SATURDAY, OCT 4, 2014 07:58 AM +0900
Horror movies were my therapy
As a kid, I was forced to watch gory slasher films that terrified me. But now I'm grateful for what they taught me
SAMUEL SATTIN
But strangely enough, if I’ve gained anything from blood-curdling terror, it’s been a deep sense of comfort. When I watch or read a work of horror, it’s not because I want to feel bad. Whether it lines up with the goals of those in the industry or not, I watch horror movies to feel good. According to studies performed at the Rockefeller University in New York, horror fans fall into the category of “thrill seekers,” compared with those who enjoy skydiving, base-jumping, or flirting with death in any semi-safe form. The study also concluded that horror films can raise both blood pressure and cortisol levels, and, most disturbingly, unlock repressed memories.
In his famous essay “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” the late film critic Robin Wood wrote the following: “The true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization repressed or represses.” In other words, whether you’re talking about the classic horror films of the 1930s or the modern variety, horror exists primarily to defy social conventions. And not just social conventions, but narrative conventions. Not to say that successful art doesn’t ever challenge the status quo, or that it exists primarily to cater to the mainstream. But that conventional works rely on pre-established norms.
Horror films, on the other hand, seem to be more concerned with examining, and then widening, the cracks in polite society, playing on paranoia when the barn is on fire. This is particularly true in modern horror, which deals with late 20th and early 21st century social dilemmas such as wealth inequality, sexism, immigration and terrorism. You begin with a family as normal as any other in pop-cultural representation, a symbol of the American middle class, possibly with children, and, as opposed to examining their lives, deconstructing them in the manner of John Cheever or Jonathan Franzen, you breach the home, you defile it, you tear it to pieces. You leave it bloody and dying on the ground without asking questions, and decide whether the victims are worthy of survival.
So when a dog is killed, then, as usually happens early on in a great number of modern horror films, the notion of stable society is breached. The family unit is endangered. Societal norms, heights of human achievement in this new age of civilization, have been rendered ineffective, and crumble before the primeval forces of an evil that seethes beneath us all.
A writer like Flaubert in ‘Madame Bovary’ writes about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. I write about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.”
Horror as a genre seems to think that the stable world you’re presented with is false, and the one depicted in horror films–caustic, chaotic, dangerous–is a refreshing balm for the brain. Not because you enjoy watching violence―particularly for someone like me, who cringes at the sight of actual blood–but because fear reveals more about the world we live in then we’d like to admit.
On some level, whether we acknowledge it or not, it’s possible that we all expect society to crumble, and realize that we’re living on shaky ground. And if that’s the case, modern horror tests those eerie frontiers, hoping, perhaps, that we’ll be able to use it as a tool to fight against our downfall. To survive. How many times have you heard people screaming at the screen during a scary movie? How many times have you done so yourself? How many times have you yelled, “Don’t go in there! Don’t open that door!” All as if to say that, if we were to find ourselves in the same situation as the characters on screen, faced with a killer standing behind a shower curtain or a monster lurking in the dark, we would have known better. That we wouldn’t have gone down that dark alley. That when the threat came for us, we would have defeated it.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that, if anything, horror has been a beneficial force in my life. It’s helped me tackle my fears, or at least face them head-on. In observing different ways in which the end can come, I’ve begun to feel connected to my humanity in ways I might not have been before. I find that a world in which no one is safe is more similar to the one I know. To me, horror tells the stories of ordinary people with bills to pay and families to raise and vices to fight. Ordinary people that, the more in tune with adversity they are, the better chance they’ll have of survival. Horror takes on our societal fears head-on, in grotesque and questionable ways.
Instead of attempting to beat around the bush, horror goes right for the jugular. It wonders what happens when humankind is pushed to its limits. It’s the genre of immediacy. More than just offering an audience a thrill-ride, raising the heart rate and dredging up fear, it helps those who have been hurt by this world to survive.
スプラッターものとかホラーものというのは個人的にはほとんどみないし、興味もないのだが、ホラー映画の癒し、効果について書かれたこの記事はまあ、おもしろかった。
ホラーを見る人というのは、大抵は、スリルを楽しむのだそうだが、ホラーをみることによって、自分が抑圧してきたものを解放される、という人もおり、また、ホラーのテーマというのは、社会規範に挑戦し、文明が抑圧してきたものをしっかり見据えることだ、という人もいる、と。
現代のホラーものの設定というのは極々普通の主人公の平穏な生活環境が異常な仕方で損なわれ、粉々にされるのだが、ホラー映画にとって、平穏で安定した世界こそ偽りであり、こうして危険な混沌な世界を暴露することで、脳をリフレッシュさせるのである、と。
この世界が崩れ去ってしまえばいいという思いは心の片隅にあるということもあるし、危うい足場の上で、われわれは、生活しているわけだが、この安定した世界がもろくも崩れ去ったときに、どうにか生き延びるための術をおしえるためにホラー映画があるのではないか、論者にとっては、ホラー映画は、少なくとも現実の恐怖に真正面から立ち向かうために役立っているのだ、と。
現実の人間の方が幽霊や妖怪よりよほど怖いものだが、しかし、ホラー映画で馴らすことによって、妖怪や魑魅魍魎のような現実の人間たちに立ち向かう勇気を与えてくれているのかもしれませんね。
