Happy Halloween, everyone! To celebrate this joyous and slightly spooky occasion, I’ve elected to do a series of essays over the course of today and maybe tomorrow on topics that I think are relevant to the present holiday. Let’s get going.
HORROR MOVIES
I come from a family that does not like horror movies, my sister Holly and I being the exceptions. My mother saw “Night of the Living Dead” when she was a teenager, and her dreams were ruined for weeks; ditto for my father with “Alien,” even though he watched it at ten in the morning with the lights on. Caroline was once tricked by her high school friends into attending “I Know What You Did Last Summer” under the guise that it was some kind of drama, and when the killer first stepped onto the screen, she quietly bludgeoned a man half to death with her fists in the darkness of the theater. My wife sat in the bedroom with her ears plugged while I watched “The Strangers” last night. According to Holly, Brady made it through about ten minutes of “28 Weeks Later.”
But Holly and I love them. We anxiously trade tales of edge-of-your-seat suspense, of leaping from our chairs and diving for cover, plugging our ears and screaming “don’t go through that door!” The strange thing, and it’s been pointed out to us many times, is that when we talk about these experiences later, we normally say one thing and then follow it with another, and the two aren’t supposed to go together: “I was so scared,” and “That was great.”
Why do we do this? Brady has asked that question many times, indignant at our quiet and very reasonable suggestion that he is a “buh-bAAAAhhhkk chicken!” Why would one seek out being terrified? The human body doesn’t intend this to be a pleasurable experience, so how come there’s a massive, multi-million dollar industry for it? Why would I pay someone to scare the crap out of me?
Since it’s Halloween, I’d like to reflect on that question and offer some answers. I’m not an expert, but I was a minor in psychology at William and Mary, so the stuff I totally make up might have some big words in it.
It’s important, first of all, to consider that fear is an everyday part of life. No person has ever walked the Earth and not been afraid at some point, and since there are so few absolutes in the whole of humankind, it forms a powerful bond between us. Fear is empathetic, we can immediately relate to anyone who experiences it, because we recognize it in ourselves. Horror movies play on this in two ways: the first is that characters who are afraid pull us in and make us care about what happens to them, and the second is that an audience which is frightened by a movie feels a connection with one another. On a rudimentary level, it’s satisfying to know that other people are frightened along with you, and I think this speaks to the level of disconnect we are forced to tolerate in most of life. In our society, we meet a lot of people, most of whom we completely ignore, and over time this makes us feel cut off from the humanity of those around us. Sitting down in a theater and screaming together reminds us that we are connected, and since humans are social by design, this does matter to us.
Still, you can share a laugh too, and that’s very pleasant, so why wander into the darkest corners of our imagination? I think the answer there is that fear, unlike comedy, is a thing we want assuaged, or exorcised, and sharing it creates the sense that we’ve mastered it just a little bit, even if we haven’t. All of us are afraid of something, and most of the time this emotion has to be kept in check, so letting it run wild in the safety of a theater can have a cleansing effect.
And that’s the other key thing: safety. Roller coaster designers will often say that the point of their rides is to trick your body into thinking it’s going to die, while your mind knows better. When you fly towards the ground at sixty miles an hour in a little steel car with no engine, your body instantly red-flags the speed and the sensation of falling as omens of demise. But your mind, which bought you the ticket and put you in the seat, knows that everything is fine, so you don’t panic. So what happens when your body thinks it’s dead and your mind knows death is impossible? Immortality. For those few minutes, a human being feels as if they are beyond death.
Horror movies work the same way, only the process inverts: now your mind is fooled, trapped in the illusion of a moving image created by pictures that are flashed at rapid speed and sound playing to match it. In any decent movie, and a horror film especially, we spend much of the running time outside of our bodies, locked inside the world that the pictures and sound create. This time, it is our body that keeps us tethered to safety, reminding us that it is warm, comfortable, and feeling no pain. We flinch away as the killer stabs our hero with a knife, but our bodies don’t experience anything, so we feel safe. This is part of why scary movies date very poorly: it requires complete submersion, there can’t be an inch of dead air between the viewer and the movie, and cinema technology evolves too rapidly for a consistent standard. In other words, color movies can retro-actively ruin the effect of black and white ones.
Fair enough, buy why go into the shadows at all? Why not watch people do happy things? The answer to that is more complex. On some level, we as a species have to come to grips with the fact that most stories, whether novels or movies, comedies or thrillers, are about people experiencing things they are really not enjoying. There are exceptions, but the vast majority of fiction is about problems we ourselves would not want to face; even most comedy is about discomfort, pain, uncertainty and death. We should not consider liking this sadistic, however, it’s actually quite the opposite: our desire is to empathize with the journey of our protagonist as they try to overcome something.
But more than that, things that go “bump” in the night are a universal experience in the human psyche, and like it or not, we have come to seek out and even love that which we’re afraid of, if only in the abstract. I’m not sure why, but people will embrace almost anything if they live with it for long enough, and terror has been there since day one; it’s not unlike an existential Stockholm Syndrome. These things are a part of our lives, and if we’re given an opportunity to engage them in complete safety, our natural curiosity will compel us to do it.
This is why good thrillers, like the work of Hitchcock and “Halloween,” are a healthy and enjoyable thing to partake of in moderation. These movies do not create fear, we bring them the fear we already have and they play with it. When it’s over and the lights come up, everyone is fine, nobody was harmed, and we conquered, in some small way, the things that frighten us. After we’ve died and entered the Kingdom of God, fear will go extinct and horror movies will be useless, but until then they address a foundation of the human experience.
The downside in all of this is that horror movies can also be used in quite perverse ways, as we can see with the massive sub-genre very aptly called “torture porn.” With these movies, which are never very scary, the fascination with the dark runs overboard into a thirst for titillation, which is one of our kind’s most persistent flaws. People who like this stuff, and even more so the people who stand to make money off of it, will spit a lot of half-arguments at you which amount roughly to “whatever.” They will insist that it can’t possibly be bad for you although they lack proof, and somehow they’ll try to convince you that’s all in some weird kind of fun. Ignore them. Use your common sense and ask yourself what on Earth is wrong with people who like to think about torture all the time.
The barometer, of course, is not sheer number of minutes spent enduring violence, and to use that standard is hypocritical. After all, there is more torture in “The Passion of the Christ” than there is in “The Devil’s Rejects.” Also, some horror movies are violent or disgusting without slipping into pseudo-sadism, such as Cronenberg’s “The Fly” or “The Descent,” an absolute masterpiece that came out a few years ago. However, anyone who tries to use these movies to justify watching “Saw” is just hiding from the argument, desperately muddying the waters so no one can see clearly. Yes, a lot of people went to see “The Passion of the Christ,” but not so many argued afterwards about what their favorite torture scene was, or how the sequel will be even bloodier, or how awesome it was when they put a nail through his hand. It’s just different, and anyone who says it’s not either knows that they’re wrong or are hopelessly deluded.
The point of all of this is that I don’t want my defense of scary movies to extend to torture porn, which I struggle to even call “movies.” Lovers of a good scare are not necessarily people who like to see fake blood and guts everywhere, and it’s important to make that distinction. With the financial failure of movies like “Hostel: Part II,” “Captivity,” and Rob Zombie’s horrendous remake of “Halloween,” I think we as a culture are starting to get turned off by this crap, and that’s good. It just makes way for better, more intelligent offerings.
It’s also worth mentioning that horror films, like many things in life, should be taken in moderation. Even the tamest, least violent thriller should not be one’s entire cinematic intake, or even most of it. It’s beneficial to think of movies like food, and a good balance like a healthy diet. Violent, scary entertainment has its place and there isn’t anything wrong with it, but studies suggest that too much of it rubs off in negative ways; it doesn’t make people killers, but it’s still bad for you. Remember that no matter how much you are conscious of the fact that movies aren’t real, humans are visual creatures, and we’re highly impressionable.
So that’s it, dear reader. Being scared is just life, there’s no way around it, so I say it’s better to let some fear in on your own terms. God bless a good horror movie, and long may it thrive.
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