A few years ago, a journalist bade the bold claim, on Twitter, that the Alien movies weren’t horror because they were set in space.
I’ve always haunted a fair few movie and horror forums, and it was reposted there multiple times (here’s one of the places I saw it on Reddit where it’s still posted). No one, in any of these spaces actually agreed with her, but her reasoning was as follows.
- “Horror is predicated on the fear of the other, the unfamiliar in the world as we know it”
- Space is already unknown
A few passes of the logic even internally, and it doesn’t stand up very well. Space as an unknown environment is still an unknown compared to Earth. Coming at it from another angle, to the crew of the ship, space is less of an unknown. They’re familiar with space travel and space ships, and it’s the xenomorphs that present the unknown. So by her own logic, Alien still fits no matter how you break it down.
It’s the first step of this logic that I actually find the most intriguing because in a broader, general sense that’s not how horror is described. We define horror as something that elicits a certain set of emotions. Fear, repulsion, disgust. It’s a piece of media that shocks. That startles. A relationship with the unknown or unfamiliar is not inherently implied in that broad definition. Things that are known can still be shocking. Things that are familiar can still lead to repulsion.
Creating more narrow distinction within the broader, academic definition, isn’t unique to this journalist.
Browsing movie discussion forums, you’ll sometimes see that certain movies live in a weird horror borderland. There’s contention over whether they “count” as horror or not. The Kathy Bates vehicle Misery, for example, is often a subject of this discussion. Frequently, those of a certain opinion will posit these movies are thrillers, not horror. And that might be a fair distinction based on the expectations of what those two genres have to offer and other softer conventions. When you dig deeper, asking for that clarifying factor, it’s never about the more nuanced distinction. As one self-proclaimed screenwriter in a thread I read recently claimed:
“…thrillers have humans as the evil. Horror has some supernatural aspect to it.”
And this specific idea does get repeated. People asking for clarification on this point show up as a forum headline a couple of times a year. The vast majority of people will clarify no, horror does not have to have supernatural elements to it, but there’s always a few who say “yes, it does.”
You have to ask, where does this come from? Because, yes, supernatural and speculative elements are very common in horror. The aforementioned unknown is often the source of the distress that makes a story. But academically, horror has only ever been defined on its fear-invoking quality.
A number of classic horror films in the slasher genre in particular suddenly stop being horror under a definition that insists on the presence of supernatural elements. Can you imagine trying to say that Scream isn’t horror?
There’s nothing in the history or colloquial study of horror that suggests this supernatural refinement on the definition. There’s no support for it at any angle.
So why does it persist?
To my mind, it’s exactly because the definition is so broad, but also speaks to a set of emotions that are ultimately pretty subjective. But there’s also an implication of intent that can’t always be read on the surface. Was the filmmaker trying to facilitate a feeling of fear, whether it was successful or not?
So we end up with a genre that has extremely fuzzy edges in comparison to things like romance or sci-fi or fantasy. Some people are fine with those fuzzy edges. We make due with saying something is “xyz with horror elements” to avoid committing it to the confines of the genre.
Other people struggle with that. And in that struggle they have to find something hard to use as a binary indicator. Horror does not have that, though. It doesn’t lend itself to creating that kind of hard boundary.
So they go looking for one and the end result ends up being very very weird.
Pixels and Pins Studio 