The Horror

It lasted for days, maybe even weeks. I woke up from a nightmare, almost every night. The one I remember the most is the head with a missing eye that pops into the frame underwater. It was the scariest moment in Jaws for me, in a film that scared me for life. Now, over 30 years later, since October of 2020 I regularly watch horror movies and it makes me feel good and actually helped me get through a really dark time. What’s going on?

I’m surely not the first to wonder why we watch horror films. To escape reality? To face our fear of death? To be titillated by violence? To be relieved when the thrill is over? To experience fear in a safe environment? There are endless dissertations, essays, books, articles about this topic and there clearly is no one right answer. But I want some kind of answer for me. Horror movies have been such a big factor in my life forever. When I think of my childhood, I think of the horror movies that traumatized me. Nevertheless, there is no other genre that still fascinates me more but that also disgusts me more with its many, many, many terrible movies. I still keep watching them, in a way I don’t do with comedies or sci-fi or westerns or thrillers or dramas or any other genre.

When I looked back to ‘research’ my childhood, I realized that Jaws wasn’t really the first movie that traumatized me (even if it left the deepest scars), but many other examples beforehand. Many scenes in Earthquake, which I watched without my parents, probably around the age of 5 or 6.

The moment in The War of the Gargantuans, where a monster chews a woman and then spits her out (actually, it only spits out her clothes, which I only realized now, more than 30 years later).

Many scenes in Poltergeist, especially the mirror scene.

A TV program about dangerous violent movies that featured short clips of horror films that I could never figure out but are some of the most haunting moments until today (something about a grandfather torturing a child, from some German film). A moment in another TV program, where they showed the discovery of the mother in Psycho but faded out right before the chair is spun, which made it all the more scary.

All of The Birds, probably the second-most traumatizing film of my childhood. There is probably more, if I dig deeper.

And then there was Jaws. I don’t know exactly how old I was, probably around 7 or 8 but I know I watched the whole film because terrifying moments from the whole film stayed in my mind forever. The autopsy scene with the limbs. Biting off a leg in the water. Shaw in the shark’s mouth. And the head with the missing eye, more than anything else, ever. Just writing about it, conjures up my childhood memory of it, which is more extreme than the actual image but that was the moment that made me wake up many, many nights, with long nerve endings floating out of the socket. It haunted me, it really did. I still have trouble swimming in open water because of this film.

That my really strong fear caused by this film and all the others was largely ignored by my parents, is probably responsible for a lot of things in my psyche I’m still working on. I wasn’t taken seriously in my emotions, in fact, they barely registered for them, which made me feel helpless, alone, scared, feelings that determined many situations way up into my present adult life. Even the fact that they let me watch this film (or, even more incredibly, The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover, which deserves a whole other analysis of what movies did for my ideas of sexuality) hints at negligence on a worrying level. Watching challenging movies with kids is one thing but if you then actually deal with the feelings these films conjure, it can be worthwhile or at least not deeply disturbing. But that never happened. My father always claimed that he hated horror films but that didn’t stop him from not caring that I watched all of them.

I kept watching movies and during puberty, I entered the phase of purposefully seeking out movies that were surrounded with the legend of violence. My older brother used to tell me stories of movies he’d seen (or had heard of), through which the violent details always seemed more extreme than they actually were. The Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Rambo II sounded like absolute gorefests, which they clearly aren’t. But once I reached the age where I was able to get my hands on movies of my choice, I often set out to find violent movies and ranked them on a gore scale. Predator was always on the top of the list for a while, but Pet Sematary was close behind. At a sleepover, me and some friends were absolutely terrified by watching Halloween. Later, I had to know how tough the Evil Dead movies actually were, was completely creeped out by Hellraiser II and The Fly. Still, I can’t say I enjoyed these films or their violence. I was just so incredibly fascinated by it but also really scared of it. I bought myself a book on horror movies, to try to understand what it was about that genre but was still haunted by the violent images that were included in it. At the same time, I got into Stephen King and other horror writers to steep myself even more into horror.

I started writing my own horror stories, often modeled after what I had read, but there was no question that there needed to be violent passages within them. Did I enjoy that violence? No, not really. But there was an urge to deal with it. Maybe I wanted to delve into these extremes because that was easier than dealing with my detached parents, their divorce, my failures at school and my growing mental issues. I was looking for violent stories but I needed stories nevertheless. Movies that focused on the violence were never that interesting. Jaws haunted me that much because it was an exciting, captivating film, which made the violence so much more effective.

When other kids told me about Faces of Death, I felt disgusted and had no interest whatsoever. The violence was part of what these stories special, but the violence itself wasn’t what was important. Done right, violence was intense and intensity was what I wanted. It’s probably why I later fell in love with Se7en and Tarantino movies.

For the next 20-30 years, my relationship to horror and violence stayed more or less the same, but more importantly my fear stayed the same, too. I always came back to horror films but I also was always a scared person. In recent years, my I became more and more averse to violence, especially gratuitous and exploitative violence. I saw how directors abused their viewers by celebrating violence and I wanted none of it. It was hard to admit, but it was an aspect in Tarantino movies I disliked more and more and I didn’t enjoy pure splatter or gore movies at all. When Jason beats up two girls in a sleeping bag in Jason X, it just felt wrong to me.

Last year, in October of 2020, I decided to only watch horror movies all month, Halloween and all. I hadn’t planned for this to coincide with one of my worst periods of depression. And it took me a while to realize that something had changed. At first I just watched whatever horror movie came into view but then I decided to finally watch Audition, a film I had avoided for years because I was scared of it. But now I felt ready and I liked it. And it did something to me. My fear decreased, almost miraculously. So, slowly, I watched other movies I hadn’t want to watch, mostly out of these childhood fears I was carrying around with me. Next was Re-Animator. Harmless fun. The Strangers. Kind of dumb. 47 Meters Down. A shark movie? No problem. Cannibal Holocaust (one of the highest on my not-watch list). Absolutely terrible, but not traumatic. The Last House on the Left. Martyrs. Hostel.

The quality of these movies was varied but the effect was similar. It was liberating. It was like facing an abstract fear that had never let go of me, personified as these movies, and every movie I watched made me less scared. And in the case of Martyrs (and some other horror films, like Kairo or Repulsion), it actually seemed to deal with depression and trauma, which helped me too. That thing I was so scared of, was not that scary and actually helpful.

October was over, but now I couldn’t stop watching more horror films and ticking off more movies I thought I’d never dare to watch. Every Saw movie. Wolf Creek. The Devil’s Rejects. Zombi 2. I Spit on Your Grave. Mother’s Day. Society. Nekromantik. That last one was another milestone because in my mind it was directly tied to that report about dangerous splatter films I had seen as a kid. And now I could just shrug it off. Often it was relieving to see the movies weren’t as scary as I’d imagined. Sometimes it was good to see how bad some of them were because that gave me a different tool to get rid of them. ‘Scary? This garbage? Get lost!’

I’m not cured and there are many different circumstances that helped me to get to a better place in my life. But I’m convinced that watching all these horror films was an important step along the way. This becomes really clear when I look at my inner child that spend over 30 years being scared (and fascinated) by horror films and now seems freed from these anxieties, which helps me to move on. And I’ll keep watching horror films, good and bad ones, embracing the comfort they offer me.