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Why do we love horror films? An Italian pasta dish holds a clue

The horror genre is often perceived as a playground for pubescent males. In reality, it is the preserve of the feminine

David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown in Terrifier 3. Photograph: Signature Entertainment/Jesse Korman
David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown in Terrifier 3. Photograph: Signature Entertainment/Jesse Korman
Sarah Cleary
Thu Oct 31 2024 - 06:15

Halloween is upon us, the last line of defence before the festive season smoothers us all in contrived happiness. Horror fans revel in this Black Christmas. But unlike other forms of recreation, with the exception of extreme sports, the act of watching horror is often met with incredulity. With so much real horror in the world, why do we turn again and again to horror films?

We could descend into the murk of psychoanalysis or evolution theory, which posits fear as a positive primal instinct keeping us alive. Or explain our love of the horror genre as a shared communal experience. However the majority of us are now streaming our films alone, and who has time for psychoanalysis?

A better answer is the one inspired by a pasta dish. The great granddaddy of the undead, the late director George A Romero, once described horror as akin to a lasagne. In the dish, a cheesy, creamy top layer belies layer after layer of nourishment beneath. Horror films work in the same fashion. You can just pick at the top layer, but if you want you can go deeper. The deeper you go the more intense the flavour becomes.

The top layer of horror is that physiological thrill, or the “rollercoaster effect”. The jump scares and suspense all increase our heart rates, providing a titillating thrill of frisson and fear. It’s a Wim Hof experience without the nonsense of freezing to death, unbearable but exhilarating. It’s the first game we play as babies. The parent disappears behind hands only to reappear, exclaiming “boo!” The infant squeals in delight. Supernatural franchises such as Sinister and The Conjuring have all capitalised upon this delightful frisson to great effect.

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Next is the emotional layer. Whether the emotion provoked is fear, anger, disgust, offence or sorrow, horror when done correctly is designed to make us uncomfortable and shake us out of our complacency. With its emphasis on the body as a site of extreme vulnerability, it reminds us of our mortality and the fact that each of us will die, so we’d better not forget to live. It is the ultimate memento mori. Daniel Roebuck’s 1980s throwback slasher Terrifier 3 – which mounted quite the PR campaign with its proclamations of being the goriest film of the year – encapsulates this sentiment perfectly, peppering our disgust with curiosity as the human body is rendered vulnerable and exposed.

[ Terrifier 3 star Daniel Roebuck: ‘You can bring your family to see it – but if you do we will turn you in to social services’ ]

The final layer, where all those crispy, tasty bits lie, is the psychological. It is a safe place to explore unsafe things, throwing illumination on to the darkest recesses of our thoughts, giving them form and meaning. Horror has been casting a light on issues such as coercion, pathology, sexuality, patriarchy and mental illness for centuries. It captures the zeitgeist of any given moment while staying ahead of the curve when it comes to social policy. Take for example Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece, Don’t Look Now, in which the trauma of losing a child haunts parents, driving them to the edge. Or more recently, Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (an English remake came out this year) navigates the complexities of self-defeating cultural politeness.

Horror is often perceived as a playground of sorts for pubescent males. The reality, however, is that horror is the preserve of the feminine – which is why so many women and young girls are drawn to it. Horror is extremely comfortable with the visceral body as it bleeds and seeps, exposing the hypocrisy of keeping secret and reinforcing shame around bodily functions and ageing; tip of the hat here to Demi Moore in this year’s The Substance.

Horror understands fear, the intangible abstract threat that is the register through which many women view their surroundings, especially at night. A stranger is a threat until he is not and walks past. Horror draws upon these fears and makes manifest those abstract feelings of insecurity and strengthens our resolve. Similar to the ever-popular true crime podcast genre, it gives us a sense of control over our darkest fears.

Above all, horror has traditionally been a champion for the disenfranchised. Be they female, child or (Frankenstein’s) monster, horror consistently roots for the underdog.

[ Irish women ghost writers: Rediscovering lost voices ]

Stemming from the Gothic novel, which was always considered the domain of the female due to its visceral, transgressive and (often) irrational nature, it was also an advocate for the autonomy of women from patriarchal systems, giving them space to breath and time to think. Of course, this was also one of the reasons that the Gothic was considered to infect “vulnerable minds” with a “maggot malady”. Today those “maggot maladies” are known as “negative effects”, and are now mostly centred on arguments about the desensitising nature of horror.

I would argue that horror, conversely, sensitises. This sentiment has existed since the emergence of the horror genre with the controversial birth of the Gothic novel. The Marquis De Sade, no stranger to controversy, when asked why he and his contemporaries wrote about such “unnatural horrors and mysterious nonsense”, looked out his Bastille prison cell window and stated that the Gothic novel was “the necessary fruit of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe” for those who bore witness to the horrors of the French revolution. With so much death and depravity on the streets, the Gothic novel had to raise the stakes in order to get people to engage.

[ Feeding the Monster by Anna Bogutskaya: Reclaiming horror as the ‘genre of empathy’ ]

Today, social media accounts are sites for the most horrific images, yet we scroll past image after image of babies and children suffering and dying. The world is in trouble.

Horror can serve a purpose if it slashes through the ennui of our compassion fatigue. In a world increasingly desensitised to suffering, horror acts as humanity’s last line of defence, forcing us, whether we like it or not, to feel.

Dr Sarah Cleary is a horror consultant, development executive and author of The Myth of Harm: Horror Censorship and the Child (Bloomsbury)