‘As a genre, horror doesn’t like you.’- Why You Should Watch Horror Films

To be honest, after spending a 5-hour shift in the library of reading and taking notes as my research for both; this post and to satisfy my intention to find some new existential philosophy of life that I could cope with, I lost the motivation to actually go back to the library and to write what I am writing right now. The comfort of my warm and cosy bed, the idea of binge watching some mindless reality TV shows, eating high-calorie food to increase the serotonin levels in my brain, explaining to myself that I just 'do not feel like it' and that it is 'fine' not to be writing a blog post, all seemed so much more powerful than actually completing the task that I scheduled to finish for today. The described scenario is not something out of ordinary, it is a bad coping mechanism, the safest delusion from 'what I can and actually want to do', that was missing the personal impetus to be done. "Today is the last day to let myself procrastinate", I promised to myself, "and the last day of falling into guilty-pleasures, from tomorrow on, I am totally changing!" (I've been waiting for that 'tomorrow' this whole month).

Why am I writing about my boring day, instead of talking about the topic that I actually want to present? Well, I decided to reflect on my personal failures and recycle them into exemplar points of the philosophical/psychological concepts that I want to discus in the context of horror genre.

The way of thinking, described in the first paragraph, is something that Zilboorg called ‘the illusion of safety’, which is very troubling even to observe and accept as something illusionary. My main problems do not originate only in my laziness, they arise with thoughts such as: 'no one will actually read this blog post', 'maybe people won’t like it, maybe I embarrass myself', or 'maybe it is a wrong decision to post it, since who am I to analyse, who am I to give an opinion', 'who am I to write in English, while I’m probably making grammar mistakes that I am not even aware of', etc. In psychoanalysis, these thoughts that so often pop up in our minds are called ‘character defences’ and they give us desires “not to expose ourselves, not to stand out and to embed to external commands” (Becker). In that way, we are enabled to live in our own safe ‘imagined infallibility’ of the world around us; 'if I don't post anything, I can not be disappointed by my action and work'.

Why is the world around us so terrifying, you are probably asking? The answer is simple, because we are dual creatures: “up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body”. We were given both; mortal bodies that represent the inevitable determinism and the impossibility to fight against 'fate' and at the same time, we are given our symbolic selves, our free will. Rank nicely put it together, therefore I will just quote him: “it is impossible to stand up to the terror of one’s condition without feeling anxious or fearful.”

In many ways the horror genre promises a similar experience: "the anticipation of terror, the mixture of fear and exhilaration as events unfold, the opportunity to confront the unpredictable and dangerous, the promise of relative safety and the feeling of relief and regained control when it’s over" (Carroll). This genre, even though in many ways uncomfortable to consume, makes us aware of the building-blocks that we use to construct a safe worldview in order to function and deal with the reality of our human condition. Psychoanalysts named this phenomenon an 'automatic equanimity', explaining that it is “being driven toward things that support the lie of our characters and the illusion of safety, so we could feel like we are in control of our fate” (Becker). Horror films are a digression point from this illusion, they exactly highlight its malleability. Horror genre allows our conscious-selves to process what it is subconsciously shaping to protect itself. Bunuel, for example likes to introduce a mad dog into his films and in that way break the pattern of equanimity. The dog is a metaphor for awakening from our inner need to be free of the anxiety of annihilation. Becker notes: “it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being alive.”

Again, referencing my writing, I have a tremendous perfectionist desires when it comes to the content that I produce, as well as with everything that I do. This desire is at the same time, my greatest burden and a reason to quit before the job is done. The obsession with order and perfection rises again, from a human need to fight against the chaos of his/her own condition.

The postmodern art movements, including those in the area of film have tried to break the fixation on perfectionism, but have not managed to do it entirely. We could see these kind of attempts in Italian Neo-Realism, for example, where suddenly an every-day man has the role of a hero, with all of his flaws, living in the poor and war-damaged surroundings. I would like to argue that horror films aim in the same direction, but much more successfully. The same distressed working-class is in a horror genre portrayed through the metaphor of living dead, dehumanised zombies. In Perfume, on the other hand, the same action of deconstructing the ideal of beauty into something more sublime. As Purdy suggests; an acceptance of horror is an expansion of our possibilities to strengthen our ability to live creatively. Since horrors primarily rely on visual metaphors, in that sense they make it easier for us to digest the notion of equanimity as an illusion and to be able to continue living with it, without having an existential crisis, or simply a repulsion towards the genre itself.

We can hardly resist to rely on the world not to annihilate us, and we can hardly resist trusting others not to do so. Yet, every now-and-then, our automatic equanimity experiences an earthquake of unexpected emotional traumas, failures, death of loved ones, isolation, etc. For example, a heartbreak offers this kind of an experience; a person that is closest to you decides that he/she is happier living without you, sometimes even betraying the other partner (cheating, laying, saying rude things, etc). After a breakup, you find yourself lost in the world in which your equanimity no longer has one of its core holders. Similarly, Kafka writes, it could be metaphorically possible for us to wake up tomorrow as a giant insect, we could be faced with a giant rabbit that leads us exactly to our predetermined failure just like it was the case for Donnie Darko, or maybe we could wake up one day and realise that we've became one of those non-desirable working-class zombies as in 28 Days Later. While we use an immense number of people/objects/facts to build our sense of personal safety, there seems to be a deep reservoir of anxieties capable of doing the contrary, fuelling horror. The horror genre doesn’t like us, it puts us into the state of fear and terror.

Let’s observe the opening sequence from Hitchcock's Psycho for a moment, in which the camera zooms into a random window opening of an again, random hotel, highlighting that it could be any day, any time and any place for this kind of narrative to take place. In the room, we see two lovers, spending time together, in other words, everything that we could relate to what is ordinary and a scene that is probably happening at this moment all around the globe in real world. Hitchcock slowly draws our attention deeper and deeper, by carefully building the tension. He even ironically, names a character that causes a conundrum, Norman, which could “represent normalcy: a normal man, an every-man, for whom we later find out “to have an abnormally dark side” (Carroll). It is also important to mention, how Marion, before she comes in danger, leaves her equanimity and in that way her safety-illusion, placing her in a condition of “anxiety and vulnerability” (Carroll). This scenario does two things: it reminds us of the fact that many times when we decide to trust other people, we could be facing an extreme possible danger. On the other hand, it reminds us that as humans, we need to satisfy our desire for equanimity, by showing us Marion’s fundamental vulnerability and loneliness after abandoning 'the safety'. Annette Baier warns us: "trust is like the air we breathe in that we only notice it when it disappears or goes bad" (1986, 234).

Similarly, in the Shining, Kubrick attacks our automatic equanimity as a subconscious mental process, by playing with continuity errors in a family environment. Our subconscious realises that there is something wrong about a TV having no wires and yet still projecting an image, about rooms that have windows in places in which they are not supposed to have them (if you observe the architecture of the Overlook Hotel, you could see that there are some clear 'errors' when it comes to the film setting), changing the pattern on the carpet floor in the scene in which Danny is playing with the ball... These small 'errors' won't probably be consciously registered when watching a film for the first time and that is exactly why they make us feel that there is something wrong, without being able to identify what exactly. In the end, there is also a character, Jack, that changes his personality, abandoning the trust of his family and putting them in danger. It could be the case that he is affected by some external force, posing the problem of our own mental-changes that are possible to happen and again, posing the problem of our trust to other people and safety in an unfamiliar environment.

To conclude, horror films make different epistemological points by “making these scenarios vivid as terrifying alternatives to the everyday world”(Carroll). First of all, horror films deny the need for perfectionism, by deconstructing beauty. Many times horror scenarios are placed in what we think as ‘safe’ environments, such as: “the home ( The Haunting or The Sixth Sense ), the family ( The Exorcist or The Shining ), or innocent and mundane activities such as checking into a motel or babysitting”, etc. (Carroll). Horrors also portray that our construction of illusion of safety is necessary. “Just as important, horror makes us realise that we can still go on, even in the absence of perfect certainty. The return to everyday life restores our equilibrium... just as one experiences when he/she walks out of the theatre after a horror film into the parking lot on a sunny afternoon (Carroll), or as David Hume brilliantly tells us: “there is no resolution of our fears except to go on”.

So did I, finished and published my blog post. :)

#horror #cinema #philosophy #personal #blog