In a dark room, your heart is racing while your respiration turns sporadic. Your focus blurs, and you sure as shit should not be operating heavy machinery. To the unsuspecting observer, it would seem like you’re in the middle of some pretty top-notch sex. Yet you find yourself fully clothed and alone with your hand not inside your pants. You’re gritting your teeth as you sit in front of your favorite horror flick, trying your best not to jump at the sudden, anticipated appearance of a zombie on screen. You’re entertaining yourself by watching a movie with the deep-rooted intent to scare yourself— and you can’t get enough of it.
Aside from creating a false sense of circumstance to trick your body into thinking it’s actually getting laid, a good scary movie tears you away from the nuances of the humdrum of everyday life. Whether you’re watching a suspense thriller involving a knife-wielding masked killer, or an over the top B-rated horror flick with werewolves fighting zombies, you can’t help but become engaged in the fictional plot. No matter how over the top, you still allow your mind to wander and wonder if all of this is taking form in your closet or outside of your window.
There’s something wildly obtuse about the horror film genre (including all of those sub-categories that fall in between the lines). They incorporate lighting, music scores, quick action cinematography, and make-up effects into a final product that intends to unsettle the viewer. While other productions take great pains in creating something that may be visually stunning or emotionally captivating, horror films work towards bringing about a particular terror in the audience. They escape the limitations of a typical drama that demands a conflict and subsequent resolution to it. They give you the opportunity to justifiably cheer against the story’s protagonist, hoping that he’ll turn a corner and fall victim to a bloody, enraged monster pulled out of the depths of the screenwriter’s imagination. Horror flicks can kill off every major character while still leaving the audience jeering and fulfilled.
Fear is a sensation that I will embrace in few circumstances. Despite having an insatiable craving for suspense, thrill, and gore on a television screen, you will not find me in the haunted houses and cornfields of autumn. I will never enter Buffalo’s H.H. Richardson Building, informally known as the old psychiatric asylum, nor do I intend to disprove my disbelief in the paranormal (which coincidentally only appears in the darkest of hallways and the most secluded of corridors). I look to the aforementioned film genre as a means of coming to terms with terror and paranoia in a comfortable setting. It provides a safe environment for viewers to involve themselves with an emotion that would normally elicit panic and anxiety. Watch enough scary movies, and you might soon find yourself developing an addiction.
When exactly it first hit, I cannot say. Growing up around an older siblings’ movie collection, the Halloween, Elm Street, and Friday the 13th franchises more than likely set the stage. It was not until I had absorbed the expansive list of works done by zombie director George A. Romero and his acolyte successors, however, that I realized how I would much prefer a blood-ridden tale of chaos to one of more subtle dramatic origins. Stretching across multi-media platforms into video games and novelizations, I became obsessed with every element of horror fiction and, more specifically, the zombie tales that frequently accompanied it. I began to sit around groups of friends and envision when and how the inevitable zombie apocalypse would come about. To this day, I cannot find a greater entertainment over discussing hypothetical zombie scenarios and survival situations.
Horror is not a genre to be limited to the Halloween season. Expand your horizons and visit any local video store in your area. Go out on a limb one night and rent whatever looks appealing in the horror aisle. It doesn’t have to be the most gloriously advertised movie, and it certainly doesn’t need a familiar actor’s face on the cover. Grab it, watch it, and have some fun with something that might just be out of the ordinary for you. It’s a brave new world out there.
