Our loaded question for this Halloween weekend is prompted by an essay in the Chicago Tribune by Nina Metz about scary movies. Some of us like them:
Does watching scary movies — experiencing fear in a controlled setting — help people to deal with fear in real life? “That’s the other main arm of my research,” said University of Chicago’s [Coltan] Scrivner. “My colleagues and I had this idea that if you engage in scary play frequently, it helps you build certain cognitive and emotional skills that you can then — at least some people seem to be able to — translate them into other areas of their lives.”
In other words, watching horror allows you to rehearse or practice feeling anxious and afraid. And to practice not being paralyzed by these feelings. It’s not that you’re learning the specifics of how to escape Michael Myers in one of the “Halloween” films, Scrivner said, “but that you’re learning how to think and act when you’re feeling anxious.” In fact some people, he found, have been seeking out scary movies specifically as a way to cope with anxieties caused by the pandemic, even as many people — with good reason — try to avoid anxiety.
Some of us don’t like scary movies. As Metz says about herself:
I cannot watch scary movies. I know my limits. For me, fully make-believe scenarios conjure lasting fears, which is why I am forever fascinated that plenty of audiences have the opposite reaction.
For me, I don’t like most of the movies Hollywood considers scary — such as most of what is labeled “horror” — primarily because I simply don’t find that sort of thing scary. When I do find a movie genuinely unsettling in ways that keep me away at night, it will be something like the 2004 film Open Water [pictured | Prime US | Prime UK | Netflix UK], about a couple forgotten in the middle of the ocean when their scuba-diving outing accidentally leaves them behind; I find it a terrifying reminder of just how big our planet is and how tiny and fragile we are as beings walking upon it. Or Threads [Prime US | dvd UK], the 1983 BBC docudrama about nuclear war that is still the scariest film I’ve ever seen; it’s all about how fragile our civilization is, and how it could be disrupted it beyond all recognition.
Do you like scary movies? If so, why? If not, why not?
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The Question of the Weekend experiment I (re)started back in July seems to be going well, so I’m going to continue it indefinitely. But I’m changing the name of the feature to Loaded Question, just so that it doesn’t feel dated once Monday arrives.
So, many years ago, I did some occasional model building for an animator…to scale, apparent vanishing point perspective, electricity pylons, for instance, or a building that a claymation figure was going to move around. I met a lot of film nerds that way, nearly everyone of the other people who worked with this animator were, obviously, DP types, animators or comic book artists themselves. One of them was someone I didn’t like much (always drunk), but, hey, we did different work and I was able to be cordial. Working one evening with Drunk, Boss, and Friendly Horror Nerd at Boss’s studio. FHN and I are talking about cult films we like. I tended more towards Jack Smith, Derek Jarman, and Peter Greenaway at the time (still like them, tastes have expanded). FHN explains something very much like what is in that article… controlled environment, fake,…etc… I respond, “well, I have seen plenty of real blood and I deal with things and I don’t consider it entertaining.” And I shrug. He says “Yeah, well, I’ve been lucky and my life doesn’t have that.” He shrugs, convo shifts and we finish what we’re doing together, Boss and FHN go to pick something up and leave Drunk and me at the studio.
Drunk is using a large matte knife to score translucent plastic to make a new lightbox. He’s doing it dangerously, but, I’m ignoring him because he’s an asshole and wouldn’t listen to advice anyhow.
I hear “Shit” and the knife drop. I turn around and there’s blood all over the plastic and he’s doing quick panic pacing back and forth. I briefly start to turn back to my work because my brain says “It’s Combative Asshole Drunk…who gives a damn, let him bleed.” And then my sense kicks in, I grab a paint rag, pull him to a standstill by his shirt, slam that rag over his finger, wrap duct tape around, drag him out the door (ground level) and hail a cab. I shoved him in, threw money at the driver and said get him to Cabrini ER! Might have been 45 seconds from start to finish. Or 5 minutes. Time is kinda strange in an adrenaline rush.
I go back in, there’s blood all over because he had alcohol in his system and that makes people bleed more and the guy cut about an inch and quarter off his finger, as I later learned. Boss and FHN return and just stand in the door stunned. I explain I’m looking for the finger and what happened. Boss actually sees the finger because he goes to make a call (landline days) and saw it from that angle. I put it in a film bag, get ice from the fridge and put it in a bigger bag with the ice around it. FHN and I are waiting outside while Boss locks up. I turn to him and say “Remember that conversation we were having just before you left?” And I hold up the bag with the fingertip in front of his face and wiggle it a bit.
So, fuck that “practice fear” shit.
Learn skills instead and practice rapid response.
I tend to like horror movies less than the average, but I think that’s because I don’t like the types of horror movies that mostly get made. I don’t go for slasher flicks or body horror. But something like The Babadook, or The Ring, or Annihilation? Fantastic. And some of my all-time favorite media in general is horror (google the comic His Face All Red by Emily Carroll or Candle Cove for two great examples). So basically, my answer is “it’s complicated”.
Agreed. I enjoyed The Babadook since that was about psychology and maternal issues.
I don’t enjoy seeing suffering, and since much horror takes the cheap way out and shows suffering as entertainment, I hardly ever watch horror.
When I do, I have had the ability since childhood to recognize fictional horror as just a bunch of actors pretending, same as James Bond machine gunning henchmen was just stunt men having fun falling down. So horror doesn’t even work on me in that sense. The original Friday the 13th was on TV the other day, and I thought I’d see how it ended. All I could think was what is the in-universe explanation for why Michael Myers can’t be killed cuz it was beyond silly seeing him fall down, only to get up good as new.
But I love suspense, and then I let myself go and enjoy the tension. Doesn’t prepare me for real-life suspenseful situations though. Real-life and fiction are just too separated in my mind.
“Suffering as entertainment” — yes, this is the thing I hate. Thank you for those words. Honestly, for sopmeone with a very *very* high gore tolerance, I have no appetite at all for gore / slasher / stoopid-people-gettin’-dead fair. Psychological horror can be appealing if it’s done well, but on the whole, I get enough cheap emotional manipulation from the news these days. I save my entertainment time for other things.
I don’t enjoy being scared, and especially hate “jump scares” and the like. Also (thanks, Nicolas Akmakjian, for putting into words something I had trouble expressing) “suffering as entertainment.”
I don’t mind cheerful movie violence as part of an overall story, or even not-so-cheerful treatments of violence on more real-world terms, but torture, dismemberment, etc. when it’s supposed to be entertaining in itself is something I don’t like at all.
I saw someone divide “horror” into three categories: 1) Violent, gory, splattery, 2) Intense psychological horror, and 3. “Rahr, I’m a MON-stah!”
I’m not much for 1, have to be in a rare state of mind for 2, but will always be there for 3.
For years, I didn’t enjoy watching horror movies, because the conventional studio horror films weren’t particularly interesting or scary, but I love some of the newer, independent films like Let the Right One in and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Babadook, which try to turn complex life experiences into metaphors.
The scariest movie I’ve ever seen, though, was Eighth Grade.
“Scary” is a huge gray area. I generally don’t like movies that are labeled or marketed as horror, but I *do* watch movies that have scary stuff in them. There are horror elements in a lot of fantasy/adventure movies (Indiana Jones, LOTR, Harry Potter, The Matrix, and so on). The more fantastical and removed from the “everyday” the horror is, the better I seem to be able to tolerate it (I won’t watch serial killer stuff, for instance). I seem to do better with historical-period horror; I enjoyed Coppola’s Dracula (was that really horror, though? it seemed more like its own thing) and the first season of Penny Dreadful, but am far less likely to watch a modern-day vampire or zombie story. Comedy helps, too; I liked Evil Dead 2 and the bits I’ve seen of What We Do in the Shadows.
Maybe horror is a spice. I can sprinkle it on my food, even liberally, but I won’t eat a bowl of only that.
And as you mentioned, “scary” goes beyond just horror. Apocalyptic movies, natural disaster movies, stranded-and-alone movies, and other “crisis” movies are scary too, and can show how people find their best/worst selves and rise (or not) to the occasion. I don’t mind watching those.
I have always really, really loved horror movies. When I was a kid Nightmare on Elm Street came out and I was so scared to see it; I had way overprotective parents and my church always said horror movies would corrupt you. One of my friends convinced me to watch it and i loved it. I don’t know why, I like horror movies, but I do.