A Bit of Backstory

In a former life before horror, I worked in the comic industry. I had a few different jobs during my time there: sales and marketing, writer, and a super brief stint as an inking assistant. The last one was fun, but not my strongest suit.  I will always love comics, but my time in the industry is not fondly remembered. I was young, female, and as such struggled in a few ways.

What made it worse was my writing partner (not the beloved H³) was a bit known in the industry.  I was doing a signing for one of the books I wrote, and an artist asked if my partner “had me in tow” for the event.  At my own signing. It was as if I was merely there to support his work. Not a creator in my own right. It’s been over a decade and I still remember how that moment felt.

I bring this up, because while I was still writing comics, I made a short horror film. I wrote, directed, and edited it, and then premiered it at a comic and horror convention. When I got there I was expecting much the same treatment from the horror community that I received from comic professionals and fans. 

I was wrong. My shitty movie was met with so much love, encouragement, and acceptance from indie directors, actors, and fans. No one quizzed me to see if a was “real fan”.  I was just someone else to share their enthusiasm with. After spending time swapping stories of childhood favorite horror icons and on-set tales. I was hooked. Not on horror—that happened decades prior—but on the community.  In that one weekend, I was done with comics.

Back to Now

Which is why it pains me to see aggressive gatekeeping and over-labeling in the current state of the industry and in online discourse. This may seem hypocritical considering I’m writing a series where I’m defining what is and is not a slasher. I get that.  All I can say is identifying broad genre elements can help clarify why viewers like or dislike certain things. And for the sake of fun discussion. Please take “The Year of Slashers” as just one humble ghoul’s opinion.  I’m not trying to dictate anything. If you want to call Psycho or Texas Chainsaw Massacre a slasher, I’m not going to fight you on it, but I’d love to talk about it. 

What Is Horror?

The same general labeling issues apply to horror movies in general. It’s a broad category, and so often prestige movies get moved out of the horror category to sell them to audiences. Silence of the Lambs, for example, was a horror movie until it was a contender for some Oscars, then it became a thriller.  They got away with it since it’s about cannibal serial killers and not monsters or ghosts. The more human your villain, the blurrier the lines between horror and thriller. Psycho also gets this treatment. 

The flip side is those are great movies to introduce to people who associate the label horror with low quality. 

Sinners won’t have the same luck. It’s got vampires; that’s a horror movie. It’s just a damn good one. Go see it. 

On the other hand, weird, hard-to-label movies get dropped into horror, like Death of a Unicorn or Mad God. These are odd and unsettling. Are they horror? Maybe. Probably?  That’s kind of a personal question.

Horror is Deeply Personal

The Exorcist does not scare me. I don’t watch it for funsies, and I think it’s a great movie, but it doesn’t keep me up at night.  Not many horror movies do. I however am deeply over-exposed to the genre.  This doesn’t mean I’m immune.

There are things that do bother me.  The little boy from Ju-on gets to me; I don’t love thinking about him. And the short film that became Lights Out.  An old coworker and I used to effectively “rickroll” each other with the last scene from that.  Also E.T.; fuck that alien bastard.  (This is the only use of the F-word in this blog. I’m PG-13 so I get one, right?)

The way that these images affect the viewer is rooted in something personal; a memory or experience that it triggers some extreme reaction.  Some of these play off shared human fears, like being stalked by an unstoppable killing machine. Others tap into something far more specific to a group or subculture.  Some of our cult hits come from groups with hyper-specific fears, like the arachnophobes. So many great movies in that subgenre. If you don’t care about spiders, all the killer spider movies in the world probably won’t move you. 

This is one of the reasons I’m so loathe to judge anyone’s entry point to horror. They saw something that scared them and wanted more of that. I don’t care if it was The Frighteners, Monster Squad, Nightmare on Elm Street or Martyrs. I super don’t care if it was Twilight. The only important thing is that they want more. 

Why? 

And we should want more too. Any genre that discourages entry is a dying genre. We can’t live off the movies and fans of the golden age. That pool is growing smaller.  And we can’t depend on old fans to make new ones the old-fashioned way. While so many of us were introduced to horror by either loving or overly permissive parents, that’s a long game.  I want people to love what I love, now. 

Sometimes It’s Good To Be Wrong

If you recall, I was worried a while ago about too much pop culture in my horror convention. I was an idiot. At the time, I failed to realize every single one of those people who were attending Mad Monster for The Shield or Fallout, were also getting exposed to other IP that could keep them coming back for more. I love being wrong. It means I learned something, and that was the best thing to be wrong about. 

That real-world lesson is why I was so put off by the villain speech in Blood Feast. I told you I’d get back to it. It’s fine that the bad guy is ranting and encouraging tribalism. He’s not supposed to be the best example of values. The issue is that the crowd agrees with him, including our horror-loving main character. The movie also never changes that perspective. It puts forward that horror is one specific thing: hardcore, extreme, extra violent and bloody and only that.  REAL horror.  I aggressively disagree. 

Final Thoughts:

Look, we’re a unique group of people who find joy and beauty in darkness. The unconventional and uncomfortable is entertaining. There’s not a large group of people who regularly seek that out. Maybe don’t go out of your way to make it smaller?

Real horror is whatever scares you. 

If it’s clowns, slashers, spiders, or a freaky alien who looks like elbow skin: find it, love it and keep looking for more. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. 

Horror is for everyone, no matter how you got here.