Spoiler alert: You won’t find out by reading this post. If you were expecting an actual answer, John, you’re going to be very disappointed. I’m sorry. This is the best I could come up with because the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s almost no logic behind my thought process.
My boyfriend has asked, on several occasions, what defines something as “horror.” I think it started when we watched the first season of Westworld together. All hell broke loose and he asked, “Is it horror yet?” No, it’s still sci-fi. He then asked why, and I guess “It just isn’t” wasn’t a satisfying response because this continued with Ex Machina and Sunshine (more on that later) and my answer, of course, was still no. These are not horror films. At one point, he asked me if Prey is considered a horror game and I was at a loss, partially because I haven’t completed the game and I need to experience the story and the overall mood/tone in its entirety before I can come to a conclusion, and also because based on my first impressions, I think it equally qualifies as sci-fi and horror. After he’d asked me enough times about this subject, I even started asking myself, okay, what makes something “horror” then?
Until John started questioning me about it, I never really thought about what makes something a horror film/game/show. Is it the overall tone? It can’t be dependent on whether or not it manages to scare me because there are so many movies that I consider horror films and they didn’t even make me flinch. John brought up this “What is a chair?” exercise that perfectly relates to the problem I started having when I initially wanted to describe what I think a movie needs to include in order to be a horror film. I began describing it to myself while working on this post and I realized, “Oh wait, but it also includes this, and not every movie has that,” and it became one huge contradiction. Because not every scary movie, regardless of what Scream will have you believe, follows the same formula.
There are sub genres of horror. It’s not a one size fits all thing. There’s psychological horror, slasher films, sci-fi horror, comedic horror, Lovecraftian horror, supernatural horror, fantasy horror, God awful torture porn. There’s Cabin in the Woods, which is the most beautiful love letter to the horror genre I’ve ever seen. There are movies I consider fringe horror, like the first film in The Purge franchise. It’s more suspense than horror, but I would throw it in the horror category anyway.
There are films that can fit into several genres, but they lean slightly more in one direction than the other. I would classify Alien as a sci-fi horror film, with emphasis on sci-fi, but Event Horizon as a horror sci-fi film, emphasis on horror (and Dead Space as a horror sci-fi game since it’s pretty much Event Horizon). And then there’s John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is just straight up horror even though it does have an element of science fiction to it. I think the reason Alien leans more sci-fi than horror is because...It’s about an alien, whereas Event Horizon leans more horror for me because EVERYTHING happens. Everything. Seriously, watch Event Horizon. It’s the only good movie Paul W. S. Anderson has ever made. Maybe one day Uwe Boll will surprise us, too. Probably not though. Anyway, back to the point. What’s “interesting” is that I say Alien (the movie) leans more sci-fi than it does horror, but Alien Isolation is one of the scariest games I have ever played and I absolutely 100% consider that a survival horror game. I couldn’t even explain or defend my reasoning for this if pressed to, John, so don’t ask.
I can’t categorize Jurassic Park, even though it can technically fit into horror or sci-fi, I have a hard time saying it’s either. I know a lot of people consider Jaws a horror film, but I think I just put Jaws into the “shark movie” category, as if that’s a genre in itself. When it comes to dinosaurs, sharks, oversized bugs and mammals, those all lean way more sci-fi than horror to me, no matter what the story is, Cujo being the exception, but even that is something I don’t consider horror. They’re “animal films.” Not to be confused with “family friendly animal films” like Homeward Bound.
As a counterpoint to John’s questioning about whether or not something becomes part of the horror genre based on a brief moment where something frightening happens, I’d like to offer this example. No one would ever call Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune a horror game, but surprisingly it has a really scary section you have to play through later on in the game, and this is the best case I can think of that explains my feelings on this subject. Just because something has horror elements, that doesn’t make it horror.
Last night, we watched Sunshine, a movie that deserves its own post (but isn’t getting one because I refuse to waste any more of my time on it) for being a spliced together trainwreck of what seems like two totally different movies and once again, he asked me, “Is this horror?” This movie is the one that should be impossible for me to categorize because even the movie itself doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, however, I think it helped me figure out, at least somewhat, how I determine whether something is sci-fi or horror. For me personally, if a movie spends a significant amount of time developing a plot around a science fiction story, at the very least, it’s sci-fi horror, if not just completely sci-fi. If it has a slight sci-fi subplot happening in the background, with mostly a horror overtone, it’s a horror film. When I was watching Sunshine with John, I told him, “This is just regular space stuff. This is what happens when you’re dumb enough to go into space.” The first hour and twenty minutes of that movie could have been Armageddon or any other “We have to go to space to save the planet” movie ever made, so even though it turned into a really bizarre slasher/supernatural horror film at the end...It’s still just regular space stuff to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That’s the best explanation I can come up with. Thanks to my boyfriend for making me sit through that mess (I had such high hopes for it, I was expecting necromorphs) and helping me reach some sort of conclusion about how my mind works.
