From the perspective of many, a fascination with horror might seem strange. Why would people subject themselves to media intended to frighten and disturb them? If you asked people that, you would probably come away with a variety of responses. I think the most fundamental answer has to do with the nature of art and media as a whole. They are most effective when they illicit strong emotions and reactions from us, either sadness from drama, anxiety from suspense, or excitement from action.
The most powerful examples of media remain with you long after the initial feeling subsides. Horror is not different. The reaction sought is perhaps a bit more visceral, and the lingering impact may have you checking over your shoulder for a few days, but it is ultimately an art form that conjures powerful responses when done effectively.
Now, not all horror is made equal. I would utterly disregard the majority of slashers as the genre-equivalent of generic, dumb action films. They are intended to show gore and provide a few jump scares, not to actually frighten the audience. You jump in your seat, shock and surprise override your emotional range for a moment before subsiding. You then take your friends to see the film so you can mock them for jumping at the same part you did. Thus is the nature of mainstream horror. The primary response is shock, not fear. Fear is paralyzing, not something you leap from your seat over. A consistent failure in horror films is the use of stingers, or loud musical cues that tell the audience they are supposed to be afraid. More often than not, the best horror uses silence.
The character lies in bed amidst a torrent of rain and thunder. The camera settles on them, lying on their side and facing away from the bedroom door. Lightning flashes, illuminating the room behind them. Thunder. The light cuts out—darkness. Another flash. Thunder. Darkness. Another flash. Thunder. Darkness. Another flash and the vague outline of a figure peering from behind the doorway is illumined for a split second before a blast of thunder and a return to darkness. All the while, the scene is silent.
With a stinger, or musical cue, the audience might jump and be surprised for a moment. Their heart-rates may rise before settling back down as they grab another fistful of popcorn. But silence changes everything. The silence draws your focus, demanding that you pay attention because the film won’t tell you when the scary bit happens through music. Instead, your eyes wander and steadily focus on the shadow that’s not meant to be there. The realization burns in your chest and your fight or flight response short circuits, causing your muscles to tense in a momentary paralysis as you comprehend what you’re seeing.
Terror is the true basis of horror media. It is the steady build-up of dread and anxiety. You know something bad is going to happen, but you don’t know when or necessarily what. In the cheap formula of your average jump scare, there is a false scare then a cut to silence just before the stinger erupts alongside the actual scare. The sense of surprise overrides the feeling of dread which had been building, and the tension of the scene ends. Effective horror relies on terror far more, denying the audience the relief brought by the jump scare. If only you could finally see what’s lurking in the darkness, then the dread would end and you would know. But terror denies this for as long as possible.
Horror is when you are at last confronted by that which you have been dreading. The killer appears, a body is discovered, the demon manifests. These do not need to occur as jump scares, though they can be effective as such when done well. The question remains, however, why in the world would someone enjoy this? As I said, horror evokes a visceral reaction from audiences, more so than most other genres. There’s a clear taboo in watching things that are intended to frighten you, but I think it goes beyond that. There is a sense of danger to it, a controlled sort, that can provide an immersive sense of adventure. But even beyond that, horror forces us to deal with aspects of reality that we oftentimes refuse to acknowledge.
Ari Aster’s debut feature film Hereditary (2018) is a supernatural horror film centered around a family troubled by a curse. The film is primarily interested in the discomfort and horror of grief and the sundering of familial ties amidst tragedy. There are supernatural elements to it, but the thematic focus is grief and our human inability to cope with drastic and devastating change. Much of the movie feels like an intense family drama, allowing the emotional turmoil of the characters to build dread toward their inevitable end. Horror of this sort is many leagues ahead of the usual drivel put out into theatres, as it attempts to speak to real human experiences and fears.
Effective horror, as with all fiction, taps into and participates in reality through some connection to human experience or the nature of the world. The various subgenres of horror have diverse themes, but effective examples always lean into genuine fears. My personal favorite subgenres are folk horror and cosmic horror. There is a fair amount of overlap in their dominant themes, but they diverge in several ways.
Folk horror is comprised of stories which include, you guessed it, folkloric elements such as pagan/nature deities, shamanism, and mystery cults. Folk horror stories oftentimes emphasize feelings of isolation, strangeness, and lack of belonging. Oftentimes characters in folk horror find themselves to be trespassing in some way, leading to the story’s conflict. Film examples of the subgenre are Children of the Corn (1984, 2009), Midsommar (2019), Apostle (2018), and the seminal classic The Wicker Man (1973). Recent novels I have read in the genre are A God in the Shed (2017), The Hollow Kind (2022), and The Only Good Indians (2020).
Folk horror leans into our fear of old things, things that we don’t quite understand in our cultural mindset, or bits of the past that haunt us. Characters in folk horror are normally confronted with ways of living that are deeply strange or foreign, or places that aren’t like home. The old ways are not like our ways, and that is terrifying.
Cosmic horror is often tied with science fiction, but not always. It relies on feelings of insignificance, fear of the unknown and unknowable, the loss or change of self, and the horror of being confronted with the ‘other’. Cosmic horror is notoriously difficult to capture in film, so non-literary examples are rare, but some prominent ones are The Thing (1982), The Void (2016), and The Endless (2017). It is worth noting that season 1 of True Detective (2014) has many elements of cosmic horror, however the horror is not placed centerstage. In terms of novels, both A God in the Shed and The Hollow Kind would fit within the cosmic sphere as well.
I would be worthy of all disdain if I described cosmic horror without mentioning the progenitor of the subgenre, H.P. Lovecraft. The subgenre is often referred to as Lovecraftian horror due to his influence. Lovecraft was a man with many fears, but one of the most prominent which had a significant influence on his work was his deep loathing and fear of the ocean. Many of the creatures in his stories exhibit marine features such as tentacles, scales, and fish eyes. Due to the unknown of the ocean, his stories make reference to the ancient entities dwelling in that abyss, waiting for something to rouse them from their slumber.
While others may primarily find human and natural evils more compelling in a story or even in reality, I remain most interested in and affected by folk and cosmic horror. Evils where there is some semblance of escape or resistance are less frightening to me. I can fight a serial killer, though I may lose. I can arm myself against a wild animal. I can flee from a disaster. While in each of those cases I may, and very probably would, fail, it does not matter.
The mere possibility of escape and resistance is enough for them to be lessened. They are also dangers that solely affect my body. In the cases of folk and cosmic horror the evils are, most of the time, beyond resistance or flight. Not only are they beyond the reach of simple weapons, but their threat also goes beyond the physical and into the spiritual and mental. Such threats require powers beyond our own to combat them.
Both subgenres grasp at the natural human fear of the unknown, either as being beyond our lived experience (folk) or beyond our comprehension (cosmic). The question remains, however, why horror? What draws us to the experience of fear?
As I said above, I think part of it necessarily comes from the desire for adventure, the rush of adrenaline, the sense of danger that makes the day, in retrospect, more thrilling. Horror provides a controlled experience of these sensations. More importantly, horror forces us to confront the reality of evil within this world. Whether the evil is of a human variety such as a serial killer, a natural variety such as a disaster or animal, or of a supernatural variety such as a demon, horror confronts the viewer with evils we might otherwise wish to ignore.
Effective stories cause a change in the viewer’s perception of the events unfolding within the narrative. They immerse you to such an extent that you are able to, on a lower level, suspend your disbelief, or, at the higher level, acquire a secondary belief within the context of the story (this is a topic worthy of its own post).
When applied to horror, an individual who may not fear serial killers in daily life will come to fear them deeply in the context of an effective story. Likewise, an individual with no belief in demons will find them terrifying and dangerous within the boundaries of another story. This immersion is possible and worth pursuing in all genres of fiction and modes of art. Specifically applied to horror, it forces the audience to grapple with darker aspects of reality—to be unsettled and uncomfortable for a short time in an otherwise comfortable life.
Part of the ultimate appeal of horror is in its unsettling nature. Art can be lovely, captivating, and soothing, but it can also be terrible, haunting, and discomforting. Beauty commands both fear and awe, and that which is truly beautiful is equal parts unsettling and mesmerizing. Horror, as with any other genre or art, seeks the beautiful though not via the same pathways.
Perhaps the beauty is most often found in the ways horror reveals the comfort of our actual lives. The dark on the screen or in the pages sheds light on the good in our lives, and reminds us that greater suffering exists. I think another key message to be found in a lot of good quality horror is that there are fates worse than death, and we ought to be mindful of our lives.
Horror as an art form grasps at the beauty which haunts us, the wonder of creation that terrifies us when considered another way. The beauty we witness here grasps for something that is higher than itself. Our imaginations seeks nourishment in stories of all kinds, stories that participate in the fundamental truths of reality, and the battle with fear is an enduring truth.