I have been a fan of horror for many years now. It’s the sort of fascination I can’t quite explain, a sort of physical and psychological thrill I can enjoy within the safety of my own home or theatre. I love being at the edge of my seat, waiting for the protagonist to stumble upon the ghost lurking in a home or the plot of the home invasion flick to hitting its gruesome climax. Horror is a way for me to explore the boundaries of my own psyche, to see how scared I can get from what appears on screen or what comes out of a speaker. Nothing is more satisfying than knowing a movie still can make me look away, as if in some dramatic stroke of irony, the greatest compliment a filmmaker can get was me not watching their movie at all.
As I’ve gotten older and have watched a great number of horror films of all kinds, from thrillers to slasher films, from found footage to eerie-mind bending cinematography, they have seemed to have done less and less to scare me. Jump scares seem to be lazy, predictable, and yawn-inducing; monsters remind me more of cartoon characters than my nightmares. Every once and awhile another will come around which is actually made well, leaving me more hope for this genre, but I fear they have become too far between.
What is making me so indifferent to so many horror movies? In many ways I suspect it’s the craftsmanship of the scares, which become so quickly cliché with excessive use by so many successive movies. If something works, garners attention, and makes money, somebody is bound to try it out for themselves.
While this might be true, I have another idea which has been making more and more sense to me the more I think about it, and it might be a way for this genre to bring something new and of substance to their fans.
What if more horror movies had happy endings?
I mean, am I the only one who's bored of so many of them ending with the main character dying or the monster somehow living on to haunt again? Sad endings can be good, but horror has been doing it for years and frankly it’s boring. The idea of having a sad or scary ending might seem like a good idea, it might leave the audience unsettled which might make the scare experience even better. What I have come to find is that unsettling endings do just the opposite they’re supposed to, especially if the ending is more obviously just trying to hint at a sequal. When I see the monster coming back at the end, all I can think was about how much of a waste the hour and half before was. If the monster is always going to come back in the end, then what's even the point? If we’re right back to where we started, how can this story progress at all?
As much as I enjoy cheap thrill, I think horror needs to start making aspirations towards more artful, nuanced and enriched storytelling, and I think happy endings are part of that.
Take The Babadook (2014) for example. This film is great for many reasons, including the music, acting, and scares but this film also offers up something which a lot of horror movies don’t: a resolution.
The film follows a single mother, Amelia, who lost her husband while going to deliver her son, Sam. The film takes place several years later, the death of her husband still haunting her while her son proves to be a bit of a problem child. Quickly we understand how bleak, depressed, and lonely she feels, whether it's from her acting or the cold, creepy house they somehow are still living in. After finding a terrifying children's book, the film descends quickly into an escalating haunting of both their home and the mother's body, which climaxes with her trying to kill Sam. After an emotional scene where Sam calms the possessed Amelia, she recovers and now confronts the monster, which shrivels up to lie dormant in the basement.
The ending of the movie does allow the monster to live on again, but instead of the last shot being a still frame with a jump scare or a tease of a jump scare, it’s a tender image of Amelia and Sam embracing. This difference is important to the telling of the story and says things much larger that the plot of the movie itself.
On one level, you could take this movie at surface level, a good scary movie which transcends common horror movie clichés. On a deeper level, this films offers up enough to build a terrifying metaphor with and uplifting conclusion.
Grief, as with all difficult emotions, are very difficult to understand unless you are living with it at that very moment. How is it possible to convey emotions like grief to someone if they haven’t experienced a major loss for themselves? How is it possible to feel what it’s like to have violent thoughts against a child?
The Babadook monster is borrowed from a Nosferatu aesthetic to become something fresh and terrifying, a crooked demon which turns Amelia into the scariest monster of all: a mother who wants to hurt her child.
If we take a step away from the scares of the film, it's not difficult to see how the Babadook can operate as a metaphor for unprocessed grief, a grief that when not confronted over many years turns someone into something unrecognizable and evil. Is it any surprise a horror movie would take the role in explaining such rich and horrible parts of the human experience?
What this film offers us is a way at looking at difficult topics like grief, growing up without a parent, raising children alone and child abuse through a new, clear lens, which completely immerses the viewer in the raw fear these problems invoke when you're living through them. I don’t think the Babadook works to ease the blame off parents who might hurt their children; it puts you in the children’s skin, watching something you love turn into a nightmare that wants to harm you.
The reason why it’s so important that this film ends happy is because it also offers an allegory for a resolution to these very real problems. By showing us that Amelia isn’t completely free of the Babadook but has control over it demonstrates how grief can be processed and the murderous thoughts towards Sam can be destroyed through love.
Why more horror movies haven’t gone down this route of storytelling beats me. There are so many injustices and horrors in the real world. Why haven't more horror movies, which use fear as their main medium of communication to convey a message, brought us stories which can operate both to scare and to move us, to keep us at the edge of our seat while also teaching us empathy? My point is that having a horror movie which both scares well and helps us understand the horrors of modern life is something which is hardly ever approached in this genre, and movie after movie with nothing but sub-par jump scares is frustrating to someone who knows that these films could be so much more.
