This week we published a story on the website about the history of Grand Guignol, and two things struck me about this piece. The first thing is that it’s a deep, informative read about a topic that, while once more or less common knowledge, has faded into obscurity as a struggling horror journalism ecosystem devours its own tail, competing for clicks over the same ten topics.
The second thing that struck me about this article, and this is not a coincidence, is that it was written by an 88-year-old writer — as far as I know, the oldest contributor in Fango history.
That writer is Kurt Brokaw, and Mr. Brokaw has been writing about genre for longer than most of us have been alive. I think that’s brag-worthy on its own, but the even cooler fact is that his article is infused with knowledge and experience that’s rarer than hen’s teeth.
As an editor, I’m spoiled for choice on thoughtful content from the best minds of Generations X, Y, Z and, soon enough I suppose, Alpha. If I want to know what a Millennial thinks of this trend or that in horror, or what a Gen Z young’un has to say about the hallowed classics of the genre, the smartest members of those demographics are an email or DM away. It’s something I don’t take for granted, and I’m grateful to know so many informed, curious, passionate minds.
But if I want the wisdom and experience and deep, deep well of knowledge that can only come from an octogenarian horror fan, well… so far Mr. Brokaw is it.
And that’s a conundrum for me to sort out, but there’s a lesson there for all of us, I think. My parents died almost half my lifetime ago, and as such there is no audio, no video, no record of them beyond photographs and memories. I don’t feel a deficit there; that’s how it was for over a century. But them dying just before phone videos were everywhere kind of sharpens the digital divide that they died on the wrong side of. I’m not missing that material, exactly, but I’m more or less constantly aware of its absence.
When Alzheimer’s took my grandfather’s mind in the late ’90s, there was a moment that was as tragic to me as his eventual passing. We knew he was having trouble at this point; I’d recently gone to see him and he answered the door butt-ass naked. I later (after confirming he had clothes on) took my then-girlfriend to see him and, in an attempt to engage his mind, started paging through a family album with him, asking him to show the photos to my girlfriend.
We stopped on a photo of his parents and their children, taken before he was born, with his older, now-deceased siblings all dressed up for the photo. I nudged him, pointing to his mother. “What was her name?” “That’s my wife.” In that instant, I knew every bit of knowledge that my grandfather had in his head, that we didn’t record or write down in time, was lost. All the things that he was the last one alive to know, gone. And it was horrifying.
It would be easy to say that, since that was the ’90s, I didn’t have the tech we do today to document my grandfather’s experiences and memories, but the fact is it was just a lack of diligence, and the cost of that didn’t hit me until he was looking at a picture of his mom and thinking she was someone else, his mind a guttered candle struggling to stay lit.
The horror space is experiencing a singular moment right now: life expectancies are up, and every one of us has a high-def video camera/audio transcriber/notepad in our pocket. We can bark at each other on social media about the same ten topics week in, week out, but — and I know this because as a horror mag editor I clock every single death that happens in this space — we have a finite opportunity to capture the thoughts and experiences of horror fans and horror creators who truly have rare, endangered information to share with us.
I’m going to see if Mr. Brokaw has any contemporaries with something to say. If you’ve got someone in your sphere who has knowledge that might one day be extinct, get that shit written down, recorded, documented. Now that you can, you must.
