Outside Your Heaven

Posted: 31 Oct 2018 07:54 AM PDT

Horror is one of the most important genres we have. Some days I feel it's the most important genre, because it's the easiest genre to tell the truth with. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its blind spots, or awful ways it can be used. The growing awareness of horror's significance has become a double-edged sword. On one hand it has helped produce more socially courageous work, work that helps us process and develop strategies for what is happening in the real world. On the other storytellers can perform this awareness to cover up the fact that they are exploiting pain. In our increasingly self-aware media landscape, it's necessary to know the difference.

I was at a conference recently where I spoke to another media maker about horror and its impact. I said I loved horror, but sometimes I wished it dealt more seriously with healing. I gave my colleague the example of a video game I played a long time ago, Fear Effect, where one of the three main protagonists gets mutilated and left on a meat hook mid-way through the story. I remember thinking that was the end of him, but suddenly he wakes up, pulls himself off the meat hook, and crawls gasping through the rest of the game. I remember loving this, because his injuries were precisely the kind that characters don't come back from. I mean, when one of the poor victims in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre gets put on a meat hook, you know she's not gonna be the final girl.

Horror deals with topics and ideas we find difficult to face in reality. But that doesn't mean it always does so responsibly. Some horror films bring up topics only to dismiss them. While survivors in horror stories tend to get injured, all the truly horrific cases of bodily destruction happen to lesser characters that we simply aren't expected to think about much. And when movies sometimes focus on those truly horrible things happening to the protagonists, in series like The Human Centipede or Saw, the imagination of the filmmaker tends to stop right at the moment where all the questions of healing would begin. The final horror is that the [insert unimaginable thing here] isn't prevented. It happens. The end.

Horrifying? Yes. But by ending a horror story that way you reinforce the idea that there is no coming back from something so horrifying, that your only psychological response to such a traumatic event would be to beg for death. This is a believable response, but it is not the only response. Reality is full of people coming back, rebuilding their lives after horrific physical trauma, whether they be car accidents, acid attacks, or other unthinkable life-changing disasters. It's hard. Some of them don't make it. Some of them do. But they almost never do in horror films. I find that troubling.

As I was explaining this to my colleague we naturally began brainstorming what a horror film about healing would look like. What if there was a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween where a seemingly minor character got their arms or legs ripped off -- a serious debilitating injury that would change your life -- but they crawled to a hospital and got help? What if the movie's narrative switched at that point to the story of their emotional and physical rehabilitation, as they learned how to live with their injury. What if we got to see them go through surgeries, prosthesis fittings, battles with depression, family and friends supporting them? What if it was a bait and switch like Psycho, but instead of the protagonist dying halfway through and switching to other characters who complete the horror narrative, we stay with the victim and it becomes a healing narrative? What if the movie ended with them taking their first steps after a year?

To be fair, we were sort of chuckling and joking as we said this. This wouldn't really be a horror movie anymore, more like a deliberate trolling of horror fans. But I still think there's room to make gestures toward this sort of healing even within the confines of a more conventional horror narrative. Fear Effect -- while not exactly about healing -- is a good example of how just not letting serious injury stop a character can be dramatically interesting, resulting in some real punch-the-air moments as they do the impossible. And of course you have sequels to deal with longer term healing. The Alien franchise at its best did this, charting Ripley's emotional trauma, her survivor's guilt. The new Halloween, where Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie -- the original Final Girl -- comes back after 40 years as a badass survivalist for the #MeToo era also does this. But most of the examples I can think of are purely psychological, not that special mixture of psychological and physical trauma that results from having one's body permanently damaged. The only exception that's coming to mind is Misery, though even that pulls its punches by choosing to have the killer merely shatter the protagonist's legs with a sledgehammer, not chop them off like she did in King's novel.

I love Halloween, Alien, Suspira -- these are all great films, and in fairness none of them really deal with life-changing physical injury in the ways I am suggesting, and I'm not even sure I'd like them more if they did. If I'm honest with myself, what I'm responding to more is when horror film directors raise truly upsetting topics, use them like genre shock punchlines, and then claim artistic intent to paper over their lack of courage to actually face the topics they raise. We all find The Holocaust horrifying, but we also know that just setting a horror movie in Auschwitz would be in bad taste. That's a real thing that happened, and we are faced with the historical trauma of it every day. The healing is part of our daily reality and will be for some time.

I wish more horror filmmakers took pain that seriously. Thinking of some insidiously fucked up fate to happen to a minor character and then saying "Ooooh! That was HORRIBLE, right? Anyway, back to the protagonist!" No, not back to the protagonist. That was a human being. They were the protagonist of their own life. If that happened to you, that would be your story. Imagine what it would be like to have that happen to you and for you have no stories, no examples, you could turn to for models of healing.

That's the thing. When we turn away from those stories -- when we refuse to ask ourselves at the end of something like The Human Centipede "What comes next? What if they got out? What if someone found them? What would their rehabilitation options be?" -- we rob people of role models for dealing with their own trauma. And when our entire media landscape is bereft of them, we send the message to people that there is no rehabilitation, that coming back from that kind of trauma is so impossible it isn't even worth imagining. And when you can't imagine it, how can you achieve it?

The reason why horror is our most important genre is because the world is full of it. We live in a horror movie. Around us, every second, something you would rather not imagine -- something that would ruin your day or your week if you thought about it -- is happening to someone. It could happen to you. It could happen to me. Horror is supposed to help us face those things, so that when they arrive at our doorstep our brain won't be paralyzed by literally encountering an idea for the first time. But for horror to serve that social function media makers have to have the courage to face horror themselves, to not make excuses, and especially not hide behind the newfound respectability of the genre. Raising an issue is not dealing with an issue. Portraying pain is not processing pain.

It can be though, and we will need it to be if we all expect to get through what's coming.

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