Horror Isn't Scary

I was listening to the Geek Gab podcast as I usually do every week, and an interesting topic came up.

No, it wasn't retro gaming (the 8 and 16-bit eras are still king), but the topic of horror that the Gab spent most of the show talking about. It was quite an interesting conversation.

You can watch the episode here:

It's well worth listening to.

Daddy Warpig goes on to explain that horror simply doesn't work without innocence. It doesn't work without the possibility of true and terrible loss. It isn't simply about being killed--you can turn on the news and see that every day. The true terror of horror is the possibility of soul-sucking dread and the realization that there is something more to the world than what you see before you. Think of your favorite horror story, and there are very few chances it doesn't contain that essence in it.

And that isn't what horror is anymore. It hasn't been about that in a long time.

At least, that's what it's like in the mainstream. Horror has become about people being hunted down and gutted as messily as possible. Think of that terrible Rob Zombie Halloween movie where Michael Myers is not only given a detailed backstory, thereby missing the point of the orignal, but where the "scariest" kill involves him slamming someones head down viciously for a minute straight. That's it. Spooky, right?

Basically, these stories can be summed up as: Everything is out to get you, you will die bloodily, and there is nothing you can do about it.

How unique.

But it's also boring. And repetitive. And empty. And tired. And repetitive. And pointless. What made The Thing scary was the sense of dread and alienation rolled in heavy paranoia where even at the end you don't know who the real monster is, but you know there is one. What made the original Frankenstein scary was the implication of what meddling in things you don't understand can cause--and it can be horrific, and it can destroy you and everything you treasure. The universe is a mysterious place. There is more to these stories than mindless carnage and death. These stories show a wider world than the one we know of.

There are moments* like this:

Out of nowhere, here comes a supernatural invasion! There's mystery, intrigue, and unbreakable rules right out of the gate. You are in a new, wider world, where things are not what they once were. Everything is upside down, now how do we figure it out?  Horror is the one genre of film that lives and dies by the scope of its moral core. A horror movie with a diseased conscience is a bad horror movie.

Even something as simple as Nightmare on Elm Street (only the ones directed by Wes Craven, the others are trash) have a moral center. Simply watch them and pay attention to what hurts Freddy Krueger and what ends up getting other characters killed. There's a moral core at play. The Dream Warriors is set up specifically as an anti-Freddy force where good finally triumphs over evil. As far as Wes Craven goes, and most fans, that was the final film in the series. There was nowhere else to go.

But then they screwed it up with the next movie. To go into spoiler territory, because you shouldn't ever watch the other films, every single one of the surviving Dream Warriors from the previous film is unceremoniously murdered in the next movie. This is done because of a lack of imagination. They simply couldn't figure out how to tell a story without a bunch of people being murdered for no reason. As a result, Nightmare on Elm Street became standard slasher fare.

Just as in Alien 3, which is a movie that might exist in some alternate dimension, kills off everyone from Aliens. The creative staff completely rejects the rules and themes of the previous film in order to make what they want instead. And what they want is always a rehash of a previous entry in the series. Every movie after Dream Warriors (except Wes Craven's satire, New Nightmare) is essentially just another slasher movie with nothing to say except to show stupid people getting murdered in gruesome ways.Yawn.

Horror works because of clear cut rules that the filmmaker is never allowed to break and because of a sense of wondrous dread, a conflicting atmosphere, that pulls the viewer in and doesn't let go until the credits plays "Bad Moon Rising". Books are the same way, as are comics. Rules exist to lock the audience into the universe.

If a rule is broken, a price is paid. If the universe is disturbed, it must be explored as to what caused the disturbance and what can fix it. There has to be a moral status quo as the baseline to contrast with the horrors going on. If the "real world" is as hopeless and empty as the encroaching horror is, then, what is the point in partaking in the horror?

If the end result of the story is the same as if every character blew their brains out in the first five minutes, or pages, then how can I be invested in the story? There has to be more than a hollow shell for a story to work. The story has to be working towards something. The characters and story have to go somewhere.

There has to be a reason to fight the darkness, and there has to be a reason for the characters to do so.

There has to be a soul worth fighting for. And that, is what horror is about.

*Yes, The Devil Rides Out is my favorite horror film. How did you know?