Who loves horror films?

I’ve always dreaded Halloween season. It’s a time for people who enjoy things that go bump in the night, for those of who like the unexplained, dark, even terrifying parts of the human experience. Haunted house adventures were never for me, and I avoided watching horror films for most of my life because why would anyone want to watch anything that made them feel afraid? What’s the appeal of movies about fear, the unknown, and depictions of indiscriminate, violent death?

According to research into the popularity of horror films, disinhibition, low amounts of empathy and fearfulness, and a desire for a wide range of sensations and experiences are some of the strongest predictors that someone is a fan of horror films.

Although I don’t fit that description on paper, a month or so ago, I felt a sudden need to be frightened not by the state of the real world but within the safety of fictional ones.

She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat

In almost all of the films I watched, from Halloween (1978), a movie I enjoyed much more than I’d like to admit, to Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which was way too campy to be scary, I found myself connecting to what Carol Clover calls the final girls, or the female characters who, against all odds, survives their violent confrontations with a movie’s male villain. Not all survivors are women, and not all horror villains are male, but Clover’s final girl describes a character who is “introduced at the beginning [of the film] and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail…She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat.”

The appeal of scary movies

However, it wasn’t just their ability to survive that I was drawn to. I found something terrifying, nauseating, and exciting about how these women slowly recognized the monsters that lie hidden, secret behind familiar faces and became full not only of fear but also of rage. “Horror films,” Bryan Stone argues, “both interests us and disturbs us by confronting us with the disgusting and the fascinating simultaneously,” and he cites filmmaker David Cronenberg as describing those films as “the genre of confrontation.” We might also think of it as the uncanny (a translation of “unheimlich or “unhomely”), which the Freud defines as “the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”

the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasurable one in which women retaliate to become the agents of violence and turn the tables on their aggressors

Of course, not all “final girls” are girls at all, and not all villains are male. The Thing, The Lost Boys, Child’s Play, and Jaws feature male characters who survive the ultimate battle against their villains and monsters, but as Isabel Cristina Pinedo explains, slasher films restage “the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasurable one in which women retaliate to become the agents of violence and turn the tables on their aggressors” (6)

These films also depict female characters as learning to arm themselves when they see villains for they really are, despite being told, repeatedly, that they’re wrong. Faced with skeptical friends, family, by their communities and law enforcement, they fight to take back their power over their minds and their bodies.

That’s something this October, I’m finally able to enjoy.

References:

Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’ [1919], in The Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press 1955 & Edns.), pp.217-56. [trans. Alix Strachey, in Freud, C.P., 1925, 4, pp.368-407].

Martin, G. Neil. “(Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films.” Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02298.

Stone, Bryan. “The Sanctification of Fear: Images of the Religious in Horror Films,” Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 5 : Iss. 2 , 2001 7.

Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. SUNY Press, 1997.