It's October at last, the second month of the year that I consider prime horror territory (the first is April, home to Dundee's very own horror movie festival Dundead). As such, I wanted to offer a few ill-considered musings on why some of us enjoy seeing mind-bending terror and stomach-churning violence, as well as a personal history of my relationship with the genre that has come to dominate a considerable part of my filmic experience.
The first piece of media that I can recall finding truly terrifying was Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. A teacher of mine, when I was roughly 8 years old, thought it a good use of her time to share Wells' classic with her charges, allowing us to listen to segments on Friday afternoons. While not strictly horror - though most near-apocalypses are a little unnerving - I was utterly petrified. The "Ulla!" exhaltations of the Martian fighting machines became the mental accompaniment to nightly dread of the dark, and the abduction-crazed alien monsters that presumably lurked within. Even today it remains one of the most evocative experiences of my young life. While I have come to love the novel greatly, listening to the musical adaptation still leaves me with an irrational unease, though no longer any real fear.
This fact might hint at some of the foundational elements of the horror genre itself. In my view, horror requires the successful suspension of disbelief in order to truly horrify, and has a tendency to focus upon a fearsome Other. Suspension of disbelief is, of course, important for fiction in general, but horror requires of its audience such a visceral reaction that a lack of engagement can be utterly fatal. This is the reason that in my own case psychological horror will always be more frightening than anything supernatural; while ghosts and goblins strain my credulity, the torments of the mind can seem very real. A Nightmare on Elm Street may be my favourite slasher franchise, but Halloween (prior to the overtly mystical shenanigans of later installments) is scarier. Less essential but still almost universally common is the idea of some force, internal or external, that means to do you harm. This may be some outside aggressor, human or elsewise, or an opposition within the self, when a disassociated and diseased mind turns against itself. This feeling is frightening on a primal level. While in real life this mistrust of the unknown can lead to bigotry, tribalism and fanaticism, horror fiction acts as a kind of channel and catharsis. They allow us to experience terror on our own terms and in a controlled environment. Return for a moment to A Nightmare on Elm Street, which offers a great example of this notion: what scares us loses its power as it is recognised and understood (though Freddy only weakens when he is figuratively, and not literally, faced). Fear, shorn of any real danger, gives us both an adrenaline rush and a teachable moment.
Successful teaching requires that a student be at least partially invested in learning. This explains why the next stage of my development as a horror hound was so bereft of education. Fast-forwarding to my teenage years (and bypassing my juvenile philistinism regarding The Exorcist), horror became something at which to laugh, if not outright sneer. I don't take full credit for this. Doubtless it's a trick of memory, but it seemed like the horror genre was particularly marinaded in absurdity and failure during my peak cinema-going years. Given the ubiquity of atrocious remakes of '80s slasher flicks, cack-handed adaptations of horror video games, and miscellaneous cinematic idiocy, I may not be entirely misremembering.
A couple examples will help to illustrate my somewhat infantile attitude to horror at the time. Walking out of a film is a bold statement of dissatisfaction in which I have never personally engaged and that I have only rarely seen performed. The finest example I have ever witnessed came at the climatic moment of Orphan. The story of a family who adopt a strange little girl - and featuring the least responsible bereaved parents in movie history - there comes a twist in the tail of the tale. Upon this revelation, the entirety of the sparsely scattered audience, excepting my own party, left the theatre en masse. We may have left too were we not paralysed with laughter at the absurdity of what was happening both on and off the screen. This hysteria was a relatively common occurrence. I used to take regular trips to the cinema with groups of high school friends, more-or-less for the expressed purpose of lampooning and mocking whatever lacklustre horror was showing that week. Silent Hill stands out as a particularly strong memory, turning the highly-influential survival horror franchise into visually faithful but absurdly plotted horror schlock. The point at which the film's resident creepy little girl raises her arms, proclaims, "Look at me. I'm burning." and promptly spontaneously combusts was the point at which the laughter may have crossed over from raucous to obnoxious, at least as far as other cinema patrons were concerned. Silent Hill may be one of the most faithful and successful adaptations of a video game ever made, that says more about their consistent awfulness than about its own quality.
A film I ought to have walked out of was the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (there may be an unintended theme here). This is not because it was the worst film I have ever seen, but because this was the most holistically abysmal experience I have ever had in a cinema screening. While I am not innocent (I was foolish enough to watch Wes Craven's classic right before setting off to see the re-heated retread), circumstances conspired to create much discomfort. Allow me to paint a picture: I am sitting in the front row, at the extreme left, of an auditorium overflowing with spectators. Because of this, I am separated from most of my friends and must tilt my head at such an angle that acute neck pain is a certainty. Tilting my head to see is fairly fruitless however, as the screen is so close as to be blurred almost beyond recognition in my defective eyes. I am watching a film that is so tedious that, if I didn't know better, I'd consider its soporific effect a brilliant meta-effect used by the director to allow us to share in the experience of the exhausted protagonist. And given the utter boredom induced by the film my dear friend sitting next to me required regular updates as to what was actually going on. So I am forced to recount the unengaging and worthless plot of an inferior movie that I can barely see to someone who is unable to follow the turgid plot and anonymous characters. It wasn't even bad enough to merit the riffing that made films like Silent Hill, The Grudge 2, and The Final Destination, among others, so damned entertaining.
I was not the type of kid to surreptitiously watch horror after my parents had gone to bed, nor did I haunt discount cinemas to catch the latest gore-soaked B-movie. This does make me feel like I missed out on a formative childhood experience, at least among those who later obsess over the macabre and the sanguine, but I'm attempting to make up for lost time. The aforementioned Dundead has become my Easter, a yearly opportunity to worship at the altar of horror new and old, and every year brings a discovery of at least one genuinely brilliant film. I intend to spend October filling in further gaps in my knowledge - conveniently ignoring that most of the films I watched in September were also horror - by finishing up the big three of slasher franchises, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th, and only briefly taking time out to enjoy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
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