A Few Horror Myths

Sean at ADDTF points to some interesting recent debate about the current trend in horror movies like Hostel, Saw, Open Water, Wolf Creek, etc. It may or may not surprise you that I haven't seen a single movie of this sort, and not only from the current bumper crop, but even from the first turn of the cycle--I haven't seen the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on the Left or any of those, either. I therefore can't offer any informed opinion on their merits. In a perverse sort of way, though, I think I can still say something interesting about them, as a die-hard horror fan who's shunned them on the basis of the image they've fostered and cultivated so aggressively.

Looking at how they're promoted, and listening to how they're reviewed, discussed, and especially how they're defended by their fans, my impression is that they're based on a rationale that's seductive in its simplicity but ultimately very, very misguided about horror. Now, that might sound like an extraordinarily arrogant thing to say--"misguided!"--particularly coming from someone who hasn't seen these movies. Fair enough. Nevertheless, in my experience, most people seem pretty bad at analyzing, understanding, and articulating their aesthetic responses to movies or anything else. As I hope to explain, it's easy to see how someone could come to be a horror fan, misidentify what they enjoy about the genre, and proceed on a number of mistaken assumptions toward something that's quite far indeed from the original kind of experience that made them love horror in the first place.

The chief fallacy, which extends far beyond the subgenre under discussion here, is overestimating and overvaluing fear as an ingredient of horror. I've touched on this before. Fear is the defining spice in our enjoyment of horror, so it's obvious why fans would zero in on it in this way, to the neglect of other ingredients that might be just as essential even if they're not nearly as apparent. But I suspect that the kind of original experience that makes a horror fan has a much richer appeal, with fear as one element among any number of others. I'll put it this way: I shake a lot of Tabasco on a lot of food, but that doesn't mean I'll swig it straight from the bottle. My impression of these movies is that they try to deliver a straight, raw dose of fear, which sounds just as unpalatable to me for essentially the same reason.

Again, just going on my impressions formed by ads, reviews, and what fans say about these movies, it sounds like they compound the above fallacy by misconceiving fear as an entirely aversive emotion. We're so used to hearing about the "fight or flight" response and thinking of fear in negative terms that we lose sight of the full scope of our experience of the emotion. For good evolutionary reasons, there is a powerful attentional and even attractive component to fear. A frightening stimulus provokes heightened vigilance and rivets the attention, to an extent that sometimes elicits approach and exploration (as opposed to flight or some other aversive behavior). Darwin documented this in monkeys.

The physical changes associated with fear prepare us for action, which might mean fleeing or fighting off an aggressor, but which might also, more positively, mean proactively taking a risk (for example, "going out on a limb" for a piece of fruit that's difficult to reach, or going after dangerous prey, as when wolves attack moose that significantly outweigh them and present daunting natural weapons such as hooves and massive antlers). The rush of risk-taking is nothing more, really, than a positive and pleasurable quality of fear that propels you into a situation rather than away from it. To my mind, this is most likely the kind of fear that makes a horror fan in the first place--fear that fascinates, attracts, thrills, and pleases.

Contrast that, now, with the stated aims of so many of these movies to make audience members leave the theater, faint, vomit, wet themselves, or at least look away. This is a strictly aversive understanding of fear. Although I think it has nothing to do with the root appeal of horror, it's easy to understand how horror creators and fans could mistakenly come to embrace it.

If what you think you enjoy about horror is fear, pure and simple, and if you quite naturally want more of a good thing, you'll probably reflect on times when you've felt fear most intensely. The experiences that will stand out most vividly in memory will most likely be among the most aversive, because they probably touched hardest on issues of survival, and probably did not resolve into more positive emotions as would happen after successful risk taking, for example. Thanks to cognitive biases like these, it's just an unfortunate fact that a little thinking about something can lead very far astray. And that's exactly what I think is going on here--why horror creators and fans pursue an otherwise inexplicable escalation of raw cruelty, ugliness, and vileness in horror. They've simply done a poor job of analyzing their enjoyment of horror, they've profoundly misunderstood it, and everything follows from that.

The laundry list of aversive responses above points to another huge horror fallacy: the view that horror should aim to provoke real fear behaviors. There are good artistic reasons for maintaining a strong distinction between fantasy and reality for the audience when it comes to horror. Much horror, though, misguidedly strives in every way it can to dispel that sense of distinction. The most effective means to that end is increasingly naturalistic horror depicted in an increasingly realistic manner. I'd expect diminishing returns from such a progression, and without a doubt this kind of horror quickly hits the dead end of reality itself. Horror creators hit that wall hard when they come to see themselves in competition with internet footage of beheadings and camera phone video of Abu Ghraib prison interrogations. That's a face-off they can't win, because, after all, reality is reality, and it doesn't get any more real (or horrible, in the most negative sense of the word) than that.

Aside from the purely artistic problem of hitting this dead end, I'd also just note in passing that to the extent that horror succeeds in piercing or breaking down the distinction between fantasy and reality, it lays itself open to legitimate ethical questioning and critique. And I say that as someone who usually dismisses out of hand the various overheated, half-baked criticisms of horror as a supposed contributor to real-world ills.

As wrong and ultimately self-defeating as this approach is, it does make a certain intuitive, prima facie sense, so it's easy to see why so many horror creators and fans are led astray by it. Conversely, it's not so simple to understand precisely why and how horror is much better served by maintaining as firm a distinction as possible between fantasy and reality.

The whole point of fantasy is that it allows us to experience feelings and emotions in isolation from certain unwanted, limiting, or inhibiting factors in reality, such as real outward behavior, real consequences, and real time. What happens in your fantasies can stay in your fantasies--nobody gets hurt, and nobody's the wiser. Fantasy thus offers us a "safe place" in the sense Ernest Hartmann describes when drawing parallels between dreams and therapy:

Starting again with my material on dreams after trauma as the trauma is resolving, I have suggested that dreaming has a quasi-therapeutic function (Hartmann 1995). Dreaming allows the making of connections in a safe place. I reviewed many similarities between dreaming (whether or not remembered) and the process of psychotherapy, especially after trauma. Both good psychotherapy after trauma and dreaming first provide a safe place for work to be done. In therapy the safe place is much more than the physical setting; it involves the safe "boundaries" of the therapeutic situation and the gradual trusting alliance formed between patient and therapist. In dreaming -- especially in REM sleep -- the safe place is provided by the well-established muscular inhibition which prevents activity and the acting out of dreams.

Once a safe place is established the therapist allows the patient, especially the traumatized patient, to go back and tell her or his story in many different ways, making connections between the trauma and other parts of the patient's life -- overall making connections and trying to integrate the trauma. Dreaming performs at least some of these same functions -- since its nature is making connections broadly in a safe place.

As this quote indicates, maintaining firm boundaries around a metaphorical "safe place" allows not only for a broader range of emotional experience, but also in certain circumstances for a greater depth and intensity of emotional experience. Violent, threatening emotions that our defense mechanisms might dull or inhibit in a real-life context may be accessed and experienced more fully when we can feel safe and assured that they won't fly out of control and lead to acting out with all the unwanted consequences that would entail. I hope this clarifies why I think it's misguided and self-defeating for so many horror films to strive to provoke exactly that kind of negative real-life fear response in viewers by assaulting their sense of a safe boundary between fantasy and reality.

To wrap up here, I honestly don't have any idea whether any of these criticisms really apply to any of the films in question, since, as I mentioned, I haven't viewed them. I know for a fact, though, that these horror myths do loom very large in the promotion, marketing, discussion and defense of all these movies--which is precisely why I've avoided them.