14.

The Great Train Robbery roused a cinematic ache that has increased each year in intensity. Our cultural desire for savage action films as well as for their near sibling, slasher horror movies, is by now insatiable. Even as we still struggle under the guilt of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, even as we continue to fear terrorist attacks and mass shootings—even as all this brutality infects us—gruesome films like Hostel, Saw, The Dark Knight, and 300 are pervasive and extremely popular, attracting millions of viewers.

What is the perpetual draw of the horror film, a genre that, like a vampire, will not die? It flourishes in times of peace and war (more in times of war), powerful regardless of form—whether the Old Horror of James Whale’s exotic creepy castles; the New Horror of John Carpenter and Tobe Hopper, where crazed killers lurk in the suburbs or backwoods; or the ironic horror of the Scream series.

Pauline Kael, though never a fan of the genre, claimed that scary movies infect us with the “fear sickness,” that “crazy, inexplicable delight that children get out of terrifying stories that give them bad dreams.” As Jason Zinoman explains in his recent book on horror, this exhilaration arises from the confusion of confronting “the forbidden, the taboo, and a hint of the disreputable.” Such ecstatic bewilderment, he observes, recalls “the innocence of childhood.” The gore of the R rating returns us to the joy of the G.

Surely this is one of the enduring enticements of cinematic creepiness. But there are perhaps other more complicated and serious attractions as well. Consider the recent defense of the genre mounted by the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, maker of lyrical horror films such as The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Sounding a little like Jung, he says, “Art is a reconstruction of the world, and violence and horror are absolutely as much part of the world as butterflies and happy faces. There are so many more people trying to sell us the bullshit that the world has to be happy and the world has to be sunny, and you have to have good breath and shiny hair. With this, we lose touch with imperfection and that makes for a really harsh, cold measure to live by. I think horror makes us human, because it reminds us of our imperfection.”

This sentiment ennobles the genre, suggesting that it cuts through our vain delusions about what is real. Morris Dickstein, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, also believes in the value of horror films, which are, he claims, “a safe, routinized way of playing with death, like going to a roller coaster or parachute jump at an amusement park.” Imagining our own end, we meditate on what we need to enliven our remaining years—what we shouldn’t take for granted and what we should ignore.

For Will H. Rockett, another professor in the humanities, horror films force us to face our own guilt over our own evil behaviors, so that we “might expiate real or imagined sins through the controlled trauma of the film experience.” This purgation comes from our desire to transcend our isolation.

Aristotle developed a notion of purgation, too (invoked, as we saw earlier, by Sendak in his justification of his book on wild things). In his Poetics, Aristotle focuses on the literary genre of tragedy, which he defines as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.” The tragic drama features a hero of high social stature who, though noble, possesses a flaw that leads to his downfall, more catastrophic than he deserves. Audiences experience pity and fear as they watch the decline of the hero—pity over his suffering and fear of his transgression.

These intense feelings, Aristotle claims, effect “the proper purgation of these emotions.” How this purgation—the translation of the Greek katharsis—actually works is not entirely clear, but the gist is this: Expressing pity and fear in an artificial setting, we drain these emotions from our systems and subsequently feel purified, relieved, refreshed.

Our desire for catharsis might explain why we like Hollywood tearjerkers in which wives or girlfriends or daughters die—Love Story, Terms of Endearment, Steel Magnolias, and the like. Catharsis might also account for our attraction to more operatic fare, in which not one, but both lovers die: think of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet. (Indeed, many believe, with Wagner as their support, that romance reaches its zenith when the lovers, preferably young and beautiful, die in each other’s arms: amour consummated for all eternity.) And, certainly, Aristotle’s theory can clarify the popularity of horror films: we are drawn to gore because our vicarious experience of violence cleanses our hearts of aggression.

Aristotle is gospel for the great makers of the macabre. Stephen King claims that we “make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones,” and the mode of coping is catharsis: horror stories, in film or fiction, are the “barber’s leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety.” Hitchcock concurs: “Seeing a murder on television can be good therapy. It can help work off one’s antagonism.”