Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.
The month of October has always been a big month for cinephiles and casual movie watchers alike. Each year Halloween seems like a massive event because we spend the previous 30 nights building up to it. Pumpkin carvings, spiced lattes, late night scary movie marathons, candy bars, debating who we’ll spend one night as on an overpriced costume. All of it is a monthly ritual bubbling into the howls, chatter, and laughter of Halloween night. I typically avoid horror movies, even in the month of October, but unlike most years, I’ve spent a majority of October 2021 in the grit, grime, terror, and fear of horror films throughout history. On this run I’ve come to terrifying conclusions, discovered a little bit more about what I love in film, and how we’ve spent the last 100 years using movies as the home of soul-shaking fears.
I made it a monthly goal of mine to work my way through Universal’s monster movie classics they have to offer on The Criterion Channel. Having never seen these beloved, founding fathers of horror, the opportunity to see some of their greatest hits taught me a lot about how I’ve come to reflect on the sights and sounds of terror. What stands out the most in these films is how they spend their limited time. Nearly all of these films clock in around the 70 minute mark and a majority of the time their horror is built into the fabric of the sets they’ve built, and the moods they convey. Contrasting that to where we are now with horror, I ponder how we got to a point where horror had to be so aggressive to be considered “scary”. There are far too many horror movies today littered with loud music and sound design to elicit some sense of “fear”, but it is never particularly scary. It’s scary in the moment, but it never sits with us longer than that. Simply put, all great horror movies surpass the moment and wrestle with us afterwards. They’re more than just an opportunity to make the audience yelp, but to reflect on our most specific fears being personified.
Dating back to our earliest years we’ve had some understanding of what we fear. Clowns, spiders, heights are notorious for being the icons of phobias. As we’ve gotten older our fears have developed into being anxious about everyday occurrences, or the prospects of the future. Many of those fears still reside within the recesses of our mind and we get chills thinking about physically confronting them, but our immediate surroundings have become a force to be reckoned with. Which is something that horror was conceptualized as from the beginning. Dating back to the Universal classics, there was less of an emphasis on scary faces or blaring sound, and a bigger focus on allowing it’s spaces to elicit fear from the audience. The cobwebbed stoned walls of Dracula’s castle, the depths of a lake, the encased tombs of the undead, are all backdrops and the source of horror in these movies. Seeing how the horror genre has evolved, it’s a bit disheartening to see many of these movies obsess with inflated budgets and not allowing the environment to be front and center. After all, it is the sandbox the characters play within, and a sense of space that allows the director to harvest more fear to play with. If you look at the greats, most notably John Carpenter features, the emphasis on environment overwhelms the movie. The icy caps of Antarctica in The Thing, the suburban housing developments of Halloween, or the cornered asylum of Prince of Darkness, Carpenter lives in these worlds and allows their defined geography to play a part in how the movie scares us. Carpenter isn’t the only example, but any great horror movie understands this, and capitalizes on it.
At the same time, it isn’t what the movie looks like or where it takes place that leaves us quaking in our boots, it’s what it’s about that really gets to us. When we reflect on the history of horror films, many of them find creative ways to exercise an idea, a subject, a victim of horror that isn’t mutually exclusive to being gashed to death, but the horror surrounding us everyday. Although religion is preached as a safe space and source of optimism, there is a sense of fear rooted deep within the foundation of something as overarching as religion. The doorways into our bedrooms or safe spaces are obstructed by a masked menace. The people we love can be inhabited by a vengeful spirit. Cars can spring to life and hunt us down as can our couches or lawn gnomes. Horror can be as seriously dramatic as religion, or unbelievably silly as lawn ornaments, and that’s a big reason why it’s such a special genre of film. Every aspect of our day to day life can be inhabited by evil and the medium of film captures it better than just about any other. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark or Goosebumps can be haunting considering we birth images to life from our mind (and what’s more unnerving than our own thoughts), but watching films bring them to life is a different ballgame. Especially when they can force us to be unsettled for hours on end. I’ve often considered the horror genre to be the best for that reason.
No other genre of film can harness the ability to make us cower in fear as well as make us shed a tear. Not because we’ve been scared to death, but the fact that horror is an encapsulation of a universal emotion every single time. It’s not so much that something in a horror film happened to scare us, it’s the fact that something could happen that scares us. Is there a monster in the closet? A slasher down the street? A ghost in the attic? A demon in our sleep? In these films we turn corners and shuffle through narrow hallways to face the greatest fears artistic minds can conjure up. At the same time, horror films are a terrifying reflection of us, what we’ve created, what we could become, and what can be done unto others. Think about it. Freddy Krueger is a completely different outlet of horror compared to the ghosts of Paranormal Activity or the cult of Midsommar, but why do we always choose to face these fears? What about horror films drive us to the marathons or annual rewatches of the greatest hits or cult classics? It’s a mixed bag of variables, but I lend it to the fact that we sympathize with this happening to other people. If movies are a medium that allow us to physically and emotionally react with characters on a screen, then horror films do it better than the rest. Not only are the characters scared, but the audience is as well. We are scared for them, just as much as we are for ourselves, and that is overwhelmingly transcendent. Afterwards we recollect on situations we don’t ever want to be a part of. We nitpick some silly tropes and cliches. We riff on cheesy one-liners or underwhelming visual effects. At the end of the day we’ve experienced something so inhuman, vile, or emotionally upsetting that it upends everything we thought movies were capable of. That’s special, and it’s because we yearn for it.
As I wrap up I’m left pondering not just what my favorite horror films are (Alien, The Shining, The Thing for good measure), but why we obsess over Halloween night. Is it the rabid sugar rush? Maybe. More than should be revealing costumes? Unlikely. Bobbing for apples? Who still does that? What it is is creativity. The costumes, decorations, haunted houses, the slight chill of a late October night getting in between our clothes, the music, the maniacal laughter of children. It’s all ambience worth being a part of because it’s monumentally universal. It’s the only holiday besides New Year’s that transcends our personal circles filled with family and close friends. There’s something special about it. All of that reflects how we gather around a screen together hooting and hollering over unforgettable kills, scary masks, chilling music, and the evil that lurks in and around us.
Happy Halloween!
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