The Bigger Themes
Is it always better for the horror genre to become more important to regain relevance?
Oh… Hi! First of all, thanks for stopping by.
This is my first of (hopefully) a regular series of articles about pop culture ideas I can’t help but overthink. Because English is not my first language, the fear of making a fool of myself has prevented me from taking the first step. That, and the tiny little detail of thinking that I couldn’t provide something of value to anyone.
Who has not felt like this before?
I don’t have a monopoly on truth, nor I’m what you’d call an expert in any matter. So then, why am I finally doing this? First of all, because you only have to check your social media of choice to realize that there are too many voices out there talking about what they feel like — and it’s not like they always have a profound understanding of the subject itself.
And before sounding (even) more pedantic than I am, I think this can be a positive thing. Let me explain.
On the one hand, every one of us has that need to communicate, and we resort to that kind of behavior because we want to make sense of all those ideas and themes. And some of those themes aren’t always vital or life-changing. On the contrary: we love to talk about the most trivial ideas because they’re everywhere and every one of us crashes with them more often than not. As the Danny Elfman song said, [we] “can’t get away from the little things”.
But on the other hand, I’m tired of all the noise. Social media has become almost an OBLIGATORY part of our lives. Everybody has something to say, but because we are so many, our messages must never pull any punches: they must be blunt and big. That’s why I wanted to write this way. To have my space. To share this cozy room with you. Instead of throwing grandiloquent headlines to grab your attention, here I can write at length, even if it’s only to make questions, instead of providing answers. And thanks to this approach, I don’t have to fall prey to the Bigger Themes.
Now, what better medium to talk about the themes that assault us than stories? I’ll go straight to the point: I LOVE genre movies and literature, especially Horror. It hasn’t always been like this, but I’ll spare you from telling you the story of my life… The crucial thing that made me fall in love with these types of stories is that it takes the things we want to keep hidden and brings them all out. It confronts us with our taboos, our fears. In that way, the horror genre talks about ourselves in a much more sincere way than other kinds of fiction. Horror isn’t usually about what we deserve or what we can aspire to; it vivisects us and shows us who we really are. Because of that, it’s a genre that upsets or offends people, and that turns it into a niche.
And you guessed it: that’s also the reason horror isn’t precisely the most laureated genre on award seasons or why some authors prefer to distance themselves from the genre (rebranding their stories as psycho-thrillers, dark fantasy or so) to avoid scaring the mainstream audience.
But in the last few years, a phenomenon happened on the cinema front… Horror movies mutated. Maybe I’m being oversimplistic here, but I noticed that there were, in a nutshell, two types of horror: the intense but vacuous Ghost Train kind of flick and the profound, socially conscious supernatural drama. The former I don’t have much to talk about because they themselves have few things to tell (and probably that’s an article for another time…), and the latter is what has propelled horror films to a new “Golden Age”. Or so a bunch of critics says.
Mental issues, the alienation of minorities, migration problems, cancer… Thanks to these Bigger Themes articulated on that new strain of cinematic horror, the genre became relevant to the mainstream audiences and better regarded by critics. And yes, I KNOW most of those issues were contained in lots of horror movies from the past decades, but it was different before: their messages were buried under a blood-red color wrapping. Those movies knew that their main mission was to scare the crap out of you in the theater and then, after you’ve experienced them, leave you with something more to think about. At least that’s what the best ones did.
I realized this when, a few weeks ago, watched Body Bags for the first time. I adore anthology films (and I miss this format a lot nowadays) and it had John Carpenter as a master of ceremonies, so it was a win-win. Of the three shorts included here, two of them were directed by the master himself and, particularly, the second one grabbed my attention. Because this movie was a horror-comedy, the whole package was supposed to be very tongue-in-cheek, but this segment called “Hair” was especially funny.
That was until it made my skin crawl.
Instead of presenting a very significant social or psychological issue, it revolved around a very “lesser” theme: the idea of losing your hair.
I know, I know… This surely sounds like a silly premise and it even had some campy B-movie tropes in there but the story reminded me of a fear lots of us have felt at some point in our life. Primarily men, probably, but lots of women too. That disdainful feeling about your body, of how you start to transform into some abject being incapable of being loved… It doesn’t have to be about your hair in particular, but about other physical imperfections you discover that there weren’t there before. It’s about the disintegration of your own self as a whole. It’s about getting old. Add some body horror to the mix and -voilà!-, the movie has you running to the nearest mirror to check if your scalp is more noticeable now or if you have a blotch where there shouldn’t be.
When the movie ends, you know that you had a great time… But that fear doesn’t leave you so soon.
Movies like Hereditary, Suspiria (the newest one), It Follows, or Get Out are as necessary today as ever (and I love them in their own right), but the more these kinds of movies stick to be important, the more I feel like the “terror” is secondary. I enjoy them, for sure; but it’s more like an intellectual experience than a visceral one. They make me learn about a theme because I sympathize with the characters and the situation they have to go through. They provide me a new point of view. They educate me.
However, because some of those Bigger Themes are so important, I experience the stories from the outside. I witness them, but I’m not as involved.
When the scale of the problem is too big, it needs more context. As an audience, we need more info to be able to understand an issue, be it socio-political, economic, or medical. Unlike mundane problems, those haven’t an instant impact on us.
And if you think this article is an argument about “keeping politics away from horror”, please don’t.
Every story is political, whether you notice it or not. Whether you like it or not. Instead, this is me complaining about some movies and how they’re used as Ted talks before they provide an audience a way to be involved. To be bystanders instead of accomplices.
Ultimately, I don’t think that’s a problem. One of the best things about horror is that it can have many forms. It’s vital that it communicates its messages so they permeate us as individuals and as a society. But at the same time, horror films should not be ashamed of being “unimportant” and “trivial”.
Some of these new horror films understand it and, like the greatest classics from the past, mix the Bigger Themes with the mundane. Watching movies like His House, not all of us would fully understand what it is to be a refugee from a war-torn South Sudan, but any of us would know for sure what it’s like to be anxious to belong when you move to a new place or the crawling, poisonous feeling of guilt that doesn’t let us sleep. And those little things are what makes us connect.
Stories are always empathy machines and, in particular, horror films make us feel vulnerable and thus, more open to feel like the characters and to understand their problems.
Maybe it’s just when they are put together with small ideas it’s easier for them to get under our skin?
Carlos P. Valderrama
@Valderrama_CP
