ESSAY: What Is a Horror Film?

Let's talk, you and I.  Let's talk about horror.

The other day, I was grilling with some friends, and the subject came up.  I'm fortunate enough to live in a time and place where I can happily bicker about such things.  The argument started with people tossing around names like Aliens and Deliverance and The Silence of the Lambs.  Were they horror films?  Isn't the first one a sci-fi action film?  Isn't the second one a step-child of Peckinpah?  Isn't the third a procedural thriller?  Can they be horror?  More confusing examples came up, and people made some bold pronouncements, and so I asked what I thought was the only real question at that point: how do you define horror?

After that, the emotion faded - explaining the terms of an argument is less fun than indulging the argument itself, and we were full of beer and gearing up for a viewing of Tommy Wiseau's The Room.  The other people at the table offered some plausible definitions.  A film that's trying to scare is a horror film.  A film that lingers on the threat of violence is a horror film.  The promise of exploitation is a defining part of horror films.  One man pointed out that the separation between "thriller" and "horror" films is mostly one of acceptability.  Thrillers are perceived as legitimate, while horror, too often, carries the stink of a cultural gutter.

I think the big reason for this latter distinction is the advancement of exploitative horror that emphasizes gore and cruelty.  When horror films began, they were considered "horrifying," sure, but their violence was more implicit, their inspirations more fantastical.  It wasn't until the sixties that filmmakers pioneered explicit violence (H. G. Lewis, George Romero) and human monsters (Psycho, Peeping Tom), and after the Vietnam war, the genre got even messier.  There are now generations of film-goers whose chief idea of "horror" is gore and cruelty...not because those elements produce the most popular films, but because those elements are more vivid and assaultive, more likely to stick in the mind.

After the conversation (and the screening of The Room, which was disturbing in its own way), I reflected on the idea some more.

I've always associated horror chiefly with dread - the suspense of fearing that something bad may happen.  However, this in itself can't be all that defines the genre.  Don't most action movies contain dread as a substantial element?  Hell, plenty of romances contain dread during their second acts, when the relationships suffer the most.  Okay, then, maybe the better definition is "dread of death."  Even then, there's a lot of dread in noir pictures like Double Indemnity.  What about war movies?  Saving Private Ryan contains more dread (and more gore, for that matter) than something like Eight Legged Freaks. which isn't scary or threatening, but owes enough to films like Them and The Beginning of the End that it belongs to the horror genre.

The closest definition I've been able to come up with is this: a horror film is any film with either a significant emphasis on dread or a significant number of elements consistent to the genre.

Even then, this definition is incomplete, because "significant" is a subjective qualifier, and because the second half of the equation holds circular logic.  Horror is what is consistent to horror.  How helpful - now that we've solved that, let's move onto how the Bible is inerrant because the Bible says it is.  This inability to define the genre has more to do, in my eyes, with the limitations of genre itself.  Over the years I've come to believe that genre is a type of mosaic.  From a distance, you see a lot of horror films, and you get a broadly useful picture of the genre.  The closer you look, the harder it is to see the picture, the more distinct the individual pieces become, and the less important the big picture is.

Honestly, I think it's important to not worry about what horror is, to not spend too much time bickering and drawing lines in the sand.  Doing so can be a fun way to kill fifteen minutes on a beer-soaked Sunday night, but I think it's a better use of time to talk about the individual movies.  What they're pursuing, whether or not they're succeeding.  If they're fun or thrilling or painful.  I think all three of the movies at the top of this post could qualify as horror.  Why not?  Aliens can be a sci-fi movie, and an action movie, and a horror film.  Deliverance can be a thriller and a drama and a horror film.  The Silence of the Lambs is a crime thriller and, I'd say, a horror film.

Of course, I also think it's a tragic romance, but that's just me.