I’m a fan of horror. I’m releasing a horror novel at the end of this year, and I released a sci-fi/horror novel earlier this year.
But I have to admit, I’m not the biggest fan of horror that ever was. For me, it’s hard to find good horror stories. There’s lots of horror I’m just never going to watch or read. (I’ll never touch a Stephen King novel, for instance. Nothing against the man, but his style–both the writing style and the sheer quantity of adult content–just doesn’t jibe with me.)
Why do I feel that way? Well, I think it’s the genre most prone to being meaningless. Emptiness and hopelessness tends to make for lousy stories, in my opinion, and many horror movies have nothing more to say than “people are evil and life is terrible.”
I think that’s a useless message to give unto the world. The world doesn’t need more stories that do nothing but affirm its evil.
Real, valuable horror, in my mind, is about either a) showing the journey people take to overcome intense trauma or b) exposing problems in human nature, causing the audience to think about how they can become better. Granted, option “b” can sometimes be no different from “people are evil and life is terrible–therefore, try and be better.” But there’s a fine line to walk, I suppose, and some people will find value in stories that other people can’t.
But in this article, I want to go over some of the ways I think horror movies can misstep and prove to be less worthwhile, as well as a couple examples of films that I think do horror right.
Pointless Horror
I watched Halloween (1978) (an edited version, because unless the topless women added a whole lot to the plot, I felt I wouldn’t miss them) since it is so highly regarded as a horror masterpiece. I really like Psycho and Alien and I like The Sixth Sense and a couple other horror movies seen as “best in the genre,” so I thought I’d like it.
Well, I’ll be honest. I kinda thought it was pointless.
It was fairly well-crafted, I’ll admit. There was tension. The villain was menacing and visually interesting.
But that’s pretty much it. I didn’t find it fascinating in any way under the surface. Maybe it’s one of those things where you just “had to be there at the time” to appreciate it, but I don’t know, I watched Psycho and still thought it was fantastic in spite of being an old movie. I get that Halloween birthed a sub-genre, but…when it was over I couldn’t help but wonder, what was the point of that?
Even the scene where the psychologist talks about how he saw pure evil in Michael Myers–although well-acted–fell flat for me. Where’s the depth? The villain is pure evil, and that’s sort of interesting, I guess, but…then what? I feel like it never does anything with that.
The point of the movie is, I guess, that “evil is out there, and it’s gonna get you if you aren’t careful.” Okay. Point noted.
Maybe there’s a way I could have appreciated it more, but overall, I thought there was no point to the movie. It didn’t explore the psychology of evil or the human condition. It didn’t have anything profound to say. It was just conceptually unique.
And I don’t think that usually makes for very interesting stories.
Perhaps I’m being hypocritical, however, considering I love Alien, and that’s also a movie where there’s not much depth to the villain. But I dunno, I still feel like I found depth in Alien (more so in its sequel, Aliens) where I didn’t find it in Halloween.
Or maybe the depth came with the nudity that I missed? Yup, that must be it…
Hopeless Horror
Sometimes horror is just plain hopeless. Horror as a genre is naturally about really horrible things happening to people (although it certainly isn’t the only genre where that’s the case), so some hopelessness is to be expected, but there are far too many horror movies that go way too far, in my opinion.
The worst offender I can think of in recent memory is Pet Sematary (2019). That was one hour and forty minutes I’ll never get back. The concept is interesting, but (spoiler warning…) the movie ends with everybody dying/becoming undead, the main characters being punished for their sins, and evil winning. I hated it, frankly. I gather that it differs from the book somehow, but I haven’t cared enough to look into it.
I just felt gross after finishing that movie. It was hopeless. I don’t see the point of hopeless horror–at least, not when it’s this tasteless.
Sometimes horror can be hopeless without being overly tasteless, and thereby have some merit. Take The Descent (2005), a film about a group of spelunkers who get trapped in an unexplored cave network that ends up being filled with subterranean humanoid monsters. The Descent is a gruesome and bloody film, but the vast majority of that violence is committed upon non-human “Crawlers” rather than on humans. There is violence done upon humans, of course, but with the exception of an accidental death at the beginning, none of it is extremely graphic (although this is an R-rated film we’re talking about, so it’s certainly not tame by any means).
Then, of course, the film ends (spoiler warning…) with every single main character dying. (Assuming you go by the superior U.K. ending.) None of the women escape the caves. Seems rather hopeless and therefore meaningless, doesn’t it? Well, something about the setup of the movie made that sort of ending feel like it was the only way things could have gone. Sarah’s grief over the death of her family was so pervasive from the beginning of the film that her escaping would almost have felt wrong thematically. It was a movie about a plunge (or “descent,” if you will) into hopelessness; ending the movie on a hopeless note was pretty much the only thing that could have happened.
Not to say I think that is the best type of story to tell, but it was a choice that felt appropriate for that specific story that the filmmakers were trying to tell, which is why I didn’t feel disgusted or cheated by the ending, however disturbing it was.
Now, if the film had reveled in the gruesomeness of the deaths of all the women–really shown their deaths as gory and upfront as possible–or if it reveled in the miserable hopelessness of its ending (as was the case with Pet Sematary), I might have felt differently. It would have felt less like a sad story and more like a sadistic and tasteless one, and that’s not something I think is worthwhile.
Some movies like The Witch (2018) are hopeless and extremely disturbing, but at least they give a deep commentary on human nature through it–in that case, the negative aspects of religious puritanism. (Although, as a disclaimer, I do feel that particular movie is so thematically disturbing that I can’t really recommend it to most people.) Something like Pet Sematary had nothing to say of any worth at all that I could gather.
Scares And Nothing More
I watched Insidious (2010) during a period when I was just looking for horror movies to watch. There’s really nothing to say about it, but I honestly thought the only point of the movie was to scare the audience. Did it succeed at that? Yes, but I don’t think it was worth my time.
Again, maybe one could argue that the only point of Alien was to be scary. What depth was there? I don’t know that I can argue against that. I guess I felt that the science fiction elements of Alien were so compelling that I felt the horror was balanced and justified. Or maybe I’m a hypocrite. *shrug*
Then there are the many, many horror movies that do little but attempt to be the next most shocking, bloody, and disturbing thing put to film. The extreme scares for the sake of scares (or worse, extreme gore for the sake of gore) is why I will never watch V/H/S or Saw or Friday the 13th or any of those sorts of movies. (And those certainly are not the worst examples of too-extreme horror movies out there–not by a long shot, unfortunately.) I’m sure they’re entertaining in some ways, but from what I know about them, they’re far too seeped in pure horror and/or gore to be actually valuable as stories.
A Message Too Extreme
Sometimes horror can tell a great, meaningful story, but just tells it in way that’s too extreme for some people.
One example of this for me is the It movies, released in 2017 and 2019 respectively. I watched them and overall enjoyed them a lot. On the surface, it seems like it’s just a pair of films about a malicious extraterrestrial clown-monster tormenting and killing children. But underneath the surface I found a story that, to my great surprise, spoke to me quite a bit in some touching ways.
I can’t speak to the value of the novel–again, I’m never reading that until King releases a version where some of the most extreme and profane content is no longer present (to be clear, I’m not demanding or expecting that)–but as for the film duology, it’s a story about children who each go through traumatic life challenges and learn to overcome them.
Pennywise, the evil clown-monster, torments them and preys upon their fear. Their journey is to overcome fear by overcoming their trauma.
The scene that touched me the most–possibly only matched by when (spoiler warning…) Beverly and Ben finally connect with one another–is a scene in It Chapter Two. Adult Bill is confronted by the clown-monster Pennywise manifesting as a demonic version of his younger self and his little brother, Georgie, and Pennywise reveals the truth: in the first scene of the first movie, when childhood-Bill told his brother he was too sick to go out and play with him in the rain, he wasn’t really sick; he just pretended to be, because he didn’t want to play that morning.
Of course, that happened to be the very morning when Pennywise killed and stole Georgie away, leaving Bill overwhelmed with guilt thenceforth for not being there when his brother needed him.
In the nightmarish, present-day “vision,” Pennywise manifests as an evil version of young Bill and tells adult Bill that he is responsible for his brother’s death, that he should feel guilty forever. Adult Bill–who’s been tormented with that guilt for years–has to overcome his trauma and decide that he’ll refuse to believe that.
Adult Bill: “You were the best big brother there ever was.”
Young Bill (Pennywise): “No! We killed our little brother!”
Adult Bill: “He loved you. And just because you didn’t wanna play on a rainy day…just one time? That does not make it your fault.”
I absolutely love this scene! I love the way it is acted–as if adult Bill, with a burgeoning moral strength, is deciding that he really believes what he’s saying only as he says it, in defiance of the Satanic monster that wants him to hate himself, and grows stronger through it. Man, that’s such good stuff!
That’s a really valuable story, in my opinion. A message that lots of people need to hear! Where the movies lose me, unfortunately–and they lose me, personally, only to a degree–is the severity of some of the horror. You just can’t get around the fact that there’s a lot of disturbing-for-the-sake-of-disturbing stuff in these movies. For most people, I think the surface-level “pure horror” of the movies kinda overshadows the deeper themes, and that’s a shame. My hope is to write horror stories that aren’t overshadowed by too much extreme horror.
And hey, maybe that’s just me. Maybe Stephen King and others just want to tell stories/experience stories where horror is the prime focus, and if that’s what they want to do, that’s fine for them.
But it’s a shame to me that because of the extreme nature of the horror, It‘s audience reach can only go so far, and some people who may have enjoyed the deeper themes will never watch the movie because they (understandably) can’t get past the sheer depth of horror they’ll have to wade through to get there.
One great example of approachable, hopeful, and meaningful horror is A Quiet Place (2018) and its sequel. I don’t have to tell you they’re great and wholesome films in spite of being full of genuine terror and horrifying situations. The difference is that it’s never excessively hopeless or gory or disturbing. Now that is horror done right!
Value In Horror
Horror has a power to evoke emotions that few other genres can match. The best horror movies can tell stories that examine interesting characters and psychologies (without going so far into exploring evil that they become sadistic or overly disturbing), and they can even show us examples of people overcoming horrific trauma, which is a sad and inescapable reality of the world we live in. To me, that’s truly valuable.
And that’s why I wish most of the stories that can currently be found in the horror genre didn’t feel quite so meaningless.
As I said, I’ve written horror novels, and I plan to write and release at least a few more in my life. It’s not impossible that I’ll fall into some of these pitfalls myself! But through all that I do, I hope to tell stories that are valuable, even if they happen to be scary or contain disturbing elements.
Cultivation is, I would say, somewhat of a mix between being a story about overcoming trauma and being a commentary on human nature. When you read it this December, you can tell me if I succeeded in telling a story worth telling.
Thanks for reading!
– Noah Gallagher
arcreonis.com 