Inspired in part by my posts on the subject, Curt at Groovy Age of Horror argues in an pair of posts that where both the current wave of brutal-horror films and their ’70s indie-horror antecedents fail is their “overvaluation of fear” as the desired end-product of the horror-moviegoing experience, specifically the “aversive aspect” of fear–that is, more than offer a roller-coaster thrill ride, these movies want to make you feel as frightened and uncomfortable as you might during a mugging or a car accident. If I’m reading Curt correctly (and I confess that my blog-reading and -writing time these days is borrowed, so I may not be paying the attention Curt’s arguments deserve–feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), he’s saying that the fear element in the horror genre is almost like a homeopathic medication–judging solely from the active ingredient it would be unpleasant in itself, but the results of exposure are actually beneficial. In horror’s case, the benefit is “the rush of risk-taking,” what Curt calls “fear that fascinates, attracts, thrills, and pleases.” In Curt’s way of looking at the genre, focusing simply on the sort of fear that “make[s] audience members leave the theater, faint, vomit, wet themselves, or at least look away” is akin to taking homeopathic remedies to cause allergies, rather than prevent them.
To which I reply, well, yes and no. And I’m afraid it’s difficult for me to come up with a better articulation of the “no” half of that answer than, well, “nuh-uh!” As I’ve said before, there is virtually no overlap between the sort of horror that interests Curt and myself. In fact, I’d likely refuse to categorize a lot of what he calls horror as horror at all, if I were forced at gunpoint to be the genre’s arbiter. Why? Because, to me, fear is precisely the point of the genre. I’m pretty much a horror elitist on that score. In fact, in my senior essay on horror I argued for what Lovecraft deemed the highest form of fear, “cosmic fear,” as being the ideal reaction inspired by horror works. To the argument that such an ideal would establish too narrow a “standard for inclusion into the genre,” as per The Philosophy of Horror author Noel Carroll, my reply was a terse “so what?” Long story short, I believe horror scary rises or falls with its scariness, and while that scariness can attract, fascinate, thrill, and please (per Curt), it should in the end, and primarily, and fundamentally, scare. If you can’t approach a genre based on how well it executes its defining characteristic, I don’t know how you can approach a genre at all.
But on the “yes” side, I think Curt’s on to something when he talks about the “aversive” aspect of fear being overvalued these days. This is something of a semantic point, but isn’t it true that if a film truly succeeded in being completely abhorrent, no one would see it? After all, even those of us who enjoy seeing abhorrent things–well, we enjoy seeing abhorrent things. I may not be interested in the kitsch frisson that Curt’s favored works produce–that thrill-ride thing–but at the same time I acknowledge that there is a part of me that finds the unpleasantness of very dark horror to be, in some way, pleasurable. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t watch it. In the past I’ve tried to pinpoint this pleasurable aspect by theorizing that I appreciate the genre’s certainty (see also here), even if what it enables one to be certain about are that evil is rampant, that things are fundamentally awful, that there will be no happy endings. (Whether I’m talking about the movie or the real world in which it was created depends on how pessimistic, or how honest, I’m being that day.) A psychoanalytic approach would indicate that we seek out horror in art for the thrill of the forbidden (and that the fear response is simply our psyche’s way of placating our superegos for the sin of our transgression). For his part, Carroll bypassed both personal and Freudian explanations and said, simply, that “[o]ne wants to gaze upon the unusual, even when it is simultaneously repelling.”
However you slice it, there is something pleasurable about the unpleasantness of fear.
(On an unrelated note, but probably not as unrelated as you’d think, this is essentially why I can’t bring myself to see United 93–I just can’t derive pleasure from a realistically rendered account of the real terrorizing and murder of real people in an atrocity that fresh in my mind and heart. There’s no pleasure to be found there for me, even the dark pleasure of terrible certainty.)
My point is that pleasure must, definitionally, be an aspect of any work of art we profess to enjoy or appreciate, and that while you don’t need to reduce it to Curt’s explanation that fear is the pinch of salt you throw in the water of your endorphin receptors to bring it to a thrills’n’chills boil, nor should you, as I believe the likes of Hostel and Wolf Creek may be doing, ignore that pleasure entirely and aim your movie at people as some sort of punishment for either their perceived failings or those of their society or culture. Nutshell version: I do think fear is THE defining aspect of horror, and as such can’t be overvalued. However, I think fear itself is pleasurable in some way unrelated to the roller-coaster rush, or else we wouldn’t be interested in the genre, and striving to create the most unpleasurable film possible therefore forces people to derive pleasure from elements not present in the actual film, leading to much weaker horror filmmaking generally. Looked at in this fashion, I wonder if all the breathless political readings afforded these films stems from the fact that the only way they can be viewed in a non-aversive fashion is if the critic chooses to interpret them as a cudgel against political, cultural, or aesthetic forces (anything from neoconservatism to Ritalin-addled cellphone-wielding teenagers in movie theatres to Scream-style WB Stars In Peril flicks or spooky J-horror remakes) she dislikes. Whichever tack one takes with these movies, I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen praise for one that’s able to stay within the four corners of what was projected on the screen. Is that because what’s there is so “aversive” that even those who profess to appreciate them must look away?