Not a horror freak

When I was 9 years old, long before I read Great Expectations, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or anything at all by Louisa May Alcott, my favorite author was Stephen King. 

How and why I first latched on to King remains something of a mystery to me, but I suspect that I had been exposed to the ceaseless series of screen adaptations of his books that were being produced throughout the 1980s. Back then, the movie versions of The Shining, Stand By Me, and Misery were forever being shown on television.

King himself was such a memorably striking character, an oversized, oafish man with a malevolent smile and diabolical eyes accentuated by glasses, that seeing his picture gave me a mental image of the sort of person I thought I wanted to be since I felt certain that I myself would one day be a writer. I remember wanting to move to Maine. I actually did prevail upon my parents to buy me a typewriter. You know, like the one Jack Torrance uses.

I once waited an entire afternoon to get my hands on a freshly unboxed copy of King’s 1992 novel Needful Things, which was added to my stack of King tomes at home — a stack, I hasten to add, I skimmed expectantly but not very enthusiastically. Truth be told, I found his books not only beyond my level of reading comprehension but obviously, egregiously age-inappropriate. Yes, children can tell when they’re reading something they’re not supposed to be reading, and being a “good kid,” I could never do so without a pang of guilt. 

Above all, what bothered me about reading King’s work was the genre to which it belonged. Finding it increasingly unbecoming to be so associated with a practitioner of gore, I announced to my father: “I’m not a horror freak, you know!” Even at age 9, I had no desire to be regarded as a horror groupie.

Over the years, I had certainly fed my appetite for fright by watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and, inevitably, Unsolved Mysteries. Yet, as far as I was concerned, these benign shows were of an entirely different character than the King canon. To be merely scared by a horror book, movie, or show is to dance at the edge of the terrifying while remaining, by definition, leery of it. To actually come to relish the genre, indeed, to cease to be scared of but to bask in the horror, is to cross over that edge. 

Works of art aimed at inducing chills are age-old, but many of the finest examples — say, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the collected works of Shirley Jackson, or the Universal monster movies — were constrained by past standards of good taste. More importantly, earlier books and movies were conceived prior to the development of a horror fan base that would, inevitably, demand deeper shocks and gorier gore. There was no such thing as a “horrorcon” when Washington Irving wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and 40-somethings did not dress up for Halloween when Val Lewton produced his classy slate of horror films at RKO Pictures in the 1940s.

By the 1970s, proudly grisly, unashamedly grim horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Last House on the Left cultivated the same audience that would later soak up the horror wave of the ’80s and early ’90s: These were the years of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Psycho III, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and Child’s Play 3.

These movies are neither defensible as art (because they are so inartful) nor as the cinematic equivalent of scary stories told around the campfire (because they are so poorly told). They do not even have shock value as a theoretical attribute. In a horror sequel, the bad guy/killer/demon is generally the most familiar character, and the protagonist-victim the latest in a series of bland rubes, so the audience does not wonder what is going to happen but when: When is Michael Myers going to escape from the asylum? When is Norman Bates going to go crazy? When is Chucky the doll going to start terrorizing people? The audience expects these things to happen, and far from being startled or even scared, they hoot and holler when they do — at least in the rowdy horror crowds in which I have sometimes found myself.

To talk about the damage done by a steady diet of this dreck is to invite accusations of censorious puritanism. But to deny that movies of this ilk work to deaden, harden, or at least inure a person’s sensibilities would be disingenuous. It would be difficult to imagine any serious moral or religious system in the world that would regard as salutary the consumption of horrible images simply for kicks. In fact, even America’s leading movie critics found the horror craze of the ’80s hard to take: On their TV show, critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel routinely inveighed against this fare. 

What they said was both funny and true. Siskel contended that Hellraiser II should have been re-titled Skinned Alive and that something called The Hitcher was really “nothing more than a dozen ways to chop up a person.” Ebert discussed the latest installment of Friday the 13th as an exercise in sheer, undisguised nihilism: “Just think of the message this film offers to a teenage audience: The world is a totally evil place, this movie tells you. It’ll kill you.” And here’s Ebert on Child’s Play 2: “What good can come of having such foul and ugly images pumped into your mind?” And on the twisted Randy Quaid movie Parents: “It has no other purpose, as far as I can tell, than to disgust.”

This was strong stuff, but so were the movies under consideration. Ebert was right to adopt a tone of righteous indignation: These movies don’t present a darkly complex vision of the world but an entirely simplistic nightmare in which stalkings, stabbings, and demon possessions are so quotidian, so denuded of their savagery, as to be entertaining. 

Today, however, the moralists have lost and the horror freaks have won. They have won so decisively that the genre has largely shed its formerly disreputable image. In 1992, The Silence of the Lambs won best picture at the Oscars, and in 1999, The Blair Witch Project was regarded as a cultural milestone. Most fans would have probably conceded that Sleepaway Camp II or Poltergeist III were pretty cheesy affairs, but these days, horror is high-toned and haute.

Well-regarded indie production companies like A24 and Blumhouse churn out films as stylish as any foreign film import, from Mother! to M3GAN, from the Suspiria remake to the relaunched Halloween series. The spit and polish of these productions reveals the mainstreaming of what had once been a cultish enthusiasm. The genre has become akin to a great oak tree with many branches, including “Christmas horror,” “techno horror,” and “body horror” — the last of which is evidently the category of the recent Demi Moore movie The Substance. Each of these subgenres has its own devotees, as do, apparently, even the most unspeakably grotesque of all film franchises: At last count, there were three films in the Human Centipede series and 10 in the Saw series. 

The cultivation of audiences for every conceivable variant of sick and sickly movies — from those that wrest cheap thrills from the rite of exorcism, including this year’s The Exorcism with Russell Crowe, to those in which crazy people simply smile portentously, such as Smile and the recent Smile 2 — communicates a distressing message to the public: No matter what weird stuff you think you enjoy watching, there’s a movie, indeed an entire subgenre, just for you.

Watching these kinds of movies is not akin to listening to a scary ghost story but to gawking at a car wreck — an exercise not in empathy or curiosity but sheer morbid fascination with blood and guts. With all due respect to my 9-year-old self, Stephen King looks quaint by comparison.

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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.