Last week I was meaning to post my Writing Angles work on the horror genre, I forgot – but here it is now!

What is about William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ that has people enthralled with one eye open, what makes us turn to the next page of Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ or offer a dubious laugh at the clichéd interplay of Oren Peli’s ‘Paranormal Activity’?

Some may argue horror movies are symptomatic of the modern ere, yet a century has past since George Méliès took the first foray into the horror genre with graphic and horrifying depictions of Demon Mephistopheles* in ‘The House of the Devil’.

Over a hundred years later horror filmmakers still hark about to such early cinema, and use evolutionary fear to cause trepidation; being that of the dark, the unknown, predators and, of course, our mortality. The latter is a prerequisite to all horror films, the fear of death is so innate that even to conceptualise our death is enough to put most on the edge of their seats, a good result for any filmmaker, horror or otherwise.

Some horror films, however, explore the world of immortality and ironically this can sometimes be as, if not more, frightening than death. In Bram Stoker’s 1922 classic ‘Nosferatu’, the depiction of Count Orlok is not a converted one; a tall shadowed man with the long clawed hands and glass-eyed expression all portray immortality as something entirely abhorrent.

In modern day horror, filmmakers go beyond intrinsic fears and explore our psychology on a much deeper level, enabling them to give a once innocent image an insidious reputation, for instance, the children in John Wynham’s ‘Village of the Damned’ or the clown in Larry Cohen and Tommy Lee Wallance’s ‘It’. This metamorphosis is an unnatural one, and is engendered by such films, once more begging the question, why do we watch them?

Perhaps it’s about catharsis, the thrill, or to be ‘that’ person who attempts to prove ‘horror movies don’t scare me’ whilst cringing as ‘Chuckie’ turns a corner with a knife. Ultimately we tend to love them as they have become engrained within our society. Maybe the most obvious reason we love, yet endure, such films is the comfort we feel in knowing they’re not real, or are they…

Bridgette Adam

*Mephistopheles

Demon illustrated in early German Folklore