I’ve never exactly been a huge fan of the Horror genre. OK, I grew up with the classics from the 40’s and 50’s with Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman but these are barely Horror – especially by today’s standards. Maybe this early exposure inoculated me to the later copious outpourings of gore that erupted across movie screens in the 70’s, 80’s and beyond.
I think my enjoyment of horror was essentially ruined by my sceptical nature. I couldn’t understand why people would scare themselves on purpose especially when the scares where remotely projected onto a movie screen. Whenever I happened across such a movie I keep repeating “this isn’t real”, “this couldn’t happen” and “jeeze has no one here seen zombie movies before? Just shoot them in the head why don’t you?” It probably explains why I enjoy Horror spoof movies like ‘Love at First Bite’ and the ‘Scary Movie’ series much more that Horror movies themselves. Likewise I’ve never enjoyed needless gore. I’ve laughed more than once at the literal buckets of blood that some movies seem to use. Again such things were more suited to the spoof than to the serious Horror movie. So called ‘Body Horror’ either had such bad special effects as to be laughable (again) or grossed me out and being made to feel sick has never been high on my list of entertainment forms.
Films that make you jump are on the cheap side of Horror. It’s pretty easy to get someone there but after the first few jumps the whole process starts to wear off. The only way to reset things is to calm (in other words bore) the audience into a more relaxed state before introducing the next jump – which makes for a pretty boring movie. The slasher gene never appealed either. The whole genre seemed to be based on men (dead, supernatural or otherwise) killing women and/or teenagers in more and more gruesome (or ridiculous) ways as the movie progressed. Seeing people killed in inventive ways is, in my opinion, hardly the height (or even the middle) of entertainment. I can’t help wondering what an alien or someone from the future would think of this sort of thing being entertainment. It has the feel of not being too far removed from throwing criminals to the lions in ancient Rome. Oh, how far we've come!
There have been a few movies that generally scared me. The Shinning scared the crap out of me both as a movie and as a book. As far as I know it’s the only book that I’ve read where I was almost too afraid the turn the page to find out what happened next – nothing good I was betting. Reading it was a weird experience and isn’t one that I would actively go looking for again. Being scared is not a good feeling. Being relieved from fear at the end of the book or film is all very well but I would much prefer not being scared as part of the process. I know some people ‘get off’ on it but I am not one of those people.
Of course as a SF fan there’s quite a bit of cross-over between Sci-Fi and Horror. ‘Alien’ was primarily a Horror movie in space. ‘Aliens’ (a much better film in my view) is primarily a combat SF movie with Horror elements. Oddly, after all of the above, one of my favourite genres in both movies, TV and books is Vampires. I do find them quite fascinating and although they ‘live’ primarily in the Horror genre I don’t view them in the same way as the rest of it. There’s certainly a fair share of gore for the obvious reason but even that doesn’t bother me overly much. Vampires have something much more going for them. It certainly isn’t their supposed hyper-sexuality (being undead has its drawbacks it seems) but more for their immortality – or rather e-mortality – and how they cope with the idea that they cannot (easily anyway) die. The whole idea intrigues me……
Generally Horror leaves me cold as the grave. It seems pointless to me but I doubt very much if it’s going the fade away any time soon. I’ve heard that no Horror film (no matter how bad) has ever lost money. Somehow I can believe that to be true. It’s just not for me.
5 comments:
I'm not much for horror, either, for the same reasons as you. I do try to read something appropriate in October, usually a Stephen King novel because he's effective at what he does. The only slasher flick I like is "Scream", and that's mostly for nostalgia! Watching it takes me back to 7th grade, when I watched it on VHS with a friend and his siblings when their parents were gone one night. It inspired my first attempts at writing fiction....which was all variants of slasher fiction, but with monsters like mutated spiders sometimes. I was an incredibly sheltered kid, so it would be amusing to see how I depicted murder or drug use back then.
I have always liked horror films, though I find very few of them scary. I have read a very limited number of horror books, but what I have read I generally liked.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti was an interesting philosophy book in it the author suggests that the reason that people like horror is that it is reflective of existence, which is much more horrible then almost anyone is willing to admit.
really like the Roman reference: bread and circuses! i'm easily scared so i stay away from those sorts of film... Ligotti's proposition has a lot of merit, i think...
Having been a timid child who could never understand why other kids seemed to like being scared, I avoided horror in any form until I was fully grown up, meaning just recently. I like all the sub-genres of horror you made up.
@ Stephen: Good to know it's not just me...!
@ Brian: I actually own 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race'. I must dig it out of the pile its sitting in and give it a read. I suppose that Horror movies show the world as a (at least potentially) bad place and then we realise "oh, it's just make believe" so we all feel better when the movie is over.
@ Mudpuddle: I feel that life is just too short to waste time trying to scare yourself for entertainment.
@ Judy: I've dipped my toe into Horror - both movies and books - over the years but it's definitely not my 'go to' genre by any measure.
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