Some Musings From a Horror Movie Skeptic

Jason Voorhees

My parents didn’t let me watch horror movies growing up. I imagine lots of parents didn’t “let” my friends watch horror either, for what that’s worth. But the cultural saturation of slasher flicks in the 1970s and 1980s, and those occasional parents permissive enough to turn a blind eye, meant I grew up surrounded by horror iconography anyway. My mother thought my sensibilities were too tender to withstand the emotional onslaught of horror.

This weekend, I binge-watched Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy in one long, caffeine-fueled evening and, to my surprise, slept like a baby. Not because the movies weren’t good, mind. I thought them remarkably well-done, often genuinely scary, with several well-earned jump scares and characters crafted with enough depth that, when they died violently, I had a justified emotional response. And yet, though I was occasionally startled, I was never out-and-out afraid.

I wondered… was my mother, perhaps, wrong?

Fear Street accurately pastiches prior horror franchises. Part One reshapes Kevin Williamson’s Scream into a commentary on the horror mindset. Part Two channels Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, but with more emphasis on the price characters pay to survive such stories. And Part 3 is like a police sketch of an M. Night Shyamalan period psychodrama. Although I wrote yesterday that writer-director Leigh Janiak misses the sociopolitical point, these movies are genuinely well done.

So why, in retrospect, was I not terrified? I remember jolting awake from deep black terror many nights, having dreamt I was pursued by Hollywood’s favorite big-ticket monsters, usually Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. These nightmares helped verify my parents’ opinion that I felt things too deeply, that my emotions ran too wide, to ever safely watch horror movies. As an adult, I now consume remarkably similar content recreationally, then go to sleep.

Freddy Kreuger

Except, looking back at those nightmares, I didn’t really have bad dreams about overhyped movie monsters. Sure, I had fleeting images of Freddy’s disfigured face and gloved hand, or Jason without a face, swinging a nine-pound maul like a toy. But those were secondary; to pinch Hollywood parlance, they were set dressing. Having never seen those movies, my brain couldn’t replay their storylines; it used their images to express my personal fears.

Growing up in a military household, I didn’t have an extended social net. Every two years, Uncle Sam uprooted my family and shipped us elsewhere; schools, friends, after-school jobs, religious congregations, and other forms of human connection were transitory until I reached adulthood. My family was everything, a view I’ve heard expressed by others who grew up similarly rootless. It becomes difficult to nurture other social relationships when you grow up seeing friendships as temporary.

In my nightmares, Jason and Freddy generally leapt out to take my family away, leaving me alone. Either they killed my family, before pursuing me into a house that assumed labyrinthine properties; or, less often, they made alliances with my family over my objections, leaving me morally adrift. Either way, these monsters didn’t have personalities, only roles, and their roles left me alone in a hostile world without certainties, either moral or, in dreamland, physical.

Maybe that’s why one of the few horror movies to genuinely frighten me, in a way that persisted beyond the watching experience, was Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. The small-town cowboy protagonist, Caleb, gets abducted, or perhaps adopted, by a “family” of vampires wandering America’s Great Plains. The remainder of the movie develops into a contest between Caleb’s natural family, who wants to return him to the old homestead, or his adoptive family, who repeatedly threatens to kill him.

Bill Paxton as Severin
in Near Dark

Where Fear Street genuinely scares, it does so in moments when it upends characters’ ability to trust. In the first movie’s prologue (half ripped-off from Scream), when Heather realizes the killer who’s just murdered her is the slacker friend who promised a ride home. When Cindy’s excessively nice boyfriend Tommy grabs an axe and goes berserk. When Sarah Fier realizes the friend she’s trusted throughout, has turned against her, I experienced a moment of genuine fear.

But the more I consider which stories scare me, and which don’t, I’ve realized why horror movies don’t bother me like my parents feared they would. The circumstances that genuinely scare me are difficult to depict onscreen. True, protracted isolation, lack of trust, and moral rootlessness, aren’t very visual. The gore in slasher films might’ve traumatized me when I was a child. But they couldn’t compete with the terrors that originated from within my own brain.