Deconstructing Genre Expectations Through the Lens of Horror

For horror movies, I love a good paranormal story. Something with demons or ghosts that present this sort of otherworldly threat. Mostly because I have the audacity to think I could take out a slasher, alien, monster, or otherwise corporeal menace. So I like a real threat.
It’s also one of the very few genres where you really get to play with things like demons and ghosts.
Paranormal entities work better when they have a broader space to work in. Start strapping them down with too many rules, they lose some of their teeth. They, in fact, benefit from not being permanently defeatable, just temporarily escapable. In portions of the Paranormal Activity franchise, for example, they never once actually get rid of one of the possessing spirits. They just move it around, and at least some variation of it stays a menace through the whole franchise.
And when a piece of horror media tells us what a spirit is or what a curse does, we just sort of accept it. When it gives us a threat or sets up a construction, we tend to run with it. You can’t poke the premise in the House of Wax repertoire too hard, or it gets a little melty under scrutiny. The threat of the movie has to be truly unfathomably stupid before we’re unable to wave it away, and even then there’s going to be someone who enjoys the irony of it.
Because horror has this looser construction, it’s one of the genres we get to break the rules in other ways around speculative elements.
Say we have a vampire or vampire-adjacent creature.
A vampire in a second-world fantasy setting would need to fit within the overall worldbuilding. They would need to mesh with the internal ruleset. There’d be social and ecological consequences.
In a science fiction setting, that vampire is the result of genetic engineering or a virus or a they’re a totally different species that emerged from the stars or some secret place on earth. They have to make sense from a logical perspective. There needs to be explanation for why they are what they are.
A drama or a romance or even an urban fantasy, our vampire has to abide by the restrictions of the human world. It has to interact with people in a non-destructive way. In this kind of story you’ll expect there to be good vampires because we can’t have our invariably female main character smooching bad vampires. That leads to ethical quibbling and complex social hierarchies.
You throw that vampire into a standard horror, all that guy has to do is fuck it up bloodsucker style. While the comic mini-series goes into a little more detail about the vampire social background, 30 Days of Night as a movie never feels the need to dig particularly far down. They’re just there to eat people.
So there’s a level of freedom there.
That freedom also ends up carrying over to the hybrid genres. While I like a good paranormal movie, I like my horror books with a more science fiction angle. Mostly because I just love science fiction. The thing is, when your sci-fi book is really a horror book, you can let a lot of things slide that you simply wouldn’t in a traditional science fiction book.
[minor spoiler for Bury Your Gays]
One of my favorite books from this year was Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. I adore Chuck Tingle horror. All three of his books are hinged hard on speculative elements. For Bury Your Gays, the monster in the darkness is ferrous nanites.
As much as I love this book, I also know that the science is bad. It’s not logical, sensical science. If it was billed as traditional hard sci-fi, it would be torn to shreds. But it’s not a hard sci-fi book. It’s a horror book. So I don’t care if it’s good science. That’s not what I’m here for.
And just what a marvelous way for us all to have a chance to deconstruct our genre expectations by mashing two of them together.