Horror in a time of violence

Content warning: descriptions of violence; mention of child sexual abuse 

In 1993, Paul Watson took a photograph of an American soldier’s corpse being dragged, naked  and mutilated, through the streets of Mogadishu. When Time published his photos, they digitally  censored the soldier’s exposed penis. Though nearly 30 years old now, Watson’s photographs of a mutilated corpse are a skeleton key for understanding contemporary horror movies. In the decades since, ‘slashers’—horror movies that feature a single knife-wielding villain—have largely been replaced by supernatural and psychological horror films. The decline of slashers is, arguably, a result of regularly broadcasting violence and war (especially American imperial violence) on television and social media. 

Increasing depictions of violence in the news have desensitised viewers to brutality. The desecration of a body was acceptable to American viewers, but a glimpse of that body’s penis was not. Violence is routine, yet sexual organs and vulnerability are scary. Watson’s photographs, of course, are not the root of this desensitisation. The exact date when televised violence began to rise is difficult to pinpoint, but it likely began with the First Gulf War. Three years earlier, that war had come to life on television. During the Vietnam War, most media coverage was not of battles, but regular press coverage read by anchors. By contrast, the First Gulf War featured CNN camera crews reporting on battles and bombings, live, 24 hours a day. The feeling that Americans experienced watching the slaughter of 25,000 Iraqis would prove difficult to replicate. 

After the release of Halloween in 1978, the slasher became a staple of American horror.  Slashers depend on graphic violence as their primary method of generating fear. In Roger Ebert’s 1979 review of Halloween, he called it “an absolutely merciless thriller, [so] violent and scary.” To a contemporary reader, this might seem incomprehensible; calling any slasher merciless and ultra-violent feels laughable.

Take, for instance, the final chase scene in Halloween. Michael Myers, the movie’s villain, pursues Jamie Lee Curtis’s character into her house. Curtis hides in the crook of a sofa and palms a knitting needle, stabbing Myers in the neck and leaving him for dead. However, Myers survives and follows Curtis up the stairs, moving deliberately. Despite failing to kill Curtis initially, the speed of his steps conveys his sustained control over the scene. Curtis, on the other hand, cannot stop screaming. This is where the tension in the scene is ruined for contemporary audiences: Curtis’s screaming seems like an overreaction to the violence of the scene—the violence that was shocking in 1978 has become routine in 2022. 

Curtis’s reaction, although justified given her situation, appears campy or comedic because we see that level of violence (or worse) on a near-daily basis. A movie Ebert called “so violent and scary” is not even particularly gory. Michael Myers may have killed five people in Halloween, but Barack Obama killed 18 people on his third day in office.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) marked the beginning of a new era in horror movies. The age of  the slasher was over, and Blair Witch heralded the dominance of supernatural and psychological horror. Rather than attempting to scare audiences with a knife-wielding man, supernatural horror movies seek to tap into latent fears of witches, ghosts, and demons. Whereas violence in slashers is routine, psychological horror dissects violence in an attempt to further unsettle the viewer. For example, Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) examines a failing relationship between two PhD students. The most disturbing scene in Midsommar is not gory; rather, it consists of the protagonist’s boyfriend having ritual sex with a minor.

Movies like Paranormal Activity (2007) and Midsommar were attractive to studios for two reasons: first, they were capable of being scary on a shoestring budget. For example, Paranormal Activity grossed nearly $200 million on a budget of $15,000. Second, and more importantly, slasher movies had become box-office duds. Violence that had excited audiences in the 1980s was now dull. How could Hollywood hope to compete with the real-life violence of the First Gulf War or 9/11? 

Some of the most popular horror media of the past decade are Netflix’s Stranger Things and Aster’s Hereditary (2018), both supernatural horrors, and, in the case of Hereditary, psychological horror. This new horror is for us what the exposed penis was for Time. We’ve collectively lost interest in our pile of mutilated corpses, grown large in the shadow of a decadent empire, and instead, we search for the same excitement in the psychological and the supernatural, genres that do not remind us of the real-life horrors we witness daily.