Monsters Under Our Beds: Why We Love Horror Movies

There are fears so universal that we seem born to them. The most universal of all fears, crossing every cultural barrier, is the fear of death. Fear of the ultimate unknown. It's been said that more people claim fear spiders and flying in an airplane than fear death. But that statistic is misleading. We don't fear spiders, delicate creatures so easily crushed. We fear their bite, fear hypodermic fangs sending a rush of venom through our bloodstream, racing for our heart to still it. And we don't truly fear flying in an airplane, we fear that dreaded accident, either human or mechanical error, that sends us plummeting from the sky which is not our home.

Horror movies, no matter what their sub-genre, budget or message, play on our fear of death. Awareness of our own mortality is both our gift and our curse. We must live our lives every day with the knowledge that they will end. We fear death by natural causes, by accident, perhaps most of all we fear death by violence, and the pain and terror such a death would certainly hold. It is that fear which horror films play on most. That fear that they use to reach inside us, to grab what is small and vulnerable and give it a good shake. And we fans of the genre, in a kind of cinematic masochism, can't get enough of it.

While we have always feared death, we have not always feared it in the same way. When the ancient Egyptians whispered stories of horror, they were not about death itself, but of the possibility of our soul becoming lost. The physical body destroyed was their ultimate horror... a tragedy that would leave the spirit a restless nomad. They were not obsessed with death, as is so often said, but with prolonging life. The millennium's answer to that is the possibility of cloning, and of the tantalizing scientific theory of stopping the process of aging. Freezing ourselves in a state of youth... perhaps forever. Horror films, always keen to exploit our latest terrors, have addressed this issue time and again. The question of what happens to the soul when the body refuses to release it is enough to keep most horror fans and artists (and I include writers, painters and filmmakers among the artists of the horrific) awake and inspired long into the night. Suppose eventually clones become angry at our expectations. Surely they would wish to be their own person and not a carbon copy of someone lost. Suppose our own souls eventually feel a restless anger at being imprisoned in an ageless body? And you thought Zombie movies were scary!

Universal fears break down into smaller fears. Cultural fears separate us, and are a part of what makes it difficult for filmmakers to cross oceans and inspire the same sense of terror and dread in their audience.

The horror films of Japan, an island nation, leave a trail of wet footprints and bloody water in their wake. The very first monsters to emerge from Japan were awakened, along with the fears of a generation, by the horror of nuclear weapons.

'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' when viewed by modern audiences seems frighteningly prophetic. Cesare, the sleepwalker, murders innocent citizens. However, as grim and terrifying an image as he is, lurching across twisted, expressionist landscapes, he is not the film's true monster. That honor goes to the evil Dr. Caligari. Like a General at war, he orders Cesare to kill. And Cesare, like a soldier under a sadistic and senseless regime, does not question. He merely follows orders. The military as a potential evil has not left the German subconscious and it's horror films continue to march across a battlefield haunted by ghosts of the past.

Horror in America underwent a drastic change in the 1960's. Until then, our celluloid monsters expressed themselves in mostly supernatural terms. The Bogeyman, the creations of mad scientists and unexplainable beasts haunted our dreams and drive-ins. It wasn't until a series of particularly gruesome murders, carried out by the now infamous Ed Gein, slammed home the terrifying reality that not all monsters lurched through a moonlit swamp powered by an evil outside of humanity. We ourselves have the potential to become monstrous, and we are capable of almost unimaginable evil.

In the twitch of an eye (or a death nerve...), horror films began to focus not on the now almost charmingly benign threat posed by a vampire or werewolf but on the possibility that lurks inside the smiling man who hands us the keys to our hotel room or the next door neighbor to whom we wave every morning on our way to work. No necklace of garlic of handful of wolfsbane can repel a "monster" like Norman (an interesting sort of anagram for "normal") Bates or his all too human real-world counterparts such as Ed Gein. The notion that evil does not exist only as a force outside ourselves is one of the most frightening realities of being human.

One of the first post-Psycho horror films to capitalize on the fear and fascination with human killers was 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', the work of director Tobe Hooper, who went on to direct another popular horror film, 'Poltergeist'. Early publicity for TCM played up the angle that the film was "based on true events", a claim that was not entirely untrue. While the events of the film are certainly fictional, the truth of the matter is that the strange "art" which decorates the family home of Leatherface and his kin, composed from human and animal bones and skins, was inspired by similar creations found in the home of Ed Gein. America's first well known serial killer created art, furniture and jewelry from pieces of dead human bodies he dug up in a nearby cemetery.

Films such as 'Psycho', TCM and others of their ilk play on our fears of death and insanity. Fear of insanity has a long history. It's well known that early treatments for mental illnesses were less than kindly therapeutic. Often blamed on demons, the most popular cures for insanity in the earliest records of humanity were torture designed to drive the demons out. Unfortunately, they more often resulted in killing the patient. While we no longer treat mental illness with such barbaric methods, time and modern technology have done little to erase our fears of making a mental split from this world. Characters in horror movies who wake strapped down on beds in hellish looking asylums are playing on our ages-old fear of being thought crazy and/or demon-possessed when we ourselves know we are not. They also play on our less dramatic but perhaps far more relevant fear of simply being misunderstood. The old rhyme, quoted famously in Stephen King's "It" goes: "He thrusts his fists into the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts" We all fear opening our eyes one day and seeing the ghosts, real or not.

The fear of insanity is twofold. Not only do we fear our own minds splitting from reality, nobody wants to run into Leatherface out for a stroll in the woods! The worst of criminal insanity follows no reason and so cannot be reasoned with. We know what motivates us, what drives our actions, what moves us to anger, sympathy or pity. It is the total lack of those motivations that makes villains like Leatherface so terrifying and compelling. On the one hand, we fear their irrational (to us), violent actions and evil. We sympathize with their victims and hope for the hero to escape with his or her life. Often, we'd also like to see these human monsters get a taste of their own medicine in the form of a victim who turns the tables on their attacker.

...but on the other hand, we secretly can't help but admire them. We have a love/hate relationship with our horror movie villains. We fear them not only because of their evil natures and obvious disregard for human life but because they represent a very real part of us. How far below the surface is the part of us who would commit murder? How suppressed is our instinctive animal urge to lash out violently when someone hurts us or those we love?

Imagine one day you sleep through your alarm clock, waking too late to have coffee and relax before the workday begins. You rush to work, only to discover a co-worker has quit without giving notice and the burden of their responsibilities of the day have been handed unceremoniously over to you. A headache already beginning, you settle into the rhythm of the day and your double workload. At lunch, someone cuts you off in traffic, causing a minor accident. Traffic slows as the two drivers argue with police and each other. You give up on a relaxing lunch break and quickly buy a small bottle of juice and something nourishing to get you through the rest of your day. That afternoon, your boss blames you for an error you had no hand in, using unprofessional rudeness and then walking away without listening to your explanation. As he does so, you think to yourself "Man, I could kill that guy." It's a flippant thought, the result of stress and a bad day. But somewhere inside a more primal part of you is the realization that yes, you could kill that guy. But you don't. Or at least... most of us don't. (Just in case I do, I was with you that night, okay?) While we don't give in to our momentary impulse to violence, we can certainly enjoy, on a vicarious level, watching someone who does. It's cathartic. Not to mention entertaining as hell.

Out of the likes of Jason Voorhees, Michael Meyers, Pinhead and Freddy Krueger we've made not only bogeymen but also beloved antiheroes. These characters act out our darker impulses. And, secure in the knowledge that they're only fantasy and that, once the camera stops rolling, everyone, victims and villains alike, goes safely on home, we can cheer them on.