HORROR SHOW
The sun is rising in a red sky. An imam is chanting a prayer. Sheep are being herded and workers in turbans are digging at an archeological site in northern Iraq. Suddenly a boy in a red keffiyeh is running to the lead archeologist, gesticulating. Something has been found. The archeologist hurries to the location. Lamps, arrowheads, coins are dusted off from a tray, and then a strange amulet. The archeologist digs further into the opening at the base of a mound and extracts a small, sand-encrusted rock with something attached to it. He breaks off the piece and dusts it—and the black sculpted face of the devil is revealed.
This is the opening scene of The Exorcist (1973). It is rated by film critics as one of the top horror movies of all time, and it is also one of the top money-making films ever made. Ranking number nine, The Exorcist comes in just behind Jaws (1975) as the highest-grossing horror movie.1
When The Exorcist hit the silver screen, the audience screamed, some fainted, some vomited, and one man reportedly broke his jaw on the seat in front of him. Vomiting while watching The Exorcist is an excellent example of the vomit empathy response, as Linda Blair repeatedly regaled the camera with her devilish green spew. Fainting demonstrates the drop in blood pressure that occurs with disgust, and breaking one’s jaw may be the unfortunate consequence of an overly exuberant “ahh-ugh” reaction.
Not only can you hurt yourself by flailing about in disgust, but horror movies may also be bad for your health. In an experiment conducted in Britain, one group of participants was assigned to watch the grisly 1974 hit The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while a control group of volunteers sat in a room with banal reading material for the same length of time (eighty-three minutes).2 Blood samples and other cardiovascular measures were taken from both groups, before and after their session. As expected, the heart rate and blood pressure among those who had watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre increased by about 20 percent, whereas in the control group there was no change. The bigger issue, however, was that blood samples taken from those who had watched the film showed markedly elevated levels of leukocytes, the white blood cells our body releases to fight off invading pathogens. Blood samples from the control group were normal. This means that watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre set off the body’s immune response when there were in fact no pathogens present. The problem is that this false-alarm immune reaction and release of leukocytes produces a temporary depletion of leukocytes which would have been available in the case of a real health threat. In other words, if you watch a horror movie during flu season and then pick your kids up from day care, you’ll be more likely to catch the bug going around than if you had watched Caddyshack (1980). Where does the demand for watching movies that are clearly aversive, and may even be unhealthy, come from?
A LITTLE HORROR HISTORY
The first horror motion picture ever made premiered in Paris in 1896. It was a two-minute short called Le Manoir du Diable (“The Haunted Castle”). Audiences would then have to wait another twenty-four years for the first full-length horror feature. In 1920, the terrifying German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was released. A few years later came The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, followed by another Lon Chaney hit, the ever-playing The Phantom of the Opera (1925). By the 1930s, horror had taken a firm hold on haunting the night, and masterworks such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and The Werewolf of London (1935) were shown to screaming audiences in North America and Europe. But the horror film industry has not escalated linearly in viewership or production. Rather, sociohistorical events, especially war, have driven or deadened the genre’s popularity.
In the early 1940s, The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, and Bela Lugosi, as well as many other horror films were big box-office hits, but only in countries like the US, where the fighting of World War II was out of plain sight. In Europe, where death and destruction were everywhere, the nightmare of reality took the interest out of paying to watch fictionalized horror. In North America, the only direct images the public saw of war were of heroic soldiers mowing down Nazis, but the knowledge that real slaughter was occurring and the constant expectation of news that a loved one had died lurked in people’s minds. What horror movies did was provide a fiction of control in which the terror could be captured and vanquished. Therefore, when the war—and this anxiety—ended, so died the horror movie industry. According to Curt Siodmak, a screenwriter and novelist whose credits include The Wolf Man: “The day the war ended, the bottom of the horror movie industry fell out . . . Horror pictures couldn’t even be given away.”3
The horror movie industry was revived by Cold War anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s, as the abstract and protracted dread of an unseen enemy and annihilation by nuclear holocaust loomed. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), giant pods from outer space symbolized American fears of the “Red menace” and the deforming effects of nuclear weapons. An interesting exception to this cycle occurred during the Vietnam War. For the first time, the American public was inundated with real horror as television news brought scenes of dead and dying American soldiers and bloodstained battlefields into the living room nightly. This time, instead of spiking when the combat was across the globe, horror movie interest declined and a new brand of horror film—as sociopolitical commentary—emerged.4 The zombie cult classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) is well-known to be a critique of the mayhem and loss of humanity that occurred during the Vietnam War.
In the mid 1970s, horror movie production began to increase again, but this time with a new twist. Rather than fright being the central draw, another emotion was competing for star billing: disgust. Early horror films dwelled primarily on eliciting fear, with minimal portrayal of graphic murder, torture, and gore. In Psycho (1960), you never directly see Norman Bates stab Marion Crane. But in horror films produced after 1975, for the first time gore was on equal or greater display as terror, and nowadays, with terrorism as the skulking menace, horror movies that splatter the screen with as much viscera and mutilation as possible are more popular than ever. In fact, a new subgenre called “extreme horror” has emerged, with so-called Splat-Pack films such as the Saw franchise (2004–10), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), and the Hostel series (2005–11). These films are rife with no-holds-barred carnage, torture, and protracted bloodshed. The director of the 2007 remake of Halloween, Rob Zombie—this is his real name—explained that in his films “violence isn’t gratuitous—it’s the point.”5
The limits on cinematic disgust seem to be bounded only by the imagination. Nevertheless, there is something special about horror movie mutilation that has an appeal where non-horror gore does not. People will quickly turn off a slaughterhouse documentary that has the blood-and-guts content equivalent to a popular horror film.6 The difference is the reality factor. Horror movies give explicit signals of their fiction—eerie music, bizarre camera angles, and fantastical plots—which allows the viewer to indulge in the horrific. Fiction enables disgust to become entertainment. Horror mockumentary movies such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) unintentionally made this point when dedicated horror fans complained what a letdown this “reality horror” film was.
When John Carpenter’s first “slasher” movie about a murderous supernatural psychopath on a killing rampage—Halloween—was released in 1978, it immediately became a huge box-office hit.7 The film, which was made on a budget of only $320,000, grossed over $60 million worldwide that year. And profit drives creation. In 1980, sixty-six horror movies were released worldwide.8 In 1990, 229 horror movies were made; by 2000 the number had increased to a modest 358; but since 2000 the production spree has escalated at a startling rate. In 2006 no fewer than 874 fear flicks were released, and by 2010 the number had risen to 1,017 (excluding TV miniseries and rereleases).9
The reason for the skyrocketing production of horror films in recent years, especially those that feature extreme gore, isn’t entirely clear. One explanation is that, as during World War II, we are visually shielded from the atrocities that are taking place elsewhere on the globe. Vietnam video journalism was an exception. Indeed, the only shocking imagery most of us have seen from the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the Abu Ghraib photos of 2006. Another factor is that demand drives production, and serious horror movie fans claim to become “addicted” to watching them. Their claims are not without basis. The high-intensity emotions that are ignited by horror (terror and revulsion) give viewers an adrenaline rush and release of endorphins (the body’s natural opiates) which, though much weaker than a speedball (injecting a mixture of heroin and cocaine), are in the same physiological ballpark and apparently as enjoyable to some people.10 Addiction means that the high is followed by withdrawal, which can only be sated by more of the drug—horror films. This cycle of need intensifies with each repeating loop. And since watching the same movie over and over is not nearly as rewarding as getting a fresh buzz, there may be no limit to how many new horror movies will be made as long as an “addicted” audience keeps craving more.
THE LURE OF HORROR
Many theories have been proposed for why we are drawn to such a seemingly counterintuitive and even counter-health activity as deliberately revolting and terrifying ourselves. Evolution-based theories argue that we do things for a “good” reason. That is, some adaptive advantage for our survival and reproductive fitness must be conferred if a given behavior is maintained. But if watching horror can make you more susceptible to illness, how could it be biologically favorable? More to the point, given our abhorrence of death and disgust, what motivates us to deliberately want to watch such terrifying and repulsive cinema?
One popular explanation for the lure of horror is that we get relief from the stresses and anxieties of real life by viewing it. As during World War II, news of war across the globe and today’s constant furtive menace of terrorism produces a culture where fear is ever-present, and therefore a release from fear is necessary if we are to cope with daily life. Theorists from disciplines ranging from media studies to psychology propose that horror movies provide an outlet for our fears and offer temporary relief from our worries that lurk in the shadows. As Alfred Hitchcock said, “I aim to provide the public with beneficial shocks.”11 The reason we come back for more is because the catharsis works, but because the relief, as well as the high, is only temporary we’ll need another fix again soon.
In addition to geopolitical apprehension, personal anxiety is another motivation to expose ourselves to the gruesome and terrifying. That is, horror movies can offer catharsis from our personal traumas. The first time in life when many “monsters” and anxiety torment nearly all of us is during the teenage years, so it is no accident that schools and school-age characters dominate contemporary horror movies, on the screen and in the audience. Carrie (1976), Brian de Palma’s masterful film of Stephen King’s 1974 novel, tells the story of an outcast teenager who is the subject of intense derision and cruelty from her classmates. Carrie then finds herself equipped with supernatural, telekinetic powers and inflicts murderous revenge at her high-school prom. An audience of teens can identify with the characters and the environment. School as a backdrop for terror and horror provides a fantastical extension of daily anxieties about failure, social exclusion, and lack of control. Watching horror and violence taking place in a school setting not only gives adolescents relief from their own routine horrors, it gives them an outlet for their feelings of hostility toward peers, teachers, and parents.
HORROR THERAPY
The psychological benefit of horror movies for teens is similar to the respite that young children get from the macabre fairy tales that make for comforting bedtime stories. Despite the tender age of their target audience, fairy tales are anything but tame, with monstrous wolves devouring their victims, as in “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs,” and witches burning children alive, as in “Hansel and Gretel.” Fairy tales are rife with terror and gruesomeness. But, importantly, fairy tales portray unempowered and vulnerable characters who, through their resourcefulness and ingenuity, overpower the evil forces. The stories conclude with the protagonists’ victory and safety.
Fairy tales offer psychological succor by enabling the child to associate with the stories’ heroes so that she is now armed with the courage to neutralize the terrors that lurk beneath the bed and in her closet. In the same way, slasher films typically depict a hero or heroine who is initially the most timid or helpless among the bunch, but who then emerges as the most valiant and vanquishes the “monster.” Moreover, in many slasher films, the parents of the teen protagonists are portrayed as useless and out of touch (“parents just don’t understand . . .”), playing to the classic teen–adult struggle. Slasher films, with their teenage actors, school-based backdrops, and parental ineptitude, provide a fantasy setting where adolescents can be bolstered with feelings of control and power over their worries, which helps them to gain mastery over the tumult in this difficult phase of development. Whether watching horror movies actually decreases teenage depression, anxiety, the number of hallway brawls, or dinner table battles isn’t known. But it has been shown that when teens act violently, horror films can be used therapeutically.
In 1990, a thirteen-year-old boy who was committed to a psychiatric facility after drinking through the liquor cabinet and then destroying his aunt and uncle’s home with an axe was healed by horror. During his therapy sessions, the boy confessed his resentment of his uncle (his legal guardian) and repeatedly mentioned scenes from the horror films he was “addicted” to. The boy was an especially ardent fan of the psychopathic murderer Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and so in an unprecedented move the psychiatrist decided to use A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) in psychotherapy with him. The psychiatrist watched portions of the film together with the boy, helping him to come to the realization that Freddy’s violence and hatred stemmed from his having lost his mother at a young age. The psychiatrist then pointed out that the boy might understand how Freddy felt, since he had been placed in his aunt and uncle’s home after being abandoned by his own mother at the age of nine. Continuing treatment in this way, the boy and his psychiatrist discovered and worked through many of his emotional problems, and along with family therapy the boy was successfully treated.12
Identifying with horror movie characters, however, doesn’t always end well, as was the case when a fifteen-year-old boy killed a seven-year-old in order to use his fat to create “a flying potion.” The teenager had apparently gotten the idea from the movie Warlock (1989), in which the villain boils the fat of a child to create an elixir that can make him fly. The fifteen-year-old had no previous criminal history, but when clinically examined he was found to be delusional and believed he was in the presence of the devil.13 Psychotic disorders, where there is a true disconnect from reality, are very serious but also rare, and murderous rampages by avid horror movie watchers are therefore highly unlikely.
However, some personality types known as “gore watchers” may be unhealthily captivated by the carnage on the screen. Gore watchers get pleasure from horror movies specifically as a function of how much blood, guts, torture, and mayhem are depicted. Gore watchers are also most likely to fantasy-imitate their favorite character—the villain, to have negative attitudes toward women, and to display some psychopathic personality traits, such as low levels of empathy.14 By contrast, “thrill watchers,” who derive delight from jolts and suspense, get their enjoyment because they identify and empathize with the spills and thrills of the victims, and are generally of no danger to anyone. Parents of teenagers who seem to get extra pleasure out of horror movies may want to pay attention to whether it is gore or thrills that their child is especially titillated by. If it is the former, some monitoring or intervention may be worthwhile.
Theories that relief from anxiety and the catharsis that comes from watching characters act out their angst do well at explaining the attraction of horror, especially for adolescents. The teen years brim with struggles over impulse control, managing aggression, dealing with anxiety, hostility in school life, parental expectations, and of course burgeoning sexual urges. Indeed, sex is another major motivator for the lure of horror, particularly for teenagers.
LOVE AND DEATH
The cliché that boys take girls to fright flicks because it makes the girls leap into their laps so that the boys can comfort them, in the hopes that it leads to more contact sport, is partly true. But the reason why horror movies can lend a hand in budding romances is due to more than the opportunity for a little grabbing in the dark. Horror movies provide a means to demonstrate an important dimension of sex appeal, especially for teenagers and young adults—mastery of gender-role identity. In heterosexual hunting, how macho or feminine you are has a big impact on how attractive you are seen to be by your peers. And the way that young men and women act while they watch a horror movie together is an ideal opportunity for revealing and testing each other for their gender-identity mastery. Not only will their behavior influence how much they’ll like each other when the lights go up, it will also influence how much they each like the movie.
Researchers at Indiana University tested first-year college students for how much they liked a particular horror movie, as well as an opposite-sex partner, as a function of how that partner acted when they watched the film together. The film was a 7.5-minute segment of Nightmares (1983) that was highly suspenseful, but not gory. In each opposite-sex duo, one member of the pair was a confederate—who played a prearranged role for the experiment—and the other was the unsuspecting participant. Depending on the condition the participant was assigned to, the confederate was instructed to act fearless, distressed, or indifferent to the horror on the screen. A “fearless” confederate sat casually slouched and shouted encouragements like “That’s the idea . . . use the knife!” Acting “distressed” entailed fidgeting, nervous body scratching, and muttering “Oh my God.” “Indifferent” confederates were quiet and expressionless. After watching the movie segment, the participants rated both their enjoyment of the movie and the sex appeal of their viewing partner.
It is a testament to the power of sex roles that how much the movie was liked was directly affected by how macho or feminine the male or female confederate acted. Men rated the movie as most enjoyable when the woman they were with acted distressed and as least enjoyable in the company of a fearless woman. By contrast, women enjoyed the horror movie least in the company of a squeamish man, and most in the company of an intrepid companion. Interestingly, when it came to how much the partner was sought after, natural good looks were able to take the edge off “incorrect” behavior. When the partner was judged as very good-looking, they were still considered desirable whether they yelped, sat stonily, or encouraged the film victims, but when the partner was not so beautiful, how they acted had a big impact on their attractiveness. In particular, when a so-so-looking guy acted tough in the face of terror, he gained lots of points in both positive character traits and how much his female companion wanted to see him again.15 Playing macho while watching horror movies boosts the allure of men who aren’t graced with irresistible looks. Therefore, if you don’t look like Justin Bieber, you can still end up with star appeal if you take your date to a horror flick and show off your bravado.
The reason horror movies are such an ideal venue for demonstrating gender identity is because today’s world offers so few occasions for adolescents to display this prowess. Most of us no longer spend our days hunting for food, fighting our enemies, or taking care of family, and therefore teenagers need to find other outlets to show they can do this if necessary. The teen girl needs to demonstrate her capacity for nurturance and compliance and the adolescent boy to demonstrate his resilience and bravery—and the safe venue of the movie theater or living-room couch provides the perfect setting.16
Besides providing an opportunity to display sex-role mastery, horror films also feature a lot of sex, and sex is sexy. In a scene analysis of horror movies, although violence occurred most often, nudity, kissing, fondling, and implied intercourse occurred more than nine times per film and “sex before death” occurred an average of three times per film.17 In an investigation of how sex influences horror film enjoyment, men reported that sexual content made horror more enjoyable, while women stated that the sexual component didn’t make a difference. This may not sound surprising, since men enjoy pornography more than women do,18 but it was also found that sex makes horror scarier for men. Men rated horror movie clips with sex in them as more frightening than similar horror movie clips without sex. For women, sex on the screen had no impact on the scariness of the movie.19
Sex may not enhance horror movie enjoyment for women, but fear can make women sexually aroused. When women were shown frightening photographs—people pointing guns, terrorists, snakes poised for attack—and then watched a pornographic film, their sexual arousal increased above and beyond porn without frightening foreplay. However, when women viewed disgusting pictures, such as corpses and vomit, and then watched pornography, their sexual arousal decreased.20 So, if a man wants to get his date “in the mood,” watching a scary movie together is a good idea, but only if it isn’t gruesome.
There is another blend of sex and horror that is especially alluring to teenage girls. I happened to be at the cinema on the same night as the premiere of one of the Twilight saga films, and my curiosity was piqued by the outrageously long line of teenage girls waiting to buy tickets. Why all the girls? I decided to find out what all the fuss was about and rented New Moon (2009). Teenage boys will likely be bored by this movie, but it may be worth it for them to sit through it for the amorous consequences that may ensue. The film tells the classic story of star-crossed lovers—a beautiful human girl and a beautiful vampire boy, complicated by a love triangle with a gorgeous Native American boy who turns into a werewolf. The vampires twirl and fling themselves with supernatural might and the werewolves lunge and gallop with mythical speed, but you see only slightly more blood in this movie than you would watching someone get a paper cut—which in fact happens and causes a vampiric frenzy. Basically the film is a hopelessly romantic teenage love story with death mixed in. And in this context death couldn’t be more opposite from disgust.
In New Moon, as in so many romantic poems and stories, death symbolizes the devastation of heartbreak, the idealization of love’s immortality, the yearning to give everything, including your life, to the object of your desire, and literally dying to be with the one you love. In the Twilight chronicles, death and monsters are not scary and grotesque but beautiful and romantic ideals—the apogees of erotic and passionate love. Watching this stuff with a teenage girl is excellent foreplay.
Cathartic relief, gender identity displays, and opportunities for fondling and sparking arousal all play a part in explaining why people, especially teenagers, are drawn to horror. But there is another reason, and I think the best one, for why horror is so appealing to the young and not-so-young alike.
THE THRILL OF IT ALL
The devastating cyclone of events was finally over. Relieved and saddened, Sue stared at the blackened ground where the frightful house once stood. In the quiet, crisp, autumn air, she bent down contemplatively to place a small bouquet of hand-picked wildflowers at the site of her former friend’s dwelling, when suddenly a bloodied arm thrust through the ground, grabbed Sue by the wrist, and tugged her down to the earth below.
This is the final scene in Carrie, and the feeling you get when in that somber scene a grisly arm suddenly lunges for Sue is a rush of fear that can be enjoyable for the sheer excitement it produces. This is the same motivator that makes some people love to ride roller coasters, bungee jump, and sky dive. They know with a reasonable degree of certainty that their speed ride will not end in death, just as the horror movie audience knows that their theater experience will not lead to their imminent demise (unless they’re watching The Ring (2002), where, according to the plot, seeing it makes you die). These horrifying situations provide intense fear in a relatively safe context, leukocyte reactivity notwithstanding, and therefore are pure thrill. However, how much you want to be shocked and stimulated depends on your personality, and specifically a personality trait that is intertwined with your biology and changes as you age.
“Sensation seeking” refers to how physiologically aroused you like to be. People can be categorized on this dimension by answering “true” or “false” about themselves on statements like “I sometimes do ‘crazy’ things just for fun” and “I enjoy getting into new situations where you can’t predict how things will turn out,” as well as how much they’re willing to take risks for the sake of such experiences, such as “I like to explore a strange city or section of town by myself, even if it means getting lost.” If you answered “true” to all these scenarios, you are probably a high sensation seeker. High sensation seekers want novelty, complexity, and excitement, and they also enjoy negative emotions such as fear because of its intensity and accessibility. Fright-inducing exploits like riding roller coasters, bungee jumping, and going to horror movies are easy to do and easy to come by. Low sensation seekers would answer “false” to all the statements above, and they explicitly do not want or like excitement, novelty, risk, and intensity, nor do they enjoy negative experiences or fear. The majority of people are somewhere in between these two extremes.
How much you like to be stimulated is related to your baseline level of neurological arousal—meaning, how awake and active your brain naturally is. People who are naturally hyperalert don’t like high-intensity stimulation because it can easily push them over the edge and become unpleasant, whereas people who are naturally set on low want more jazzing up. That is, high sensation seekers are actually functioning at a comparatively low baseline level of neural arousal and therefore need intense experiences in order to feel more alive, whereas low sensation seekers are internally revved up and therefore seek to avoid further arousal. High and low sensation seekers, respectively, behave and modulate their environment in order to heighten or dampen their internal states so that they can enjoy life. High sensation seekers are more likely to become firefighters or race car drivers, and low sensation seekers to become librarians and gardeners. Not surprisingly, high sensation seekers watch a lot more horror and are more entertained by horror movies than low sensation seekers. And this is because it not only perks them up—they get more bang for their buck from it too.
In a recent experiment conducted at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, brain activity was examined while participants who varied in their sensation seeking watched frightening and neutral scenes from movies such as The Shining (1980). Consistent with previous evidence that high sensation seekers operate at lower than normal levels of neural arousal and low sensation seekers operate at high baseline levels, the higher the participants’ sensation-seeking drive was, the lower their neural activation was in visual areas and the anterior insula (where disgust is processed) while watching neutral scenes. The low sensation seekers had comparatively high activation in these brain regions. But when watching frightening scenes, the higher sensation seekers displayed greater brain activation in visual areas and the anterior insula than the low sensation seekers did.21 In other words, low sensation seekers’ brains weren’t electrified by the terrifying scenes, rather they were relatively dampened down, while the brains of high sensation seekers got an extra charge from them.
Sensation seeking is a biological personality trait, but it changes as you age. For everyone, sensation seeking increases during childhood, peaking in adolescence or young adulthood, and then remains relatively steady until you’re in your forties, when it starts to decline. These changes correlate with the horror movie fan demographic. Teens fill the seats at horror flicks, and you are unlikely to meet your grandmother there. My eighteen- to twenty-something-year-old students—from the meekest to the most self-assured—all insist that they love horror films, whereas my peers tell me they rarely if ever watch them.
Horror movies give us curios like monstrous psychopaths, vampires, zombies, and werewolves. They depict chaos, destruction, unusual and extreme forms of violence, and parades of supernatural activities, all of which increase arousal. The perverse pleasure of horror comes from the titillation that these bizarre, unpredictable, and exciting scenes bring, which itself is pleasurable for anyone with at least a moderate degree of sensation seeking.
BLOODTHIRSTY
I am not a big fan of horror movies. Perhaps you aren’t either, but I bet you still dance with the macabre. I’ll confess to it. Who can admit never to have craned their neck to get a closer look at the devastation after a car wreck, or for that matter tuning into the evening news, or, as I like to say, “the fire and murder hour.” The crowds that public hangings drew were very rarely filled with aggrieved victims wanting revenge; rather the hordes were lured by the queer and tantalizing attraction of watching life being turned to death. Plato astutely described the seduction of death in his story of a man who passes by an executioner with a pile of corpses at his feet. The man desperately wants to look at the pile of bloodied bodies, tries not to, but then cannot resist giving in to his “evil” eyes that have to stare at the “beautiful sight.”22 Why do we have a perverse interest and even get pleasure from horror, gore, and death?
I believe that at the bottom of it all, the lure of horror is the lure of the mystery of death. By watching horror movies, we get to experiment with the possibilities of death in fantasy form and in such extreme ways that we can comfort ourselves with thoughts that it couldn’t possibly be worse than the grotesque, uncontrollable, unexpected, and brutal things that we see on the screen. Death can also be romantically glorified and even become attractive, as in Twilight-type movies. Just as we are terrified by death, we are also desperate to understand it—and by exploring the enigma of death through film we may be able to make it a little less “horrifying.”
Just as with the Sunday public hanging, our wish to discover and conquer death underlies why millions of British viewers ghoulishly tuned in to watch Jade Goody die in real time on national television. Jade Goody (June 5, 1981—March 22, 2009) became famous for her role in the British reality TV show Big Brother in 2002. She continued to be a centerpiece of the public eye and in 2008, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, television crews and an avid audience followed her continuously through her illness through to her death.23 The enticement of death and disgust also explains the popularity of TV shows like Fear Factor, where challenges to consume hideous insects or engage in daredevil stunts celebrate how one can master the horrifying and survive.
Horror movies bring us up-close and personal with death in inescapable and extreme terms. From the safety of our upholstered seat, the absurd and excessive imagery momentary alleviates our terror of inevitable oblivion. In horror movies with “happy endings” where the evil monster is destroyed, we even get revenge on our fears for having tormented us. But what would it be like to live face-to-face with death every day?
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
I recently had the opportunity to discover what it’s like to see dead people all the time—not of the ghostly type, but real flesh-and-blood dead people. Sam Greco has been a funeral-home director for more than fifty years, and I spent an afternoon in the summer of 2010 interviewing him and his wife, complemented by gin and tonics and homemade stuffed peppers.24 It was a lovely, lively day—in contrast to the topic.
Sam started his funeral-home business at the age of twenty-five, and after burying over six thousand local residents he is now ready to retire. His wife, Catherine, herself the daughter of an undertaker, laughed when she told me, “I’ve lived above a funeral home my entire life.” The parents of three boys, Sam answered the question that was on my mind. “Our kids were fine growing up in a funeral home. The kids never had any fear.” Catherine continued, “I always told them dead people cannot hurt you. Don’t worry about the dead, worry about the living.” They both beamed when Sam told me that their grandson had just joined the family business, making him the third-generation descendant to service the community in death.
What is it like to make a profession of one of the most taboo topics in our society? What is it like to live with death and to deal with it daily—and not just the death of strangers, but the death of family? Sam had already buried his four older brothers. Now that he was the last one standing, was he afraid of death? And how did disgust feature in his experiences? Sam, a natural storyteller, set about enlightening me from the minute I sat down.
“I never saw a dead body in my life until I got into the business,” Sam began. “I’m not afraid of death and it doesn’t disgust me. You get used to it. Not that I want to rush anything along!” He laughed. “I just don’t think about it.” “Mind you,” he continued, his voice lowering, “I had problems with embalming when I first got into it. I used to have to put gloves on. Then you get so used to doing it you can handle them just like that.” He waved his hands in the air to give me a sense of his carefree attitude toward corpses. “Sometimes we make people look better in death than they did before.” He chuckled and shook his head.
His difficulty in getting used to embalming seemed obvious and normal, so I pressed him on whether anything had ever really appalled him. “It’s not the dead that disgust me, it’s the living,” he retorted. “Some of the dirty houses we go into. It’s disgusting! Dog crap on the floor and there’s a dead body lying there, and the relatives are just standing around. The living are more disgusting than the dead.” But the incident that bothered him most was one that happened soon after he began his profession. “It was a little baby and the mother had starved it to death.” Sam’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed as he recounted the event. “I was so disgusted with her—for what she had done! That woman starved her little baby to death! She didn’t have any money, she was on welfare, and she just spent her money on cigarettes and whatever, and never fed her own baby. That dead baby looked just like a little pigeon! Just like a little bird. Just skin and bones. When I got over there, I said to the policeman, ‘This is disgusting! Why would she do this?’ It bothered me so much. I scolded her, I didn’t care. I said, ‘What kind of person are you to let your little baby die when there’s no need for that?’ ” Telling me the story was clearly upsetting him now.
His wife, a registered nurse for forty-two years before retiring, cut in with a change of topic to remedy the mood. “We consider ourselves caregivers.”
Sam nodded. “I’m a caregiver, a protector of the dead. I want to make sure that the person’s death is dignified.”
I steered him onto a discussion of the supernatural and asked whether he ever felt his funeral home was haunted. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in any of that.” At first he seemed slightly insulted by my question but, ever-pleasant, he winked and continued. “Sometimes my kids played jokes on their friends . . .” That would be a story for another day. I asked him if he watched or liked horror movies. “No,” was his simple answer. “Why would I? I don’t want to go to bed with all those things in my head. I see enough. I don’t like those movies. I never did. I have no interest in it. I like serious, sensible stuff.” This remark echoes other comments I’ve heard from people who have been exposed to the atrocities of war—they avoid fictionalized death and horror of any kind.
The most intriguing observation Sam made to me before I left for the day was how he had always noted an unusually high rate of suicides among the sons of funeral directors. Sam surmised that the suicides were because the sons couldn’t deal with the pressure of the job or having to disappoint their fathers because they didn’t want to go into the family business. He explained that being a funeral director spawned a lot of divorces and was a big strain on one’s personal life. “Your family life is always on hold. You have to put your profession first. If someone calls in the middle of the night to tell you their mother just died, you go there right away. You have to cancel your plans or stop what you’re doing—often—and no matter what time it is.”
Sam might be right; a demanding, “on-call” career with a disrupted personal life seems to put one at a higher risk for suicide. The occupation with the highest suicide rate is being a doctor, especially a white male doctor. But following that are black male guards (such as crossing guards, not prison guards) and white female artists,25 both of which are professions with rather obscure “on-call” aspects. A review of suicide rates by profession shows that the rate for funeral directors is unremarkable, and the rate for their sons is unknown if they don’t already have a profession.26 However, just as horror movies allow us to engage our curiosity with death, I wonder if continuously being around death takes away some of its terror and mystery, so that if you are seriously depressed you may see death as a logical and unfrightening option.
Evidence to suggest that familiarity with death makes suicide more likely comes from the observation that there is a surprisingly high rate of suicide among Holocaust survivors. In a five-year study of 374 elderly Holocaust survivors and 574 elderly community members who were all attending a mental health treatment clinic, 24 percent of the Holocaust survivors attempted suicide compared to 8 percent of those with no World War II experience.27 The inscrutability of death and the fearfulness of it that those who are unfamiliar with it have may create the self-protective consequence of making suicide less likely.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
The same year that the original Halloween splattered blood on screens across the country, another of the most successful films ever made was splattering chewed food.
In walks a chubby, affable guy with dark, messy hair and disheveled clothes and, to the strains of Sam Cooke crooning “Wonderful World,” he merrily makes his way down a cafeteria line of assorted lunchtime comestibles. Starting with a golf ball from a discarded soup bowl, he stacks his tray and fills his mouth with nearly everything on offer, from piles of éclairs to green Jell–o squares to meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and squishy sandwiches, and then saunters over to a table of preppy peers who are less than happy to see him. Our hero sits down and, staring at the scandalized posse, proceeds to shovel a wobbling blob of Jell–o into his mouth with his fingers. “This is absolutely gross,” scoffs one of the girls. “That boy is a P–I–G pig,” chimes in another. And then our food lover retorts, “See if you can guess what I am now.” And with a mouth full of mashed potatoes he bashes his fists against his cheeks, exploding the contents of his mouth onto the hapless group in front of him. “I’m a zit. Get it?” He grins and a massive food fight erupts that engulfs the entire cafeteria.
The star of this scene is Bluto, played by John Belushi in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). Animal House is credited as being the movie that launched the “gross-out” genre, despite the fact that it was preceded by Pink Flamingos (1972), with its notorious poop-and-scoop scene. Gross-out is a subgenre of comedy movies which deliberately invoke disgust by capitalizing on slapstick and vulgar humor, an obsession with bodily functions, random destruction of property, and pleasure in the humiliation and “humorous” injury of others.
Animal House was produced on a modest $2.7 million budget, but it has turned out to be one of the most profitable movies of all time. Since its initial release, Animal House has garnered an estimated return of more than $141 million in video and DVD revenue. In 2001, the Library of Congress deemed it “culturally significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Animal House is ranked number one among the “One Hundred Funniest Movies” by the Bravo TV channel, and comes in at number thirty-six on the American Film Institute’s list of the hundred best comedies in American cinema history. What makes disgusting so funny and such good entertainment?
THAT’S DISGUSTING BUT VERY AMUSING
Humor and disgust may seem like unrelated emotions—humor makes you feel happy and laugh, while disgust is highly unpleasant and can make you gag—but they share the same core. They are both high intensity experiences. Furthermore, laughter often erupts when a violation occurs, when something happens that isn’t “supposed to,” and so does the feeling of disgust. Violations can occur in all sorts of domains, from physical indignities, such as slipping on a banana peel, to linguistic peculiarities, such as bizarre accents or malapropisms, to social faux pas, such as drinking from a sterile bedpan. These violations are funny if they are harmless to you, especially if you feel distanced from the target—such as an actor in a movie—and they are funniest of all if the target is vilified—like the preppy snobs in Animal House. In this latter case, the violation is both mirthful and vindicating; like the monster being destroyed in horror films, the degradation of “bad guys” in comedies is rewarding and relieving. But what’s so funny about watching something disgusting?
Disgusting jokes have never been in short supply, but a scientific analysis of them has been meager. In the mid 1990s, Dolf Zillmann, a horror and humor media expert at the University of Alabama, and his graduate student Patrice Oppliger,28 had college students watch clips from Beavis and Butthead.29 The students then rated how funny the clips were and completed the Disgust Scale from chapter 2. Not surprisingly, more disgust-sensitive students found the clips a lot less amusing than their stalwart peers did. Men also found the episodes funnier than women did, but even more revealing, the more disgusting the clip was, the funnier men found it to be.30 Like sex making horror scarier, disgust makes humor funnier—to men. An explanation for this gender difference comes from the phenomenon of “excitation transfer,” in which arousal from one situation augments your arousal in a different situation, but you misattribute where the arousal is coming from.31 Since men get more charge out of cinematic sex and disgust than women do, the added energy (from sex and disgust) transfers to the accompanying emotions of fear or humor and the movie scenes are felt as scarier or funnier accordingly. The gross-out genre is primarily aimed at the teen and young adult set and has a predominantly male audience, which is the same demographic that is most captivated by disgust and fills the majority of horror movie seats. The market researchers who have discovered that the grosser the better for young males indeed have their audience pegged, and there will never be a shortage of this demographic.
Another scientific inquiry into the appeal of disgusting humor used the legendary scene in Pink Flamingos (1972) where the female impersonator, Divine, eats dog excrement. The aim of the experiment was to find out how one’s relation to a “disgusting” event alters its amusingness and disgustingness. Participants watched the two-minute clip, in which Divine and her two sidekicks are walking down a street when they see a dog and its owner. The dog defecates on the sidewalk, and Divine sits down beside it, scoops up the poop with her hand, and puts it in her mouth. While watching, participants were told to imagine themselves either as Divine or as an uninvolved observer who had no relation to the scene. Participants then rated how they felt along six dimensions: happy, excited, angry, scared, and, most importantly, disgusted and amused.
Everyone, it turned out, was equally disgusted by watching the clip, but those who had imagined themselves as an outsider were also quite amused by it, and much more so than those who had imagined themselves as Divine. Moreover, it seemed that feelings of disgust and amusement occurred simultaneously as a mixed emotional state. That is, the viewers felt both disgusted and amused separately but at the same time, rather than the feeling merging into a blended state. A well-known mixed emotion is “bittersweet.” For example, at graduation you feel happy over your accomplishment but at the same time sad that you are saying goodbye to your former way of life. By contrast, contempt is a blended emotion, where you feel disgust and superiority together as one unified feeling. It seems that disgust and amusement can become mixed emotions, and disgust gets funnier as a function of your relationship to the situation. If it’s happening to someone else, it’s disgusting and it’s also amusing. If the disgusting situation is happening to you, it’s disgusting and also often humiliating. As Mel Brooks quipped: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”32
The scatological motif has been a consistent theme in humor since the dawn of humankind, and it is thriving today. In 2007, the animated series South Park was acclaimed as the funniest television show on air since its debut ten years earlier by Rolling Stone magazine. It has also been nominated for an Emmy Award nine times. South Park revels in gross humor, especially of the potty variety. Why is poop so entertaining? Freud believed that poop becomes funny through the process of “repression.” Freud contended that because the topic of defecation has to be so greatly repressed in polite society, when it is exposed, a great deal of pent-up energy is released, like the energy inside a bomb when it is detonated. The release of this energy-tension is a relief which feels good, and the pent-up energy is converted to laughing. In other words, the more high-tension and taboo-breaking a poopy scene in South Park is, the more potential it has to be hilarious.
After excrement, food violations and food fights are the most common platforms for disgusting comedy. Besides Animal House, Spaceballs (1982) and American Pie (1999) feature outrageous food scenes. And who can forget the obese Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), who explodes into a million pieces after a huge repast that he finishes off with a fatal after-dinner mint?
Horror is a vehicle through which we can explore and release tension and distress about death and what disgusts us. However, horror can also be humorous. An insight I gleaned from my horror-loving students is that a central appeal of “extreme horror” is amusement. In fact, for some it is a true comedy of horrors. These horror movies are funny because of their sheer absurdity. Extreme horror is also so over-the-top that it actually allows one to become distanced and removed from the violence and slaughter it depicts. Indeed, rather than exploring death and being relieved of our anxieties of it, by watching horror viewers may be mocking death and removing themselves further from it. Paradoxically horror is transformed from a medium that disgusts us with butchery and brings us face-to-face with our utmost fear in a way that actually bolsters our feelings of immortality.
Humor is a vehicle through which we can animate and make enjoyable what makes us uncomfortable and especially that which reminds us of our animal nature, such as toilet activities, eating, and dying. Thus humor is also fundamentally about psychologically escaping or denying our mortal coils. Food is not a particularly common tool in the horror genre, but it is a winning and versatile device for disgusting humor because food and eating can be permutated endlessly into diverse and entertaining forms that elicit disgust. Food further illustrates how that which can give so much pleasure can also be revolting, and conversely how we can get pleasure from being revolted. Food is also exceptionally engaging because it is the source of one of our greatest passions. And so is sex.