Look, there's simply no other way to put this: I'm a big scaredy cat.
While I'll sample almost any cinematic flavor, I simply can't handle horror movies. This time of year, that becomes especially problematic. It's usually easy enough to avoid cinematic horror — that is, until the calendar turns over to October and the fear-inducing becomes the default state.
I know I'm not alone in my anti-horror stance, but I still feel like my fellow fear-averse folks are looked down upon during the spooky season. But I feel our collective perspective is pretty easy to grasp if y'all stop looking down on us with your vacant Michael Myers death glares.
My aversion to big-screen scares runs deep. As a kid, I remember hating trailers before movies because sometimes there were scary ones. I'd bury my head deep in my lap and plug my ears in hopes of not even letting a solitary image or sound that might spook me enter my brain.
It comes down to a very basic truth: Fear is a bad feeling. It's literally biologically wired to make us get out of dangerous situations. While clearly many people love manufacturing the feeling from the safety of a movie theater or their couch, the whole concept makes no sense to me. It must generate endorphins in some brains, but mine is just left with bad feelings and scarring images of things I can't unsee. My own brain can't fathom choosing to subject itself to fear over the joy of laughter a good comedy can provide.
It's not that I'm against movies that make you feel bad. I think there's value in a good sad cry movie. Films that make you cry are connecting you to humanity and empathy that we sometimes keep bottled up. It's a release. On the other hand, horror movies actively remove you from that humanity, instead tapping into the fight-or-flight subconscious animal instincts of your brain.
Here's how bad my horror aversion is: I hadn't seen the original 1978 Halloween until 2019, and my mom is in the movie! (She's only momentarily in the movie — a parent Michael Myers watches leave a house so that he can get to more killing — but still!)
There are so many classics of the genre which I've actively avoided for years. I've never seen entries in massive franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, It, or Hellraiser. I've also avoided other lauded standouts ranging from old standbys The Omen, The Exorcist and The Thing to sensations during my youth like The Ring and The Blair Witch Project to contemporary critical darlings like Midsommar, Us, The Witch, and Hereditary.
I particularly loathe slasher flims loaded with jump scares, gore and torture. I've always found jump scares to be cheap, manipulative filmmaking at least 90 percent of the time (especially when a jarring music or sound sting is added to trick our brains into thinking the image is even more intense). And scenes of gore and torture just don't fascinate me. While some horror movie makeup can be a pure work of inventive art, in general it's mostly low-brow provocateur nonsense that boils down to being something icky I didn't need to ever see.
All that said, I still don't want to be the total cinematic horror rube, so I do try to subject myself to a few movies in the genre each year around this time. It's a lot easier with some of the much older classics like Nosferatu, The Birds, Night of the Living Dead, and Psycho, since their directors are less desperate for their big scares. There's a whole section of thrillers and weirder art films that I enjoy, those often labeled horror films despite not totally fitting the template: Silence of the Lambs, Get Out, The Lighthouse. Others I've taken in because I know the directors: Jaws, Alien, the Evil Dead films, The Shining.
But my real horror sweet spot is movies that use horror motifs without scaring you as their primary objective. My favorite horror flick is Let the Right One In, the romantic Swedish horror film which moodily dwells on the relationship between a young-looking vampire and a 12-year-old boy, but is almost completely unconcerned with being scary. On the other side of that coin, I can get a real kick out of elite-level horror comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Tucker and Dale Versus Evil.
What will I choke down this year, watching the screen through the slits between the fingers covering my face? The Cabin in the Woods? One Cut of the Dead? Sleepaway Camp? Time will tell.
But I am dreading it. ♦
