13 - Horror
Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch (A24)
I’ve spoken extensively about my love of horror, so this should come as no surprise.
What more can I say about the genre that I haven’t said ad nauseam?
Horror is the freshest and most innovative film genre, and it’s not particularly close.
Slasher flicks, monster movies, found footage, psychological horror, sci-fi horror: the sub-genres are endless; all with their own formulas and norms, and subsequent subversions of those norms.
Get Out, Hereditary, It, Annihilation, The Witch, and Halloween are all horrors, but they’re also very different films with very different themes.
But it’s not just the variety of films under the horror umbrella that’s impressive, but the variety of feelings those films evoke as well. Existential dread, uncertainty and distrust, squeamishness, or simply just genuine, overall fear.
Those feelings, as unsettling as they are, spark a morbid curiosity in a lot of people; which is why many of us find ourselves on Wikipedia late at night reading up on murder mysteries, serial killers, and paranormal events. It’s why people are hooked on true crime docs and podcasts.
A part of us wants to test our mettle. Explore the darkest parts of our psyche and the psyche of humanity at large. Entertain ideas of supernatural or alien existence. Open the wounds of our phobias and try to face them head-on. Scare ourselves just to feel something. Horror scratches those subconscious, primal itches in spades. It satisfies our dark curiosities, often to the point of regret (the film Martyrs did this for me), and reminds us that we all have a certain threshold when it comes to absorbing such content - and that we’re better off not crossing that threshold. In short, it keeps us in check.
Horror - more so than any other genre - creates a visceral world you can almost smell and touch. Everything from the lighting, to the camera angles are deliberate. When it comes to books, everything is described in painstaking detail to make it feel all the more realistic. But the reason why it’s effective is because while the stories may seem fantastical, they’re more grounded in reality than any superhero blockbuster or adventure story. Abandoned houses exist, cemeteries exist, serial killers exist, cults exist, and while we can’t for certain say paranormal activity exists, there are plenty of stories throughout history that simply can’t be explained using normal activity and scientific facts as a basis.
Horror isn’t frightening because it creates worlds or scenarios that don’t exist. It’s frightening because they create worlds and scenarios that do.
It doesn’t show us things that are impossible - but rather things that are possible, or could be possible, given the right set of circumstances.