Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 223
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Can someone help me understand horror as a genre? I really don't see the appeal of it. I categorize it in 3 types, either it's jumpscares with loud music suddenly which would startle pretty much everyone, a slow burn of building anxiety with no payoff or just really gross stuff, neither which make any sense as to why someone finds appealing. What do you like about it? Is my categorization off, or maybe missing some angle? Am I just incapable of enjoying, in the sense of that ssc post how some people don't have that "coming as one" stadium/church/large gathering sense?
For much of horror it is an amplification and expansion of a mystery. Instead of who killed whom and why, it becomes how is this possible and how do we stop it? And often the answers will not be available but that's part of the appeal of horror that it can't answer everything or more often that it won't. You get what the story provides, horror makes it easy to be sloppy, yeah, but it also makes sure it's a genre that can allow anything to happen.
Now, what you're describing is the tone of horror. The telltale signs that show or trick the audience into believing that anything can happen. In other genres it's very rare for things not to work out, for evil to triumph, for the protagonist to lose and die, but it's accepted as part of the genre of horror. If characters can die horribly than it's more possible that important characters can die. If important characters can die then evil can win. If evil can win then you're watching something that you can't predict.
But this goes beyond plot contrivances. Unless a story goes out of its way to tone-match to another genre then horror is the catch-all bottom of the pit for anything weird. If it's time travel and it doesn't go out of its way to try to be a comedy or make damn sure known that it's scientific then it ends up in horror. Horror is the genre without a safety-net to make sure that it stays within certain boundaries. Sure, it makes it easy to have things end up worse because genre boundaries usually exist for a reason to make things more enjoyable but for a lot of people the risk is worth the reward because they crave things that are different, odd, unexplained or even gross.
Aside from the rest, the gross, the gore, is a taste that not everyone has but it's a human appetite that's really not served elsewhere but there are people that watch pimples being popped, or surgeries, or even actual people dying. There's an aspect of just straight up visceral response to the thing be it disgust or awe but just a shock out of the humdrum of thinking that someone being murdered doesn't matter or is nothing. A movie about a serial killer that strangles victims doesn't destroy is disrespect the body enough to make people care or be invested, the deeper we go the more we force the audience to get invested in what's happening. For most of Saw the people in the traps are people that are bad and a lot deserve to die but the horror at the disfigurement, destruction of their bodies, the struggle against death, we suddenly care whether they live or die when we probably wouldn't before if it was a just .22 to the back of the head or a rope around their necks. I don't like the saw movies, really, but I have to admit the entirety of the gore and grossness makes the deaths inside it feel closer to real than they would have otherwise and each successive one makes you want the next character to survive the trap(s). It's more expensive than swelling violins but it's probably more effective as well.
But I'll go back to what I said before, you're describing the tone of horror movies which is basically a costume these days and it's specifically trying to make you believe that anything can happen to heighten excitement. There are quite a lot of horror movies that aren't horror but just wear it as a costume these days and there are quite a lot of movies that are called horror just because they have more gore than is acceptable or set a large expectation that good guys can lose. Maybe tone is what horror actually is but I don't think that Silence of the Lambs or Green Room are horror just because they have some or a lot of that tone.
It sounds like you just don't enjoy horror and that's fine. Horror is the bottom of the pit avoiding every other genre's safety nets for good or ill.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link