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By Lainie Beauchemin
*Slight spoiler warning for “Midsommar” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”*
Before I knew what anxiety was, I knew this about myself: I’m a worrywart. I was first informed by my mother, quite early in my childhood, each time my budding neuroses would foresee disaster in the mundane. Sometimes lovingly, like at the bus stop on a rainy morning, when I would fret over the fates of the hundreds of swollen worms on the sidewalk. Sometimes with exasperation, like on summer afternoons at the public pool, when she’d drag me out of the car because I was convinced that if I stepped onto the pool deck, my imaginary friend who was invisible to lifeguards would drown. Throughout the years my fears would evolve, becoming much more vague and adult and, dare I say, “sophisticated,” but never really leaving.
As a worrywart, I have a close and long-standing relationship with fear. But would I consider myself, if I may use the term, a “scaredy-cat”? Not at all. Ironically, I think it’s my anxiety that has always attracted me to scary stuff, horror movies included. There’s something validating about being able to assign an external source to my built-in hum of dread. There can also be empowerment in opting out of it. You leave the theater, you laugh it off with your friends, you go home to watch interviews with the actors to confirm they do, in fact, have all of their body parts intact, and you forget.
But admittedly, my favorite horror movies are the ones that don’t quite let you do that. The ones that identify anxieties you’ve never quite been able to put your finger on, and then play them out in front of you in ways that stick with you. These movies know how to leverage the genre to tell a hard-hitting human story, because physiologically, it’s the moments when your heart’s pumping, your eyes are wide, you have goosebumps and your senses are heightened that
you’re most susceptible to the emotional wreckage of a story. It’s for this reason that Ari Aster’s movies rank as my favorites. His most acclaimed works, “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”, left me with a hollow feeling so unshakable that I couldn’t sleep properly for weeks after. It was awesome. A few months ago I eagerly introduced my cinephile friend to “Midsommar”. He enjoyed it, but seemed relatively unaffected — during the most disturbing scenes, he reacted less upon his first viewing than I did upon my fifth. And yet this week, when I asked to draw upon his vast movie knowledge for horror movie recommendations, he was of no help. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “Horror isn’t really my thing. I get too scared.” When I pointed out that he seemed fine watching “Midsommar”, he clarified — “No, like actual horror. Like ghosts and jumpscares and stuff.” I couldn’t help but feel a bit offended, like he had just called me a scaredy-cat for flinching at such a “toothless” and “soothing” movie as “Midsommar”. And as we have established, I am no scaredy-cat. I didn’t blink at “The Conjuring”, or “It”, or “Insidious”, or many of the other films that he deems “actual horror.” But I was properly “horrified” by “Midsommar”. And yet, Aster himself has said that if someone asks if he considers himself a horror director, “I’m quick to respond with a very clear no, absolutely not.” It got me thinking — how do I even define this genre that I love so much? To find answers, I naturally defaulted to the wellspring of most human knowledge: Reddit. According to the top-voted comments on r/horror, horror narratives exploit the natural human fear of death. Reddit user u/XfresnobobX actually put it quite eloquently when they said, “In my opinion, if your movie is largely about the fear of death personified, then it’s probably a horror film.” They cite Michael Myers and the shark from “Jaws” as examples. Good start, but not exhaustive — loads of horrors don’t quite fit this template.
According to a surprising number of sources, the mingling of the normal with the paranormal makes a horror movie, but to my eye supernatural elements are neither necessary nor sufficient. Some of the most horrifying movies technically have no paranormal elements (Zach Cregger’s excellent 2022 debut “Barbarian”, “The Shining”), and some great films and shows that just simply aren’t horror are chock-full of spooky monsters, like Taika Watiti’s brilliant mockumentary-style vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows”, or the heartbreaking (and heartbreakingly short- lived) BBC drama series “In The Flesh,” in which a young man is reanimated as a human after his premature death and four- year stint as a zombie. Hell, by that definition, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, with all its witches and ghosts and goblins, would qualify.
Both aforementioned definitions also notably exclude psychological horror, which as a subgenre is even more difficult to define. Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” is a textbook psychological horror, but I’d argue that if its script had been handed to a different director — same dialogue, same plot, just different acting, directing, and aesthetic decisions — it could easily have been a drama. What can I point to and say, “There it is! That’s horror!”?
In Jacobellis vs. Ohio, a 1964 Supreme Court case about whether the state had the right to restrict “obscene” materials under the First Amendment, the court was in a similar predicament when they struggled to decide what exactly constitutes obscenity. When asked, Justice Potter Stewart famously said “I know it when I see it.” That seems like a cop-out answer, but the fact is that some things have no “objective” definition, exactly because the defining quality is “subjective” by nature. Several Wikipedia holes later, my favorite definition of horror fiction is that of historian Darrell Schweitzer: “A horror story is one that scares us.” In other words, if you want to decide if a movie is horror, don’t look at the screen — look at the faces of the people in its audience.
This isn’t to say that horror doesn’t have its hallmarks. Classic horror tropes are almost painfully consistent and recognizable because some fears are largely universal — most people shiver when they watch a character walk into a dark basement, most people jump at a sudden loud noise. But the boundaries of the genre are so ambiguous because some fears are so informed by personal experience that it’s impossible to guarantee a uniform audience response. For instance, religious horror has never really resonated with me because religion has never been a part of my life. But as a lifelong, card-carrying member of the Peanut-Free Cafeteria Table, if there’s an anaphylaxis scene, I’m walking out of the theater clutching my EpiPen for dear life (if you know, you know).
I can think of several movies that the rest of the world has filed as “psychological dramas” that I found properly horrifying (I’m looking at you, Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”). Even among movies that are commonly classified as horror, I’m not always in agreement with other viewers on what the horrifying parts are. This is where Ari Aster comes back in, because in my friend’s defense, if you’re judging solely based on the presence of classic horror elements like gore, dark corners, and jumpscares, “Midsommar” really isn’t all that scary. In fact, in what I now see as an act of defiance by Aster against the imposed identity of “horror director,” the film takes place on the Swedish countryside on the summer solstice, completely precluding darkness as a device. Without spoiling anything that isn’t revealed in the first 15 minutes, “Midsommar” tells the story of a young woman named Dani who has lost her entire family suddenly and traumatically. She suffers from severe panic attacks, has taken leave from school, and now depends solely on her boyfriend for comfort and support — a boyfriend who, the audience knows, is too cowardly to tell her that he’s actually wanted out of the relationship for years. Dani is completely alone, haunted by her trauma, knowing deep down that she is unloved in her relationship but lacking the courage or support to admit that to herself. As a result, she’s uniquely vulnerable to evil. While “Midsommar” features some pretty gnarly, messed up stuff over its runtime, to me, Dani’s predicament was by far the scariest part, a take which I’m sure is informed by my own neuroses and anxieties. Isn’t everyone secretly afraid that they’re completely alone in the world and a burden on those who claim to love them? No, just me?
And this is one of the fun parts about watching a really good horror movie, right? The introspection. Why did my body react like I was being chased by lions in the entire second act of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”? Was it the fact that the protagonist with whom I deeply identified proved to be an unreliable narrator? Am I “that” deeply afraid of deception by someone I trust? Or was it the disintegration of traditional narrative structure? Is it because I depend on stories for comfort in a world I can’t make sense of? The truth is, I miss when my fears were as simple and definable as worms getting crushed or imaginary friends meeting a watery grave. Now my anxiety is a big tangled mess of vague dread that I can barely make sense of. But even though we’ve established today that some things have no straightforward definition, I’ve found horror movies to be one way I can start to put my finger on the things that scare me most — pulling off the proverbial white sheet and seeing the monsters for what they really are once Halloween is over.