I can still remember my high school drama teacher’s reaction when I asked him what he thought of horror movies. This guy was an acting snob of the highest order; theatre to him meant musicals only as a PTA-enforced necessity. He talked of Uta Hagen and the Chekhovs as if he knew them personally.
“I certainly don’t have any respect for the genre,” he said matter-of-factly, as if you could read all about it on his Wikipedia page. “But I’m sure there are some good horror movies I haven’t seen.”
His opinions meant a lot more to me in those days, but even back then I had to wonder what was so irredeemable about the horror-movie tradition that it couldn’t be looked upon with respect.
To put this guy into perspective, he’s a Baby Boomer, like my parents. Horror-movie storytelling was probably at its least sophisticated (at least in America; Japan is a totally different story) when that generation was growing up. I love Rod Serling, but you and I both know that “The Twilight Zone” wouldn’t scare a 5-year-old in 2021. And that show was undoubtedly the best horror writing of the day. Mix that with the B-horror flicks the postwar generation inherited and it’s not hard to see why someone would write off the whole deal.
Horror as a film genre did get more sophisticated as the 20th century wore on, but not by much. The movies that stand out ― “The Exorcist,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “The Shining” ― are the ones that subvert expectations and show ingenuity, two sacrilegious moves for a genre predicated on repetition of tropes, themes, and scenes.
Consider the slasher flick. It’s hard for me, a horror-movie obsessive, to maintain interest in staples like “Friday the 13th,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” or “Halloween” because the commodity being hawked by these products is not a new or interesting story; it’s how well the actors can chew the scenery. We all know what’s going to happen to the pretty girl being chased by the evil creature― but how does it happen? Who cares.
Maybe that’s what my old drama teacher was getting at. Maybe he was merely offended by bad acting. But the actor’s cheesiness, the tiredness of the script, it’s only one piece in a larger psychosocial puzzle.
My mental gears cannot stop whirring when I think about horror movies. Why are they such an American staple? Personally, I liken our nation’s devotion to the genre to a fact I learned about humans: We’re the only creatures in the animal kingdom that eat spicy food. This means we’re unique in our desire to test our own resolves. The reasoning behind this factoid seems obvious: We’re the only ones who do it because we’re the only ones who can.
Is that also true for Americans and scary movies?
I can rest assured in the notion that the American horror genre was never intended as high art, so that’s one reason for its endemic popularity in the U.S. Then there’s the so-called American death drive, seen more clearly in high-key thrillers like “Nightcrawler,” “Black Swan,” and David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” but explored in horror as well. There’s the fear of what lies just beyond the edges of one’s friendly backyard, a concept explored in “Deliverance,” “Pet Sematary,” and “The Hills Have Eyes.” There’s the shallow connection Americans have to their own history; “The Blair Witch Project” and any film that features the famed “Indian burial ground” explores this.
While these ideas all offer a perhaps-too-close view of the American psyche, none of them hit at the spicy-food conundrum of Americans rejoicing in particularly American nightmares (serial killer documentaries, anyone?). I think we love horror so much because it has evolved and commingled alongside another distinctly American conceit: camp.
How to describe camp? “The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” according to Susan Sontag. According to me, campiness is whenever a thing becomes a Thing.
Why is this so American? Because for so long, we have been the world’s pop-culture pioneers. Then, sometime around Andy Warhol, we made an abrupt turn and decided it was time to make fun of ourselves. Why? Spicy-food conundrum. Only we can.
Camp and horror run deep together: Prominent examples include “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”; the “Goosebumps” series; the films of David Lynch, Ed Wood, and William Castle; the “Chucky” movies; “Elvira: Mistress of the Dark”; “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family”; “An American Werewolf in London”; and countless other features with much less self-awareness.
Camp, like American horror, hinges upon the repetition of those tired, old themes my drama teacher rejected in favor of Shakespeare: The scream, the slash, the blood, the fear, the creature ― look! He’s right behind you! You’re not expected to really fear for the poor protagonist; you’re expected to be delighted. Are you not entertained?
There have been valiant efforts of late to rehabilitate American horror and make it into something my drama teacher would want to watch. Indie studio A24 comes to mind, with its recent list of prestige hits like “The VVitch,” “Hereditary,” and “Midsommar.” Then there are sweeping, metaphoric odysseys like “A Quiet Place,” “Annihilation,” and “Mother!”, which pride themselves on their commitment to visual effects and brow-furrowing storylines. We’re getting further away from “The Twilight Zone” by the second. And while it makes for good viewing, it’s a little like watching a dog stand on its hind legs. Why be ashamed of the corniness from which you came?
More than an artistic genre, scary movies are an American ritual. Much like our innate knowledge that the two teens at Makeout Peak in the beginning of the movie aren’t going to make it, we create repetitive and time-honored behaviors around our viewing of these films. Pop the popcorn, turn off the lights, huddle under the covers with a friend, scream, gasp, and laugh out loud.
We have rituals to scare and titillate ourselves because we’re American, and we have little to fear in terms of boogeymen. We have plenty of other things to fear, sure. But when we eat spicy food, we know we’re not eating poison. And when we watch movies filled with plastic fangs and corn-syrup blood, we know we’re safe.
