There have been a lot of jokes on social media about how 2020 feels like a horror movie. Even Black Mirror creator, Charlie Brooker, told the Radio Times he is not working on a new season right now because he does not think people have the “stomach” for stories about societies falling apart.
According to Aayla Ahmad, a multidisciplinary part-time professor at Carleton University with a specialization in horror fiction, it is typical behaviour to avert fictional horror in a time of real-life horror.
“In the 1940s, during World War II, in Hollywood, they weren’t looking for horror movies,” she said. “They were looking more for entertainment [and] stuff to take people’s minds off the war.”
With so much going on in the world, from COVID-19 to blatant racism, Ahmad said that reality may be enough for people to deal with right now.
“We are experiencing sort of a slow-motion collapse of the society that we knew,” Ahmad said. “In some ways, the horror genre kind of forecasted, predicted it, and gave people a bit of a model for what happens during social breakdowns.”
Ahmad predicts that the future of horror will be looking at weird ways people deal with disasters.
Many people are comparing the current pandemic situation to zombie apocalypse horror that gained traction around the millennial era, Ahmad said.
“People are not going to find the zombie genre so appealing anymore,” she said.
“When we have a real-life example of a pandemic, it’s not going to be so compelling to imagine that as a zombie pandemic.”
Where does fictional horror come from?
“People like to have horror fiction that reflects the fears of the time,” Carleton University cognitive science professor Jim Davies said.
Horror tends to change in cycles and moulds to the current events around it, Ahmad said. One example of this are slasher films (movies featuring a murderer killing a group of people one by one) that gained traction in the 1980s, alongside a cultural revolution in Western society with the rise of birth control, drugs and rock and roll.
One theory is that slasher films around this time were about punishing people who were taking part in these revolutionary activities, and were ultimately a way to punish female sexuality, she said.
Typically, female characters in slasher films—like Laurie in Halloween or Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street—survived by not being as sexualized as their friends.
The movies were basically saying, “you’re going to get away with it until Jason or Freddy appears when you’re off in the bedroom,” Ahmad said.
Why do we enjoy unpleasant things?
There are many unpleasant things people do deliberately—riding roller coasters, eating spicy food, being spanked in a sexual way, watching sad movies to cry—and among those things is horror, Davies said.
According to him, people watch horror for the satisfaction of relief afterwards or to learn something from it—a topic he explored in his book Riveted.
“Being able to have vicarious experiences is a real fundamental part of the human condition,” Davies said.
According to Davies, people are able to learn from movies because most of their brain does not understand that a movie is not real-life. He said this suggests that the reason people consume horror fiction has similar roots to why people observe horrific events in real life, such as watching a fight or stopping to look at a car accident.
“We put ourselves in situations—watching frightening news programs, watching zombie horror movies—and we find ourselves unable to turn away because our primitive mind thinks that this is something important that we need to be prepared for,” he said.
There is similar evidence when people dream, Davies said. For instance, people will watch a zombie horror movie and then have a nightmare about it, which is almost a way for them to practise for that dangerous situation.
“When we’re watching horror movies, even though it might not always be a pleasant experience, you’re compelled to keep watching,” Davies said. “I think that’s because our minds think ‘This is important, we need to see this,’ even if it doesn’t feel good.”
Psychological science also suggests that humans have a negativity bias, which explains why people tend to pay more attention to negative events rather than positive ones, Davies said.
Will the world ever be too dark for horror?
“Right now is a great time for new content to be coming out,” Hamilton Trash Cinema founder and horror movie screening organizer Ben Ruffett said.
Saying the world is too dark for horror is like saying the world is too happy for comedy, Ruffett added.
Ruffet said that he disagrees with the decision to postpone Black Mirror production.
“Letting the worldwide mood kind of dictate what you’re doing seems kind of counterintuitive to me,” he said. “Especially a show like Black Mirror, that’s supposed to be kind of forward-thinking and cutting edge and exposing scary ideas, it seems odd that they’re kind of succumbing to a scary idea.”
Chief executive and finance officer of the Carleton Film Society, Keya Shirali, said she shared Ruffett’s view.
“Horror films are very socially relevant,” Shirali said. “I feel like if we don’t face up to our ugliness and we run away from it, we’re not really understanding ourselves.”
Shirali added that although escapism is important sometimes, people should not distract themselves completely from the world.
“Eventually you’re gonna have to see what’s happening in the world and what’s happening within yourself, and I think horror films are a great mirror into humanity,” she said.
In an unprecedented time for this genre, people are still excited to watch horror films.
“People will always want to watch horror,” Ahmad said. “People are just overwhelmed by what’s happening around us.”
“You don’t need to think about the worst when the worst we can imagine is happening,” she said.
Featured image by Netflix.
