This is the third part of a series on the cultural moment of horror
Horror is a comfortable genre.
Wait, what?
How can horror be “comfortable”? Isn’t it the genre where people are chopped up onscreen, jump scares abound, and the bad guy always somehow slips away at the end or comes back to life in the sequel? How does horror offer “comfortable engagement”?
Simple, horror is full of recognizable tropes that require little or no work on the part of the filmmakers in order to tell us exactly what’s happening in the film. There’s a full moon and someone starts to moan in pain or sprout hair on their neck? Werewolf. Two small bite marks on the neck? Vampire. Or, to take the example of the book Old Country we can immediately recognize the work of a ghost. It’s a unique ghost, to be sure, but a ghost nonetheless.
What this means and why it is helping horror to thrive right now is that filmmakers have a world of expectations already built into their audiences. Once we see that vampire, werewolf, ghost, or whatever, we know what has to happen next. A silver bullet, stake through the heart, or some kind of appeasement is coming our way.
In the case of Old Country (spoiler alert), the solution is to make peace. Granted, it’s a very 21st century kind of making peace, where the lead character really just has to forgive himself (ugh). But still, the authors don’t have to spend lots of exposition space explaining things to us. We just know, because of centuries of ghost stories, how this works. There’s even a mildly Christian theme, where forgiveness is the key to getting along with the spiritual world (granted, it’s not through God’s forgiveness of us, but there’s still an echo of the truth at work here).
All that to say, horror is having a moment because it is a genre where the culture has already done a lot of the worldbuilding, so all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the story.
That, by the way, tells us that this is a moment and not something that’s here to stay. As we’ve seen with the collapse of the MCU, there will come a point when familiarity will just mean contempt and we’ll demand more from our filmmakers. For now, however, horror is riding high and we can enjoy the ride.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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