74: On Grief in Horror Movies

I had a thought this week while my husband and I were watching the alien-invasion flick No One Will Save You: "'Trauma' is the 'content' of horror movies." By this I mean: it's easy to boil a lot of horror movies down to the idea that they're about grief, or about some past trauma, and the characters just need another horrifying incident to work through the feelings they've buried. Grief and trauma become a shorthand for What A Horror Movie Is About, so much so that we're comfortable summing up a horror movie using those terms, much like we're comfortable lumping all manner of art and entertainment under the label "content."^[1]

Of course horror movies are about trauma in some way; if horror movies didn't invoke some feeling or contemplation of horror, then they wouldn't fit into the genre. What I chafe at is the need to boil horror down to the same register, every time. Horror is interesting as a genre because it can be visceral, psychological, existential, metaphorical, or literal; it can be dialed-up or toned-down; it can be effective regardless of the filmmakers' budget. What I find scary might be distinct from what you find scary, but I don't need a fright for a movie to count as horror. Sometimes it's enough to sit down with something schlocky from the 1950s and to contemplate an otherwise frightening premise from a relatively safe angle. Roger Corman's The Masque of the Read Death doesn't scare me; it's gleeful in the color and energy it brings to its adaptation of Poe's story, holding the horror of Vincent Price's character's actions at a remove. Horror works in a range of tones and registers; it doesn't have to be relegated only to blood and guts and nonstop adrenaline. Forcing it into the box of a grief/trauma metaphor does the genre a disservice.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I wrote about Gareth Edwards' The Creator, a movie that frustrates me more every time I think about it.

What I watched:

It's been a good week for movie monsters. Last weekend I caught a screening of The Night of the Hunter on 35mm at the Gene Siskel Film Center, then chased it the following night with Fritz Lang's M at Doc Films. (Those two make for a hell of a double feature; both good movies, but I don't recommend watching them back-to-back, especially if you're sensitive to children in danger.) And finally, Josh I saw Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark on 35mm at the Music Box. Spooky season's in full swing.