Reader, don’t you just love the horror that keeps you on edge, your hands over your eyes, legs shaking and quivering, pieces of popcorn, drizzled with ketchup, falling all over the floor (you meant to grab the butter, but you grabbed the ketchup instead. Silly reader). You decide to be brave, peaking over your now pale hand. “It won’t be that bad,” you think in your head. Suddenly… BAM! You scream… the loudest, banshee-esque (I know it’s not a word) scream that the world has ever heard. You throw your head back and legs in the air, and the neighbors, suddenly woken up from their afternoon nap, become concerned for your wellbeing.
It’s okay, it happens to the best of us. You pause the movie to clean up your spilt ketchup-y popcorn, and you realize how thrilling that whole experience was; knowing the jump scare was coming, but you didn’t know when, the eeriness giving you a rush of adrenaline, the giggle afterwards because you screamed like a teenage boy that hasn’t hit puberty yet. That, dear reader, is the beauty of horror.
Getting so scared that you almost give yourself whiplash in front of all the people in the movie theater, or at a sleepover with friends after you just gossiped about boys (or girls), the laughter that follows and your face turns as red as the ketchup in your popcorn (yes, I’m still making fun of you for it), hoping your friends won’t tease you about it in the years to come.
On a serious note, though, the beauty of horror is how well the film director or author can execute it. When done right, the movie or show has been wrapped in a nice cobweb bow with blood all over it, spiders crawling up your arms and into your hair, the clowns knocking at your door wondering if you liked the present. In this present day, horror doesn’t even have to be “banshee screaming” scary for it to be good. There’s also a psychological element to it; it plays with your mind and gets into your head, so the only thing you can think about for days is just that one movie, your new-found love for horror buried deep in your heart.
For you to get that profound appreciation for the H word, you need to know what elements exactly make “good” horror. According to screamhorrormag.com’s article, “The Essentials of Making a Successful Horror Movie,” there are (the big) three core elements: atmosphere, tension, and character development. Atmosphere because it paves the way for unease to enter your body, tension because you can’t predict what’s coming, adding more unease, and character development, which allows you to grow closer to the characters, trying to anticipate their next moves (I think you know what I’m about to say next), which adds increasing unease that’s through the cinema roof and is waving at the birds flying overhead.
But, to truly understand horror, you need to look deep. While the horror genre has a lot of good qualities, there is this one, humongous, life-threatening bad quality that keeps the majority of people away. That monster hiding under the bed is… controversy. The horror, the horror (pun intended)!
George Orwell explains it perfectly, “No literary, film, or artistic mod genre is free from political bias” that being said, horror is the punching bag of all genres, the scapegoat, the middle child if you will. It gets a lot of unnecessary hate for being who it is. Paul Trembly also explains this perfectly in his article The H Word: The Politics of Horror by saying, “Horror is supposed to push and prod at moral boundaries and social mores, confront personal and societal taboos, to make us uncomfortable, to make us think about why we’re made to be uncomfortable,” because of this, a big chunk of Americans (46%) hate, or dislike horror.
People are afraid of thinking too deeply because they could find out something about themselves, sometimes dark, that they try to keep hidden. Horror makes people think deeply. Do you see the correlation?
My advice to you is this: EMBRACE THE HORROR. Let it consume you and feast on you like a 1-billion-year-old vampire who hasn’t had a meal in the last 999.9 million years. It’s okay to be weird, dear reader, that is the beauty of horror.
