Why I Don't Like Horror

Short one today, as I am in the hospital for now. I am feeling much better, and the surgical option appears to have been ruled out, but they won’t let me out for a day or two just to be certain. So, you get a literary/movie quasi-rant instead. Hey, I did say this place would talk about books.

I don’t like horror. I feel as if that is some sort of admission of personal failure that I should be vaguely ashamed of given how much press horror movies and book are getting. Maybe that is just because Halloween is coming up. But it seems that the success of the horror driven (though not entirely) A24 studios and what appears to me to be a surge of horror or horror adjacent books recently, I think it is something deeper.

Horror, I am told, allows people to experience fear about existing problems in ways that let you gain coping skills. I am sure that is not true for me. First, I know the world is shit. My younger days were a constant struggle, to the point that I would worry about here my next meal was coming from and occasionally it did not come from anywhere. To this day, I have fallout from an injury that I could not see a doctor about because I had no insurance (something Obamacare prevents today. It’s not perfect, not at all, but I assure my younger readers, the before times were much, much worse). I have been shot at (nothing personal, just wrong place wrong time) and held up at gunpoint two- and one-half times (the one half time is a semi-amusing story. Remind me to bore you with it later). I have had children shot down right outside my house. I have lost good friends to stupid wars and even dumber luck. I am well, well aware that the world systematically opposes happiness and health for most of its people. I don’t need a book or movie to scare me into that realization.

Nor am I impressed with the idea that horror improves coping skills. Almost everyone in a horror dies, excluding one or two exceptional people at the end. Look, mate, I am not exceptional. I will not be the final girl at the end of the film or one of her amusing sidekicks. I will be dead, probably in a gruesome, painful manner that the audience yet finds funny. And at the end of the horror movie or book, the supernatural or man-made evil has only been pushed back a bit and the system remains to come and get someone else in the sequel or our imaginations. What a lesson — most people die, all victories are temporary, and there is nothing you can ever do about the root of the problem.

Yeah. I feel much more able to cope with the world at large, don’t you? And I certainly feel inspired to take on the hard work of collaborating with others to try and change the underlying problems!

Look, all of this is subjective, of course. If horror movies and books have the opposite effect on you, then good on you and them. And of course, there is nothing wrong with someone just liking to be scared or to scare people. There are all different kinds of entertainment, and we need to entertainment, of whatever kind, to be fully human. I just, personally, think their benefits are being a bit oversold, perhaps in a misguided attempt to make the genre more respectable.

Come back next week when I trash another favorite genre of other people. Hopefully I am out of the hospital by then.