Where Must Art Stop
I have a horror movie fan in my life. I’ve seen him every day this summer. We work together and live near each other. He speaks about being provoked, the thrill of seeing a new trick used to scare him. I joke and scoff and disagree.
I dislike horror films. I hate them, in fact. I suppose it is because I like distance between myself and art. I guard my privacy closely. I have come to be secure in this impulse, not worried that I am closing myself off. Art should lie on walls and on screens and swim through the air in currents of music. It should not reach out and prick me. It should not wrest control from me, rather, a work of art should earn my attention and be full of folds and layers that keep my attention.
A Shakespearian drama makes the characters transparent, by giving them language to articulate their natures and wants and vices. I love those. The honesty does not make me horrified. I lean in like a voyeur. How do Lord and Lady Macbeth, the rulers of Scotland, live? And how do they claw at each other enough to dissolve a marriage? I want to know and see and hear and watch others go through an emotional ringer.
Horror movies take away my curiosity with ghostly silence and silly music. They are not about people, rather about human powerlessness in the face of ghosts, the supernatural, God, rabid animals. The haunted house genre is one that has so much substance beside its’ scares. From Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King, great writers (many of them New Englanders!) have brought class conflict, gender relations, fate handed down by family, and the thrill of a love story into the haunted house setting. Those are books I can read with hunger and attention.
But rarely are those books translated well to film. And the value they have lies in the drama and psychology prior to the horror.
So I refuse horror and its’ invasion of my senses. After all, I need delicate senses to appreciate subtler art.
Or… that’s what I tell myself to keep myself safe.