MVPs of Horror: Neil Gaiman on 'Coraline,' 'Sandman,' and more

Neil Gaiman isn't exactly a horror author but much of his work include moments, if not extended passages, of horror.

The acclaimed author spoke to Yahoo Entertainment about crafting scares and how re-reading his own material managed to disturb even him.

He said that "Coraline," his 2002 novella that was adapted into a film in 2009, "is pure horror for adults, [for] the kids, it's adventure."

From the adult perspective he explained, "They're reading a story about a child in danger and a child in danger from the things that they had tried to forget about their childhoods."

He recalled how after publishing the shocking "Sandman" story "24 hours," readers would tell him how disturbed they were.

"People would come up to me and say, 'Hey, Sandman six, 24 hours. It's really disturbing," Gaiman said. "And I would say, 'yes, it is. And you know what? You got to read it in 25 minutes. And it took me three weeks of living there to write it.'"

Video Transcript

- Why don't we play a game?

- I know you like them.

- Everybody likes games.

NEIL GAIMAN: I've always been somebody who has sidled over to my horror, while looking the other way, and then taking a couple of nervous glances down, and then jumped. That basically is my approach to horror. But I look at Coraline now and go, that actually in many ways is pure horror for kids. Actually, let me amend that. For kids, it's adventure. It is pure horror for adults. They're reading a story about a child in danger. And a child in danger from the things that they had tried to forget about their childhoods and from their childhood fears. And adults, the ones who say to me, I can't believe that book is published for children. I finished it at 3:00 in the morning and went round the house turning on all the lights.

- Evil witch! I'm not scared!

NEIL GAIMAN: I only did one edit on the whole of Coraline. And one. You can't do that on the whole of Coraline.

- She's practically naked.

NEIL GAIMAN: My one edit was actually in that scene. Coraline's reactions to Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, as they first appeared, were the other way around. It just was a little bit too on the nose. And it was a little bit too much, oh, my God this ancient, huge woman is being a practically naked mermaid. I said, Henry, can you swap those around? And he did. And it just worked so much better and was a little bit less weird.

- I can't look.

NEIL GAIMAN: And the other thing that I did was there was a point right toward the end, where they didn't want to drop the hand down the well. And I said no, you have to drop the hand down the well.

- And you never knew.

NEIL GAIMAN: We recently did a Audible adaptation of the first three volumes of Sandman. And it hadn't occurred to me that there was anything in Sandman that I could find disturbing anymore, because, after all, I'd written it. And when I wrote it, I spent a long time there. You know, people would come up to me and say, hey, Sandman 6: 24 Hours, it's really disturbing. And I would say, yes, it is, and, you know what, you got to read it in 25 minutes, and it took me three weeks of living there to write it.

NEIL GAIMAN: We started shooting about 10 days ago. So I've been watching my dailies. But nothing produced the profound emotional reaction on me that watching a camera test of our Morpheus in his glass prison in the cellar did. Just watching shots of him in there and going, oh, this is Sandman. While I cannot tell you yet who is playing Morpheus, I can say we had 200-odd auditions, out of which we found one that we really liked. But, you know, season one, we have 24 Hours. We have the serial killers' convention. We have the Constantine story, Dream a Little Dream of Me. We have going to hell. It's all in there. So yes, it will be scary. It'll be lots of other things too, 'cause that's the joy of Sandman, is that it's a lot of different things in the soup. And you can taste all the different flavors.

- You like me?

NEIL GAIMAN: I wanted to let the readers know that they should fasten their safety belts, because it's going to be a bumpy ride. And, also, I wanted to let the readers of American Gods know that if this wasn't for them, they should stop now. Didn't want them to get halfway through the book and say, I was reading this lovely book and then it went really weird. Which was why I loved that they made that scene and they put it in episode one. And I'm sure a lot of people stopped watching, which is probably a good thing, because it wasn't a show for them.

- I don't know what I'm doing.

- What man does?

NEIL GAIMAN: I just wrote an enormous, great book. And having to do the complete read of this for copy editing purposes, every now and again, I would find myself disturbed by something that I had written. I wrote once a very, very short story called Click-Clack the Rattlebag. It's really short. It's a conversation between a guy waiting in a house for his girlfriend to get home and his girlfriend's little brother, who wants to be told a story. It's really not terribly scary, except that it is. It is because I'm making you do all the work. It is because it has funny bits in it. There's a moment in there where I very carefully go, OK, I need a joke right now in classic horror ways, where you relieve the tension, and you get somebody to laugh, and now they're going to be a little more scared and more awake and more alive when the thing happens.