The Horror Genre

Chartered by the BFI in conjunction with the BBC's award-winning Spinechillers radio series, The Horror Genre by Paul Wells purports itself as a primer for those beginning film studies and who are interested in the horror film specifically. This is problematic from the start: Film is rarely taken seriously enough and the horror genre is rarely taken seriously - add to this the fact that academic film studies are rarely more than a soft option for those looking to become grips in Hollywood and the study of horror films becomes downright laughable. This book is no exception.

Like most film study I've read, The Horror Genre looks at film through the same lens as literature, breaking it down into the same generic movements and assuming the same generic influences. It assumes that horror films are social documents, merely reflecting the values of their time. The book makes little mention of the obvious stars of the show. In fact, it spends as much time on the genre's darling, Psycho, as it does on Batman Returns - a movie wholly outside the genre. It is content to lay down a timeline, to delineate the major themes outside of film during those times, and to list the films which were made inside those times. It suggests two major movements in horror - 1919-1960 ("Consensus and Constraint") and 1960-2000 ("Chaos and Collapse") and touches briefly on the major studio movements, which are key to understanding the evolution of horror. The first thirty-three pages are wasted on sophomoric name-dropping and attempts to legitimize the very idea of horror-study by tying it to such concepts as Marxism, Darwinism, and Symbolism and such visionaries as Nietzsche and Bataille. Those pages are practically unreadable. The remaining book is a breathless exhibition as the author stumbles to provide as many movie titles into his forcedly-fluid timeline as possible. I feel sorry for the undergraduate whose course is assembled around this sorry state of affairs.

But there is something there. Something to study and discuss in the horror film that transcends the baseness of social comment and enters into the primeval world of symbols and archetypes - of God and art. There is something that speaks to meaning inside all of us, and there are horror films which are capable of disturbing, terrifying, and opening up our eyes to the very things which keep us from communicating with each other, from living with one another.

I remember in school when we first learned about the literary device of conflict and how it was generally broken down into simple dualities - man vs. nature, man vs. God, man vs. man, man vs. himself. When I first saw A Picnic at Hanging Rock - one of the best horror films ever made, in my estimation - I was shocked by the realization that none of these dualities were real. They were simple extensions of the one true conflict, man vs. the other. There is no way in Picnic to define what happened on the rock, who the enemy was, if there was one. There is little proof there, even, that we are who we are. There are vague impressions of what it is to be human, the soft-fleeting juxtaform of memory, but when the limits of that experience are reached there is terror in the face of the barrier.

Last night a friend told me that he awoke recently to find a book, which he'd left on his bed, levitating. This terrified him, because he knew that it was impossible. And that is what terror is: to be confronted with something against which your knowledge of the world can provide no traction. In that definition, there is so much available for the genre to play with, but I must confess myself disappointed with both it and the study of it.