I think it’s really interesting the way women, queer people, people of colour, disabled people, or a mixture of any of those are drawn to the horror genre. Every single person I’ve gotten into a deep discussion with about horror, or a subset of the genre such as slashers, talks about beauty in things our society tells us are grotesque.
Something that I personally adore about horror is the placing of the audience in a space where the rules we live by in our society do not apply. It immediately throws the viewer off their game and forces them to live vicariously through the main characters. We see time and time again how the choices that we’re told are “correct” do not save our protagonists. In fact, it is usually only when our final character slips into the rules set by our villains that they’re able to survive, always changed in the end.
I know for myself, I always found comfort in that shift. The excuse to be monstrous is freeing. We’re told that it’s ugly and shouldn’t be allowed and yet there are so many things in our life that bring that out in us. Inequality in any form and the nuances that go with that bring rage out from within your soul, and yet those who suffer are told to be quiet for the benefit of those who hurt us. We are told not to go against the rules that society has set because it is inconvenient and scary. But I have plenty of rage. I have plenty of sorrow. It’s all bubbling within me and I have to find a place for it otherwise all it does is eat me alive.
With horror, I see myself in both the protagonist and the antagonist. I see a version of me that has become hideous and twisted by my pain that is shocking to those who live in a society that cannot understand it. I see a version of me desperately trying to escape that pain and finding that the tools society has given me don’t work because I am outside of it. And at the end of the film, I see myself in the new version of the character that mixes both into something that has survived and won.
It’s why I love the Final Girl/Boy trope. Not only have I been asked by the movie to be that character as the audience, I feel a kinship with that character as my individual self. I want to come out on top of the horrible shit I’ve been through and know that the scars it gave me don’t have a hold on me anymore. It’s why I often don’t judge our protagonists for their broken bits at the end of the movie, because they aren’t who we started with and that’s good. They survived and it was in spite of everything else.
Horror will always be an outlet for the darker parts of our feelings. You aren’t a bad person for thinking of a mixture of “Good for them” and “Oh god no” at the end of a horror movie. That just means it was incredibly well done and that it gave your brain something to chew on.
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