Best Essays and Books About Horror Movies

Learn more about your favorite frightening films, or film theories of horror itself, with this list of creepy books and essays.

You’ve probably wondered about the inspiration behind your favorite scary movies and the background of some of those horrifying stories. Sometimes the origins of a horror movie are as simple as an author telling a scary story, and at other times films are based on more sinister, true events . You might also be interested in the making of certain horror movies or the impact they have on the audience or the cast. Maybe you're into film theory and want to study the gender dynamics, cultural and political significance, and philosophy of horror, like in Carol Clover's seminal book Men, Women, and Chainsaws . Luckily, there are plenty of resources that explore these exact topics and the development of horror movies in general.

You might be interested in why people are attracted to horror movies and the act of feeling fear. In which case, you might want to read Stephen King’s essay Why We Crave Horror Movies . Digging even deeper, you might notice horror films can help us examine fears around eating, sexuality, religion, and more. You might even wonder about the characters that often die first and why, which is explained by Lindsay King-Miller in her essay A Love Letter to the Girls Who Die First in Horror Movies . Whatever it may be, in addition to the aforementioned texts, here are the best essays and books about horror movies.

Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares

An American Werewolf in London

Director John Landis ( American Werewolf in London, Twilight Zone: The Movie ) wrote a book on movie monsters covers some of cinema’s most terrifying creatures and their development. Landis explores the design of movie monsters and special effects, both in high and low-budget films. Monsters in the Movies includes interviews with the minds behind the monsters, their historical origins, and tricks behind bringing these ghouls to life.

Nothing Has Prepared Me for Womanhood Better than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 Leatherface

Sarah Kurchak’s essay examines a subject people might not consider in horror movies. The truth is that many scary films express beliefs about women and their experiences via horror and gore. Kurchak dissects how Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 features female stereotypes in hot pants but also explores women facing the threats of men and emerging from adolescence completely altered. Kurchak argues that this horror comedy can teach female viewers about what to expect from the world and adolescence.

Stephen King At the Movies: A Complete History of Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror

Book cover of Stephen King at the Movies

The chilling stories of author Stephen King have made both startling reads and frightening films. King’s works have established more than 60 horror movies and 30 television series. This book covers the making of all of them, including behind-the-scenes material and King’s opinion on some adaptations. If you’re looking to dive deeper into some iconic films based on King’s stories , consider picking up Stephen King at the Movies .

There’s Nothing Scarier than a Hungry Woman

Rosemary eating raw meat in Rosemary's Baby

Remember how we said that horror movies can contain messages that don’t appear obvious on the surface? Laura Maw notices how in many horror movies there is always a scene of a ravenous woman eating, and her fascinating essay considers the meaning behind that.

Related: Best Performances in Horror Films of All Time, Ranked

Maw writes that “horror invites us to sit with this disgust, this anxiety, and to acknowledge our appetite and refuse to suppress it.” Maw presents a feminist analysis of hungry women in well-known horror movies in a way which both explores and challenges preconceptions about women.

Behind the Horror: True Stories that Inspired Horror Movies

Demon girl Linda Blair from The Exorcist

Dr. Lee Miller’s research into the origin stories of movies like The Exorcist and A Nightmare on Elm Street are compiled in this handy book. Miller details the true accounts of disappearances, murders, and hauntings that inspired these hit movies.

Behind the Horror explains the history of the serial killers featured in Silence of the Lambs and takes a good look at the possessions that motivated the making of The Exorcist and The Conjuring 2 .

My Favorite Horror Movie: 48 Essays by Horror Creators on the Film that Shaped Them

My Favorite Horror Movie Book Cover

Arguably one of the best books to read if you are curious about the makers behind famous horror movies. My Favorite Horror Movie features over 20 essays from filmmakers, actors, set designers, musicians, and more about the dark works that solidified their careers.

The films discussed include It , Halloween , The Shining , and others. It’s a good book for looking at horror movies from different angles and recognizing the many minds that contributed to these iconic works.

The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History

The Cover of The Art of Horror

Yet another great book for establishing a rounded perspective of horror movies, this time in a much more visual way. The Art of Horror sorts through famous illustrations, movie posters, cover art, comics, paintings, photos, and filmmakers since the beginning of horror with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s infamous Frankenstein . Learn about these talented artists, their chilling work, and their impact on the direction of horror.

Wes Craven: Interviews

Drew Barrymore in Scream

If you’re trying to hear from the best horror directors themselves, the Wes Craven interviews are a great place to start. Craven is responsible for films like Scream , The Hills Have Eyes , A Nightmare on Elm Street , and The Last House on the Left , and is often considered one of the greatest horror filmmakers of all time.

Related: The Best Scream Queens of All Time, Ranked

Craven established a particular style in his films that changed the way horror movies are made, and this book pulls information from the master himself. Wes Craven: Interviews includes almost 30 interviews with the director ranging from the 1980s until Craven passed away in 2015.

101 Horror Movies You Should See Before You Die

Jack Nicholson in The Shining

Ever wonder if you’re missing a great horror film from your spooky collection? This is the book for you. 101 Horror Movies You Should See Before You Die covers the absolute essentials of every kind of horror film, from gothic to slasher and international horror classics as well. Horror can take on so many different forms and this book is one of the best for finding horror films you might have missed.

The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects Stunts, and Stories Behind Your Every Fright

The cast of the The Haunting of Hill House

Authors Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence examine women in horror movies in this book that explores feminist horror films , and more misogynistic ones from the standpoint of feminist film theory. The Science of Women in Horror recalls the history of women in horror movies and goes on to analyze more recent, women-centered horror flicks and series such as The Haunting of Hill House and Buffy the Vampire Slayer . If you want to know more about the women on and off-screen in horror movies, check out this book!

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Why Do We Enjoy Horror Movies?

Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

essay on horror movies

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

essay on horror movies

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  • Explanations
  • Personal Differences
  • Therapeutic Effects

Horror is one of the most enduringly popular film genres in many areas around the world. While many people willingly buy tickets to the latest release, in our daily lives we often try to avoid anything that frightens us. So why would we pay to watch a movie that induces fear and terror ?

Here we explore several of the theories behind why people like horror movies. We also dive into who tends to gravitate toward movies designed to provoke feelings of fright, along with the ways in which these types of films can actually be therapeutic.

Reasons People Like Horror Movies

No single explanation provided by scholars accounts for every reason people enjoy watching horror movies. Below are among the most well-established explanations offered to explain this phenomenon.

Vicarious Experiences and Threat Mastery

Horror scholar Mathias Clasen suggests that a tendency to love horror can be traced back to the constant danger our ancient ancestors experienced in the environments where they lived. Constant vigilance was required to avoid becoming the prey of a larger or more deadly animal.

These long-ago experiences have granted people a highly responsive, albeit mostly unconscious, threat detection system. Because horror movies do such a good job of simulating threatening situations, this means our emotional responses to them are similar to those we'd experience if we encountered a real-life threat.

Because we don't encounter real-life threats as often as ancient humans, going to horror films can be a novel experience that lets us put our innate threat detection system to use. This not only makes horror movies more attention-grabbing for audiences, but it also allows them to experience things like post-apocalypse, alien invasions, and the threat of an attacker in a safe environment.

In short, horror movies are a risk-free way to vicariously experience threats and rehearse one's responses to those threats. Plus, after people get through a horror movie unscathed, they may feel a sense of accomplishment and mastery over the threat they've experienced, which then leads them to feel more confident in their ability to handle other anxiety-provoking situations .

In our everyday lives, we don't encounter scary situations all that often. But if we do encounter something threatening or dangerous, it attracts our attention.

Excitation Transfer Theory

One of the earliest psychological theories to explain people's enjoyment of horror movies is Dolf Zillmann's excitation transfer theory, which was developed in the 1970s. This theory proposes that our enjoyment is created by the negative affect created by the film followed by a positive affect or response when the threat is resolved, leading to a euphoric high.

More recent studies suggest that excitation transfer theory is still alive. One was published in 2017 and looked at permadeath (the idea that once a character dies in a video game, the game starts over from the beginning) in the survival-horror game DayZ. It concluded that permadeath was appealing to players due to excitation transfer.

Exploring the Dark Side of Humanity

Other studies theorize that our enjoyment of horror movies comes from a morbid curiosity about subjects like death and terror, also referred to as the dark side of humanity. One piece of research found that people with higher levels of morbid curiosity are more likely to watch horror films, less likely to be scared after watching them, and generally watch these flicks alone.

According to this theory, horror movies let us vicariously explore the nature of evil , both in others and in ourselves. They also allow us to grapple with the darkest parts of humanity in a safe environment.

Who Likes Horror Movies?

Not everyone enjoys horror movies. In fact, there are many who stay away from the genre as much as possible. Psychology has provided some insight into the individual differences that make someone more likely to enjoy horror films.

People Who Seek Sensations

Numerous studies have demonstrated that those high in the trait of sensation seeking tend to enjoy horror. Sensation seeking is the tendency to look for novel, risky, or intense experiences . People high in this trait tend to experience positive emotions when they have intensely stimulating experiences, even if those experiences are negative.

High sensation seekers are wired to enjoy the stimulating experience of horror films in a way people low in this trait are not.

People With Lower Empathy Levels

Research indicates that people lower in the trait of empathy tend to enjoy horror movies because they are less impacted by the suffering depicted onscreen. Not everyone agrees with this, however.

Some researchers contend that our empathy toward a real person is not necessarily the same as the empathy we feel for a fictional character. The problem is that this is difficult to determine in studies, making it hard to know if and when true empathy occurs.

People Belonging to the Male Sex

More than any other individual difference, sex is most predictive of enjoyment of horror films, with males tending to enjoy scary and violent movies far more than females. This difference can be at least partially explained by the fact that females tend to experience greater fear and anxiety than males.

In addition, females tend to be higher than males in the trait of disgust sensitivity. This could lead them to dislike horror movies that depict blood and gore.

Horror Movies as Therapy

There's a growing body of research that suggests horror movies could be used in clinical settings to help people with anxiety or trauma. For instance, one study found that people who watched horror movies were less psychologically distressed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and those who were fans of the apocalyptic subgenre of horror felt more prepared for additional waves of the pandemic.

This suggests that people who consume horror develop the ability to cope with stressful and anxiety-provoking situations.

If this is the case, watching horror movies and other media could be used by mental health professionals to help people with anxiety develop emotional and behavioral strategies to cope with their fears, which could ultimately make them more resilient in general.

While people who don't enjoy horror may not find this beneficial, for those who like the genre, watching horror movies could be akin to exposure therapy . More research needs to be conducted to determine if this approach is effective and, if so, in what instances.

American Film Market. The relative popularity of genres around the world .

Clasen M. Why horror seduces .

Clasen M, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen J, Johnson JA. Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology of scary media .  Evol Behav Sci . 2020;14(3):213-230. doi:10.1037/ebs0000152

Scrivner C, Johnson JA, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen J, Clasen M. Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic .  Pers Individ Dif . 2021;168:110397. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2020.110397

Martin GN. (Why) do you like scary movies? A review of the empirical research on psychological responses to horror films .  Front Psychol . 2019;10:2298. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02298

Carter M, Allison F. Fear, loss and meaningful play: Permadeath in DayZ . J Gaming Virtual Worlds . 2017;9(2):143-158. doi:10.1386/jgvw.9.2.143_1

Sanders A. Exploring the dark side of humanity: Motivations of morbidly curious individuals . Murray State University.

Yang H, Zhang K. The psychology behind why we love (or hate) horror . Harvard Business Review.

Petraschka T. How empathy with fictional characters differs from empathy with real persons . J Aesthet Art Criticism . 2021;79(2):227-232. doi:10.1093/jaac/kpab017

Al-Shawaf L, Lewis D, Buss D. Sex differences in disgust: Why are women more easily disgusted than men? Emotion Rev . 2017;10(2):149-160. doi:10.1177/1754073917709940

Scrivner C, Christensen K. Scaring away anxiety: Therapeutic avenues for horror fiction to enhance treatment for anxiety symptoms .  PsyArXiv . 2021. doi:10.31234/osf.io/7uh6f

By Cynthia Vinney, PhD Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

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Our Favorite Essays and Stories About Horror Films

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Make tonight's evil dead marathon more literary with our best writing about the genre.

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It’s the spookiest day of the spookiest season, but you already had your party last weekend, and now you have to stay home and either hand out candy to grabby children or turn out all lights visible from the street and pretend you’re not home. What makes a night in both fun and seasonally appropriate? Horror movies, of course! So while you’re waiting for, or hiding from, trick-or-treaters tonight, put on a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon and make your way through some of the best stuff we’ve published about scary films.

“ There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Hungry Woman ” by Laura Maw

Maybe you haven’t noticed this, but horror movies contain a lot of scenes of women eating—and not only eating, but eating voraciously. Laura Maw has noticed, and she thinks she understands. This essay is both a sensitive cultural analysis of a horror movie trope and a beautiful personal narrative of coming to terms with both the threat and the banality of hunger.

As a woman, to say that you have found eating uncomfortable at times is not particularly groundbreaking. The anxiety has become mundane because it is so common for women, but isn’t that in itself noteworthy? Horror invites us to sit with this disgust, this anxiety, to acknowledge our appetite, to refuse to let us suppress it. There is something uncomfortable and enthralling about watching a woman devour what she likes with intent.

“ Horror Lives in the Body ” by Meg Pillow Davis

This Best American Essays notable is about the physical experience of horror—both horror films, and the familiar horrors we encounter in our normal lives, the ways we brush up against mortality and violation and fear. Why do we seek out this physical experience—”the pupil dilation, the quickening heart, the sweat forming on your upper lip and the surface of your palms, and the nearly overwhelming urge to cover your eyes or run from the room”?

If those other viewers are anything like me, they watch horror movies because they recognize the horror, because its familiarity is strange and terrifying and unavoidable. It is the lure of the uncanny filtering into the cracks and crevices of the cinematic landscape and drawing us in.

“ What ‘Halloween’ Taught Me About Queerness ” by Richard Scott Larson

Michael Myers wears a mask to hide his face while he kills—but is that the only mask he wears? Richard Scott Larson talks about watching Halloween obsessively as an adolescent, while he was starting to understand that his own desires were also considered monstrous.

The experience of adolescence as a closeted queer boy is one of constantly attempting to imitate the expression of a desire that you do not feel. Identification with a bogeyman, then, shouldn’t be so surprising when you imagine the bogeyman as unfit for society, his true nature having been rejected and deemed horrific.

“ If My Mother Was the Final Girl ” by Michelle Ross

The “final girl” is the one who’s left standing at the end of the film, the one who survives the carnage. But what do you call someone who’s still standing after childhood trauma? This short story is about horror films, but more than that, it’s about mother-daughter relationships—a deeper and more mundane form of horror than the kind in slasher flicks.

The one thing my mother and I share is a love for slasher films. When the first girl gets hacked up or sawed in half or stabbed in the breast, my mother says, “Now there’s real life for you.” And I glance at her sideways and think, you can say that again.

“ A Love Letter to the Girls Who Die First in Horror Films ” by Lindsay King-Miller

Unlike the “final girl,” the girl who dies first doesn’t have a catchy title. Lindsay King-Miller writes about the lost friend who taught her that we don’t all have it in us to be a final girl—and that we should celebrate the girl who dies first, because she’s not living in fear.

To survive a horror story you have to realize you’re in one. The girl who dies thinks she’s in a different kind of story, one that’s about her and what she wants: to dance, to party, to fuck, to feel good. She thinks she is the subject of this story, the one who watches, desires, sees, the one who acts upon the world. She does not feel the eyes on her, does not know she is being observed, that her fate is not to reshape the world but to be reshaped by it.

“ Nothing Has Prepared Me For The Reality of Womanhood Better Than ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’ ” by Sarah Kurchak

Yes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a cheesy horror-comedy hybrid in which women are menaced and their bodies are treated as set dressing. But so is adolescence. Sarah Kurchak writes about the many ways in which this movie taught her what to expect from the world.

Sure, this was, on many levels, a schlocky B-movie with so many of the expected hallmarks of the time — women in hot pants and peril, over-the-top gore. But it was a schlocky B-movie in which a woman faced men’s threats, both implicit and explicit, and was left breathing but almost unrecognizable at the end of it. That felt familiar.

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The Psychology Behind Why We Love (or Hate) Horror

  • Haiyang Yang
  • Kuangjie Zhang

essay on horror movies

Some people spend $$$ to experience the thrill of a scare.

Fear isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (or coffee). While some people would spend money for the love of a scare, many would run in the opposite direction. So why is it that some crave all kinds of frightening experiences?

  • One reason we consume horror is to experience stimulation. Exposure to terrifying acts, or even the anticipation of those acts, can stimulate us — both mentally and physically — in opposing ways: negatively (in the form of fear or anxiety) or positively (in the form of excitement or joy).
  • Another reason we seek horror is to gain novel experiences. Apocalypse horror films, for example, allow us to live out alternative realities — from zombie outbreaks to alien infestations.
  • Lastly, horror entrainment may help us (safely) satisfy our curiosity about the dark side of human psyche. Observing storylines in which actors must confront the worst parts of themselves serves as a pseudo character study of the darkest parts of the human condition.  

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Some people LOVE to consume horror. From popular shows like American Horror Story and The Walking Dead to haunted theme parks and scary Steven King novels, we crave all kinds of frightening experiences.

  • Haiyang Yang is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on decision-making. His work has appeared in premier journals such as the J ournal of Marketing Research , Journal of Consumer Research , Journal of Consumer Psychology , and Psychological Science.
  • Kuangjie Zhang is an assistant professor at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on marketing. His work has appeared in premier journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General .

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According to Stephen King, This Is Why We Crave Horror Movies

The horror king breaks down our obsession with the macabre.

Stephen King and horror are synonymous. Are you really able to call yourself a fan of horror if one of his novels or film adaptations isn't among your top favorites? The Maine-born writer is hands down the most successful horror writer and one of the most beloved and prolific writers ever whose legacy spans generations. Without King, we might not be as terrified of clowns and or think twice about bullying the shy girl in school. One could say that King has earned the moniker, "the King of Horror." In addition to all he's written, King has also had over 60 adaptations of his work for television and the big screen and has written, produced, and starred in films and shows as well. He has fully immersed himself in the genre of horror from all sides, and it's unlikely that we will ever have anyone else like Stephen King. But did you know that King wrote an essay that was published in Playboy magazine about horror movies?

In 1981, King's essay titled " Why We Crave Horror Movies " was published in Playboy magazine as a variation of the chapter " The Horror Movie As Junk Food" in Danse Macabre . Danse Macabre was published in 1981 and is one of the non-fiction books in which that wrote about horror in media and how our fears and anxieties have been influencing the horror genre. The full article that was published is no longer online, but there is a shortened four-page version of it that can be found.

RELATED: The Iconic Horror Movie You Won't Believe Premiered at Cannes

Stephen King Believes We Are All Mentally Ill

Stephen-King-Insomnia-From-a-Buick-8-The-Regulators-1

The essay starts out guns blazing, the first line reading "I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little bit better." From here, he describes the general behaviors of people we know and how mannerisms and irrational fears are not different between the public and those in asylums. He points out that we pay money to sit in a theater and be scared to prove a point that we can and to show that we do not shy away from fear. Some of us, he states, even go watch horror movies for fun, which closes the gap between normalcy and insanity. A patron can go to the movies, and watch someone get mutilated and killed, and it's considered normal, everyday behavior. This, as a horror lover, feels very targeted. I absolutely watch horror movies for fun and I will do so with my bucket of heart-attack-buttered popcorn and sip on my Coke Zero. The most insane thing about all of that? The massive debt accumulated from one simple movie date.

Watching Horror Movies Allows Us to Release Our Insanity

i spit on your grave gun

King states that we use horror movies as a catharsis to act out our nightmares and the worst parts of us. Getting to watch the insanity and depravity on the movie screen allows us to release our inner insanity, which in turn, keeps us sane. He writes that watching horror movies allows us to let our emotions have little to no rein at all, and that is something that we don't always get to do in everyday life. Society has a set of parameters that we must follow with regard to expressing ourselves to maintain the air of normalcy and not be seen as a weirdo. When watching horror movies, we see incredibly visceral reactions in the most extreme of situations. This can cause the viewer to reflect on how they would react or respond to being in the same type of situation. Do we identify more with the victim or the villain? This poses an interesting thought for horror lovers because sometimes the villain is justified. Are we wrong for empathizing with them instead?

Let's take a look at one of the more popular horror movies of recent years. Mandy is about a woman who is murdered by a crazed cult because she is the object of the leader's obsession. This causes Red ( Nicolas Cage ) to ride off seeking revenge for the love of his life being murdered. There are also movies like I Spit On Your Grave and The Last House On The Left where the protagonist becomes the murderer in these instances because of the trauma they experienced from sexual assault. Their revenge makes audiences a little more willing to side with the murderer because they took back their power and those they killed got what was deserved. This is where that Lucille Bluth meme that says "good for her" is used. I'll die on the hill that those characters were justified and if that makes me mentally ill then King might be right!

What Does Stephen King Mean When He Tells Us to "Keep the Gators" Fed?

The Purge (2013)

At the end of the essay, King mentions he likes to watch the most extreme horror movies because it releases a trap door where he can feed the alligators. The alligators he is referring to are a metaphor for the worst in all humans and the morbid fantasies that lie within each of us. The essay concludes with "It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed." From this, we can deduce that King feels we all have the ability to be institutionalized, but those of us that watch horror movies are less likely because the sick fantasies can be released from our brains.

With that release, we can walk down the street normally without the bat of an eye from walkers-by. Perhaps this is why the premise for movies like The Purge came to fruition. A movie where for 24 hours all crime, including murder, is decriminalized couldn't have been made by someone who doesn't get road rage or scream into the void. It was absolutely made by someone who waited at the DMV for too long or has had experience working in retail around Black Friday. With what King is saying, The Purge is a direct reflection of that catharsis. Not only are you getting to watch a crazy horror movie where everyone is shooting everyone and everything is on fire, but it's likely something you've had a thought or two about. You can consider those gators fed for sure.

Do Horror Movies Offer Us True Catharsis or Persuasive Perspective?

Scream Courtney Cox Neve Campbell

Catharsis as a concept was coined by the philosopher Aristotle . He explained that the performing arts are a way to purge negative types of emotions from our subconscious, so we don't have to hold onto them anymore. This viewpoint further perpetuates what King is trying to explain. With that cathartic relief, the urgency to act on negative emotion is less likely to happen because there is no build-up of negativity circling the drain from our subconscious to our reality. However, some who read the essay felt like King was just being persuasive and using fancy imagery rather than identifying an actual reason why horror is popular. Some claim the shock and awe factor of his words and his influence on horror would cause some readers to believe they are mentally ill deep down. I have to say, as a millennial who rummages through the ends of social media multiple times a day, everyone on the internet thinks they're mentally ill, and we all have the memes to prove it. It is exciting and fascinating to watch a horror movie after working a 9-5 job where the excitement is low. Watching Ghostface stalk Sidney Prescott ( Neve Campbell ) in Scream isn't everyone's idea of winding down, but for the last 20-something years, it has been my comfort movie when I'm feeling sad or down. The nostalgia of Scream is what makes it feel cathartic to me and that's free therapy!

What is the Science Behind Loving Horror Movies?

Dani Ardor in Midsommar

Psychology studies will tell us that individuals who crave and love horror are interested in it because they have a higher sensation-seeking trait . This means they have a higher penchant for wanting to experience thrilling and exciting situations. Those with a lower level of empathy are also more likely to enjoy horror movies as they will have a less innate response to a traumatic scene on screen. According to the DSM-V , a severe lack of empathy could potentially be a sign of a more serious psychological issue, however, the degree of severity will vary. I do love rollercoasters, but I also cry when I see a dog that is just too cute, so horror lovers aren't necessarily the unsympathetic robots that studies want us to be. Watching horror films can also trigger a fight-or-flight sensation , which will boost adrenaline and release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. Those chemicals being released make the viewers feel accomplished and positive, relating back to the idea that watching horror movies is cathartic for viewers.

Anyone who reads and studies research knows that correlation does not imply causation, but whether King's perspective is influenced by his position in the horror genre or not, psychology and science can back up the real reasons why audiences love horror movies. As a longtime horror lover and a pretty above-average horror trivia nerd, I have to wonder if saying we are mentally ill is an overstatement and could maybe be identified more as horror lovers seeking extreme stimulus. Granted, this essay was written over 40 years ago, so back then liking horror wasn't as widely accepted as it is today. It's possible that King felt more out of place for his horror love back then and the alienation of a fringe niche made him feel mentally ill. Is King onto something by assuming that everyone has mental illness deep down, or is this a gross overestimation of the human psyche? The answer likely falls somewhere in between, but those that love horror will continue to release that catharsis through the terrifying and the unknown because it's a scream, baby!

Why We Enjoy Horror Films Essay

Horror movie critics have asserted that there is a growing tendency in making much more violent and bloody movies. At a glance, it is difficult to understand why people pay money for the ticket to watch the most horrible, thrilling, and creepy scenes at the cinema. However, deeper examination explores much more sophisticated reasons for the public’s immense interest in horror movies.

King’s statement that horror movies “have a dirty job to do” (3) can be reinterpreted to stress that contemporary production or horror films premises on people’s desire to distract themselves from the monotonous routines and realities of grim daily activities by depicting ugliness and fear.

While deliberating on the essence and purpose of horror movies, Kinds notes, “[horror film] urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites” (2). Therefore, most individuals interested in this genre search for psychic relief because most of such pictures are premised on the simple, primitive representation of the evil and the good.

Also, the illustration of unreasonableness and outright madness is rarely observed in real life. Even though such emotions as love, compassion, sympathy, kindness, or commitment are celebrated in society, the depiction of the opposite emotions in horror movie can only enhance individual’s awareness of the significance of these aspects. Society is too bored with constant practicing of politeness and attentiveness, love and friendships.

Under these circumstances, horror movies demonstrate what could happen in case social sanity will be distorted. Human perception of insanity is relative because its normality is usually accepted by the majority. Existence of social norms allows us to be distinct between the action that makes sense and unreasonable and irrational actions.

All these dilemmas could be solved as soon as people start watching thrillers and horror films. At this point, King emphasizes, “it is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized…and it all happens, fittingly enough in the dark” (3). In this context, supporters of just and good lifestyle will not be able to adhere to the concepts as soon as they realize the main purpose of horror movies, as well as the techniques directors, employ to achieve this purpose.

Modern horror movies often depict monsters, psycho, or zombies chasing their victims. The viewers realize what is going on, and they often strive to help the hero to escape death. While using these techniques, horror movie directors emphasize the helplessness of a person in front of the danger, which makes all people be frightened.

The feeling of unexpected capture makes people attend such pictures frequently because they lack such emotions in life. In such a way, they also entertain themselves and even have fun when watching creepy scenes. In conclusion, the admirers of horror movie genre attend such pictures to grasp the main attributes of a new reality in which irrationality and simplicity provide them with new emotions and experiences that are impossible to perceive in real life.

By employing unexpected appearance, depicting ugliness and monsters, and revealing the scene of violence, the directors expect to frighten people who are in search of new impressions and risky situations. Although modern movies have become more bloody, the idea of this genre remains unchanged to approve such emotions as love, compassion, and kindness.

Works Cited

King, Stephen. “ Why We Crave Horror Movies ”. Web.

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1. IvyPanda . "Why We Enjoy Horror Films." April 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/horror-movies-art/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Why We Enjoy Horror Films." April 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/horror-movies-art/.

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How late capitalism is the underrecognized monster lurking in modern American horror.

“Sometimes I wonder what it was exactly, that led me to pull The Dead Zone by Stephen King off of my parents’ bookshelf when I was in fourth grade,” says Jason Middleton. “It was the first ‘grown-up’ novel I ever read. There were certainly parts of it that I found kind of upsetting, but also magnetic. It almost felt as if the world was opening up in a new way.”

Middleton is an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester . He also directs its film and media studies program . His captivation by King’s novel led to a lifelong love of horror films. Although horror is just one of the film genres Middleton has immersed himself in—both as a fan and a scholar—it’s a genre whose appeal he thinks is especially durable.

In horror, “normality is threatened by a monster,” he says. “What’s so wonderfully expansive about the horror genre is that the monster keeps forming and reforming in relation to the fears and anxieties of its time. And on the flip side, normality, and the depiction of normality, keeps evolving and changing based on the historical period as well.”

Work as the American nightmare

There have been some clear trends. In the post-World War II era, the monster was often a stand-in for anxieties about the atomic bomb. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, the monster often suggested anxieties about female power and female bodies.

That critique has extended into a new era—late capitalism, a phrase coined to describe a world of globalized commodification that’s both unsettling and absurd . The essays focus overwhelmingly on 21st-century horror films. Those depict a world of economic precarity and a hollowed-out middle class that make up “a new ‘normality’” of survival, or of just getting by. And even that bleak environment is vulnerable to new monsters that threaten what stability protagonists have been able to muster—or that they are striving to attain in the first place.

In Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (University of Texas Press, 2023), Middleton has joined with Aviva Briefel, who teaches literature and film at Bowdoin College, to make the case that there’s been another kind of monster lurking in American horror films all along: the post-industrial world of work.

In the essay collection, which they coedit, Middleton and Briefel suggest that ambivalence about work is a theme that has roots stretching back to classic horror , when it usually came in the form of the mad scientist. In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique. Middleton and Briefel describe the critique as reflecting “social fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality.”

An easy example is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , a pathbreaking film that’s 50 years old this year. Rural, unemployed slaughterhouse workers are never shown performing slaughterhouse labor, but are shown “repeating the trained motions of this labor upon their human victims,” they write.

New categories of uncompensated work

Middleton is especially interested in forms of uncompensated work, which he argues fall disproportionately on groups that are already marginalized. He isn’t just talking about such uncompensated labor as housework or family caregiving. In his own contribution, “No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar, ” Middleton explores “emotion work” in the 2019 film directed by Ari Aster.

He describes emotion work as “suppressing and modifying, and maybe not expressing one’s own feelings in order that a spouse or partner has the kind of optimal experience that they themselves expect to have in the relationship.” It has a long history in the quest of women to get by but has proven resilient even as women have achieved greater economic independence.

Midsommar (2019) depicts the arduous efforts of a 20-something female protagonist, Dani, to hold onto her relationship with her distant and disengaged boyfriend, Christian. The couple attends a summer festival in Sweden that turns out to be an annual ritual of a murderous cult.

Its horrors mirror Dani’s labors in preserving her attachment to Christian. But she also attains a level of power within the cult, and the film’s cathartic ending shows Dani ending the relationship by sacrificing Christian.

It’s actually a breakup story, Middleton explains. But in showing the slow, laboriousness process in which Dani comes to recognize Christian’s neglectfulness, it’s the inverse of many lighter breakup films. “It’s kind of the horror movie version of a breakup film like Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun ,” he says. “The semantic elements are mostly the same—travel, exotic location, meeting different people, food, all of these things. But whereas in those films, the work of a breakup is frictionless and fulfilling and idealized, Midsommar uses the horror genre to instead express the work of a breakup as just agonizing, laborious, and painful—and ultimately, in the end, cathartic.”

The horror of stagnation—and of leisure

The essays in the collection also demonstrate how the experience of economic precarity can differ along racial lines. Briefel’s essay, for example, is subtitled “The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us .”

“In a 2019 interview for Vanity Fair, Jordan Peele explained that one of his objectives in the film Us was to represent Black leisure,” Briefel begins. “Yet relaxation is a major source of horror in the film.” Us shows a Black family living with a constant threat of merely letting their guard down.

In another essay, Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, coins a subgenre of “Buppie horror,” which reworks the conventional home-invasion thriller. Lakeview Terrace (2008) is an archetype, Gaines explains, of a subgenre that “seems to say that entry into a rarified class status historically reserved for whites must be paid in blood.”

For many white Americans, however, the threat is losing what they have—or living with the dread of having already lost. Middleton’s colleague at Rochester, Joel Burges, finds in David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows a depiction of “the precarity of white working-class identity.” The film shows a group of young adult friends in a desolate and stagnant postindustrial Detroit. It’s a reworking of the stalker films of the 1970s and ’80s, explains Burges, like Middleton, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies. It Follows adheres to the slasher convention of punishing people for sexual acts. Sexual encounters between the characters—men as well as women, in this film—infect characters with “It,” a stalker who lurks after them, and takes changing forms, but always of mangled middle- and working-class white bodies.

In these bodies, however, Burges found something beyond the slasher convention in which sex equals death. In It Follows , the work of getting by literally takes place mostly in low-level, dead-end service occupations that fill the young adults with dread to have. There’s emotion work, in other words, in surviving the bleak landscape through which “It” stalks victims. “Dread is slow,” Burges writes. “Its menace bears down on you with steadily intensifying pressure that never relents.”

Horror films in the post-COVID era

When Middleton and Briefel got started on their project, COVID-19 was sweeping across the globe. No one knew at the time just how much the pandemic would transform the world of work. Have these changes started to play out in horror films? And if so, how?

Says Middleton: “Something that I noticed during the last few years is that some really interesting horror movies take place not only entirely in a house, or entirely within an enclosed space, but entirely just a person and their laptop. For example, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). The whole film is just from the perspective of an isolated teenage girl on her laptop, as she’s on it every night to do these internet challenges that grow increasingly dangerous and threatening as she does them.

“It’s just the horrific experience of being on the internet on your laptop all the time.”

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Why We Crave Horror Movies

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Analysis: “Why We Crave Horror Movies”

The essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies” interweaves point of view , structure, and tone to address the foundational themes of fear, emotions, and “insanity” in relation to horror movies. It examines why horror films allow the expression of fearful emotions linked to irrationality. The essay integrates literary techniques and pop culture references to form a cohesive whole, and it highlights several key themes: Good Versus Bad Emotions , The Expression of Fear Through Horror Movies , and “Insanity” and Normality in Society and Horror Film .

King argues that fear and other negative emotions are universal and that horror movies are a key art form for expressing these emotions. The essay gives audiences permission to experience and enjoy these films as a vehicle for fears.

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Essay on Horror Movies and Their History

Are you fascinated by the spine-tingling, edge-of-your-seat experiences that horror movies provide? This essay delves into the captivating world of horror films, tracing their history from early cinema to the box office smashes of today. As a genre that continually evolves, horror has been a significant part of the film industry, influencing culture and art. From the psycho-thriller classics of How to Write an Essay on Horror Movies  to the contemporary masterpieces of Jordan Peele, we'll explore how these films have shaped our understanding of fear and entertainment. Get ready to embark on a thrilling journey through the dark and intriguing corridors of horror cinema.

Horror Movies: An Evolving Genre

Horror movies, with their unique ability to tap into our deepest fears, have undergone significant evolution. The genre, marked by films like Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Roman Polanski's chilling works, has always pushed the boundaries of storytelling. These movies are not just about scares; they're about exploring the human psyche, societal fears, and the concept of evil. Understanding the roots of horror cinema is key to appreciating its impact and evolution.

Anthony Perkins in the Movie "Psycho"

Anthony Perkins' portrayal of Norman Bates in "Psycho" redefined the horror genre. His performance, marked by a complex blend of innocence and lurking darkness, offered a new face to cinematic terror. The nuanced depiction of Bates made "Psycho" a standout, influencing countless horror films that followed. It's a study in character development within the horror genre.

Movie Comparison: Classic vs. Modern Horror

Comparing classics like "Jaws" with modern horror movies like "Get Out" reveals the genre's dynamic nature. While "Jaws" capitalized on primal fears with its iconic suspenseful scenes, Jordan Peele's "Get Out" combines social commentary with horror, presenting a nuanced take on contemporary issues. This comparison highlights how horror films have become a platform for more than just fear, evolving into a medium for profound storytelling and reflection.

Narratives in Horror Films: A Diverse Spectrum

Horror films have always been about more than just scares. They explore a range of narratives, from psychological thrillers to supernatural hauntings. Each narrative offers a unique perspective on what constitutes horror, making the genre incredibly diverse and rich in content.

"Get Out" Movie: A Modern Horror Phenomenon

Jordan Peele's "Get Out" revolutionized the horror genre by infusing it with sharp social commentary and psychological depth. This film challenges traditional horror tropes and presents a fresh, thought-provoking perspective on the genre.

"Jaws" Movie Review: The Classic that Redefined Fear

Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" remains a seminal work in horror cinema. Its approach to building suspense and fear, without always showing the antagonist, set new standards in the genre. The movie's impact on both the horror genre and popular culture is undeniable.

Dos and Don'ts of Horror Movie Analysis

When analyzing horror movies, it's important to do so with an open mind and consider the film's historical context. Don't limit your interpretation to just the surface-level scares; look deeper into the themes, symbolism, and filmmaking techniques used.

FAQs on Horror Movies

  • Q: What defines a horror movie? A: A horror movie is defined by its ability to elicit fear, suspense, and a sense of dread in its audience, often through a variety of themes and techniques.
  • Q: How have horror movies changed over time? A: Horror movies have evolved from simple shock tactics to more complex narratives that include psychological and social themes, reflecting societal fears and anxieties.

Concluding Reflections on Horror Movies

In conclusion, horror movies offer a window into our collective fears and fascinations. From the chilling performance of Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" to the innovative approach of Jordan Peele in "Get Out," these films continue to captivate and terrify audiences worldwide. As we reflect on the history and evolution of this genre, it's clear that horror movies are much more than mere entertainment; they are a reflection of our culture and a testament to the power of storytelling.

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15 Modern Horror Movies With ’80s Vibes

essay on horror movies

Lisa Frankenstein recently arrived in theaters, giving us all a fresh dose of leg warmers and hair spray and reminding everyone that, while ’90s nostalgia is hot, ’80s nostalgia isn’t over yet. Zelda Williams’s film clearly delights in all the trappings of 1980s pop culture and teenage life, and if the movie hits you just right, it’ll have you craving more ’80s horror vibes when you get home.

So, we’re here to help. From killer businessmen in power suits to high-concept slashers that feel like ’80s movies even when they’re not, here are 15 great horror movies that’ll take you back to the era of hair metal and hanging at the mall.

American Psycho (2000)

Full of outstanding ’80s production design, great soundtrack choices, and spot-on costumes, American Psycho is a gleeful, relentless send-up of 1980s excess with a sense of humor as black as the fabric on Christian Bale’s power suits. The story of a young businessman (Bale) who moonlights as a serial killer and builds his own movie-worthy myth in his mind, it’s not a movie that necessarily looks on the ’80s favorably. But for all its ruthless dissection of the era, Mary Harron’s masterpiece also never fails to get the details right, which just makes the cuts that much deeper. And, hey, Jared Leto gets ax murdered in this one!

The House of the Devil (2009)

A lot of movies capture an ’80s vibe by pouring on the MTV-inspired fashion and New Wave soundtracks, but The House of the Devil is something different. A Satanic Panic–infused nightmare from director Ti West, driven by the expressive eyes of lead actress Jocelin Donahue, it’s a movie that expertly captures that particular latchkey-kid dread that comes with discovering something’s not quite right about the neighborhood. It’s an ode to the quiet side of the ’80s where dark things live. And if that doesn’t do it for you, you can always watch for a scene-stealing Greta Gerwig appearance.

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

A lot of the movies on this list aren’t literally set in the ’80s, or they spend more time on plot than they do on establishing that ’80s vibe. But if you want a pure, uncut shot of ’80s nostalgia straight into your veins? WNUF Halloween Special ’s got you. Masterminded by director Chris LaMartina, it’s designed down to the last detail to play like a local-news Halloween special you recorded with your VCR while you were out trick-or-treating, complete with faux commercials that simultaneously evoke a certain menace while adding tremendous authenticity. The plot follows a local news crew as they investigate a house reputed to be haunted, but you might have to watch more than once to get all of the details. The first time you see it, you’ll be too busy wondering if you stumbled on something that really was ripped off an old basement tape.

The Final Girls (2015)

A modern horror film with a high-concept hook that turns it into a period movie sounds a little complicated, but nothing about The Final Girls feels hard to watch. Starring Taissa Farmiga as the daughter of a famous scream queen (Malin Akerman) who’s magically transported into one of her mother’s slasher movies, it’s so self-assured in pursuing its premise that it never loses its audience, building layers of fun and incisive trope dissection while also telling a very satisfying mother-daughter story along the way. If you love Farmiga as a horror star, it’s essential viewing.

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015)

Some movies on this list are loving attempts to re-create a certain ’80s horror-cinema moment. Others are shameless send-ups of tropes that filled the movies of that moment. Dude Bro Party Massacre III is both. Framed as a lost cult classic just being rediscovered, it’s a film that revels in poking fun at a certain kind of ’80s slasher while also delivering the goods. Anyone who has ever spent a weekend ripping through a stack of VHS slashers will recognize the perspective here and just how well the film pulls it off. Plus, it’s one of the few movies where you can watch someone throw a circular-saw blade like it’s a ninja star, so that’s fun.

The Lure (2015)

American horror movies aren’t the only ’80s throwbacks in town. Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s hypnotic The Lure , about a pair of mermaids who enter the human world and work as a nightclub act, simultaneously feels like the darkest music video you’ve ever seen and an indulgent trip through ’80s Euro-horror wonders. Throats are ripped, songs are sung, and by the time it’s over, you’re simply not the same. Put this one on if you’re looking for another side of the ’80s — or if you just enjoy a good musical number.

The Babysitter (2017)

Modern-horror luminary Brian Duffield ( Spontaneous , No One Will Save You ) didn’t set The Babysitter in the 1980s, but that doesn’t stop the film from evoking some of the best doses of horror fun the decade had to offer. The film follows an adolescent boy (Judah Lewis) who’s basically in love with his cool, gorgeous babysitter (Samara Weaving), until he accidentally finds out she’s a member of a demonic cult. Funny, self-aware, and full of awesome horror reveals and playful winks at the genre’s many conventions, it’s the kind of film you’ll wish you could have gotten on VHS at the video store back in 1988.

Happy Death Day (2017)

Once the slasher market took off in the 1980s, certain key elements emerged, and it became very clear very quickly that horror filmmakers loved to set their killer movies on college campuses. The college slasher is a staple of the decade thanks to films like Final Exam and The House on Sorority Row , and while it’s not an ’80s film itself, Happy Death Day calls those movies to mind quite well, with a twist. Yes, you’ll get your scheming sorority sisters and your biting college-age putdowns, but this tale of a young woman (Jessica Rothe) who’s caught in a time loop pitting her against the same killer again and again is also something more — a coming-of-age story worthy of the ’80s best teen tearjerkers.

Summer of ’84 (2018)

One great side effect of Stranger Things’ success is the resurgence of films about neighborhood kids trying to piece together dread-inducing mysteries, often in a retro setting. Summer of ’84 is, as the name suggests, exactly that kind of movie, following a group of kids who think the nice guy across the street (expertly played by Rich Sommer) might be the serial killer who’s been abducting local kids for years. If you ever spent a summer riding around on bikes with your friends, building legends out of quiet suburban streets and maybe hiding from that one particular neighbor who’s a little too creepy, this is the movie for you.

Mandy (2018)

The films of Panos Cosmatos exist in their own warped version of time, so much so that they might not even take place in this universe. That means that Mandy , while set in 1983, doesn’t necessarily follow the same path as other ’80s-set films, but it’s better for it. The story of a vengeance-mad logger (Nicolas Cage) who sets out to get the cult that killed his beloved (Andrea Riseborough), it’s drenched in hallucinatory colors and sounds that’ll take you back to the days when you used to get high and sit between two speakers to get the full effect of the album you just bought.

It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019)

It’s not every day you get to watch a group of kids mop up a room full of blood while a Cure song is playing, but that’s the kind of ’80s movie experience you get from watching Andy Muschietti’s two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s epic killer-clown novel. The childhood chapters of the novel take place in the 1950s, but Muschietti & Co. wisely moved things up 30 years, and it was more than a cosmetic choice. The 1980s setting offers plenty of great style points (and New Kids on the Block jokes), yes, but it also adds a layer of true-crime dread to the whole thing, placing the kids at the center of fear in the decade when everyone was seemingly out to get them.

Psycho Goreman (2020)

Ask horror fans what they love about ’80s movies and before too long the words practical effects will come out. It’s just how we’re wired. We like to see the latex and the goop and the fake intestines fly, and Psycho Goreman is here to give us all that and more. The story of two siblings (Nita-Josee Hanna and Owen Myre) who accidentally resurrect an ancient, murderous alien overlord, it’s an absolutely wild ride that feels like the kind of thing you’d pass around on tape to your friends, making sure everyone had the chance to see the madness. It’s not set in the ’80s, but it has a vibe so strong you’ll start playing air guitar without realizing it.

Freaky (2020)

Another entry on this list that isn’t set in the ’80s, and even delights in depicting certain Gen-Z personalities, Freaky nevertheless feels like a welcome throwback to the kind of conceptual slashers that were everywhere in the decade when the subgenre took off. As the title suggests, it’s a Freaky Friday– style body swap that puts a teenage girl (Kathryn Newton) in the body of a masked slasher (Vince Vaughn), and vice versa. That’s fun enough on its own, but it’s what the film does next, from shop-class murders to unlikely romances, that makes it a winning blend of John Hughes and John Carpenter, perfect for ’80s movie fans who’ve already exhausted the films released in that decade.

The Fear Street Trilogy (2021)

Technically, Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy of films, adapted from R.L. Stine’s beloved YA books, takes place everywhere but the ’80s. We get an installment in the ’90s, an installment in the ’70s, and even an installment in the 17th century. But despite the quibbles over the nature of linear time, everything about Leigh Janiak’s films sends them back to the heyday of 1980s slashers, when everyone was looking for the right high concept to place a masked killer into. The difference? Janiak gives us not one, but three high concepts wrapped into one grand story, and it’s a joy to behold. Put some Jiffy Pop on the stove and start streaming.

V/H/S/85 (2023)

The V/H/S horror anthologies always felt made for the ’80s, so much so that it’s a little weird the franchise took this long to make its way to a purely ’80s-set installment. Once it got there, though, it delivered. Wrapped in a frame story that plays like a late-night ’80s news special, the segments in this film cover everything from a kid who has prophetic dreams of murders to a synth-driven piece of performance art about virtual reality to, of course, a segment that reveals cults of mass murderers really do walk among us. It’s got everything but the VCR.

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All Good Sex Is Body Horror

By Becca Rothfeld

An illustration of a butterfly made from skin in front of a rose.

The residents of the apartment complex are respectable. There are doctors, lawyers, and a surplus of those drably enigmatic persons known as “young professionals.” The building itself, the Starliner Tower, on the outskirts of Montreal, is a modern construction, outfitted with the latest amenities: a heated swimming pool, a golf course, a delicatessen, a boutique. “Sail through life in quiet and comfort,” a calming advertisement instructs, and the residents are only too eager to comply. Still, out of an abundance of caution, there is a doctor’s office on the premises. Under the circumstances, who could suppress the urge to root for disease and disaster?

Not the director David Cronenberg , who has no qualms about subjecting the bourgeoisie in his first feature-length film, “Shivers” (1975), to unexpected upheaval. The ease and efficiency of the modern high-rise are soon upended by the emergence of parasites that resemble larvae and pass from one resident to the next, sometimes by wriggling through the pipes and drilling into their victims’ viscera, sometimes by way of sexual transmission. Once the residents have been infected, they succumb entirely to their appetites: we see them ripping their clothes off, clawing at one another, eating with their hands. Before long, they begin to form feverish clusters around the uninfected, whom they seduce and contaminate.

“This is a disease of the id arising,” Cronenberg, the father of the body-horror genre, said in a 1983 interview. As “Shivers” progresses, it becomes apparent that the id was liberated by design: the in-house doctor, a hyper-rational man, learns that the parasites were created by a scientist seeking “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will, hopefully, turn the world into one beautiful mindless orgy.”

Unfortunately, the scientist is poised to succeed. One decorous young professional after another is attacked and transformed into a slavering monster, until at last all the residents converge in the heated pool. Here, they descend on the doctor, who is by now the last man standing. “Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other,” the doctor’s former lover, now reduced to a raw ravening, has informed him. “Even dying is an act of eroticism.” Before long, he’s subsumed by a swarm of bucking bodies, and chaos prevails.

Some might regard this conclusion as pessimistic, if not apocalyptic, but Cronenberg is quick to correct them. “I identify with the parasites, basically,” he said in an interview. “The ending of ‘Shivers’ was for me a happy ending.”

I loved the early days—the days of sick surrender. It was June, and by midmorning the alleys had grown pungent with rotting trash. Air-conditioners dribbled water down onto the street, and I stumbled through the reek, sweating slickly, uneasy in my body. No one I encountered noticed anything strange about me. Shopkeepers addressed me as if I were not obscene. It was incredible, I thought, that a lust like mine could go so wholly undetected. Didn’t it have a weight and a color? Couldn’t passersby tell that I was feral and filthy, dripping beneath my dress?

From one point of view, no doubt the most sensible, what had happened to me was not as calamitous as what befell the residents of the Starliner Tower. I was not a zombie; I had no trouble refraining from assaulting people in the park. But from a different point of view, less sensible and therefore more appealing, I had been smashed and reconfigured, rendered lushly lavish. In short, I was in love with an alien kind of creature, an anomaly on the outside clamoring to squirm in.

The author of my destruction was a man with long fingers and a shock of hair like a flame. He could build furniture without consulting the instructions and light fires without matches, just by collecting branches and fussing with them on the ground. The subjects about which he seemed to grasp everything were often the ones it had never occurred to me to ask about: chess openings, causal inference, social-network diagrams. I loved the way his lips pursed, the lace of shadow his lashes cast on his cheeks. He was always reading, even in the shower, his hands protruding from behind the curtain so that the book stayed dry.

Confronted with this entity, who was eventually to become my husband, I was in the grip of a carnality that was strange and implacable. I took cold showers; I sucked on ice cubes. But my body was a hungry animal that kept making mad demands. It wanted to choke; it wanted to howl; it wanted to be not just stripped but skinned. In Cronenberg’s 1988 film “Dead Ringers,” a gynecologist muses that “there should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies,” a remark that alarms the patient lying supine on the examining table. But it made sense to my body, which longed to offer up even its offal. It was only a matter of time before the longing attacked.

When Cronenberg described the ending of “Shivers” as “happy,” it was not the last time he would celebrate a transformation that others find appalling. Reflecting on Kafka’s “ Metamorphosis ” three decades later, he wondered why no one in Gregor Samsa’s family “feels compelled to console the creature by, for example, pointing out that a beetle is also a living thing, and turning into one might, for a mediocre human living a humdrum life, be an exhilarating and elevating experience, and so what’s the problem?” Perhaps there is no problem, or at least no problem not vastly outweighed by the tang of transfiguration.

Cronenberg’s genius consists in his rare ability to see that elevation can attend disgust, and almost all his movies raise the possibility that a hideous ordeal might double as a reprieve from banality. Even “A History of Violence” (2005), an effort from his later and more realist period, casts an alteration that most would deplore in a surprisingly ambivalent light. At first blush, both the film and its protagonist are quotidian. There are no mad scientists, no monsters. Instead, there is only the sort of hokey home-town hero we might expect to find in a garden-variety rom-com. Tom Stall, the owner of a diner in a punishingly friendly town in Indiana, spends his time greeting patrons by their first names, affectionately teasing his children, and exchanging pleasantries with his wife, an obligatory blonde who entices him to bed by donning the cheerleading uniform she was issued in high school.

But Tom’s placid existence is disrupted when he repulses armed robbers from the diner, eliciting admiring coverage from national news networks. The surge of unwanted publicity has dire consequences: several members of the Philadelphia Mob spot Tom on television and track him down, maintaining that he is not Tom but Joey, a notoriously violent member of their cohort who disappeared without a trace several years prior. Tom is vehement that they have him confused with someone else, but the skill with which he brutalizes his pursuers belies his denials. In the span of just a few days, the veneer of civilization he has worked so hard to cultivate is peeled back to reveal the savagery still massed beneath. At the beginning of the movie, Tom made tender love to his wife while she gushed about high-school cheerleading; at the end, Tom-reverted-to-Joey wrestles her down onto the stairs, where both of them scream in fury and exultation.

On the face of it, the ending of “A History of Violence” is unhappy. In the parting shot, Tom-cum-Joey’s family sits around the dinner table, looking like figures in a Rockwell painting gone sour. But Cronenberg is too defiantly weird to be convinced that Tom’s devolution is an entirely negative development. “Joey’s violence does have an erotic component,” he told an interviewer. The man’s wife “responds to it, but she’s also repelled by it. It’s the best sex she’s ever had and also the most terrifying. Does she want more of it or not?”

Do we want more of it or not? This is the question that Cronenberg’s œuvre poses relentlessly—and often prompts us, much to our own surprise, to answer affirmatively. Cronenberg speculates that “Shivers” viewers “vicariously enjoy the scenes where guys kick down the doors and do whatever they want to do to the people who are inside.” The film’s French title, “Frissons,” is appropriately ambiguous: a frisson is a quiver of delight as much as a shiver of dread, and for someone convulsed by one, the discomfort is inextricable from the titillation.

The ease with which Cronenberg’s characters and his viewers yield to the sublime paradox of the frisson is revealing, for evidently even the most hardened domestication is still quick to crumble. The population represented by the residents of the Starliner Tower is as restrained as can be, but not one of the young professionals living there manages to resist the enticements of the parasites. “People . . . never quite feel that they are securely embedded in their social context,” Cronenberg has observed. “They always feel that the slightest little thing is going to jar them loose, and they’re going to be hopping around,” drinking one another’s blood. But there is another reason that the tenuousness of social nicety is so tantalizing—namely, that the frailty of our present mode of being hints at the possibility of its reinvention. The staid apartment dwellers in “Shivers,” Cronenberg explains,

experience horror because they are still standard, straightforward members of the middle-class high-rise generation. . . . They’re bound to resist. I mean, they’re going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this new experience. They’re not going to go willingly. But underneath, there is something else.

This “something else” is a new orientation that vindicates their transformation only once it has taken place. The middle-class high-rise generation is not wrong to fear its salvation from ossification, for a self on the verge of metamorphosis is also on the verge of liquidation.

Regenerations as radical as the ones Cronenberg envisions involve what the philosopher L. A. Paul has termed “transformative experiences,” ruptures that change “your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience.” Not only do we lack access to information that we can acquire only by plunging into the scalding water of a new life, but we cannot foresee how such a jolt will overhaul the very predilections and values that define who we are.

For this reason, transformative experiences “raise a special problem for decision-making,” as Paul explains in her book . Traditional decision theory, propounded by sober economists who do not have Cronenbergian monsters in mind, is no use: it instructs agents who aspire to rationality to select the course of action that maximizes expected value, where expected value is calculated in terms of both “the values of the outcomes, and the probability that the state needed for each outcome will occur, given that the act needed to bring it about occurs.” Theorists have proposed various solutions to the difficulties that arise when we cannot determine how probable a given outcome is—but all the models on offer require us to have some inkling of the “values of the relevant outcomes,” and this is precisely what eludes us in the case of transformative experience.

Such experiences, more familiar but no less dramatic than those Cronenberg envisions, abound in real life. There are medical interventions that restore hearing or sight to those who lack them; there is pregnancy, itself the subject of a great deal of body horror for fairly obvious reasons; and then there is sex, love, and marriage—each of them as gruesome in its own way as the grisliest conceit of Cronenberg’s.

Of course, as flat-footed literalists are sure to object, there are salient differences between a marriage and a murderous rage, among them that one is morally permissible and the other is not. And, moreover, the literalist brigade is sure to continue, there are many reasons the events depicted with perverse glee in Cronenberg films would not be causes for delight if they were to occur in reality. No one would celebrate an epidemic of cannibalistic zombies or the takeover of Montreal by a gang of nymphomaniacs. But an analogy is not an identity, and a metaphor is not a policy proposal. Cronenberg must resort to drastic tactics if he is to remind his audience to want what the civilized world is bent on neutering, and fictionalization must trade in exaggeration if it is to awaken cravings that reality is frequently too thin to gratify. How to do justice to the longing for excess except excessively ?

The oozing oddity of embodiment, in particular, requires hyperbole. More disturbing than fiction, in which a person goes to sleep human and wakes up freshly verminous, and more terrifying than zombifying pathogens is the grafting of one life on another. I had no rational grounds for deciding that I wanted my particles to be spliced with my husband’s, but, before I had any say in the matter, our separate bodies were already minced into a different meat.

It is a commonplace in the literature of romance that love wreaks legible changes on the body, a development that is typically painted in a positive light. As the poet Octavio Paz so tenderly puts it, “My hands / Invent another body for your body.” He is echoed by E. E. Cummings in a similar poem, which opens, “i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. / Muscles better and nerves more.” Cummings is not the only one to undergo a shift during the act of love, and the full extent of his metamorphosis is explicable only in terms of his partner’s reciprocal mutation: his poem begins with the ways in which his lover renews his body and ends with the ways in which his body renews his lover’s body in turn. “i like the thrill / of under me you so quite new,” he concludes. The poet’s body changes in response to his lover’s body, his lover’s body changes in response to the changes in his body, his changed body changes in response to the changes in his lover’s body, and so on and on, twining into an ouroboros of mutual reconstruction.

These transformations recall the notion of the “interhuman,” evoked to great effect by the writer Gary Indiana in his short and sharp consideration of Cronenberg. The “interhuman,” Indiana maintains, is the product of the “perpetual re-creation of identity: simply by coming into contact, you create me and I create you, as different people than we were just before we encountered each other.” The interhuman can arise whenever we interact with one another, but the changes we inflict on each other in the bedroom, where we are so perilously susceptible, tend to be especially stark. Sex sets the interhuman into motion in Cronenberg’s marvellously demented films, in which characters copulate with cars and television screens, but the idea of erotic interhumanity is perennial. In Greek mythology, lust routinely transforms prurient men into animals, while the women they pursue change into trees and birds; in the twelfth-century tales of the poet Marie de France, one knight steals in through his beloved’s window in the form of a hawk. Cronenberg’s chief innovation is his capacity to recognize that whether lusting and falling in love are more like body horror or more like reincarnation is merely a matter of emphasis. Like Paz, he knows that desire invents another body for our bodies. But like Ovid, he asks: Why should we expect desire to leave us intact? Why wouldn’t it tear us apart with its talons?

In “ Phaedrus ,” Plato proposes that the soul of the lover is “in a state of ebullition and effervescence, which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth.” The lover’s skin softens, he continues, and she becomes dizzy to the point of nausea. She sweats, she shudders, she feels sick as if at sea, and at last she begins to grow wings.

In Cronenberg’s best-known film, “The Fly” (1986), matters are considerably more horrific. We don’t guess it yet, but we catch our first glimpse of the wings that are soon to emerge when Veronica, a science journalist, discovers a patch of coarse hairs on the back of her new lover, Seth Brundle, an eccentric physicist who has just teleported himself across his lab. At least, this is what Brundle believes he has done; in reality, he has genetically fused himself with a fly that happened to wander into the teleportation pod alongside him. He does not realize it yet, but he is on the cusp of a hideous metamorphosis into a gigantic man-insect hybrid.

Brundle’s transformation into Brundlefly is painful and, above all, repellent. In “The Fly,” perhaps more than in any other entry in his fantastically foul corpus, Cronenberg luxuriates in the grotesque. As Brundle degenerates, he putrefies, slimes, and squishes, presenting a perverse caricature of a person flush with lust. To allow the wings to emerge, his human body has to disintegrate, one piece at a time. First, he sprouts the wiry hairs that gave Veronica pause; next, his skin roughens and his nails flake off; then his teeth decay, and he begins to eat, as flies do, by dissolving solid food in a wash of acidic vomit. When his ears fall off, he deposits them in his bathroom cabinet, where he is preserving the rest of his erstwhile body parts for posterity. When Plato wrote “the growing of wings is a necessity” to “fluttering love,” I doubt this is what he had in mind.

And yet Brundle’s devolution—and, by extension, his anguished acquisition of wings—is quite literally precipitated by the violence of his love for Veronica. He enters the teleportation pod in a drunken stupor because he is driven to distraction by fear that she plans to leave him. For her part, Veronica is subject to a parallel (if less overtly disturbing) transformation, set off by her infatuation with pre-metamorphosis Brundle. When she goes to break things off with her possessive former boyfriend, she announces, “I still have the residue of another life, you know—I have to scrape it off my shoe and get rid of it once and for all.” Earlier, she lies next to Brundle and kisses and bites him so forcefully that he recoils. “Sorry,” she says as he flinches. “I just want to eat you up. You know, that’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It’s the flesh, it just makes you crazy.”

The flesh! It just makes you crazy! It just disassembles you and puts you back together in a different form! Brundlefly is disfigured and ultimately destroyed, yet I suspect that many of us would rather turn into something other, even something awful, than stay siloed in the solitary and workaday self. “The disease . . . wants to turn me into something else—that’s not too terrible, is it?” Brundle, already halfway to Brundlefly, muses with characteristically Cronenbergian flair. “Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.”

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes. As the narrator of Norman Rush’s novel “ Mating ” sagely observes, “sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties,” accompanied by the exchange of careful courtesies: “after you, no, after you, mais non.” No one has transformative sex all the time, and there is nothing wrong with sex that is merely pleasant. Indeed, a polite volley of pleasantries is probably the best thing that unecstatic sex can be.

Of course, many mediocre sexual encounters are rote in a more pernicious way. Heterosexual sex that follows the standard scripts, with its spankings and its schoolgirls, is not always devastating or traumatic, but its tiresomeness is nonetheless not innocuous. Women are the most obvious losers when the scenarios faithfully reënacted in the bedroom so consistently favor male predilections, but men who inherit their desires from the prevailing sexual culture—or, worse, men who feel they must satisfy a virile masculine ideal whether it appeals or not—lack the opportunity or the means to develop sexual agency. For both parties, the resultant comedy of errors is not satisfying. What nefariously underwhelming sex has in common with respectfully underwhelming sex is that neither brand is especially surprising or especially erotic.

To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else , and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her. Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.

Eroticism does not arise every time there is sexual activity, no matter how plodding, but it is also not the exclusive concomitant of love, marriage, or conventional commitment. Most sexual pairings are no more dishevelling than a game of tennis, but it is constitutive of sex that it has the potential to thrust us into metamorphosis that may be sweet, may be sinister, and may be both concurrently. When at last we grow wings, who can say exactly where we will want to fly?

Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing?

Surely she cannot consent in the normal way. To consent in the normal way is not merely to grant permission but to grant permission on a particular basis—perhaps a reasonable expectation of pleasure, security, or safety. In any case, there is some positive inner state to which the outward utterance of license is supposed to correspond. A woman, almost always the presumed consenter in a heterosexual exchange, is exhorted to have sex with someone only when she has good reason to believe that she will have a generally happy time with him. Over and over, she is told: you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do; you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Because she is assumed to know exactly what makes her comfortable, and because comfort is assumed to be a necessary condition of good sex, the procedure the consenter is instructed to follow is not unlike the operation favored by decision theorists. First, she is to imagine what sex with the partner under consideration will be like; second, she is to assign a value to the experience that she has conjured; third, she is to assign a probability of accuracy to her prediction. Having done all this, she finds herself in a position to make a rational decision, consenting if and only if she foresees that an exchange will turn out to be unimpeachably agreeable. Should she prove wrong in her predictions, should she ever feel the slightest scintilla of unease, she should withdraw her consent and beat a hasty retreat.

Three faulty assumptions are baked into this model. The first is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict, if roughly, what a prospective partner will be like during sex; the second is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict what they will be like during sex with a prospective partner; the third is that sex can and should be comfortable.

In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be. We can have no more success when it comes to divining how we will change our partners than we can have when it comes to divining how they will change us—or, following Cummings, how their changes will change us, and how our changes will change them, iteratively and indefinitely. Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies. All we can say with certainty is that sometimes, when it is working, sex carves out new bodies for our bodies, and these bodies can be both better and more brutal than the ones we could invent alone.

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

Writing of the conservative fear of sexual deviance, the feminist cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin notes that we are bent on drawing a line between “sexual order and chaos.” The line in question “expresses the fear that if anything is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across.” Conservatives are right. If the gender binary melts away, if heterosexuality is no longer the default assumption, if parasites enter the building and dismantle the tenants, something unspeakable will skitter across—and that is the point of any erotic effusion worth pursuing.

None of this means that consent is not an essential condition of erotically exalted and morally acceptable sex. Assault and rape are shattering, but not in the way that transformative experiences can be: indeed, both are all too predictable, all too consistent with the patriarchal pattern. They oppress and dehumanize for many reasons, but prime among these is that a sexual predator is incapable of taking his victim on her own stingingly singular terms. One of the rapist’s greatest moral failures is that he foists his own wants onto his victim without allowing hers to make any mark on him, without allowing any of his own expectations to be thwarted. (The genders, of course, may be reversed, or need not be opposing.)

Consent cannot be jettisoned, but it must be reconceptualized. If consenting is a matter of expecting to feel perfectly protected, even in the throes of the wildest elation, it comes at too high a cost. But we can consent to erotic shocks in roughly the same way that, according to Paul, we can rationally decide to undergo a transformation: if we can’t know what an experience will be like, “we might choose to have an experience because of its revelatory character, rather than choosing it because what it is like to have it is in some way pleasurable or enjoyable.”

This solution to the decision-theoretic conundrum is not completely satisfying. Someone who chooses to transform because she values revelation can never be sure that her future self will not evolve a preference against revelation, such that she will wish, retrospectively, that she had decided against metamorphosis. Consent cannot provide a wholly satisfying solution to the perils of sex, either, at least if a satisfying solution is one that insulates us from suffering. To consent to a sexual encounter that might be erotic is to countenance the prospect of a transformation that changes the consenter into someone averse to transformation, or something as horrendous as Brundlefly, or something heretofore unimagined and unimaginable. And transformative experience in the erotic domain is not the sort of thing that can be chosen, anyway, so much as it is the sort of thing that happens to us (though its preconditions can be fostered or frustrated).

Still, we can come to want revelation, while acknowledging that genuine and dizzying uncertainty is the cost of our capacity for paroxysms so potent. At best, consent is vital not because it insures safety but because it enables danger.

When I met my husband, I did not know what to say about him. He was too new for my secondhand language. I wanted a fresh mouth, capable of pronouncing unprecedented words, and a body unstained by prior touch. Now I have them. My life has been split open, like a cocoon, and I am still waiting to see just what sort of creature crawls out. ♦

This is drawn from “ All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess . ”

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20 Horror Movie Quotes That Apply to Everyday Life

P ulling a quote from a film is all part of the cinematic experience of enjoying movies. No matter the genre or if the film is good or bad, anyone can find a line or two that hits a chord with them. Some are classic lines that are universally known by filmgoers. Others are so niche that maybe only a few of us quote them in our everyday lives.

And that is the point here - utilizing these famous film quotes in your everyday life. The horror genre may not be for everyone, but it is indeed a genre that taps into our fears of the world around us. Every now and then, a film comes along that scares us but has a line in it that we laugh at or find relatable. And what really makes it worthwhile is that we quote it either within the context of it in our everyday lives or use it just for fun.

"Never look back. The past is a wilderness of horrors." - The Wolfman (2010)

Over a decade later, film lovers are still split on whether they love the 2010 remake of the classic tale of a man taming the beast inside of him. The Wolfman stars Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins in the primary supporting role of Sir John Talbot. Hopkins is a respected Thespian and always surprises us, even in sub-par material. One of the many lines in the film that sits well with the old-world feel of it is the one he delivers above. A statement that reigns true for all of us as we look back on things we have done in the past.

The Wolfman

Release Date 2010-02-10

Director Joe Johnston

Cast Mario Marin-Borquez, Asa Butterfield, Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, Simon Merrells, Gemma Whelan

Runtime 125

Main Genre Drama

Stream on Netflix

Related: The 23 Best Horror Movies of 2023

"I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly" - Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

By Part 6 in any franchise, you had better be having some fun and breaking some rules within a film franchise. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives does just that. In an early scene, two people drive down a narrow trail, clearly lost, in their car. They are stopped by the sight of the now-revived hockey-masked Jason Voorhees blocking their way on the road.

The woman in the passenger seat utters this line, hinting to the driver that they should turn around. How many times have we been in a rural area and the idea of a scary-looking person or animal is seen close by. What would you do? You'd turn around, of course. Fun fact about the scene: the driver of the car is actor Tony Goldwyn in an early role.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Release Date 1986-08-01

Director Tom McLoughlin

Cast Rene Jones, Kerry Noonan, David Kagen, Jennifer Cooke, Tom Fridley, Thom Mathews

Main Genre Horror

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"Get away from her, you b*tch!" - Aliens (1986)

Okay, maybe Aliens is not a full-on horror film, but it's a sequel to one with a lot more action in it. Let's be real: the face-hugger scene is utterly bonkers, and the sight of the Xenomorph's is still pretty scary. But all of that culminates when the queen alien tries to kill Newt, but Ripley saves the day with a bombshell of a line that leaves anyone cheering when they hear it. It's simple but effective, and sometimes that's all you need.

It's full of female empowerment and meant to be said by anyone if you're trying to stop any sort of obstacle in your day-to-day life.

Release Date 1986-07-18

Director James Cameron

Cast Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Michael Biehn

Runtime 137

Main Genre Action

"It's Halloween; I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare." - Halloween (1978)

Halloween has a scene with a jump scare that doesn't even have Michael Myers be the reason for it, Charles Cyphers, who plays Sheriff Brackett , gives Laurie Strode (Jaime Lee Curtis) a good scare as her back is turned. "It's Halloween; I guess everyone is entitled to one good scare" is uttered by his character. It's gone on to become a polite thing to say after giving someone a bit of a scare during the spooky season.

Halloween (1978)

Release Date 1978-10-27

Director John Carpenter

Cast Nancy Kyes, Tony Moran, Charles Cyphers, P.J. Soles, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kyle Richards, Donald Pleasence

Runtime 1hr 31min

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"Be afraid, be very afraid." - The Fly (1986)

Geena Davis utters the line, "Be afraid, be very afraid," in David Cronenberg's classic sci-fi horror film, The Fly . One would think that it had been used before in movies, and most likely it had. Let's face it, how many times have we jokingly or even seriously used this term when telling someone to exercise caution?

Release Date 1986-08-15

Director David Cronenberg

Cast George Chuvalo, Joy Boushel, Leslie Carlson, Jeff Goldblum, John Getz, Geena Davis

A fun fact about this line is that its use came from a contribution from comedy legend and the film's producer, Mel Brooks . Director David Cronenberg mentioned that the line came from Brooks reacting to the script while reading it and thinking about what should be said at that certain moment of the movie.

Rent on Prime Video

"Get out!" - Get Out (2017)

Get Out has a bit of an unconventional title for a horror film. But once the "Get out of here" scene happens, it all seems to make sense as to why Jordan Peele named his film that. When LaKeith Stanfield's character Andre drops the facade for us all to see, it becomes a very terrifying moment.

Release Date 2017-02-24

Director Jordan Peele

Cast Caleb Landry Jones, Bradley Whitford, Marcus Henderson, Daniel Kaluuya, Catherine Keener, Allison Williams

Runtime 103

Time will tell how popular this quote is among horror fans. But it's something used among groups that get the joke as well as the horror of it all when pushing the boundary of discussing something in regard to race.

Related: 10 Movies Like Get Out to Watch Next

"We have such sights to show you" - Hellraiser (1987)

Pinhead and the Cenobites don't fully arrive until nearly an hour into Clive Barker's classic horror film, Hellraiser . In the scene that marks their arrival in our world. The demonic being and leader of the Cenobites has a horrific monologue that lets us all know that they mean business. In almost a sarcastic way, the line "we have such sights to show you" also sends chills up your spine.

Hellraiser (1987)

Release Date 1987-09-11

Director Clive Barker

Cast Robert Hines, Oliver Smith, Sean Chapman, Andrew Robinson, Ashley Laurence, Clare Higgins

It's a line many people like to say in everyday life that could be used at a job of sorts when showing someone something mundane and boring. Or, it's used in terms of actually showing someone something that's going to rock their world. Either way, thanks, Pinhead.

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"Groovy" - Evil Dead II (1987)

Evil Dead II , the sequel to the original horror classic, was a little more comedic this time around, and it was also what turned Bruce Campbell into a cult movie icon. Ash from the Evil Dead franchise has a few one-liners we know and love. But one word alone taps into the inner feeling we all get when we experience something cool, either just in general or up against demonic forces, and that is the word "groovy."

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"What an excellent day for an exorcism" - The Exorcist (1973)

"What an excellent day for an exorcism" is a quote by the possessed Regan, played by Linda Blair in The Exorcist . To compare this one to everyday life, just think of a bad day that drove you mad. Madness to the point of believing Satan has gotten a hold of you. Regardless, The Exorcist has a few other lines one could use as an insult to someone who wronged you, but we wanted to keep this list as PG as possible.

"Whatever you do, don't fall asleep" - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

This one is uttered by the great Heather Langenkamp, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, to her friends to keep them safe from Freddy Krueger. This line has been rehashed by many when telling stories by the campfire. Even if they are not referencing Wes Craven's classic movie, it can be used in any sense to reference the boogeyman coming to get you either in this world or the dream world.

"You'll float too" - IT: Chapter One (2017)

Like Stephen King's stories have had a bit of a renaissance in the past decade or so, as have some of the familiar phases of the stories that come along with it. And like most of the entries on this list, many are used just to creep out some friends in a joking manner. "You'll Float Too" is a phrase coined by It : Chapter One (and Two) villain, Pennywise the Clown.

The main point of reference is when he lures young Georgie into the sewers where he dwells, where the little boy is never to be heard from again.

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" - The Shining (1980)

Have you ever been overworked, underpaid, and just having zero fun? Isn't it maddening? Well, hopefully, you don't go as mad as Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) does in The Shining.

In a scene where his wife Wendy discovers he has written on hundreds, if not thousands, of sheets of paper the same phrase over and over again: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," we sense the dread and the madness that is about to ensue. And yet, if you read that line and sit back and think about it, we all feel the same thing—that we have all been there before.

The Shining

Release Date 1980-05-23

Director Stanley Kubrick

Cast Philip Stone, Barry Nelson, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd, Shelley Duvall, Jack Nicholson

Runtime 146

Stream on Paramount+

"What's your favorite scary movie?" - Scream (1996)

Scream is the slasher film that re-energized a genre. A film with great comedic timing and an opening scene that has become a piece of horror movie history. And in said opening scene with Drew Barrymore answering an ill-fated call, we hear the line, "What's your favorite scary movie?", we know we are off to the races in terms of carnage and bloodshed. And yet every time since then, when talking to fellow horror fans, one always encounters the same question, and a flash of Ghostface pops into one's head.

"They're coming to get you, Barbara" - Night of the Living Dead (1968)

This entry from Night of the Living Dead is kind of meta in terms of this list. The reason being that, in this famous scene early in the film, Barbara is being tormented by a friend at a cemetery, with the phrase "They're coming to get you, Barbara" being said to her. Like many of the spooky lines on this list, you can reuse them to try and scare other people, depending on the scenario. Only in this scene does it go south for the character saying the line and trying to be playful.

"We all go a little mad, sometimes" - Psycho (1960)

"We all go a little mad, sometimes" has been a phrase that most of us have uttered once in a while to show sympathy towards someone who may have shown us their frustrations that they have kept bottled up for some time. It's a fair response to keep someone assured that their moment of anger and madness is justified. What's ironic, though, is that this quote comes from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and it is delivered by none other than the insane murderer, Norman Bates.

"Nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired" - The Thing (1982)

Arguably one of the greatest horror films of all time. John Carpenter's The Thing has gotten better as time has gone on, and it has found new audiences. A lot of people found comfort in it during the "stay at home" orders during COVID. Kurt Russell's quote for the entry on this list rang true for many people during that time. It even made its way into internet memes during 2020, perfectly encapsulating the state of America at the time.

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"You're gonna need a bigger boat" - Jaws (1975)

Jaws holds the mantle of being the first summer blockbuster, thus creating a culture of big concept movies to wow audiences from May to late August. What hasn't been said about Jaws ? Well, one thing that is always mentioned about it is this one line that Roy Scheider says while tossing fish guts out into the ocean to try and lure the killer shark in.

Release Date 1975-06-18

Director Steven Spielberg

Cast Carl Gottlieb, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss

Rating PG-13

Runtime 124

Main Genre Adventure

When he has a brief encounter with the shark and sees what he and his team are up against, he utters the classic line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." Since Jaws , many people have tried to utilize that quote in a job, for example. When given a task that seems doable, it becomes extremely overwhelming.

"Here's Johnny!!!" - The Shining (1980)

The phrase "Here's Johnny!" was, for many years, the introduction to Johnny Carson as he took the stage for The Tonight Show. That is, until after 1980, when Jack Nicholson would say it in The Shining. It's an utterly terrifying scene to think about, as he axes his way through a door to hunt down and kill his wife, Wendy. But for a second, it's worth a laugh with the iconic shot of Nicholson sticking his head through the door. To this day, people like to use the famous line when dramatically entering a room.

"It's Alive" - Frankenstein (1931)

If you have ever fixed your car battery after it needed a jump, changed a light bulb, or maybe if you are an EMT with a dark sense of humor and successfully saved a life, you most likely think to yourself, "It's alive" after successfully reviving something. Frankenstein was a landmark in horror cinema back in 1931. And in the scene where mad scientist Victor Frankenstein sees that his creation has come to life, there is no better celebration than being able to play god by saying, "It's alive!"

"They're Here..." - Poltergeist (1982)

You say the line when your Uber driver is here or your friend is picking you up, so you announce you're leaving. It's two simple words to announce that someone has arrived, and the way it is said in Poltergeist, it means that business is about to pick up in a very haunted house. Tobe Hooper's classic haunted house tale has the iconic scene of little Carol Anne looking into the late-night static of the television and seeing behind the white noise and fuzziness. She knows something is out there, and it isn't nice.

20 Horror Movie Quotes That Apply to Everyday Life

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  1. Best Essays and Books About Horror Movies

    Published Oct 31, 2022 Learn more about your favorite frightening films, or film theories of horror itself, with this list of creepy books and essays. Cannon Releasing You've probably...

  2. Why Do People Like Horror Movies?

    Horror is one of the most enduringly popular film genres in many areas around the world. While many people willingly buy tickets to the latest release, in our daily lives we often try to avoid anything that frightens us. So why would we pay to watch a movie that induces fear and terror ?

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    lynching. It is true that the mythic "fairy-tale" horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites.

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    Apocalypse horror films, for example, allow us to live out alternative realities — from zombie outbreaks to alien infestations. Lastly, horror entrainment may help us (safely) satisfy our ...

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    King's essay examines why modern movie audiences love to watch horror films—the primitive urges and emotions that drive this desire and the necessity to express them. He proposes that the appetite for horror is a need that all people have. Get access to this full Study Guide and much more! 6,850+ In-Depth Study Guides

  7. According to Stephen King, This Is Why We Crave Horror Movies

    In 1981, King's essay titled "Why We Crave Horror Movies" was published in Playboy magazine as a variation of the chapter "The Horror Movie As Junk Food" in Danse Macabre.

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    Published: Apr 8, 2022 Read Summary "Why We Crave Horror Movies," by Stephen King is about why people enjoy watching horror movies. Some people are good, and some are not good at hiding the reaction of getting scared that they got by watching horror film. People challenge fear, because people spend their money to watch horror movie.

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    Essays on Horror . Essay examples. Essay topics. General Overview. 26 essay samples found. Sort & filter. 1 The Reflection of Society's Fears in Horror Movies . 2 pages / 1101 words . The Reflection of Society's Fears in Horror Movies All throughout history, there have been tales of horror around to frighten people. With each passing time ...

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    The main principle of targeting society's fears has not changed. In the past century alone, horror movies have reflected fears such as radiation from an atomic bomb, communism, the violence of war, and the epidemic of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. This essay was reviewed by.

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    Essay Writing Service. In the early 1900s, myth and fairytale adaptations involving werewolves, vampires, and monsters dominated horror films. Movies were often moral lessons about keeping faith, preserving tradition, and realizing the limits of humanity in doing "God's work".

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    While deliberating on the essence and purpose of horror movies, Kinds notes, " [horror film] urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites" (2). Therefore, most individuals interested in this genre search for psychic relief because most of such ...

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    824 Words 4 Pages Open Document Essay Sample Check Writing Quality Show More Screams, bloody scenes, and suspenseful music are all the ingredients for a scream filled tormenting movie referred to as a horror movie or a scary flick. Horror films are movies that are created to provide a feeling of fright, unease and panic to the people viewing them.

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    In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique. Middleton and Briefel describe the critique as reflecting "social fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality."

  15. Why We Crave Horror Movies Essay Analysis

    Analysis: "Why We Crave Horror Movies" The essay "Why We Crave Horror Movies" interweaves point of view, structure, and tone to address the foundational themes of fear, emotions, and "insanity" in relation to horror movies. It examines why horror films allow the expression of fearful emotions linked to irrationality.

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  19. Rhetorical Analysis of Stephen King's 'Why We Crave Horror Movies'

    In the essay, Why We Crave Horror Movies, Stephen King proposed the idea that we are all "mentally ill." Most people would disagree with this idea, but to a certain extent, I agree. Due to our demand to engage in scary, gory, creepy horror movies, they satisfy us in the sense that we are watching something that a "normal" person wouldn ...

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    Essay on Horror Movies and Their History. Are you fascinated by the spine-tingling, edge-of-your-seat experiences that horror movies provide? This essay delves into the captivating world of horror films, tracing their history from early cinema to the box office smashes of today. As a genre that continually evolves, horror has been a significant ...

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    Horror Movies Essay. "Natural Born Killers," " Psycho," " Friday the 13th ," and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" are all horror films. In these films there is always some crazy person or monster-like character that goes around and slaughters innocent people. And usually, but not all the time the killer is killed at the end of the ...

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    The answer is obvious. Even though horror movies reveal something disgusting and terrible, the appeal of being afraid is one way for viewers, especially young audiences, to achieve spiritual fulfillment. Watching horror movies leaves moviegoers feeling a rush of excitement when they explore their fears, like the experience of riding a leer coaster.

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    Evil Dead II, the sequel to the original horror classic, was a little more comedic this time around, and it was also what turned Bruce Campbell into a cult movie icon. Ash from the Evil Dead ...