Horror as Genre

The Harrow, Writing

Horror die-hards like Ramage are confident that whatever the whims of the market, the genre will endure.
Horror fans, he said, are looking for two things: “B and B: blood and boobs.” — Ventura County Star, 5/19/07.

Greeeaaaat. Because, you know, some of the scariest movies I’ve watched have had so many boobs flashing on screen — Barker’s Hellraiser and Verbinski’s The Ring (which, I admit, I did think was scarier than Ringu, probably for cultural-context reasons). For that matter, Scott’s Alien haunted my nightmares for years, too. True, Hellraiser and Alien had gore, and that was part of the horror. But what was scary about The Ring and Alien was the suspense. And what I liked most about Hellraiser and The Ring was the sense of creepiness, of worlds right next to ours that might break through at any moment — through a puzzle box or the idiot box.

Blood and boobs. That must explain literary horror, too. All those boobs … on paper. In classics like Dracula or Frankenstein. Poe’s stories. Lovecraft’s. King’s. Koontz’s. Barker’s.

The answer’s so simple. Let’s just forget the role of liminality, abjection, Othering, regression, taboos, the Shadow-Self, and so forth, in horror. No doubt that’s all a bunch of academic psychobabble. It’s all about blood and boobs.

Which doesn’t explain why women, who deal with spilled blood on a monthly basis for a significant amount of their life, and boobs for most of it (barring mastectomies, a little horror story of its own) might be horror fans.

Yeesh. I can’t believe the reporter quoted the owner of Brain Damage films instead of any one of a number of other producers, directors, writers, or even stars who have taken the time to study and understand the genre. No wonder horror continues to be a denigrated genre.

On the other hand, I may now have an editorial topic for June’s Harrow.

drupagliassotti @ May 19, 2007