THE APPEAL OF HORROR

Horror films edify, satisfy and entertain; they also obscure, repulse and distract. Both celebrated and denounced, they are often dismissed as exploitation, appealing to our basest tastes and compulsions. On the other hand, they are also held up as a mirror of our collective psyche, revealing inconvenient and unpleasant truths about the species.

I believe the difficulty we have with horror is that it's ultimately personal. While these films play with our minds—creating bouts of anxiety and tension, which through their dark arts, become somehow, pleasurable—the real object it toys with is our idea of our bodies. The "body," is the central metaphor of this genre; and horror is successful only to the degree that it reminds us of the profound vulnerability of flesh and bone.

Various theories compete to explain the appeal of these films. Freud's essay, "The Uncanny," and his notion of the "return of the repressed" have informed much subsequent inquiry. Later psychoanalytic-inspired investigators have developed supplementary approaches. Still other approaches further elaborate on the role of the unconscious and these include Kristeva's Lacan-influenced account of "abjection" and Creed's and Mulvey's Feminist Theory, which examine critical differences between male and female viewing/experiences of horror.

The explanation I offer here, like those listed above, is an attempt to make sense of something seemingly inexplicable, namely, the enduring and extraordinary appeal of a genre that makes the experience of pain pleasurable, and that for lack of a better word, places at its center the "triumph" of death.

Horror, regardless of the time or place of its setting, or the particular nature of terror it exploits, seeks, above all else, to re-introduce the living to its estranged, but life-long companion, Death. As we saw above, horror achieves this by reducing the whole of a life to merely the life of the body. And in doing so, it has created what is possibly the world's most popular experience of eroticism.

I suspect what makes these sights, sounds and sensations of horror bearable are that they are experienced in the "sacred" precinct of the theater, far from where we actually live. Horror, for this duration, is contained within the screen. It is a presence in a narrative that in no way intersects with a spectator's life.

The Paradox of Proximity is a strategy that enables horror audiences to deny the fact that death is a frequent visitor in their own life. So long as death operates within the parameters of the screen, we are safe by virtue of the fact that we are not in the film. We continue to believe in this "safe distance," even as death snatches those nearest and dearest to us.

I've lived now for more than 60 years far from war and insulated by time and distance from epidemics and pandemics. I've survived earthquakes and brush fires. However, the more I began to reflect on the appeal of horror films and the more I meditated on the nature of death, the more I saw of it. Suddenly the dead included not only ancient members of my family but classmates, friends, and friends of friends, colleagues, and neighbors.

Recently, it occurred to me that I lived in the center of my own horror franchise. Death tugged, while the methods or mechanisms I used to deny death continued to defy explanation. But as I grow older, it's time to acknowledge its shadow. Its growing shadow. One by one they enter the room. The one who committed suicide. The other who took home the wrong man. Some died horribly, others suddenly, or, at the least, ironically. Of course, I should resent its presence, but I don't. Yes, every death is monstrous, each an outrage. All regrettable if for no other reason than every death is a harbinger of one's own.