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Why Horror?
May 2005
Because no matter how bad a movie it is, every now and then someone gets killed
It’s as simple as that. When you’re sitting there, turned to a lump of solidifying oatmeal as the deadening photoplay known as About Schmidt is unspooling before your eyes, discovering trenchant—but whimsical!—nuggets of wisdom of how late middle age sucks, you might find yourself hoping that soon someone onscreen will get their brain sucked out through their eye sockets. But they won’t. They never, ever do. On the other hand, no matter how bad, cheap, poorly written or directed a horror movie is, at least every now and then someone meets a gruesome and bloody end. Even better, if the movie’s really bad, you can fast-forward through the tiresome parts and just watch the killings, and often you don’t miss all that much.
Because it examines the worst
Horror movies by definition confine their subject matter to the nightmarish and scary, and so are much better positioned to cover topics that are either not covered at all by other movies, or if covered, done with such treacle, redemption, and uplift that you wouldn’t want to watch them. Much has been written about how horror tackles the anxieties of whatever age it is produced in with metaphor, but horror also directly takes on a variety of unsavory subjects head on. Look at Carrie, which includes a lot of metaphorical stuff about the dawning of a woman’s sexuality and power, but also straight-ahead stuff about religious zealotry and child abuse. What’s more, since this is already a “degenerate” genre, no one is looking closely at these films to educate and inspire, thus saving them from a lot of the tedious messaging and uplift of movies that have to appear more respectable to a larger audience.
Because it has so little to go before becoming camp
So you’re sitting there watching Crash [not the Cronenberg one, the Magnolia rip-off one], and you know that regardless of how dreary and banal it all gets, it’s probably all going to remain so tasteful and respectful that you’re not even going to be able to glean some devious enjoyment from how cheesy it all is. It’s just so mortifyingly, stultifyingly sincere. When you’re watching a movie about electrified worms that develop a craving for human flesh, you don’t have this problem, because when a movie like that is poorly written, horribly acted, and terribly directed—that’s when the fun begins. If a horror movie doesn’t supply fun and thrills by being good, there’s a much greater chance that it’ll supply fun and thrills by being bad. And often not just bad, but tremendously, off-the-wall bad. That's moviewatching satisfaction.
Because they are free from the banality of “good” films
When you’re being subjected to the soul-deadening earnestness of Cold Mountain, absorbing lessons about literary straw people created solely to explain to you, poor emotional pauper, things you could never hope to understand about love, I mean real, true love, and you’re gazing down at your watch in a stupor, thinking “For fuck’s sake, I have at least another HOUR of this to go before one of these pigs fucking DIES!,” you also know that the likelihood of Nicole Kidman’s spunky, pudgy, can-do and slightly dykey best friend being ripped apart by wild dogs—let alone hellhounds released by a pimply adolescent who has been mucking about with mystical powers—are slim to none. And that the horrifying, painfully earnest tone is going to be slopped on right until one of them is tastefully killed for no other reason than that the ending MUST be tragic. And you can see it all coming from 500 miles away. And there's no fast-forward button. And you're thinking: "You know, if I wanted to learn about what it means to be human I would have stayed home and read fucking Highlights, okay?" On the other hand, when the movie you’re seeing concerns a man stitching together the body parts of various prostitutes to make up a new body for his girlfriend who was mangled in a horrible lawn mower accident, you don’t have to worry about being taught valuable lessons about the indomitable human spirit, and you just might learn something about… yourself.
