Regardless of what anyone tells you, horror is one of the oldest and most important genres in human civilization. Whether it’s literature or movies or pop culture, horror has been the bedrock of human creativity and expression since we crawled out of the evolutionary mud.
While many might consider Mary Shelly’s masterpiece Frankenstein as the birth of popular horror novels, I’m here to tell you it goes back further. Much further.
Grimm’s original fairy tales .The epic of Beowulf. The Biblical Book of Revelations. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. I can give you a thousand examples that prove horror is one of the oldest branches of human civilization’s literary tree and I’ll argue the point with anyone on planet Earth, any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
While I don’t claim to be an expert on the religions of ancient and prehistorical human civilizations, I’m pretty sure the very first stories we told ourselves around the campfire were of the monsters that hide deep in the forests and the shadows at the back of the caves. Stories of great deeds and champions were probably hot on their heels, but the monsters and villains were getting their own stories before the heroes came along.
As far as the silver screen goes, horror can trace its roots all the way back to the first silent films, where the image of a grotesque Dracula rising from his coffin is burned into Hollywood’s storied memory.
Even if you don’t judge horror on its actual merits, the genre is still a welcome pallet cleanser to everything else Hollywood has to offer (especially Rom-Coms).
But the horror movie genre is in a tough spot right now and as each new horror movie hits the multiplex, it looks less and less likely it’s going to escape the rut it’s fallen into.
True horror, genuine horror, has always had one powerful, primal ingredient that raised it above the slasher flicks and torture porn pretenders; characters you could emotionally invest in. Characters you could root for, characters you wanted to overcome the forces of darkness or human evil. Characters you sincerely hoped would survive to see the final credits.
I wanted to see Agent Starling survive her brush with the charismatic yet deliciously homicidal Hannibal Lecter. I found myself cheering for both the human heroes as well as the redemption of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (even though Dracula’s ultimate fate was an insult to the idea of the justice). I wanted to see the Warrens thwart the demonic forces terrorizing an unsuspecting family in The Conjuring (mostly because the bastard killed the dog, but you get the gist).
But this hasn’t been the case lately.
While I gave the Shamies (the worst or most disappointing movies I see in a given year) the year off, I can tell you that Hereditary would have topped the list. Even though Toni Collette’s performance blew me away, Hereditary had a lot of problems. Like a lot (no disrespect to the very vocal fan base who sincerely love it). But the biggest hurdle it failed to clear was achieving any kind of emotional investment or rapport with the characters. When it came to that all important variable in the horror formula, Hereditary fell flat on its face. When it came to the son (the primary victim in question) I found myself rooting for his supernatural predators instead of him.
(Fair warning, spoilers ahead) I just couldn’t bring myself to care about a kid whose callous and selfish neglect lead to his sister’s beyond grotesque death (like the kind that would make Pennywise The Clown wince) and then left her headless corpse in the family car to be discovered by his emotionally unbalanced mother (who was already grieving the recent loss of her own mother). That is a some next level dickishness. King Joffrey wouldn’t even try to pull that kind of nonsense and we spent three years hoping that little prick would get eaten alive by dragons. So why would I (or anyone else) root for this kid to survive being hunted by a cult of naked, middle aged white people?
(And for the record, secret cults may really want to cut back on leaving group photos lying around in shoeboxes. It kind of puts a damper on the whole “secret” thing.)
Add to that he showed absolutely zero spine at any point during the film and I would have been cheering for Polio if it had been the villain. Successful horror heroes always find their courage at some point in their story, even if their final stand against the forces of darkness is unsuccessful. A mother standing against unimaginable odds to protect her children. The victim, tired of running, making a final desperate stand against whatever denizen of the night hunts them. The average Joe who decides sacrificing their life is worth saving their friends and family. This kid couldn’t find a backbone with a GPS on steroids. When his ticket was finally, mercifully punched, I nearly broke out into applause instead of considering it tragic (the way I was obviously supposed to).
Unfortunately that wasn’t an isolated instance.
I was really looking forward to Us, listing it on the ten movies I was most excited to see last spring. I was hoping that Jordan Peele’s follow up to his 2017 breakout hit Get Out would inject some much needed energy into an increasingly sluggish horror genre that had come to rely on nostalgia (Halloween) and science fiction (A Quiet Place) to prop it up.
But I just couldn’t get on the characters side. They kept doing stupid things, the kind of stupid that doesn’t just alienate the audience but makes us cheer for the monsters and the bad guys and big Pharma. If you’re ignoring blatant signs that some seriously biblical nonsense is about to start raining down on you and your family, or trying to score with your wife when her stress level is in the stratosphere, or run towards the mortal danger for no good reason at all, well you kind of deserve the spleen-rupturing fate waiting around the next shadowy corner.
I had the same problem with Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House. I understand that they were trying to portray the main characters as emotionally damaged from their childhood experiences with the haunted house in question, but dear lord these people were genuinely unlikeable. I’m not saying they had to be saints, but none of them had even the slightest redeemable qualities. They were selfish, distant, cold, smug, condescending, gullible, naive, needy; and those were their best personality traits. Being grade A dicks seemed to be their default setting. So when push came to supernatural shove, when some of them decided they needed to rescue one of their siblings, I had to ask myself “do you really want to? Honestly, will anyone miss your jerk of a brother/sister/whatever?” Even the ghost mom turned out to be a prick, trying to convince her adult family members to commit suicide and join her in the afterlife to keep her company. Jesus, with family like that who needs Freddy Kruger?
And don’t get me started on Black Summer. The people in that show make flat-earthers look like Rhodes scholars.
The Curse of La Llorna and Brightburn were baby-steps in the right direction (though Brightburn can best be described as an exercise in wasted potential more than anything else), but the genre still has a long way to go. It’s a skip, hop and a jump away from being on life support.
I am holding onto cautious hope that Annabelle Homecoming, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, NOS4A2 and the second season of Mindhunters (not all evil is supernatural) will reverse this disturbing trend, but if they don’t horror may be destined to become a mere parody of itself. An unending parade of rebooted SAW films and nostalgic revisits of the past.
When skillfully executed, genuine horror is a perfect reflection of humanity’s true self. A sinister mirror we fear looking at but can’t ignore when it’s cleverly disguised in metaphor and theme. And therein lies horror’s power; it’s unflinching honesty about who we truly are both as individuals (would we really be the hero?) and as a species in general (how far removed are we from being just one big crowd waving torches and pitchforks?). The old adage that sex sells may well be true, but genuine fear sells more.
Ask any politician running for election and they’ll tell you the same thing.
And while its true that horror probably isn’t scary for adult veterans of the genre, it can still be disturbing, thought provoking and entertaining as hell for the above mentioned reason. That’s its value as a genre. But in order to work, it needs relatable, likeable heroes for us to invest in. It just seems that lately movie makers seem more interested in shock value, FX budgets and Shymalan-like plot twists (that don’t really work).
They’ve forgotten the basics.
Here’s hoping that someone remembers them over the steamy summer months. If not, one of the world’s most important genres is going to disappear. Which would relegate us to summers full of comic book movies, romantic comedies and Pixar flicks. And while there are some genuine masterpieces every year in most of those genres, we’ll always need a dark pearl or two thrown into the mix to remind of us of the monsters lurking in the dark.
And in ourselves.
