Major spoilers for the Blair Witch Project, The Exorcist, Alien, Get Out, Scream, and Us. Minor spoilers for Candyman (2021), Raw, Happy Death Day 2 U, Aliens, and Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
Housekeeping note: here’s my Twitch. Eventually things will be there.
If I had to rank the various common mediums of horror, I would put TV and movies dead last. The problem is inherent: you see too much. Think about how many horror movies that are famous not because of how scary they are, but because of how awful they look: outdated effects (practical or otherwise), bad acting, poor visuals, etc. This doesn’t make the movie inherently “bad”, who doesn’t love a silly romp, but if we’re measuring how much horror it inspires then, objectively, it’s bad. Movies like this are routinely mocked in pop culture to the point where there was a time horror fans were known more as nerds who watched these kinds of movies than the more popular perception now of nerds who only watch A24 prestige horror cinema.
Compare these movies to the written version of B-grade horror films: creepypasta. Anansi’s Goatman Story isn’t Ibsen, but the eleventh hour twist still sends a shiver up my spine when I think about it. It’s not even that surprising, to be honest, the more discerning reader could see it coming a mile away, but there’s just something about it, the way I see it in my head chills my spine — and that’s the thing. You know how best to scare yourself. All an author has to do is provide you with a recipe and voila, you’ve got yourself a terrifying sandwich. The ingredients are just your imagination.
Belief is such a powerful thing. If I had a nickel for every story I’ve read about powerful beings that lived and died based solely on how much people believed in them, I’d have two nickels, but possibly more if I had a better memory about these things. There’s the rational part of our brain that knows things like “there isn’t a ghost in my closet”, “there isn’t a monster under my bed”, but a slight suggestion that this could be the fact, no matter how implausible, can have you jumping at your own shadow. (This is, of course, assuming you’re of a neurotypical mind and, separately, do not believe in the existence of the supernatural.)
This subconscious, perhaps unwanted belief is not quite the same as but certainly in the realm of a more conscious process — suspension of disbelief. As any romcom fan or hater of live-action adaptations of animated works would tell you, some circumstances lend better to audiences accepting things than others. Genre conventions dictate that these two characters will end up in a romantic relationship, so you sit back and know that even though they may have zero chemistry, the movie will end with a grand kiss between them. These turtles got mutated by a vat of toxic waste that got dumped into a sewer from the same accident that caused Matt Murdock to go blind, and now the turtles are human sized with human limbs and they love pizza and their dad is a talking rat? Sure, I’ll buy that.
Horror, being a genre with conventions, operates in a similar way. Countless people, when watching a horror movie, will call out the protagonist for investigating a strange noise, for going down a dark alley, for answering the phone when you’re home alone. But we all know that their fate was sealed the moment they were born into a horror film. You just have to suspend your disbelief and accept that this is a different world than ours. The pill is a little easier to swallow when the world isn’t also in live action with human actors.
Some things are scarier when presented in an animated form. I don’t think the film Coraline would’ve haunted my dreams nearly as much if it had starred Dakota Fanning in a wig. Then again, Pan’s Labyrinth did haunt me for quite some time and that was technically in live action, so, really, it all comes down to a multitude of factors including but not limited to personal preference.
I may not believe that horror movies are the best source for plain and pure horror, but I do have a theory that horror movies get their horror not from the ideas they present, but from the empathy they elicit.
Let’s start with another contrast: in my belief, the best ways to experience proper but still fictitious horror are haunted houses and video games. Both operate under the presumption that you, either by yourself or directly through an avatar, are experiencing the horror. Sure, technically it’s someone else whose wife gets kidnapped, who wakes up in a dark room that leads into a never-ending hallway, who has to fight a zombie apocalypse — but when almost all of their actions are dictated by you, then, well, who’s to say that isn’t just you? There’s the added incentive of death in video games that keeps you on your toes, as it could lead to not just a loss of progress but also a gruesome death scene for your avatar.
The scare we feel from fictional horror is different from what we feel from actually horrific moments in real life. Plenty of us, especially those of marginalized identities, have been in situations where we felt our life was in danger. And plenty of us are still fans of horror. I myself only started engaging with the genre after such an event. To make a comparison, it’s a little like going on a rollercoaster versus free-falling from a great height: the knowledge that you’re actually safe and you’re engaging with this on your own terms lets you feel a different kind of fear, one that keeps you coming back for more.
If you list it out on paper, nothing scary happens in The Blair Witch Project until the last thirty minutes or so. The worst thing to happen to them during this time is that they get lost in the woods, and then start arguing because they’re getting tired and impatient. It’s not not scary, but for my friends who watched it just this year, it could do with being more scary. If you’d watched it when it came out, however, it would’ve made you shit your pants, primarily because it was marketed as actual found footage. This gimmick, which was later mimicked by the first Paranormal Activity to similar success (albeit for a shorter period of time), convinced people that this was actual footage shot by the real life Heather Donahue (which technically it was because the character was named after the actor and the footage was shot primarily by the actors themselves) for a real documentary she was making before her disappearance and possible death. There were no opening nor ending credits, just a short blurb at the beginning noting that the people involved are still missing. Information spread much more slowly back in the day so it could’ve been a long time before you found out that this movie wasn’t even real.
Things are always scarier when they’re real, not only because it means that this did actually happen to someone, but also because it means this could happen to you.
If horror was measured solely by how likely it was something were to happen, the The Exorcist would be a romantic comedy to me. I don’t believe in demonic possession, and even if I were Catholic I likely still wouldn’t buy into it. A good chunk of the movie isn’t even all that scary, it’s mostly just people sitting around and talking about how scary things are and how they could get worse. The part of the movie that got me to put a hand over my mouth was when the demon inside Regan stabs her genitals with a crucifix. It’s horrific for a number of reasons: not just the act itself, but also the fact that Regan is doing it to herself and she has no control over her own body, the fact that she’s a child and her mother can hardly do anything to help. Of course, all those other reasons are contingent on the fact that you feel something for Regan, either as a character or as someone could’ve been replaced by you.
The main character in this film is arguably Father Karras, whose interactions with the demon are limited in how scary they are until the actual exorcism and the famous scene where the demon transforms into his mother. How differently would we feel about this scene had the demon turned into anyone else, had we not known that this was Dimmi’s mother and the nature of their relationship, if the horror of the scene relied upon how scary we thought the act of changing into someone else was?
Empathy isn’t limited to the protagonists of horror movies. Let they who didn’t hear Jennifer Check say “I’m not killing people, I’m killing boys” and respond, “I feel that” cast the first stone. At least once did a Hannibal Lecter kill and eat someone for being rude and I thought the guy kind of deserved it. Jordan Peele’s Us and Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (which Jordan Peele produced and is credited as a co-writer of) explore these this concept in their own way. The new Candyman, as opposed to the original one in 1992, focuses more on retributive justice for the sins of slavery, racism, and all the dirty nooks and crannies in between. In an interview exploring the role racism played in the remake, DaCosta stated, “We definitely wanted there to be some form of imperfect catharsis in the way that Candyman operates.”
Us, on the other hand, introduces the full motivations of the antagonists towards the end of the film — not only the true nature of their torturous existence, underground and forcibly mirroring their counterparts, but also the fact that Adelaide singlehandedly and forcibly put Red in this situation. You can understand why they did what they did and, maybe, think they earned that right.
The problem, however, is whether the movie is still horrifying when you’re siding with the so-called villain. The antagonist is the source of the scares, the torture, the fear, but if you think they’re right to be doing that, how scared are you of them? Consider Candyman (2021) — if you think that all of the Candyman’s actions are justified, then it wouldn’t be implausible for you to consider yourself exempt from the group he’s targeting (whether that’s true or not). There’s no reason for you to be afraid of the Candyman when you don’t think you’ve done anything to incur that wrath. Of course, empathy and endorsement don’t go hand in hand and no matter how much you may agree with someone, you may still be terrified of them. It was an angel that said “Be not afraid”, after all.
There’s an often unintentional side effect of protagonist-centric empathy in horror. In an interview I could only access through archive.org (cough cough), director Ridley Scott initially envision Ridley dying at the hands of the xenomorph, who would then mimic the deceased captain’s voice and say, “I’m signing off.” Scott was dissuaded of this ending by an executive from Fox arriving on set and “threatening to fire [him] on the spot.” The original ending of Get Out was supposed to be a police car greeting Chris as he tried to murder Rose, instead of our only favorite TSA agent Rod, who would end up meeting Chris in jail. In an oral history of the film, Marcus Henderson, the actor who played Walter the groundskeeper, stated, “What the original ending said was, ‘No, you can’t catch a break,’ because that’s our reality. But the new ending gave us a break, and I think that’s why we enjoyed it so much, because we want it so badly.” Daniel Kaluuya expresses a different sentiment, believing the original ending better “because of what it said about life” — which is true. It is more likely that this would happen in real life, which is why it was originally shot that way. But Kaluuya adds that he does like the new ending, including the fact that “Chris has a life, you know?”
Who knows why that Fox executive came to almost fire Ridley Scott, whether or not he’d seen the movie and agreed with the original ending over the new one, whether he was there under orders or because he genuinely wanted something better for Ripley. In hindsight, though, I don’t think any of us really want a world where Ripley is dead.
Empathy isn’t the end-all be-all of horror. The Twilight Zone is a staple of the genre, and more people remember it for the fucked up scenarios than the characters. I can’t name a single character from Final Destination but I can tell you fucked up ways they died. Raw is a French horror film in which a young veterinary student discovers she has a pathological addiction to meat. There’s a scene in which she eats her sister’s finger. During its festival circuit, particularly at the Toronto International Film Festival, there were reports of audience members fainting and having other visceral reactions to the content. In contrast, there’s a scene in Supernatural where two characters, under the influence of magical forces, cannibalize each other until death, with a post-mortem stating they ate to their full. Yet I didn’t hear anything about people fainting after watching that.
Horror TV shows like Evil (CBS) and The X-Files (and I guess Supernatural to an extent) are good contrasts to how much goes into a horror movie that makes it (at least in my opinion) far more terrifying. The empathy is readily there with the fact that these are characters you’ve grown attached to over a longer period of time than maybe thirty minutes in a movie before the shit hits the fan. But budget constraints, broadcasting restrictions, and the fact that the stakes (for the most part) can never really put the lives of the characters in danger prevent these shows from reaching the same height as movies. Not to mention differences in things like lighting, cinematography, music — these change the experience not just from show to movie but from movie to movie too. I think this screenshot says it all:
And we haven’t even touched on concepts! Ideas! Premises! The basic fucking plot!
So yeah, empathy is a small part of horror, but it’s an important part because it’s very much contingent on you and how much you’re giving back to the movie. It doesn’t matter how good the plot is, how spooky the music is, how the lighting hits just right, how every shot looks gorgeous — there’s a limit to your engagement with the film based on how you interact with the characters, whether you can interact with them at all. Yeah, the writers have to write good characters, but sometimes you might just not mesh with a character. They’re like their own people with their own personalities and whatnot, and through no fault of anyone, you could easily hate them. But when you do mesh with a character, when you like their whole deal and you want them to succeed and you don’t want bad things to happen to them and you can see yourself in them — that can easily elevate a film from watching it to experiencing it.
There’s a little interesting thing that comes up when examining movies with sequels. In Happy Death Day 2 U, the sequel to Happy Death Day in which a girl named Tree repeatedly relives her birthday as someone tries to kill her, Tree finds herself in the exact same predicament (albeit with a twist) and has a small breakdown over it. In Aliens (the sequel to Alien, the naming conventions in this series get tricky), Ripley wakes up 57 years after the events of the first movie, but for her it’s been only a short while before shit hits the fan again featuring the same bad guys as before (both the corporation and the titular aliens). And, as of writing this, it hasn’t been ruled out by anyone that Ripley might show up in a future installment. The immediate sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street (which is a camp masterpiece tbch) features no one from the original film, but the third one does and a character who bested Freddy in the first film and survived and managed to grow up into adulthood and have a life is killed by him in this one.
By virtue of a sequel to a horror movie existing, the characters’ torment isn’t over.
The franchise I feel the most empathy for over this fact is Scream. Sidney Prescott starts the first one already mired with the tragedy of her mother’s murder, before discovering at the end that her boyfriend murdered her mother and intends to murder her too. Over the course of the next four movies, things don’t ease up for Sidney as the ghost of the original Woodsboro Murders haunts her and kills innocent lives, including those near and dear to her. Every couple of years there’s a brief respite, but then tragedy strikes again and again and again. Neve Campbell announced she wouldn’t be returning for Scream 6, but what does that mean for Sidney? Assuming they don’t recast her, it could be anything: she could be dead before the movie even starts, murdered or natural causes; she could be around but unseen, alluded to as a person in the thick of things but akin to the shark in Jaws; or they don’t even mention her at all. In the event of the latter, that would mean this is the first appearance of Ghostface that Sidney will have no interaction with. For a moment, one single moment that could last forever, she would be free. One must imagine Sidney happy.