Still from "In Dreams" (1999)
I have had quite a few memories arrive today, uninvited as they usually do. The first one was from a movie I had watched many years ago, called The Craft, then came similar fragments from David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (another film from a long ago viewing experience), then from In Dreams, then The Fly, and finally right before I decided to start writing, memories of watching M. Night Shyamalan's iconic The Sixth Sense.
What was I remembering for each? Initially when the first memories came in, I did not pay a lot of attention. But what I realized I was remembering was how I had felt on watching those movies. The feeling taken with me had different for each film.
I looked back and was a little wistful that I used to be someone who could stomach horror movies of all kinds. Not just stomach, but enjoy. I would spend time and effort looking for great ghost stories across media. I believed (and still do) that inducing horror as an emotion (not momentary jump scares) is hard work. More often than not, horror stories go by on visual sensationalisation, gore, by working with the jump-scare impact. But not the ones I remember.
So, what makes for good horror? But for me, more important was the question, what was I missing and why?
When I had watched most of these movies, I had been quite young. I used to enjoy a lot of unsupervised time and consumed whatever caught my interest. I remember The Craft coming on Sony Pix, The Fly and Dead Ringers being shown on UTVWorldMovies, The Sixth Sense on ZStudio and In Dreams on either HBO or Star Movies. I relished watching all of these and I watched all but one alone. Watching a movie alone used to allow me to sink into the experience fully. It let me feel what I was feeling and see what I was seeing without thinking of or sensing another person's reactions or emotions. So the impact of each of these movies was heightened. But I genuinely think they had good material which is why the impact has lasted over a decade.
Horror used to allow me to make contact with the not normal. These horror movies had in common that they all focused on something outside of the usual, and the foci was always on the unusual that was unpleasant. In comparison to movies that evoke hopeful or positive feelings when showing the unusual, these movies focused on creating a sense of being trapped. In their fictional world, the audience barely escaped.
When we watch a movie, we are spectators. We are powerless to the narrative if we are interested in hearing or seeing how it pans out. With being so immersed, all that good horror requires is to create conditions that will elicit feelings of disturbance in this fictional world. Feelings of disturbance need not only happen through actual instances like someone dying grotesquely or a ghost coming out of nowhere, but they can be established by visual darkness, sounds (or their absence), introducing characters whose mere presence tells the spectator that in this world there is always a threat.
Take Dead Ringers for instance. I remember painfully little from the movie but what I remember is significant. It's a feeling on seeing Jeremy Irons' characters push each other toward certain destruction. A feeling of foreboding and suffocation that this can be a human experience.
So, what is there to miss from all these deeply unpleasant viewings? It's my ability to take a plethora of emotions, confidence in myself to be able to immerse, endure, and come out with an altered way of looking at the world. More often than not, horror movies also used to leave me feeling curious about the possibilities that existed outside the normal world, be they supernatural in nature or not, and brave. Why would I not miss the horrors then?
(There are many more horror movies that I have watched and loved and if you would like a recommendation, let me know.)
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