What We Talk About When We Talk About Scary Movies
My first real academic essay in college was about horror films and suspense films. It was for a media class, where we had to tie in something we read that resonated with us. So I chose something from Carl Jung, using his example of archetypes very liberally and maybe wrongly.
For me, at least, archetypes in horror act as vague representations of what we are really scared of or worried about in our day-to-day lives. For example, that is why a movie like It Follows leans heavily on the analogy of The Follower as some sort of metaphor for sexuality and our anxieties about it. It’s much the same for other films. The Thing as a representation for our mistrust of other people, etc. Symbols are incredibly important in horror for this reason.
But horror media is something I think about a lot anyway, so I wrote about it for that class and I thought about it throughout my college career. I even dramaturged a Lisa D’Amour play called “Anna Bella Eema” that was drenched in American myth tradition. Because I’m interested in symbols and what they mean to us.
Film, moreso than literature, is like society talking to itself. It’s constantly concerned about what comprises it and what it means to us. Meaning is something we seek constantly, especially in ourselves. Horror is just one of the easiest ways of looking inward, because the genre is so established. We know what a horror film is because it has beats defined for itself. We don’t like films that push too hard against those genre boundaries, but appreciate the ones that do find new ways to play with the rules.
It might be because we live in a post-Deconstructionist society. Theorists like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man broke down the rules and conventions a lot of us thought about. The problem is, to me at least, that people enjoy rules for the most part, and structure is confining, but there are many ways to play around with it. It might be why someone like Roland Barthes is endearingly popular (aside from his really excellent writing style).
