Horror Movies: My Take on the Genre

So I was reading this book called Shock Value by a guy named Jason Zinoman.  Said book is about the heavy hitting horror films of the 1970's and, "how a few eccentric outsiders gave us nightmares, conquered Hollywood, and invented modern horror."  It's a decent read, though it's neither as specific nor as expansive in its information as I would have liked it to be.  But that's OK because reading Shock got me thinking about horror movies I like, which got me thinking about the genre in general, which got me thinking about my friend El Lobo's blog post about horror movies.  In his post on the subject, Juan detailed the five reasons why the horror genre appeals to him.  I enjoyed Juan's post and I kinda wanted to do my own version of it.  After all, I am a child of the Internet age, broadcasting my opinions on such topics to the World Wide Web is something I can do.  So without further ado, here are the top three reasons why I love the horror genre.

1. Weird, fantastic, surreal, and grotesque imagery.  One the primary appeals of film is that it's a visual medium (duh).  Therefore, one of the greatest pleasures I get from watching horror movies is seeing what kinds of bizarro shit human beings are capable of conceiving of and visually representing on screen. Therein lies the appeal of gore for me as well.  I don't revel in gore because I'm a sadist, but rather because I enjoy seeing how people can maneuver innocuous household items to look like flesh, blood, and guts.  Plus I love how wild, loud, and vile horror film gore and imagery can be.  Subtle is nice, but sometimes you just need to unleash your imagination and revel in the excessive once in awhile.  Horror imagery isn't everybody's cup of tea, and I respect that, but my imagination flourishes in the excessive, grotesque, and oddball realms of horror film imagery and I know I'm not alone in that regard.

2.  Dark, offbeat humor.  Safe jokes don't make me laugh.  They make me smile out of politeness, but they do not genuinely engage or amuse me.  I despise most sitcoms and modern romcoms simply because they play it too safe and shoot for jokes that are cute rather than insightful.  Now I'm not going to pretend that the horror genre is always a fountain of insight, but the truth is that I simply find much of the humor in horror movies to be hard hitting and hilarious.  And yes, sometimes such humor provides satirical insight into our culture (take the undead mall patrons of Dawn of the Dead or the fake commercials of Tokyo Gore Police as examples).  But even when the humor is separated from societal commentary it often makes me laugh long and heartily.  What can I say, I just find slapstick funnier when gallons of fake blood are involved.

 3.  Iconic characters.  Sure every genre of film comes with its own recognizable stable of iconic characters and imagery, but it's the heroes, villains, and monsters of horror movies that really gain my admiration.  Part of the reason for this of course has to do with the grotesque and surreal imagery that horror films often employ in their creature design.  It's hard not to love the grotesque visual inventiveness of Hellraiser's cenobites, for example.  One also has to appreciate how iconic and instantly recognizable many horror villains (from Frankenstein to The Ring's Samara) are to modern audiences.  In today's image saturated world, the fact that people can pick Freddy Krueger's scarred visage out of a crowd speaks to how deeply integrated into our culture these movies are.