessness, and my numb, vacant protagonists. They seemed to be stunted by the act of living. I felt very at home with them.
But I might try and reintroduce some humour. I don’t see horror as antithetical to comedy. Done well, one enhances the other. Done well, there’s no distance between them. They become the fabric of the story. Hopefully, you notice tone, you notice mood, and you don’t pull them apart and go “that’s the funny bit and that’s the scary bit”. It’s just the story.
Q: If HWA members decide they’d like to write for the stage, how would you suggest they get started?
A: I’ll tell you what I did. I’d been reviewing things for an arts magazine and ended up in a “theatre and comedy” ghetto. Three or four times a week, I’d have to go and see a play or some standup and that’s something, I assure you, that will erode the joy in your soul. Every play was mediocre, every standup a bearded man in a t-shirt talking about how bad at sex he was. That sort of sustained exposure might break you but, in fact, I thought with monstrous hubris, I’ll write a play myself — how hard can it be? There is sublimity to ignorance. I didn’t think of any difficulties. A friend and I wrote a couple of monologues, we convinced our friends to act them out, and we put it on in the back room of a pub. It was a hit. So, we did it again and again. Eventually, a comedian asked me to write him a one-man show for the Edinburgh Festival — the biggest arts festival in the UK — where a professional theatre company bought the rights and toured it all over the island of Ireland. In the retelling, that sounds pate smooth, but it was a slow evolution over many years, and I’d never been so broke in my life. The theatre never made me rich.
Along the way I got into a few festivals, and smaller local theatres are always doing “scratch” nights, where you can just try things out in front of a usually appreciative audience. These places can be supportive and nurturing, and you may well meet like-minded people with similar goals. I mean, I never did, but you might be more outgoing and personable than I am. You may be clubbable. I certainly met a lot of people in the theatre I thought distinctly clubbable.
As for horror content, formative productions I felt gave me permission to interact with theatre were The Woman in Black, Ghost Stories and Shockheaded Peter. Between them they contained stage magic, Gothic horror, Grand Guignol, humour, Cautionary Tales and Victorian Ghost stories, and I thought all theatre was going to be like that! It isn’t. But for me, certainly when I was younger, launching myself recklessly into a new endeavour without having done even cursory research was my process. It was the only way I could have done it. If I’d tried to find out how you did it, properly, I’d have been sunk. I’d have been bogged down by the rules, by best practice. Enthusiastic ignorance is a tremendous enabler. And, after all, you have lots of time to learn after the fact. I’m alarmed to realise that I share my advice for new writers with Nike, but it really is Just Do It.
When I wrote plays there was a similar segregation between high seriousness and broad comedy. Where I live — I couldn’t tell you if it’s universal, but I suspect it is — there are funny plays and there are important, serious plays, and I never understood why the twain couldn’t meet. Life is funny and terrible and ridiculous and heartbreaking all the time. That’s what it does, and it does it all over you. It’s the price you pay for getting a go at life, and sometimes all you can do is laugh. Or cry. Or scream. Or crack inappropriate jokes and get glared at by an aunt. My plays never had that neat, schismatic nature. They confused people, mainly theatrical gatekeepers. They had jokes and farcical situations, and they had tragedy and despair. The audiences always understood this. They knew you could say important things with jokes, and you could fashion viable tragedy from smallness, the quietness of life.
Q: Do you have any projects you’d like HWA members to know about?
A: How nice of you to ask. My first novel, Fine, is published in November by Sagging Meniscus Press, and I’d like everyone to buy a copy of it. While not strictly a horror book, it contains many, many horrific descriptions, and opportunities for the reader to full-body-cringe. You may cringe yourself inside out. That’s the health warning I’m legally obliged to provide. Your abdominal muscles will thank you, however. I’m also working on a book of horror shorts called No Light in The Trees. I think it represents a good cross-section of my nastier pieces. Some of them are funny. Most of them are not funny. All of them are trying to get under your skin like a splinter.
Q: Where can people follow you online?
A: I’m on Facebook and Insta as John Patrick Higgins and Twitter (X) as Johnny Muggins, though I hardly ever post on Twitter — it’s a cesspool.
John Patrick Higgins is a writer, illustrator and filmmaker. His short fiction has been published in the anthology The Black Dreams, two editions of The BHF Book of Horror Stories, and four editions of Exacting Clam. He is working on a book of short stories called No Light in the Trees. His story The Wink and the Gun will be published in the forthcoming Fears: An Anthology of Psychological Terror by Tachyon. His story Hello featured in Weird Horror 8 in March 2024.
His debut novel, Fine, will be published by Sagging Meniscus Press in November 2024, and the same company published his memoir, Teeth: An Oral History, in April 2024. His first film, Goat Songs, premiered at the 2021 Belfast Film Festival. His second, Muirgen, premiered at the Paracinema Cult Film Festival in 2023. He currently has two feature films languishing in development heaven.
He lives in Belfast, goes for long walks in the rain, and sings in the post rock band, Ebbing House.
Tom Joyce writes a monthly series called Nuts & Bolts for the Horror Writers Association’s blog, featuring interviews about the craft and business of writing. Please contact Tom at TomJHWA@gmail.com if you have suggestions for future interviews. For more about what he’s looking for, see here.
