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Horror addresses that which is universally taboo or abject but also responds to historically specific concerns. Both kinds of fears are addressed by the main categories of horror, as Roy Huss and T. J. Ross usefully group them: gothic horror, monster terror (overlapping here with science fiction), and psychological thriller. Because horror provides us with manageable experiences of fear, it is one of the most sustained of film genres, as popular today as it has ever been.
Horror films take as their focus that which frightens us: the mysterious and unknown, death and bodily violation, and loss of identity. They aim to elicit responses of fear or revulsion from their audience, whether through suggestion and the creation of mood or by graphic representation.
Horror paradoxically provides pleasure, providing a controlled response of fear that is presumably cathartic.
"Horror films tend to be particularly popular in times of political unrest, economic depression, war, terrorism, all kinds of domestic strife," explained Tony Timpone, editor of horror's foremost chronicle, Fangoria. "It seems that people need an escape, so they go to horror films to exorcise a lot of this angst that they have ... These films put a picture to our deepest fears and allow us to deal with these fears from the safety of our theater seats."
"I've always felt like horror films were dealing with the fears that people bring into the theater, rather than the fears that are created in the theater," explained Wes Craven, the mind behind "The Last House on the Left," "The Hills Have Eyes" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street." "They're cultural nightmares. They're literally from the subconscious, from the undisclosed, un-discerned — but felt — part of a culture. They are the expression of that, as much as they can be."
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