Are Horror Movies Scary From A Philosophical Perspective?

 

While I don’t have a fundamental opinion about a higher power, I do have one about a similar philosophical issue. I have to believe we all have free will. The idea of predestination – that all our decisions have been mapped out in advance before we were born by some higher power – is something I can’t bring myself to endorse. And if we ever found out otherwise, I think humanity as we know it would stop functioning.

I’ve mentioned this subject before in a few of my other articles, not all of them in this series. But realizing this I think that may be a major reason I’ve had a lot of difficulty with the majority of all horror films. To be sure the blood and gore is a big factor – I’ve never had the strongest of stomachs and I don’t believe in the body horror genre – but even some of the less outwardly gory films in the genre I’ve found troubling. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized that my problems may be of a philosophical nature.

Over the course of my viewing experience, I’ve found that far too many horror films are deterministic. I don’t mean the evidence of certain supernatural entities such as God or the Devil, as we see in The Exorcist and so many of its ilk. And I’m not just talking about the often formulaic nature of it: most studio and franchise films have formulas and while I have issues with some of them, it has nothing to do with the formula. It’s that more than any other genre, horror has a very dark philosophical undertone that is almost entirely deterministic.

Perhaps the most obvious version of this is the teenage slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s. In all of these films – Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13^th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre -  all of the characters in these movies were basically irrelevant to the boogeyman: Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, et al. There is a cliché that character is destiny and if you were anyone other than the monster in these movies, your character’s destiny was already written. The details – the when, where and how – were all that mattered.

Almost none of the slasher movies in the 1980s or 1990s and indeed very few of the later versions – I speak mainly of the Saw franchise – are in a sense the worst kind of horror because their presence in the film only means we’re going to witness them die horribly sometime later in the film. Wes Craven would actually visit the archetype he’d helped create in Scream and if that movie hadn’t become a franchise it would have been clever.

(Interestingly a few years earlier he attempted what was a far more intriguing meta version of this in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Featuring Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund and Craven all playing themselves he actually argued that he as a filmmaker had summoned Freddy Krueger by writing the first movie after a new series of killings began. Craven then actually began to write a script in which he told Langenkamp that the only way to stop Freddy was to make another movie. The script itself eventually seemed to foretell the events in the movie word for word. The film was well received critically but bombed at the box office perhaps because it was too serious. When Craven revisited the subject matter in Scream, he used an original story and developed a humorous tone.)

I find these movies troubling in more recent years because frequently whatever the nature of the monster, there’s often a darker tone that the people he’s targeting deserve to die for other reasons. I recently saw a version of this called Student Body which was barely had the energy to be a teenage slasher film. It didn’t even truly have the energy of a plot: a math teacher at a boarding school harassed a high school student, she conspires with a friend to get him fired, they sneak into the school and he kills them one by one. None of the characters are more than stick figures and when the truth is reveal the teacher expects the survivor to be grateful for a ‘character building exercise’. Somehow this is worse than the slasher movies: at least Jason Vorhees didn’t lecture the final girl about why she should be grateful he spared her.

I actually find The Cabin in the Woods Joss Whedon’s horror comedy that satirizes the genre even more deterministic. It’s not just that the cliché argues that these characters have no purpose other than to be sacrificed or even that its being bet on. It’s that the ‘happy ending’ of the movie implies that it is better for the human race to be exterminated rather than carry on with these slaughters. Joss Whedon’s series have frequently taken dark tones (I recently read an article that essentially calls him a deeply existential TV writer and I agree with that) but even the series finale of Angel argues that even if everything is meaningless, the fight still matters. The end of Cabin in the Woods essentially gives lie to that entire argument and its more upsetting than any of the blood and gore in the film.

My problems with determinism almost certainly explain why I have such a huge problem with found footage films. The very description of the genre tells you exactly what you need to know about the whole movie. Everything you really need to know about any of these films whether it is Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity is basically told in the opening subtitle. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the cameraperson at the end of Blair Witch .or the camera men in Cloverfield: we just know they’re not there to tell the tale.

I am reminded of Hitchcock’s definition of the difference between horror and suspense and in that sense there’s absolutely no real suspense as we watch these movies. We’re seeing the film knowing the bomb has gone off; the fact the characters don’t know that they’re fighting a ticking clock is kind of irrelevant in that matter. In my opinion it’s why The Last Broadcast is a brilliant horror film and The Blair Witch Project is just a bunch of kids running around with cameras. In the former film,  the found footage is the ticking clock and the bomb doesn’t go off until the final shot.

Other variations on this that work as horror are Chronicle (which I talked about in the 2012 films series) and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit. In that film the biggest twist is that we think were watching a found footage movie and the reason the camera is dropped at the end is because it’s a happy ending. (I won’t give it a way because I highly recommend this one.) Both of these movies do play tricks on the genre but that actually works to its benefit. Almost every other found footage films plays into the idea – basically telling you what you’re going to get, the only question is the details.

But the version of this I find the most offensive actually has threads online. “Films where the characters do everything right but the bad guy wins anyway.” This isn’t exclusive to horror but I find it most intolerable in that genre no matter how well done the movie is. The most recent example of it – at least that I saw  - was Smile. To be clear I acknowledge that it worked on every other level I like in horror: it’s opening sequence was extraordinary, the use of the force sneaking up Sosie Bacon’s character over the course of the film, driving her closer and closer to the edge, all of the fake outs and traumatizing moments. But the final reveal at the end – which was just another variation of the hero seeming to triumph over the villain just to have turned out to be beaten by the monster – negated the whole movie.

I have a similar problem with this in horror novels as well: when after all the violence and bloodshed, the characters have either beaten the monster or at least escaped only for the fact that evil has triumphed anyway. (Nick Cutter, author of The Troup, is the most recent abuser of his trope.) Every time I read a novel like this I tend to wonder: why did we have bother with this? I almost prefer when everyone is killed at the end to this.

Now to be fair I am a huge fan of The Twilight Zone in its original version and quite a few episodes of the first two remakes. (I haven’t seen the most recent one.) But the major difference was that at the end of so many of the episode Rod Serling and his fellow writers were skilled enough with their writing and character development to make it feel like a sense of tragedy. When Burgess Meredith breaks his eyeglasses at the end of ‘Time Enough To Last’ or we realize the horror the people in It’s A Good Life will never be able to escape, the writing makes you feel a sense of pathos and sadness.

Contrast this with a series that may be the quintessential version of this kind of determinism: the 1990s remake of The Outer Limits that aired on Showtime and in syndication. Originally taking on a trope similar to the original series, it eventually began to write the stories where the twists at the end increasingly gave rise to the heroes apparent triumph being a twist to show them defeated but where those endings were just the start of mankind being doomed as a result of the heroes actions. The clearest example of this was ‘The Light Brigade’ an episode where an Earth that is losing a war against aliens sends a troop of six hundred ships to fight one battle with a ship carrying a bomb that will destroy an alien planet to turn the tide. Naturally the aliens surprise the brigade and only a single ship with the bomb and a few survivors are left, all of whom are dying of radiation poisoning.

The survivors realize the aliens have infiltrated them and are determined to complete their mission before they die. Eventually the alien is reveal and the sole human remaining kills him. He walks towards the bomb bay doors with, knowing his death is imminent. Reciting Tennyson’s famous poem, he makes it to the bomb and begins to input the code. As he does so, a blowtorch begins to burn its way in. He finished the code and the countdown begins. A figure walks in.

It's a human. While everyone was unconscious the alien turned the ship around. The survivor has dropped his bomb on Earth.

By my count there were at least twenty to thirty similar stories that led to Earth being destroyed over the course of the more than seven seasons on the air. In each of them the actions of the selfishness, terror or just misguided thinking of the characters let to this destruction.  It’s a good point – but Rod Serling only needed to make it once in five years and knew enough to let the story play out in other fashion. The writers of The Outer Limits just seemed to be telling the same story over and over again.

Now I suppose some people – maybe those philosophically inclined  - could argue that so much of this writing, at least in the third trope, is making the argument that no matter what we do, we can not escape death. No serious person would stand by it after five Final Destination movies. It’s just lazy writing.

And that is no doubt why the horror films I like will be those of Jordan Peele, who mixes his doom with both humor and social commentary or the works of Ari Aster, who build slow dread where the characters don’t realize the situation they’re in until it’s too late or the movies in A Quiet Place which show sets of characters who refuse to give into fate and are determined to fight back. That is, for the record, why I was a fan of Day One which focused its story on a character who was already doomed before the invasion even began and who looked on what was happening a chance to make her own fate. The journey Lupita Nyong’o took towards Patsy was a triumph not because she survived making it there but because it allowed her to choose how to live and die on her own terms. Her fate was pre-ordained but she managed to still defeat on her own terms. No Final Girl has ever triumphed as thoroughly in such as a way as the final moment of that film. That was a victory of free will over destiny.