Is it Crazy to Enjoy Horror Films?
I grew up in a family rich in "cultural capital". We had a projector, and every night was movie night. I was raised watching Bergman, Kurosawa, and Fassbinder. Yet when my parents weren’t around, I used that same projector to watch horror films - a genre that is normally banned from “high culture.”
Looking at myself in the mirror, I always found it hard to reconcile these two sides of my personality. Maybe this article is just an attempt to feel okay with myself. But somehow I cannot get rid of the belief that horror films are underrated and misunderstood, and have so much potential that most cinephiles fail to see.
The Great Misunderstanding
Let’s start by looking at some prejudices against horror films and their audiences. According to film studies professor Julian Hanich, attacks have come from all sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives depict horror fans as morally corrupt, and progressives blame them for their enjoyment of human suffering. Beyond political divisions, watchers are labeled as immature, weird, and deluded. They are mostly pathologised and derided.
Horror is Hollywood’s most disreputable genre.
Some believe that the whole cult behind horror films revolves around the status acquired by watching things others don’t dare to watch, to join an in-group of people with a strong stomach. Watching horror films would then be an act of provocation and social transgression. That makes the prejudices sound moralistic, and horror audiences cool. I have to admit I do feel proud of myself when I bravely keep watching while others close their eyes.
Still, some things in horror cinema are undoubtedly over the top. Think of The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2009), where an evil doctor sews people together mouth-to-bottom to create a digestive chain. Or the infamous A Serbian Film (Srdjan Spasojevic, 2010), where a man rapes a newborn in the arms of its mother. That does sound sick, and I do not feel proud when I watch it. Yet I do watch it, as do millions of people. Are they (we) all sick?
It seems paradoxical that people would seek emotions they normally try to avoid in their lives – fear, dread, disgust. Philosophy professor Aaron Smuts calls this:
The Paradox of Painful Art
“If people avoid pain, why do people want to experience art that is painful?”
There are three convincing ways in which scholars have tried to solve the paradox of painful art in the case of horror films.
Why do people consume painful art?
catharsis
The theory of catharsis dates back to Aristotle and it’s centered around the idea that people consume painful art in order to achieve an emotional cleansing. That is to say, people can purify themselves of negative emotions by experiencing them and thus letting them out.
In the 20th century, this theory was expanded by Freud, who considered drive resolution and tension discharge fundamental processes of the human psyche.
According to Freud’s insights, people who secretly want to torture and slaughter their peers may benefit from watching a splatter film, because they would rid themselves of those ‘surplus’ feelings.
Media studies professor Isabel Pinedo argues terror and rage aren’t weird feelings of sick individuals, but rather universal feelings which are culturally repressed, and should now and then be let out, for the sake of the collective good.
2. playing with horrifying thoughts
According to this approach, people don’t watch horror films because of an emotional surplus, but rather because they lack certain emotions.
Horror films are able to stimulate uncommon, profoundly negative emotions in a ‘safe’ environment. Pinedo calls it a “bounded experience of terror.”
As Smuts puts it, if the movie theater reeked of rotting corpses we would probably leave. But because we only see images, we know there is no real threat.
Hanich adds that this can be empowering for the viewer, who can experience a transfer of identity, and put herself in shoes she never walked in (and hopefully never will). These can be the shoes of the victim in the torture room or the shoes of the maniac with the chainsaw.
3. Mastering our fears
According to horror film theorist Robin Wood, the subject of horror films is “our collective nightmares.” Just like actual dreams, they allow our unconscious to deal with powerful and repressed emotions. Isabel Pinedo thus calls horror films “exercises in coping,” where the medium of the film is used to make deep and primal fears emotionally accessible. In Freud’s theory of dreams, the content of the dream never corresponds to the actual emotional object but always stands for it.
Similarly, in horror films it’s not the demon/zombie/sadist we’re actually afraid of. The monstrous element represents fears that we aren’t able to articulate consciously. By watching, we can express these fears, or even master them.
The value of horror films
There is more to horror films than the adrenaline rush. Whether it is to release surplus emotions, to play with scary thoughts, or to master our unconscious fears. It’s not crazy to watch horror films. Both at the level of movie theater and home video, the genre is in fact impressively popular, and growing. As a form of entertainment, the experience of watching horror films can be valuable, for the individual watcher and perhaps even for society as a whole, at least if we accept the idea that experiencing horror in a movie theater can help us get rid of dangerous emotions. Let’s take a step further and ask another question: Does the horror film artefact have a value?
Is it crazy to attribute value to horror films beyond the sheer experience of watching?
I surely wouldn’t value most mainstream Hollywood horror films, but that counts for all purely commercial entertainment – be it cheap thrills, cheap tears, or cheap laughs. Several scholars have defended the horror genre for its potential to talk about ideology and the status quo. Horror and fear can be tools for effective and durable social commentary. According to the father of horror studies Robin Wood, the subject of horror films is the repressed Other, represented by the Monster.
The Other can be the moral, ethnic, ideological, or sexual other, and thus “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized.”
Kruger, the freak who kills teens in their dreams in A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984), had been lynched by the teens’ parents. The alien larvae that start replacing human beings in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) are actually Soviet communists, threatening “free America” with a supposedly emotionless and conformist lifestyle. The cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), exposed to decades of nuclear experiments, are the victims of a hyper-industrialised society.
More often than not, the Other in horror films is finally neutralised by the world order and in the audience’s experience. Professor and film critic Christopher Sharrett, who considers horror one of the most subversive and “innately critical” genres in Western cinema, argues that horror films create a social allegory that can also come undone. He sees a link, for instance, between the moralistic and hyper-cynical horror movies of the 80s and 90s and the Neo-Conservatism of the Reagan era. After all, artworks reflect dominant ideologies, and dominant ideologies vary in the degree to which they incorporate or reject otherness. According to Sharrett, no honestly subversive horror film has been made after the rise of neoliberalism, simply because the dominant ideology became stronger than it was in the 70s.
Horror can certainly offer powerful means to criticise ideologies, but we cannot ignore that, most often, it is the dominant ideology that eventually triumphs over otherness. Just like in the theory of catharsis the negative emotion is let out only to be eliminated, the Other in horror films is usually only affirmed in order to be destroyed. Though you may have to endure a number of sequels before a proper conclusion, normality is virtually always restored.
As Noel Carroll argues in his book The Philosophy of Horror, we watch horror films for the same reasons why people in the Middle Ages celebrated Carnival:
‘To see the world turned upside down, just for a day.’
On the one hand this does create some space for critique of the status quo (the Other does get some visibility), but the end result is that the established order is not only reaffirmed, but strengthened.
horror: A culture of fear and emancipation
On the other hand, horror can offer more than a seldom efficient critical lens to evaluate our societies. Fear of death, the driving force behind every horror film, is something extremely powerful which affects us all. It can easily be instrumentalised. According to Nicky Reid – author of a provocative article on anarchism and horror films – this explains the drive behind the industry. It’s easy to channel such a powerful emotion into commercialised entertainment. On the other hand, fear of death can also be manipulated to convey messages, for instance by suggesting what we should be afraid of, or by emphasizing fears we didn’t realise we had. This means that horror films can also have a “normative” dimension.
But Horror Reinforces fear, right?
Several commentators have accused horror films of contributing to a worrisome “culture of fear.” In his famous documentary film Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore claims that
Americans live in a collective pathological state of fear, which is constantly stirred up by fear mongers and politically instrumentalised.
In the film, Moore shows TV commercials that suggest fear for things that are often not menacing at all. The purpose is usually to sell products: from nuclear shelters and futuristic security systems to mouthwash and cosmetics. It is difficult not to see a parallel in the film industry. While some fears are universal and even natural among human beings - fear of death, of the dark, of confined spaces, diseases, or vicious insects - and certainly are exploited in horror films, other ones are more specific, and yet very recurrent.
Think of films like À l’interieur (Alexandre Baustillo and Julien Maury, 2007), where 9-month pregnant Sarah is stalked by a creepy woman who wants to take her baby, manually, from her womb. In over 30 years, there have only been 18 cases of fetal abduction in the US, amounting to 6% of all child abduction cases. Isn’t the amount of horror films about fetal abduction a little disproportionate? Or think of the popular horror tropes of evil neighbours, apocalypses, or cannibalistic tribes. These may be fears we all have, but they may also be “suggested” or encouraged, as in Bowling for Columbine’s commercials. Would you really think that an escalator can be a “stairway to danger” unless someone suggested that in the first place?
Noel Carroll argues, horror films aren’t inherently reactionary or emancipatory. They can either reinforce or challenge dominant ideologies, depending on which fears they evoke.
A great number of horror films clearly have conservative undertones, and aim to ‘scare’ people into accepting their pre-defined social roles. Lightheartedness, libertinism, and atheism are usually punished in horror films. Those who defy authority or are too driven by their vain curiosity are taught a lesson. But does it have to be that way? Fear is only a tool, and it could be used to address socially relevant topics, like authority, oppression, war, or surveillance, instead of lingering too much on Satan, for instance. Even though Satan is scary. At least, horror films can awaken consciousness by suggesting “new” fears. Reflecting existing ones is only a small fraction of their potential.
Clever directors can make wonderful critics and prophets, if they channel their audience’s fear in subtle ways and unexpected directions.