| Defining Horror | 9.22.2008 |
I was talking with a friend today and she professed confusion about why Tremors was labeled as horror. "The movie has funny parts in it. And they are just big worms. What is so scary about that?" She then laid forth the claim that movies like Elm Street and Halloween were not horror. Neither of them were scary to her. Movies like Exorcist and Exorcism of Emily Rose and Amityville Horror (original) were horror movies in her eyes.
This seems to me a short sighted approach to what makes a horror movie. If you don't think a comedy is funny, it is still a comedy film. Just a bad one. If you don't find a horror movie scary that doesn't remove it from the genre. But all this really comes around to the bigger question of how do you define horror.
There doesn't seem to be an easy definition. Supernatural themes pretty much always fall into the horror genre. As do the gore filled, blood soaked splatterfest films that seem to be rather popular of late. It is true that there are many horror movies that are not scary, but I believe they had the intention of being scary. Silence of the Lambs was not really billed as a horror movie, but it succeeded wildly as a horror film. And launched Hannibal Lector into the record books as the most heinous and scariest villain in modern times.
I think that in some ways the simplest way to define horror is to say that if the potential for death is imminent, then the story is horror on some level. Death being the one element that tends to stay consistant within every horror film. The threat of death is one of the most horrific results possible. Some films like the Exorcist do not directly include death, but metaphysically they do. The girl from the Exorcist was in a sense facing death. The possession had removed her being from her body. To that extent she was dying because the girl that her family knew was no longer "there."
Come respond and tell us your views on this. From the responses in the forum I will choose a random winner for a Horror-Web prize. The contest winner will be drawn on October 1st so respond by midnight September 30th.
Horror-Web Forum
Bloody MonkeyZ
This seems to me a short sighted approach to what makes a horror movie. If you don't think a comedy is funny, it is still a comedy film. Just a bad one. If you don't find a horror movie scary that doesn't remove it from the genre. But all this really comes around to the bigger question of how do you define horror.
There doesn't seem to be an easy definition. Supernatural themes pretty much always fall into the horror genre. As do the gore filled, blood soaked splatterfest films that seem to be rather popular of late. It is true that there are many horror movies that are not scary, but I believe they had the intention of being scary. Silence of the Lambs was not really billed as a horror movie, but it succeeded wildly as a horror film. And launched Hannibal Lector into the record books as the most heinous and scariest villain in modern times.
I think that in some ways the simplest way to define horror is to say that if the potential for death is imminent, then the story is horror on some level. Death being the one element that tends to stay consistant within every horror film. The threat of death is one of the most horrific results possible. Some films like the Exorcist do not directly include death, but metaphysically they do. The girl from the Exorcist was in a sense facing death. The possession had removed her being from her body. To that extent she was dying because the girl that her family knew was no longer "there."
Come respond and tell us your views on this. From the responses in the forum I will choose a random winner for a Horror-Web prize. The contest winner will be drawn on October 1st so respond by midnight September 30th.
Horror-Web Forum
Bloody MonkeyZ
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