I love horror movies because they show me the sublime. I love them for a lot of other reasons too, I admit, depending on my mood. I don’t believe in a grand, unified theory of horror, or of any other genre of film; most genres are a welter of traditions and counter-traditions. Sometimes you want to see evil defeated by the triumphant “final girl”; at other times, by contrast, you want to see that even the most competent and loving heroines can’t win. You root for them anyway, knowing that their lives weren’t rendered worthless by their defeat.
Sometimes you need to know that other people have seen the world as a helpless nightmare factory of hurting and being hurt, and they decided to make a movie about it. Almost all of us at some point wonder if despair is the truest reaction to the world we see. Responding to that 2 a.m. question by making art (or shlock, I’m not too picky) can itself be a form of commiseration, a kind of gallows comfort that lets you know that at least you’re not the only one who’s worried.
There are even elements of wish fulfillment: I may be useless now, but in the apocalypse I’ll totally step up my game, just as in “Shaun of the Dead.” Or, as Luke Burbank put it on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”, “There really is a sort of change in the season of your life when you realize that you’d be sort of O.K. with [the apocalypse]. And when I think about the world ending…. I think: that gets me out of a couple of jams.”
But beyond these pleasures, horror can also provoke an encounter with something beyond and greater than the self, an overwhelming and unmasterable mystery. The horror blogger Sean T. Collins argues that the key to horror is the “monumental horror image,” “the things that should not be”:
He gives as examples the Wicker Man or the twin girls in “The Shining.”
This monumental horror image is one form of the horror sublime. Confronting this unfathomable image shatters our belief in our own sufficiency. We are not adequate to the world as it presents itself to us. Horror thrills and shakes us because it is a piano played with both hands, the right hand on the high keys of fear and the left on the low keys of longing.