Horror movies obsess me. I have watched so many I am jaded. I know what will happen in any given horror movie at any given scene. It is rare for a horror movie to do something outside of the usual horror narrative. Despite this I still find myself drawn towards horror movies. When I check out any of the streaming services the first thing I check is the horror section. Why is it that I am drawn to this genre, and like so many others want to feel scared and uneasy?
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream...
Edgar Allan Poe
Our lives are always as they seem. Life within the complex web of social relations we call society requires that our behaviour follows predictable patterns. To make sure we follow these patterns we have values and norms, the breaking of which will be meet with varying degrees of discouragement. The ultimate sanction being the state will haul you in front of a Judge and deposit you within a prison for as long as deemed necessary depending on the law you happen to break and the manner in which you broke it. You get up, you get ready for work, you travel to work, you travel home, you eat, you sleep and then you repeat it until your body and/or mind breaks or degrades to the point you are no longer able to keep going. I am exaggerating a bit, but you get my point.
And into this void step the humble horror movie. Looked down upon by many as low budget B movies appealing to our base instincts. My belief is that deep down horror fans detest the predictable nature of society. We want things not to be as they seem. Secretly we hope that there are monsters lurking in the shadows. Of course, we don't want to be a victim of the given monster (at least I don't!) or supernatural entity. But we still want to believe that life is like a Lovecraft story, with beings just beyond us that perhaps we might through some means glimpse, hoping that they don't see us of course. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately I have never experienced anything that confirms life is not what it seems, so I watch horror movies instead.
Perhaps this desire is why I am drawn to horror movies that flip normal on its head and are Lovecraftian in nature. That is not to say that I am not a fan of horror movies that are more mundane in their subject matter. I enjoy and watch virtually all sub-genre within horror, some more so, some less so. The film Alien is firmly within my top 10 horror movies. Probably the majority of horror fans would have a place for it in their top 10. The scene where they discover the "Space Jockey " in the chair with its rib cage burst out is iconic. It also neatly serves to illustrate my argument. This scene is iconic because it makes us ponder that there are creatures, Gods existing outside of our cosy little sphere of existence. We are drawn to it like moths around the flame not because of what it tells us but more importantly what it does not tell us. We know nothing of the creature, we don't know how and why it came to be there and it makes us use of imagination.
I want my horror movies to make me use my imagination, which is part of the reason why I dislike the "torture porn" genre. . A film like Hostel leaves noting to the imagination, indeed its purpose is to show you everything and shock you in the process. It’s not that a horror movie should not have gore. indeed, I have nothing against movies that use it. but gore for the sake of gore begins to bore. A film such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre is commonly mistaken to have lots of gore, but when we watch it and actually look for gore, there is very little to be found. Probably the goriest scene is the Hitchhiker cutting open his hand with the knife. We believe the film is full of gore because when we watched it, whether we knew it or not, we were filling in the blanks. We knew what had happened, more or less, we didn’t need someone to shout in our face what had happened.
Hopefully the future will bring a lot more horror that combines the best of gore with the best of making us actually think and wonder.