A funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago, and it was this mirth-provoking article from Glamour Magazine. Now, that’s not exactly a go-to source of ours for incisive, iconoclastic cinephile commentary (and they are welcome to bite back at us the very next time we do as cursory a piece on fall heel trends or whatever). And whatever the provenance, ordinarily we’d steer well clear of an article titled, with unconcealed incredulity, “Do People Actually Enjoy Horror Movies?” a.k.a., in index listings, “Sorry, I Don’t Believe Anyone Actually Enjoys Horror Movies.” It has vacuity baked in from the start. But there was one part of the article (which, fine, I did read when it became subject of a twitter-teacup-tempest of derision — I never said I was perfect) that is even more bothersome than the airy tone of “telling it like it is” when it so obviously isn’t, more even than the fact the writer was basing her dismissal of the entire genre on having seen one horror film and half an episode of “American Horror Story.” It was this: “But I maintain that there is absolutely no value in feeling scared. Why do people want to be scared? What is good about that? Feeling scared is always, always a negative experience…”
The problem with this is, it’s no longer about horror movies, it’s about not wanting to feel scared, or, indeed, to experience any “negative” emotion as a response to art. Fear is part of the panoply of human emotions and is a crucial tool in a filmmaker’s arsenal, whether they’re working in the horror genre or not. And of course, there have been reams of research done on the cathartic, vicarious or cautionary benefits of horror storytelling (which has a much longer history than cinema does) — enlarging benefits and experiences you’re missing out on if you expect every film you watch to be a comfort blanket of complacency.
READ MORE: The 25 Best Foreign Language Horror Movies Ever
This is the month to be talking about such things, of course. Ours might not be the only seasonal horror coverage in the film-blog world, but with The 15 Best Found Footage Horror Films; The 25 Best Foreign Language Horror Films; The 25 Best Horror Films of the 1970s; The 25 Best Horror Films of the 1980s; The 25 Best Horror Films of the 1990s; 15 Visually Stunning Horror Movies; and a couple more big ones yet to come, it might just be the most. And yet, despite the sheer number of films these features represent, there were at least as many again that were considered, advocated for, and then, through a “Survivor“-like process of alliances and betrayals plus some dart-throwing, excluded. And almost always the arguments were over whether it was a horror-horror, or simply a movie-that-scared-us.
Since we’re on the home straights now as October 31st comes rolling towards us like a giant grinning jack-o-lantern, we thought we’d give a little shine to a few of those latter titles — great films that don’t quite fit the genre mold or that aren’t primarily horrors (or however else we chose to interpret it on the day), but that still scared us senseless. It also made us realize there are as many types of “scary” as there are of “funny,” it’s just as subjective, and if one were to truly try to avoid ever being scared by a film, the only solution would be to never again watch one. So come with us through 10 frightening non-horror films and let’s prove to the doubters that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
“We Need To Talk About Kevin” (2011)
There have been other films that have taken a school shooting as the crux of their plot — most notably Gus Van Sant‘s “Elephant” — but they often derive their horror by attempting to put us as close as possible into the mindset of the killer(s), and as such extend a long tradition in cinema that includes “Psycho” and “Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer” and even “Peeping Tom.” But the genius of Lynne Ramsay‘s adaptation of Lionel Shriver‘s novel is that it does not try to put us into the mind of the disturbed Kevin (Ezra Miller). Instead, he remains a kind of impregnable block of sociopathic marble, and we see his life and beyond related through the fractured prism of his mother Eva’s (Tilda Swinton) deteriorating psyche. And that’s where the horror of this deeply unsettling drama lies: It’s not so much about the events and acts as their shattering effect on a person’s psychology, a person who is able to feel. The film’s unsettled, tossed-salad chronology makes it hard to follow at times, but that is exactly the point — the story is so much about causes and effects and about not being sure that they happen in that order.
“Night of the Hunter” (1955)
Charles Laughton‘s masterpiece American Gothic noir has many horror elements, from the Expressionist imagery that seems to explicitly recall Robert Wiene‘s “The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari” or F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu;” to the woozy flow of the editing; to the creation of an indelibly iconic, implacable, unstoppable villain in Robert Mitchum‘s looming, drawling, black-clad Preacher. But this is one of the times where to describe it as a horror is to diminish the film, and also to rob it of some of its power for newcomers. Roger Ebert blamed the film’s long neglect, after its initial critical and commercial failure upon release, on its uncategorizability, saying with some prescience, “People don’t know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.” But by the same token, the film’s refusal to sit wholly in any one box may also ultimately contribute to its longevity: It’s too leaky in its brilliance to be filed away neatly and forgotten again. Heavy on mood and atmosphere, brooding and foreboding and occasionally touched with the fantastic, like an unsanitized Grimm’s Fairy Tale, one of the most remarkable aspects is that all that eeriness doesn’t actually have supernatural origins, unless you count whatever demonic forces are at work in Mitchum’s unforgettable performance, heightened further, literally, for being seen through the eyes of children.
“The Act Of Killing” (2012)
We all know that truth is stranger than fiction, but Joshua Oppenheimer‘s shattering non-fiction “The Act Of Killing” also suggests that documentary can be scarier than horror — after all, in genre films at the very least, you have “it isn’t real” to fall back on. But this atomically devastating documentary on the Indonesian genocide and its legacy for both perpetrators and victims provides no such safe harbor, and the psychology Oppenheimer reveals, behind layers of self-aggrandizement and self-delusion, is so fundamentally shocking to our ideas of basic humanity that it delivers a blow of almost existential horror to those watching. The film derives part of its power from the revelation of a genocide many of us were not aware of before, but the stark statistics of that atrocity (a rumored two million Indonesians murdered in the “Communist purges”) pack far less of a punch than the terrifying experience of spending time with a likable monster (the film’s “star,” Anwar Congo) who is on the precipice of self-awareness, and the vertiginous shift we can see him undergo as he senses the chasm of guilt and shame into which he’s in danger of plunging. Very possibly the most frightening film of the new century.