One of the things I love about horror movies is that 90% of the time, they are truly tragedies. I mean that in the Greek sense--not just that bad things happen, but bad things happen because the main character has made a mistake.

Sometimes the mistake is an ugly moral disaster, like hurting someone else or lying or breaking the law. A wonderful example would be Incident On and Off A Mountain Road, which if you haven't seen it, is the best one hour horror movie you can watch (and probably my favorite Coscarelli flick). I won't give away the ending, but let me tell you, that girl did something naughty.

Sometimes, the hero's mistake is just a mistake, like being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dagon is one of my favorites in this genre. The main characters are just tourists out on a boat, causing no harm, when bam! they're beset by a storm and forced into the village of the damned.

But where horror tragedy and your usual Oscar-winning tear-jerker differ is that the good horror movie punishes not just the characters, but the viewer, too. The element of suspense stretches the nerves and puts the viewer into a position of awkward tension. Moments of gore and grotesquerie churn the watcher's stomach. The anguish felt by the protagonists is echoed by the viewer's discomfort.

So go ahead, pop the popcorn and slip something dark into the DVD player. You can relax knowing that you're enjoying a cultural tradition going back more than 4,000 years. How's that for sophisticated?

Little Miss ZomCon

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