A reader
named Sarah M. writes:
“I’ve noticed that you seem to
read a lot into horror movies. So my question to you is would you rather see a
deeply scary horror movie with no deeper or wider meaning, or a non-scary
horror movie that has a lot of meaning?”
Sarah
M., that’s an interesting question.
However, I think it may involve a false premise.
For
me, a horror movie can scare audiences in many ways. It can features jump
scares that pop us momentarily out of our seats, to be certain, but it can also
play on deeper, even subconscious fears that resonate across our society.
So
I would argue that a really scary horror movie must incorporate the idea of
deeper meaning, otherwise it wouldn’t scare us so effectively.
I
just don’t think you can have a “deeply scary horror movie” that doesn’t
reflect our culture, or that doesn’t play on some fears roiling in the
culture. It just doesn’t happen.
Later
this week, I’ll be looking back at A Nightmare on Elm Street, and that
movie clearly has deeper meaning, reflecting both literature (Hamlet)
and society of the 1980s, specifically the fear of dissolving middle-class
families, and the notion of the sins of the father visited upon the child,
which was relevant given the nation’s vast deficit spending at the time.
Now,
Freddy is absolutely terrifying as a stalker, as boogeyman, and as an initiator
of jump-scares, but he would not be as scary if not contextualized regarding
the influences I name above. And he is
not alone. The Tall Man in the Phantasm
movies represents a fear of mortality, and uneasiness about the “death
industry” in our country. Leatherface
arose at a time when our nation had run out of gas, and so forth.
So
I can’t really make an “either/or” choice, because I don’t believe that the
“either” that you present in your question really exists.
I
suppose another example of this idea is The Exorcist (1973). That film plays
on peoples’ fear in the early 1970s that the culture had turned away from
religion, and that, vis-à-vis Time Magazine in 1968, God was
dead. You can’t separate that sense of
spiritual terror from the scares in the film, can you? That cerebral meditation about spirituality
walks hand-in-hand with the shocks, and augments their power.
I
have often written in my books that horror films should effectively “scare” the
audience first and foremost. That’s their business. But as a viewer I desire the full-range of
scares from my horror movies, ones based on jump scares, and ones based on
cerebral terror, on ideas, on issues roiling the culture.
I
would find it difficult to name even one great horror film that doesn’t couch
some deeper meaning. You term this “reading into” a film, but I say I’m just
reading the film grammar, the text itself of the film in question.
So,
my answer to your question is that I want a horror film that scares me in a
variety of ways, and on a variety of levels.
If it achieves that, I’m going to write a good review and describe how
the film succeeds.
If
it doesn’t, I can write about how and where the film succeeds, and why, in
other arenas, it doesn’t measure up.
Don’t
forget to ask me your questions at Muirbusiness@yahoo.com
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