Editorials
[Editorial] Horror Doesn’t Have to Scare YOU to Be Horror
Most common comment we receive? “This isn’t a horror movie.” Let’s talk about that.
I’ve been writing for Bloody Disgusting for nearly two years now, for various other horror websites (starting with my own personal blog) for the past ten years, and I’ve been an active member of the online horror community for even longer. I spend most of my non-writing time interacting with fellow fans on social media, and one thing has become immediately clear to me in recent years: horror fans, by and large, aren’t quite sure what makes a horror movie, well, a horror movie.
Granted, there are certain films that are more action than horror and perhaps even more comedy than horror, which can make it tough to pin those movies down to one specific genre. But the sheer number of bona fide horror films that I’ve seen horror fans dismiss as “not horror movies” over the course of the past couple years, in particular, is staggering. Nearly every critically acclaimed horror film in recent years has been banished by a vocal group of fans, including The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, Split and most recently, the now Oscar-nominated Get Out. The list goes on.
I recently penned a bit of a love letter to Mike Flanagan’s Before I Wake here on BD, and that too was dismissed in the comments section as being something less or something more than a horror film, depending on who was commenting. Some expressed that Before I Wake‘s focus on human drama made it *more* than a mere horror film – whatever the hell that really means – while others outright dismissed that it was even a horror movie at all. After all, if a movie can impact you on a deep emotional level, it surely can’t be a scary movie… right?
You can’t see my face right now, but I’m definitely rolling my eyes.
As for Get Out, which made headlines once again today for scoring multiple Academy Awards nominations, including Best freakin’ Picture, I was not at all surprised to see that our article about today’s big time victory resulted in a flurry of comments pointing out that no, actually, Get Out isn’t a horror movie. It’s a statement I’m having a lot of trouble even wrapping my head around, as the Get Out I saw was mostly definitely a horror film. Same goes for every aforementioned film, as well as nearly every film that comes up in this particular conversation – The Silence of the Lambs, to date the only horror film to ever win Best Picture, is still fighting the internet battle that Get Out is currently at the center of.
So where did so many horror fans get this idea that “horror” is a tiny box that only very specific films fit inside of, when horror has ALWAYS been a wide open playing field that allows writers and filmmakers to explore all facets of the human condition and experience? More specifically, why is Night of the Living Dead unquestionably a horror film, while a movie like Get Out is up for hot button social media debate? I’ve pondered questions such as these for quite some time, and the conclusion I’ve drawn is that it often comes down to one thing for many horror fans:
“If it didn’t scare ME, it’s not a horror movie!”
Take last year’s IT, for example, an adaptation of a terrifying Stephen King novel about a killer clown who literally eats children. Unquestionably a horror film, right? Well, believe it or not, I had many fans explain to me last year that IT actually wasn’t a horror movie! Whether they called it a “thriller,” a “supernatural fantasy,” a “dark drama” or whatever other description they were able to come up with to distance one of the genre’s biggest success stories from the genre they hold so near and dear, the sentiment that was driving those comments seemed to have been entirely derived from the fact that those fans simply were not scared by the movie. And if the killer clown movie didn’t scare them, then it wasn’t truly a horror movie.
It’s fine if any of the movies I’ve mentioned in this article didn’t scare you – what scares one person isn’t always going to scare another, it’s only natural – but to scrub them from the genre simply because they didn’t work for you, on whatever level, is to do a huge disservice to the genre at large. And if you’re going to take the stance that a horror movie, in order to be a true horror movie, needs to avoid focusing on human drama or imparting any social commentary, then guess what? George Romero didn’t make horror movies. Wes Craven didn’t either.
“Horror” is more than “killer in the woods chasing down topless teenagers,” SO MUCH MORE, and I can’t help but get a little depressed whenever an incredible horror movie is dismissed by so many fans simply because it dared to do something more than slice, dice and spew blood all over the screen. There are no rules within the horror genre, which is really the most wonderful thing about the genre. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water may have been love stories above all else, but are they not still monster movies at the end of the day? Do they lose the right to call themselves creature features simply because there’s something more to them?
More than anything, “Horror” is a tone. A feeling. An umbrella for endless sub-genres. A deeply versatile means through which filmmakers can exorcise the demons we all deal with on a daily basis. George Romero’s flesh-eating zombies can be found in your local mall any day of the week. If you’ve been paying any attention to the news, you’d know that Jordan Peele’s racists are unfortunately all around us. Jennifer Kent’s Babadook? A representation of our grief. The titular “it” in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows? That inescapable feeling of adolescence being shattered by the realization that death is breathing down our neck. These are all horror movies. All wonderful explorations of what horror can be, when filmmakers respect the genre enough to do more than grab the lowest hanging fruit it has to offer.
It’s time we all have that same level of respect for the genre we love. For the endless possibilities it provides. For the movies smart enough to explore those possibilities.
Slasher movies are great. But horror is so much more than blood and guts.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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