Oh My God! It's...Horrible!

This essay began as a response to a comment, but it grew somewhat.

Why is it, when Fritz Lang makes a film about the dehumanising effect of homogenised industry and corporate control, but sets it in the future, the result is credited as a major classic? But when he makes a film on the same theme, setting it in the present and showing the effects instead of hinting at them, some people get embarrassed? Metropolis is praised, but M is quietly ignored.

Abel Ferrara's film Driller Killer is about a man who kills a lot of other men with a portable electric drill. Except it isn't. The film chronicles the slow psychological cracking of an artist faced with the prospect of bankruptcy and homelessness, which when it finally happens results in a stream of frantic murders.

Anyone who watches it expecting a gorefest will be disappointed - there is some blood in the final half hour, after an hour's dissection of one man's quiet desperation.

David Lynch's Eraserhead is another film about a man being slowly driven insane by an intolerable situation. In this case, the protagonist is trapped in a marriage with a deformed baby, neither of which he ever wanted or knows how to handle.

The Medusa Touch is a supernatural thriller with horror elements. Richard Burton stars as a man who clearly sees and boldly writes about the corruption of politics and the hypocrisy of everyday life. He can telekinetically influence the world, but finds he can only create disasters - suicide, car accident, a plane crash etc.

Of course, it might be argued that these are exceptions to a general rule. That a very few horror films transcend the limitations of the genre - becomming significant and worthy in their own right. That they say something worthwhile in spite of, and in no way because of, their horror status.

And it's certainly true that the vast majority of horror movies are utter tripe, without even pretention to be serious. There's hundreds of flicks concerning a group of teenagers trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere, at the mercy of a motiveless psychopath who gruesomely kills them one by one. There's hundreds of others about Dracula sucking the blood of nubile virgins, or indeed nubile lesbian vampires sucking the blood of equally nubile brides.

The first thing to say is that this is just Sturgeon's Law operating - 95% of anything is crap. How much science fiction is actually worth watching? How many medical dramas or sitcoms don't insult the intelligence? This is uncontroversial.

But the second thing is that giving special pleading to specific horror films as transcending the genre misses the point. The argument that a few of them are redeemed by containing some worthy non-horror elements contains the implicit assumption that horror elements themselves are bad by definition.

Which in effect argues that a good horror film is a good film which has been contaminated with horror, and that if the horror were to be extracted, a worthy film would remain. But this reasoning doesn't stand up.

What would The Exorcist be without the horror? I don't mean "what would be left if the gore, vomit and grotesque makeup were to be excised?". I mean "If the fear, threat and shock were left out, what would remain?"

The Exorcist is a good film - maybe even a great one - and without the horror it could not exist. The horror elements of the film are not peripheral and removable, they are at the core. An innocent child is violated by something powerful that can only hate, but knows your insecurities.

Say we agree that Rosemary's Baby is a good film - not a great one, but good enough to stand up to repeat viewings. Could it hypothetically be remade without the horror? The notion of something malevalent growing where a baby should be, and the sense that everyone else knows what's going on but won't tell you. No, it couldn't - the result of trying wouldn't be a different kind of film, the result would be no film at all.

Apply the same question to The Blair Witch Project, or to science fiction films like Cube or Solaris that borrow from the psychological horror tradition.

In The Wicker Man there's the lurking threat of an elusive conspiracy climaxing with the sheer blind faith of a human sacrifice. In The Omen there's the question - could you kill your baby son, even if he were the devil himself? In Alien, an unstoppable force, immune to reason or compassion it hunting you.

There are even a few 'slasher' horror films - as opposed to the psychological 'nameless menace' and 'fear of the dark' ones - that are good films while still being unanbigiously slashers. Halloween is firmly of the 'teens and psycho' type, yet the opening scene where a brutal killer turns out to be a small boy is a classic.

There are good films about love, war, superheroes, detectives, politics and bank robbers. There are also good films about fear of the unknown, extreme stress and the incomprehensible.