The Horror

I thought about writing this in the past, and forgive me if I have written something similar. Personally I find horror movies fascinating. They draw on primal fears both subtle and expressed and all of them are formulaic. Formulaic almost to a fault in that, as I have probably touched on before, the type of villain automatically determines the end of the story. Now if that was not fascinating enough how so many movies can have the exact same structure and still sell (so maybe the actors and dialogue change, but the story stays the same. Just think of all the different vampire movies you have seen...). Possibly even more interesting than that are the so called "heroes" of these movies. If the enemies were not perfect examples of canned cultural norms, the heroes are perfect examples of old folk story material. If you go back in time and study stories, folktales, fairy tales, and the like from the middle ages you quickly learn that there are set modes of operation that are followed. Stith Thompson did some work in this area. Now the cool thing is that these modes do in fact not change at all over time, but rather get re-arranged into stories. So here is an analogy, letters are to words as motifs are to stories, just because the letters and motifs themselves do not ever change and are limited to a select number, does not mean that the end result of stringing them together produces similar end results. The heroes however follow a much stricter pattern. Any person initially responsible for the "evil" must die by the end and cannot be saved. Any person who gives in to the sins of lust, greed, or anger will die before the end. Only the pure of heart and innocent of mind may even get close to surviving the entire thing. Any person with a dark secret in their past connecting them to the monster will most likely die unless that secret ends up defeating the monster. This structure rarely changes. I know it sounds vague, but think about it, can you name a single horror movie where ALL of these are not true? That my friends is not a coincidence, but rather proof of folklore in action. Folklore is our common cultural identity as we see and express it. It is invisible to us, but exists everywhere limiting what we say, do and think. It however also grows and changes over time just as people do. But in many cases fundamental aspects such as how we as humans see evil and personify it as monsters and defeat it stays quite constant through the ages. Now you may say, "Rambley Dave, you are missing the point, you are looking too deeply, philosophically and psychologically at horror movies. They are just made to scare." This, just as most things I examine, is probably true. But for a bit I made you see them as I do. Cool huh.

The following is my favorite excerpt from Red vs. Blue. If you have never seen it I recommend it. However it does use some strong language.

Church: All right, get ready to launch Operation Circle of Confusion.
Tucker: Uh, Church? It kinda looks more like a triangle from down here.
Church: What?
Tucker: I'm just saying, it doesn't look much like a circle. It looks more like we're forming a triangle. Just a side note.
Church: OK, fine. Triangle of Confusion! Rhombus of Terror! Parabola of Mystery! Who cares? Get the goddamn show on the road!

And who can forget about the good 'ol MST3000... Enjoy!