I've made my creative bones over the years largely writing about very dark, scary, gruesome things. One of the things I've always felt about the horror genre is that it's that rare story that can encapsulate the full range of every emotion - fear, love, hate, surprise, suspense, disgust, triumph. But, as I've recently spent more time looking at the work of Walt Disney, I have to make a concession:
Even the full range of great, dark stories still have a cloud that hangs over them, by design. And, while they have their place and serve an important purpose, Darkness, in the end, has only one shade. Light contains the full spectrum.
Just a thought, but maybe those of us who mine the dark corners should peek a bit more often into the more brightly lit spaces. In some ways, it requires more courage than lurking in the shadows.
