A friend of mine went to see Candyman, and after the movie said it was one of the best films they’d seen all year, but that “it wasn’t scary”. It was a very curious comment to me, because after all, “being scary” is one of Candyman’s primary aims. Yet this friend still liked the movie a lot, in spite of it not meeting that criteria for them. Why? Did it still even succeed as a horror movie? Would such a person then even consider it as such?
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Of course what one person may find scary, another won’t. What defines something as scary is likewise up to interpretation. I’ve called many films scary that didn’t illicit any kind of physical or emotional reaction in me, but I found them harrowing enough on another deep or psychological level that I don’t mind using that term to discuss them. However, generally the word “scary” does insinuate some kind of visceral response. If something is scary it alarms you, it startles you, it catches you unawares -it suggests a tangible reaction. Jordan Peele, who incidentally produced and co-wrote Candyman, compared the act of scaring people to making them laugh -both forms of performance, indeed perhaps the only forms of performance, that when done well evoke a material or vocal reception. Hence it’s why he gravitates to the media genres of comedy and horror.
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Horror movies can be very fun when they scare at that innate guttural level -especially when seen with a group. If even the worst horror movies can pull off one good scare like that it can have a great effect on the viewing experience. But whether that translates to the movie itself being great is another matter, and is dependent on what a particular audience seeks to get out of a horror movie. For some, the sensation of a scare might be enough, especially at this time of the year when folks are looking to be terrified. And there are thousands of movies that will do to fulfil that need, give you that rush of dopamine by startling you in an unexpected way -in the way a themed haunted house or corn maze might. But horror maybe doesn’t need to be about that.
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What is the purpose of a horror movie? One of its’ most common denominators, the “jump scare”, was hardly a thing when the first horror films were being produced in the early 1900s. They took their cues more from the conventions of literature, theatre, and music. From the former they looked to plot, drawing on those of gothic stories that focused on macabre ideas, cautionary social implications, and classical anxieties around the unknown -mere suggestions that could scandalize an audience of that time. Matching this with the unique visual components of film to achieve the desired response though became about conveying a mood. And these early filmmakers used every tool at their disposal, developing techniques in editing and set design, lighting and make-up, and a particular kind of music to be sold to the theatre organist to play alongside the film before the advent of sound. These all had their roots in chamber and opera music, early modern and expressionist painting, performance styles like mime, melodrama, Noh theatre in Japan. And in concert, they created a template of cinematic horror: the uncanny, the mood of the imagination made real. Perhaps the greatest and best known early horror film, The Cabinet of Caligari, even incorporated stylized title cards to match the extremities of its designs. Anything to give the audience that creeping feeling of a pervasive kind they hadn’t experienced before through one of cinemas’ myriad predecessors.
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As the genre evolved, this focus shifted slightly to emphasize novelty. The cycle of Universal monster movies began –adaptations of novels, pulp fictions, or folkloric tales based around a singular anomalous figure with a feature that would shock audiences. They didn’t even have to be traditional horror stories. The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were included in a canon alongside Frankenstein and The Wolf Man because their protagonists had notable physical deformities that played into the public's fear and fascination with the “abnormal” (freak shows were still quite popular to the point that even a generally sympathetic portrait like Tod Browning’s Freaks was labeled as horror –banned even in certain markets for being “too grotesque”). It is perhaps here where shock first became a new primary theme of horror films. Because people reacted viscerally to the effects of intense, spectacular make-up and dramatic performance choices, horror became about seeing something you’ve never seen before –as much as the standards of 1930s Hollywood would allow. It’s not necessarily a better or worse priority than what came before, just different –and indeed there were shocks in a lot of those early silent movies and plenty of creeping atmosphere in the studio sound flicks.
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More or less though, it was shock value that prevailed as the way forward for horror, especially once the Production Code ceased to be a factor in a movies’ choice of content. Those movies that relied more on dread and mood were demoted to mere thrillers -horror needed to challenge your comfort to be effective. Horror premises got more ambitious, more taboo -Psycho and to a lesser degree Peeping Tom (both 1960) changed the game with distinctly human terrors rooted in identifiable yet aberrant notions of Freudianism, voyeurism, and mental illness. But also they were more violent –they featured more murder and a greater graphic depiction of it. And it worked. Psycho reportedly provoked all manner of sharp audience reactions, from the typical screams and walk-outs to even some people fainting or vomiting; the police were called in at multiple screenings and one critic was prompted to resign in disgust. But it brought attention to the movie and for better or worse, charted the path of the popular horror movie genre from that point on. Slasher movies, body horror, torture porn –every subgenre that has come since has DNA reaching back to this movement in the early 1960s. Even where gore or violence is not involved, the tactics of shock are still employed. And the people making horror movies understand the efficacy of jolting the audience.
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But much like the kid jumping out of a closet to scare their sibling, these kind of scares are rather easy to produce. And indeed the genre has been criticized for decades now of relying on such cheap scares to produce a reaction some audience members would mistake for good. It’s not fair of course as an indictment of the genre itself, but there are still too many that indulge in lame tricks and misdirects that are almost never as smart as they intend. The list of truly great jump scares is not very long, and usually they require the scare to be creatively executed, intrepidly shot -that popular one from The Exorcist III being a great example. These are the rarity though it seems, and those horror filmmakers who fill their work out with jump scares seem unconfident, or under the impression it’s what does the job -which surely it doesn’t. Yet it brings back the question: if such moments do achieve that sought-after audience response, does that mean that the horror movie is successful? On some level I believe that it does, but at the same time doesn’t achieve anything more. Countless movies have limited themselves to the bare minimum of what can be expected from a horror film. If a movie gives you a scare, that’s fine, but perhaps movies should aspire to deeper, more lasting ways to horrify you as well. After all, what weight does a scare really have if it doesn’t connect with you beyond the surface?
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And that’s why this new trend of social horror is exciting, because it does penetrate deeper. It connects its’ elements of horror to pervading anxieties embedded within our society. Horror that has that touch of the real, the tangible, and that reflects as much as it scares …making it even more scary. Jordan Peele was not the first to begin this movement, but he was by far the most influential. Get Out works so well because it’s not typically scary on its’ surface -especially for white people. But as it digs into the racial politics behind everything that is going on, as it makes you think about your perspective and your own unconscious biases it becomes that much more frightening. The much-referenced “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could” line would not have sounded so awkward to many white people prior to the movie. They would not have had to confront what a line like that is really saying. Peele works primarily in these metaphors for race in America, as does Nia DaCosta on her Candyman. But social horror does reach in other directions. Another extremely effective example would be last years’ The Platform, which tackles the horror of class and food insecurity by making literal our economy’s top-down structure of essential resources. It’s a terrifying dystopia to those of us with privilege, a mere dramatic mirror for those left alone at the bottom rungs of capitalism.
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This horror is arguably still shocking, but at a slower pace, less sudden and spontaneous –yet its’ shock value doesn’t wear off so easily. Nobody remembers Escape Room or Annabelle Comes Home or the Pet Sematary remake –but from that same year they do remember Ready or Not, Midsommar, and Us –none of which have much in the way of typical horror scares. And it makes sense that the major horror producers of our day, namely A24 and Blumhouse, would latch on to horror projects that have these kinds of ambitions as opposed to the less inventive ones that offer nothing new. Under Blumhouse, even an old guard revamp like Halloween Kills tries to say something meaningful -it’s failure to competently do so suggesting an incompatibility of two approaches.
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It also adequately reflects where a lot of western culture currently is, and horror has always been good at tapping into the zeitgeist of societal fears. In the last decade we’ve been gradually becoming more conscious of the fault lines in our systems of power and privilege, in how we identify and comprehend our relationships to each other and the world. And it has informed the topics of our horror and how it is illustrated. Get Out would not have been made before the 2010s, our conversation on race was not there yet. We’ve also become significantly desensitized to scares. Very few people coming to Psycho for the first time today would consider it scary. I’ve introduced it to a few myself and they’ve confirmed as much. The shower scene is so iconic and so parodied that its’ lost some of its’ impact, the secret peephole is less disturbing when matched against various other perversities the horror genre has since spotlighted, and the frightfulness of Normans’ transvestism has diminished considerably to simply being a touchstone in the history of problematic media images of gender non-conformity. That’s to say nothing of the even older Universal cycle, which next to nobody would be scared by anymore. And even a lot of slashers and gore-fests of the 70s and 80s, which pushed the envelope for shock at the time, feel often tame and rote to audiences today. So horror has had to move away and redefine itself to maintain relevancy; it’s had to broaden its’ reach, its’ creativity and purpose. Scare in new ways that in the moment may not seem so scary, but might just terrify you more as you think about them.
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So I guess horror does need to be scary, but the degree to which it defines its’ scariness can be limitless. One good example of a horror movie that I think encompassed the best of both worlds recently (as in it was both full of dramatic shocks and more disturbing thematic undercurrents) was The Night House. But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the model to which horror movies aspire. Horror can scare the shit out of you in a movie theatre, but it can also gnaw away at your subconscious through themes or mood; it can also do a bit of both. The best horror movies coming out these days tend to be the ones that aren’t scary in that traditional sense, but terrify the more deeply they are considered, the more you are made to sit with them. The films of Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jennifer Kent, Mike Flanagan, and perhaps now Nia DaCosta do this with aplomb. If they don’t necessarily send a shiver down your spine or jolt you out of your seat, it doesn’t mean they’re not scary. As long as you can comprehend where the horror is coming from and what it is saying, they have done their job. And perchance, that’ll scare the pants off you!
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