How I Learned to Start Loving Horror Movies

My technique was to always wear a hoodie. (Thankfully, most movie theaters are overly air-conditioned, though still I often sweated right through my clothes.) The hoodie was because, when I put a finger in each ear, that way I would still have something free to pull down over my eyes. For I was the world's most horrible horror movie wuss.

And yet I kept going to them. I never actually had to walk out, though once I almost threw up in the Union Square Theater… fifteen minutes before the previews even started. While the lights were still up.

That was for Hostel. I just read its Wikipedia entry and I had no idea that was what happened in the movie. Here is the plot I recall: some people go to a weird part of Europe! Some guys meet some pretty girls and a weird dude and go to a disco. Then a guy is on a train going home and the credits roll.

And yet I always believed that walking out was for losers, so it's a good thing I got so very accomplished at sitting with my knees up, sound totally blocked out, staring at the inside of my sweatshirt.

Here are my six least favorite things about horror movies.

1. Blood. Blood is supposed to be inside your body, hello.

2. When scary people jump out of things.

3. When not-scary things jump out of things just for the point of surprising you. Like birds. Or raccoons. Or like, a lamp falls over. That is rude and calculated.

4. Guys in masks or guys with voice distortion systems. That's because they…

5. … are always wielding some kind of tool that does something gross that is supposed to really freak you out by slicing people's fingernails or toes or some other sensitive part of the human body.

6. Screaming.

You have to admit it, screaming is really annoying.

And yet, dislike them as I used to, I never thought our huge horror movie industry was a sign of the end of our times, or decadence, or grossness or whatever. Here's Marvin Zuckerman, of the University of Delaware, from Horror Films, in 1996:

Spectators at gladiatorial contests or public executions did not consider their recreation abnormal or perverted. No Roman wrote articles asking why people enjoy watching humans being eaten by wild animals.

I mean they probably should have because, that's nasty. Anyway, this was in preface to Zuckerman's research, which found that people classified as "sensation seekers" watched horror movies to stave off boredom. And it found that people like me—the wusses—would usually begin to enjoy horror films after being exposed to them enough.

But also, people like me—the non-"sensation seekers"—chronically over-related to the victims in horror films.

I think I figured that out during a marathon watching of the Saw movies, which I challenged myself to do in one day. By movie four, I was feeling a little bleary (though I was incredibly impressed when I realized that Saw III and Saw IV were chronologically concurrent). Those movies, because they had a slightly empathy-inducing killer, helped me figure out that I was just rooting for the wrong team.

All my life I'd been projecting myself as being the one doing the running. Why was I so easily terrorized? Why did I always want to put myself in the place of the victim? This was also why, of course, that I'd always most enjoyed feminist revenge horror, films like Ms. 45.

Thing is, I'd just gotten way too emotionally involved with the Final Girl. Or in being her.

So throughout the Saw marathon, and in horror films to come, I started to actually see the appeal of being the torturer. In part, perhaps horror movies (or, you know, society) had finally acclimated me. It was only when I started to see myself as the mastermind—me with a chainsaw! Whoo hoo, butchering!—that I could put the hoodie down and actually even watch the film. In the "movie of my life," as they say in The Secret or whatever New Age philosophy you might enjoy, why couldn't I be the menacing, psychotic murderer?

I totally could! And honestly, not to put myself on the couch or anything, why was I so busy denying that I too had hostile vindictive feelings about people? After all, everyone wants to kill people sometimes. (Uh, right? Back me up here.)

So I was just like everyone else. Stephen King once wrote that "we are all mentally ill"—only some of us hide it better. (I take that as less a metaphor about mental illness as we constitute it and more as a way of saying that all minds are unique and strange, no matter what "classification" of mental health we can be boxed into by professionals—and that those of us who have been described as "mentally ill" throughout our lives in some way are not so, if even any, different from what they call "normal people." That's a good thing.)

"For myself," King wrote, "I like to see the most aggressive of [horror movies] as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man."

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