Horror to me comes in several forms, and pretty much always has. There is the horror that I own and rewatch when I’m bored or feeling a bit down, whose numbers are vast and whose subject matter vary. In this category I put my favourite schlock films, ranging from Jason X to Santa’s Slay. This is basically a category of cheesiness, comedy, and general goofiness that characterizes possibly too much horror these days, or at the very least a fair bit of horror. You love watching it for the bad acting, the fake blood, the naked women, the cheesy one-liners. You can quote lines from the films to no end. You basically watch them in the same spirit that you would watch Dumb and Dumber or See No Evil, Hear No Evil (not to be confused with See No Evil, which just shouldn’t be seen as it was clearly evil in its mediocrity). These are your fun-filled flicks that have almost made horror a cliché of itself at times, but you always love them. Second to these comical outings are the films that you just find cool, the horror equivalent of Lethal Weapon or Rambo. Body-count, bloodspray, beheadings, bad boys beating brutally bizarre butch buttheads, beasts biting beautiful babes, and any other b-word you can think of. Actually, the B-words are not essential by any stretch of the imagination, but the ‘cool’ factor applies. For me these kinds of films often end up looking a bit like the first category, but I don’t watch them to laugh, I kind of watch them just to take my mind of other things, just to observe the cinematic prowess on display and to be witness to the massacre someone put together. It almost feels like watching only the opening scene to Saving Private Ryan, and getting to skip the emotional bullshit that comes with it. The third side of horror is the serious one. These are the ones that might at least attempt to pose some serious ethical, meta-ethical, epistemological questions, but they might also just be the ones who focus on the humanity of it all, questioning the human condition. They might even simply be a love-story with a horror twist. It’s probably the least likely of horror films as it is also often the one that is the most difficult to perfect. These are my three faces of horror. They are not the three types of films, I should add, as elements of all three faces can be present in any given film. A film would struggle to straddle the first and the third, in that a comedy that is also a tragedy tends to be difficult to follow, but they certainly are not mutually exclusive concepts. Perhaps one should elaborate.

The reason why I highlight these three aspects is not because I want to explore them. I think we can all see the comedy, tragedy, and action that most films exhibit, horror being no exception. The key for me however is that these are the only faces I really see in horror. These are the driving factors of horror. Why should that surprise? Well, you’d think horror films would want to instill horror, and that fear was their driving factor. But I really don’t think that it is. I think that fear and horror is the desired effect sometimes, but more often than not it is not what drives these films. The horror is too subjective, too diffuse, and varies too much. More often than not you get the label “Horror” more because it deals with excess in terms of violence, or because it deals with supernatural/fantastic elements far more so than your average drama or action film would, but it very rarely deals in pure terror, or tries to use fear as its true motivation. The only real side to horror that seems to be ‘fear’ driven is the small secondary aspects that are the ‘jump’ scenes, where something pops out that you weren’t (or were, as it seems is more often than not the case) expecting to see. But horror, terror, and fear are largely absent in the makeup of horror films. Now personally, I think that is a good thing. Whenever something is trying to beat you over the head with a concept, it is almost always going to fail. When a film is trying to beat you over the head with romance and romantic notions, it either borders on the pornographic of the ridiculous. When a film is trying to beat you over the head with its intellectual prowess, it usually just falls flat as a work of total pretention being manifested by an agent who values their ideas higher than the public (rather like this article, no doubt. But I digress) and when a film is trying to just scare you over and over and over again, it just looks like a cheap parlor trick. The driving force has to be one of the three aspects I listed. The horror must almost by default come second to these three principles of trying to make you laugh, trying to impress you with the action and adventure, or trying to bring you into the story with interesting dramatic set ups and tales of humanity whilst posing difficult questions.

Having head-faked myself into thinking in these terms, it is now up to me to try and reconstitute the idea that horror is not just glammed up action, not just romance with vampires, and not just some cheap thrill-ride. Luckily for me, I’m a horror fan, I can see through my own analysis just fine. It is absolutely correct that these three things drive horror, that they are the pillars upon which it stands. However, it is probably the three facets that drive most films these days to varying degrees. They make us laugh, they make us cry, and they make us applaud. What else is new? What horror does have, and that is one of the things that I always thought was impressive, is the ability to effectively transcend some of the faces it is given, and to use the means at their disposal to create a whole new atmosphere far different from other films.

For a start, look at the first aspect I brought up, the comical aspect. I don’t think anyone denies that there are plenty of funny horror films, but I always thought it was particularly amusing that there are a lot of scary comedies as well. Comedies that are firmly comedy films but which still have these somewhat eerie themes to them and certainly can make us laugh in our discomfort. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9k9lWYwrBY is a great comedy clip whose first 2 minutes certainly repeats this concept. If we’re honest, I probably saw this clip when I was young and that is why I brought it up at all. Comedy in horror is as innate as it gets. It helps relieve the tension, but it also helps emphasize it. There are even tendencies among people to laugh when nervous or to laugh when afraid, it is almost like a defense mechanism. I know, I’ve suffered from it. I used to be really quite bad, I’d smile when I was uncomfortable, rather than remaining stone-faced. Horror never really divorced itself from this tendency. It is both the bandaid that eases our fears and the knife that cuts us deeper at the same time, a brilliant paradox for horror if ever there was one. We laugh in our discomfort, and we are uncomfortable with our laughter at times. Of course sometimes it is just nice to let it all out. With the other two themes, I think it is far less ‘horror’ and far more of every film ever made as it relates more to conflict and resolution and to character. All of which most films have. But they are still key ideas and key driving forces in Horror, so I would be remised to not have made it clear that they are one of the three pillars upon which horror stands.

Now I would love to go on and point out every twist and turn that makes horror specifically horror-able, but let’s be honest, there is no such answer. Horror will always be mutable, will always vary, and will certainly pander to different crowds, different definitions, and different concepts. Even if I had the answer to what makes horror special, I would probably avoid sharing it with you, because it might ruin the fun of being a horror fan. All I wanted to do in this short opinion piece was to point out that I reckon horror has 3 driving factors, three key aspects, three ‘faces’ as it were, and that all three are very much unrelated to horror, and very often easy to discern. The bit between these three, well, that’s the subject for a different rant.