We have just left the time of year where we give thanks with our families, and now we are trying to scare the hell out of them. Yes Hallowe’en is almost here – the holiday synonymous with candy, costumes and horror films.
As a species we like to be ‘scared.’ Not really scared, because no one wants an actual axe murderer chasing them down a dimly lit street. But we do want some pretend fear in our lives.
“People like to be scared in what they understand is a fictional way, because it helps them manage their anxiety in other ways,” said Jennifer Hart-Weed, a philosophy professor at UNB who teaches a class called Monsters and Philosophy. “Maybe we like Halloween and we like horror movies and we like gothic novels because we know it’s fiction, and that’s so much easier to deal with than the news.”
There are books, plays, music even video games crafted in the horror genre, yet film still seems to be the go-to solution for scares. There’s nothing like actually experiencing a world through film, and horror films are definitely a visceral experience.
Early horror films like Nosferatu, Dracula and Frankenstein were meant to be taken as obvious works of fiction. In the 1970s that largely changed with the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It was a relatively low budget film that used documentary-esque filming techniques, and convinced many that what they had seen was real. This led into the found-footage subgenre the first of which was The Last Broadcast, but the most popular examples being The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
“Perhaps it’s the case that if you offer this realistic picture of horror and monsters it’s actually more frightening because it’s not the contained, obvious Haunted House on the Hill,” said Hart-Weed. “Instead it’s the neighbour down stairs, that keeps to himself, ‘He was a quiet neighbour,’ this kind of thing.”
While we are scared of monsters, we are also compassionate towards them. It seems that most monsters have something that makes their behaviour at least understandable.
“The author wants to give the audience a reason behind it, so that it isn’t presented perhaps as something which is like the news where somebody comes out of nowhere with a gun. It’s a school shooting, it seems entirely random, there’s no explanation et cetera,” said Hart-Weed.
Even if we are fascinated by these macabre visions, everyone has a breaking point.
“I teach this course on monsters and philosophy, but truthfully I find horror really disturbing and frightening. So I actually don’t watch a lot of it to be perfectly honest,” said Hart-Weed. “I’ve seen Hallowe’en, and that is really well done even though it was a very low budget film. There’s something truly spooky about it. And [The Blair Witch Project] I feel the same way about that, even though a lot of that is this poor young lady with the flashlight.”
