If you’d spoken to me ten years ago, the mere mention of a ‘horror movie’ would have me absolutely noping out of any room. I did not enjoy horror or being scared in any sense. I even remember having to put down Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets because when Harry starts to hear the Basilisk I found that too much. I was firmly on team never watching horror, ever.
Since I met my current boyfriend, a horror movie fanatic, I have grown to love a good horror movie (and even a bad one at times). We are always looking for something spooky or scary to make us jump and get our nerves a little on edge. Horror movies, ghost stories, creepypasta – we love it all and the more real or convincing it is, the better.
With Halloween approaching, I’m thinking a lot about the spooky world and what is it that attracts us to it. Why do we love to scare ourselves?
Fear is a fascinating emotion. Developed as a response to help keep us safe and to tell us to run from dangerous situations, it was useful at keeping our ancestors alive. Modern life means we are pretty unlikely to come face to face with real fear-inducing situations on a regular basis anymore, but we still have this highly developed response. So fear ends up manifesting in all sorts of unhealthy ways – anxiety, phobia, anger, control – because where we once would have seen the grizzly bear and run off, now the grizzly bear is societal pressures, or job worries, or relationship problems. It’s not so easy to run from those.
Think about the last time you felt truly scared. That cold, slithering, snaking sensation of fear winding its way around your bones. That feeling of being frozen in place, unable to think or move or act and all you can do is stare hopelessly while the object of your fear barrels towards you.
Real fear like this is exhausting to experience. Equally exhausting is anticipating fear on this scale. COVID-19 has shown us how much work fear demands from us – hyper vigilance of ourselves and the spaces we interact with, for example. So why, when we know how fear feels and affects us, do we seek it out for entertainment?
Artificial fear, such as from horror movies or ghost stories, is obviously very different to life-or-death situation fear. We have complete control over the scenario and can end it or change it at any time – turn off the movie, switch on the light, watch some YouTube clips of birds hopping around and the fear is gone. This fear is optional, and that rush of adrenaline and endorphins, the tension we feel as the story unfolds and we watch the characters inevitably go into the basement/pick up the possessed doll/run upstairs to hide, is induced by us wanting to feel that sensation, rather than us actually having to face a situation where death or serious injury is a genuine possibility.
We get buzzed off fear – that’s pretty well documented, not just our penchant for horror and things that go bump in the night, but in extreme sports such as skydiving, bungee jumping, free climbing etc. But what about when fear doesn’t have an obvious trigger? What about the little reactions and rejections we experience, maybe daily, in our bodies?
I’ve written before about how much I love Julia Kristeva’s work Powers of Horror and her ideas around abjection. Abjection is intimately connected to fear. It’s why we recoil from dead things, things that remind us of our mortality and fragility as human beings. On a conscious level, I’m not actually afraid of the slimy cheese I found in my fridge. Subconsciously, my instincts know that it is a dangerous object – to eat it or touch it potentially represents illness, sickness, poisoning, death. So my body acts to protect me, triggering a feeling of disgust and rejection towards the object perceived – essentially telling me ‘Be afraid of that! Don’t eat it!’ It’s why we retch at the sight of things that horror us, why fear triggers such feelings of sickness and nausea. Your body knows one sure-fire way to protect you from these things, and that’s to tell you to stay away by eliciting these visceral, physical, negative responses.
Horror movies have a special genre for this kind of abject-response, for people who enjoy pushing their limits of what they can stomach (an interesting turn of phrase, given that fear and abjection are rooted within these gastro-intestinal sensations). Gore horror, splatter films, slasher films – also known as torture porn – are all horror movies that focus on inducing this sensation of disgust tangled up with fear in us. Famous examples of the genre include Hostel, Saw, The Human Centipede, and A Serbian Film.
This isn’t something particularly new to human entertainment – turning out to watch a hanging, a witch burning, or a public whipping were regarded as common forms of ‘entertainment’ in the Middle Ages. It makes the moral panic that surrounds violent horror movies/video games pretty pointless, given that humans clearly have a subconscious taste for watching things that cause these kinds of visceral displays.
Feeling fear, whether that’s in the abject response form or in the chest-clenching, heart-pounding terror variety, makes us feel alive. You are rarely more aware of your body than when you feel afraid. Hairs stand on end, your skin prickles, palms sweat, muscles tremble, stomach churns, heart thumps and blood rushes in your ears. A good horror movie or ghost story triggers these sensations in you, and your endorphins start pumping ready for fight-or-flight. You feel that rush, and our brains love a good chemical rush – the more we feed our brains with these sensations, the more we crave them (something very similar happens when we eat fatty foods).
Fear reminds us that we are not so far from our ancestors after all, and our fragile shells of skin, blood, organ and bone are all that stand between us and the world. Experiencing the world through our bodies and senses is a a huge part of what makes us human, and fear plays a big role in that. So this Halloween, when you’re settling down in the dark to watch something scary, remember that your instincts were honed over thousands of years so you can enjoy a huge rush of fear from the safety of your sofa.
Personal recommendations for horror movies:
H.J.Albone Media 