For a variety of reasons, defining the horror genre in terms of fear, and judging given works on how scary they are, have seemed problematical to me. I've gone back and forth on the question, but no answer I've come to yet has sat entirely comfortably with me. Thinking I've done recently about whether revealing or suggesting is scarier, and whether comics can be scary, has helped me clarify another potential problem with that conventional formulation.
Basically, fear tends to be anticipatory. If you're afraid of some person or creature, what you're really afraid of is something they might do. If you're afraid of some situation, you're afraid of something that might happen in it, or as a result of it.
This has led, I think, to a lot of confusion in reaction to and discussion of certain kinds of horror. What do we say about horror that features extreme violence and the gruesome consequences of it? Because the anticipatory element is eclipsed by realization of the threat, horror fans understand on some level that they aren't responding to such horror with fear. Such horror isn't "scary," strictly speaking. So, purists whose understanding of horror has hardened around fear are dismissive of such fare. The prominence of gore misleads them into thinking that mere disgust is the primary response aimed at by such horror. In some instances, where the creators themselves have bought into this misguided notion, that actually may well be the case.
But in most cases, I think this view does a tremendous injustice to horror of this sort, and I think horror of this sort merits the name of horror more than "horror" that aims merely to be scary, because horror is precisely the primary response aimed at by such fare. Such horror confronts us with something worse than scary--it confronts us with something we would be scared might happen, actually happening. Just think: witnessing a horrible injury, death, or sudden tragedy in real life isn't scary; it's terribly upsetting, even traumatizing--it's horrifying. Watching a character get stalked in a movie by a chainsaw-wielding maniac might be scary, but watching that maniac lop off a limb or shove the chainsaw in his guts is something else entirely, and there's something fundamentally wrong, to my mind, about reducing or constricting one's reaction to a scene like that to mere disgust at the splattery eruption of blood and viscera.
Well, I'm just thinking out loud here. What say you, Groovy Agers?
11 comments:
I don't disagree with your definitions. But I prefer being scared to being horrified. I think that horror movies that suggest violence and make you imagine it are more effective, for me, than graphically gory ones. I think the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre is scarier than the remake, for example -- and scary is what I'm hoping for.
Great discussion. You sucked me right into it. I wonder about this often, as I write horror fiction. To me, scary involves the thoughts in your head more than the actual threat. For instance, as a ghost hunter, I've seen "newbies" come along on hunts and they enter the building already imaging it being haunted, imaging the kinds of things that could present themselves in the dark, and generally have their minds all worked up. What's in their head is scarier than the creaking floorboard. Something horrifying, however, is something actual--something that I wish hadn't gotten into my mind, like the "Saw" movie series when the lady is thrown into the vat of needles or the other one has her hands caught in a box that slices her wrists if she pulls them out. I didn't need my mind to build up into a state of terror, the visual was thrown at me and then it haunts me afterwards. Personally, I much prefer what my mind can create than what is actually seen. This is probably why I enjoy horror movies like "The Haunting" because it doesn't show you everything like you're an idiot and your mind can fill in the "what if's." Great discussion.
This discussion seems to echo that classic "terror vs. horror" distinction established by Gothic writer Anne Radcliffe back in 1826. Here's a good concise writeup of same:
http://womenandhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2010/04/horror-vs-terror.html
I think "scary," which more or less jibes with Radcliffe's "terror," can operate without a definite physical threat. Consider the classic "mummy's awakening" scene in 1932's THE MUMMY. Karloff's mummy doesn't do anything to the terrified bystander except swipe an old parchment from under the guy's nose and then walk off. But it's the terror-filled implications of seeing a 3000-year-old dead man come to life that drive the bystander insane.
Jack--the assumption I'm challenging here is that "scary" is "more effective" than "horrifying." Horrifying certainly trumps scary in terms of intensity of experience; can you articulate any specific way that scary might trump horrifying?
Autumnforest--why would you say that "show[ing] you everything" is treating you in any way "like an idiot"?!? And one of the primary purposes of art is to overcome the limits of purely mental imagination, so how is it better to let the mind fill in the "what ifs" than to go with a more vivid and precise explicit artistic depiction?
Gene--yeah, that does look like a parallel distinction with corresponding terms. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
These conversations always baffle me. Using your terminology for the moment, I find myself able to enjoy both scary movies and horrific movies. The need to basically elevate one above the other seems as odd to me as announcing that one specific genre of music is "true music" and all other suspect (something I did in high school, but I hope I've put behind me).
I sympathize somewhat with Jack and Ms. Forest's suggestions, I feel the graphic violence is acting as a short-hand for a broad lack of imagination. The first TCM is a superior movie to the remake for dozens of reasons. If you removed the gore from the remake, the movie still wouldn't be a patch on the original. I actually like several of the Saw films (not all though, there have been some painfully awful flicks in that franchise), but I comparing them to The Haunting is an apples and oranges thing: the latter was directed by a massive figure in American cinema and based on a literary work by on of America's greatest 20th century writers. It's no surprise that The Haunting strikes deeper.
I think gore is so often used by bad filmmakers to cover up incompetence that the technique is often suspect. In this, it's like melodrama. The operatic, accessible, manipulations of melodrama were often used so poorly that its use in the hands of a master like Douglas Sirk needs to be justified.
I want to write more, but I've already taken too many inches in you comment column. Sorry for the rudeness.
I'm eager to hear what others think.
I don't know why these conversations should baffle you. People who are really into something cultivate their taste in it, form not only preferences but opinions and theories about it, and develop and articulate values and ideals. Naturally, there's disagreement--hence, conversations like this.
Accurate observation, I think, that both effects have a strong basis in anticipation. It does cast a new light on visceral horror too...that the effect may be derived not so much from repulsion as from a different sort of imagination. The difference comes in the payoff (if the outcome isn't left mostly in the realm of imagination as in Chainsaw Massacre.)Gore effects are a highly developed "art form" now, with an evolving aesthetic. Whether this makes them more or less effective as objects of horror is debatable. For me, the bloody aesthetic usually overrides any emotional response and I tend to find even explicitly grisly payoffs disappointing. Of course the same is usually true when a supernatural terror is unveiled too...especially in modern film.
The confusion comes from a handful of things.
First, the debates always seem to work backwards. People tend to start from a conclusion - "I like scary more than horror" - then develop definitions that support that - scary happens in the head (though what perception doesn't?) and therefore is more intellectual - and, finally, reach the question: what's the difference between scary and horrifying?
This means that terms get tossed around with definition, so we've always got tons of vague notions and people talking past each other.
Take the idea of something be explicit. It seems obvious, but its being used several conflicting ways in the comments without any agreement. Sometimes there's an assumption that explicit = gore, with the following inference that no gore = things left to the viewer's imagination. But I question that. The shower scene is not particularly gory, but very little is left to the viewer's imagination. Hitchcock is not cloy or vague about what happens to Marion. What we see isn't a suggestion of violence. It's violence.
Second, we've got the issue of presentism. Isn't our sense that TCM is restrained in its depiction of violence a product of everything that's come after and not a quality inherent to the film? In '74, I doubt any viewers would have lumped in the "scary" category. And even now I can't see how we can really say that the violence of the film is suggested rather than shown. While we don't see, for example, the meat hook enter Pam's back, the film's not shy about clearly showing the spectacle of a woman hanging from meat hook and watching her boyfriend get butchered. So isn't the fact that it's now a "scary" film and not a "horror" film more a matter of our limits rather than a decision on the filmmaker or a quality inherint to the film?
These are debatable propositions both. (I've got more questions, all equally debatable, but these are fine examples.) But they point to two big and, I believe, unexamined assumptions that make the original question complicated.
If we started from the films themselves and set some definitions for debate maybe.
But then I overthink everything. It's nearly a medical condition with me.
One of the reasons that TCM is so often used as an example of visceral horror that works by suggestion, I think, is that most non-horror fans who see it remember it as explicit, even though it's not. Contemporary reviews of it indicate the same effect when it was new and though CRwM is certainly right that there are explicit bits in it and that subsequent horrors have rendered it even milder by comparison, I am still hard pressed to think of any post-60s horror film that does a better job of creating visual nastiness almost entirely between the viewer's ears. Only a sidebar to Curt's original point, of course...
Those are helpful clarifications, CRwM, and good points in their own right.
Drake--I don't know. When Leatherface stands in front of Franklin's wheelchair and shoves the chainsaw in, and we get the blood spatter, how is the nastiness "between the viewer's ears"? Just because we don't get a Leatherface POV closeup of Franklin's guts?
Even in that scene -- the most graphic in the film -- far more is implied than shown. It's kinda the difference between R and X in erotica...
In a later movie (or even one of the earlier HG Lewis epics), the director might well have chosen to show us the saw biting into flesh.
All of this has led me to another train of thought entirely... How much of the reputation of a film like TCM and the other pioneer efforts of that era, derive from the fact that they were much harder to see than movies have been since? When TCM was new, far more people knew it from friends' breathless descriptions of a midnight showing than would be the case today, so the key scenes in a film like TCM or It's Alive had a more widespread existence in the imagination. In the pre-video tape/internet days, there was almost a folkloric element to horror films....
Post a Comment