Horror movies tend to depict different scary creatures such as ghosts, ghouls, and demons. The approach to making horrific elements vary greatly, some do it well, others not so much. In this post, I will try to outline what the best kind of horror looks like. First a couple of disclaimers
1 I am not a horror aficionado, I am a cinephile and I have seen a lot of movies including horror movies, but I have by no means exhausted the genre.
2 I don’t really get scared when I watch horror movies, so this is more of a theoretical approach as opposed to what scared me the most.
The Slasher (The killer)
The first and in my opinion, the most famous example is the killer or rather the slasher.
Slasher films deploy the killer trope to perfection. It is not enough to merely have a person killing people, you need a visual hook. Characters like Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Kruger are the unholy trinity of slashers.
All three of the characters are instantly recognizable which goes a long way in creating a “face” of evil. If you see Michael or Jason’s masks you instantly know who they belong to. Freddy’s sweater, hat, and claws are likewise recognizable.
Especially Jason and Freddy are both forces of nature. Unstoppable and unkillable, their mere presence has already sealed your doom.
Another mask-wearing killer is the ghost face of scream. These masks work because they are available to most people. Thus it creates more of an everyday kind of killer where anyone could be the killer.
Masked killers work because they hide their faces. Humans read other people’s faces for emotional and context clues, when those disappear you are left with an uncanny feeling. When you can’t get a read on a person you instantly feel uneasy. It’s the same reason people find clowns to be scary, they are simply hard to read.
Freddy Kruger is a bit different since he shows his face. However, the severe burns make for a bodily mask, his face and features distorted and inhuman.
Body Horror
Body horror is a subgenre of horror that shows the body changing into a grotesque thing.
The familiarity of your own skin betraying you, and your appearance changing is truly horrifying since you become the monster.
The Fly and The Thing are both good examples of body horror.
The Exorcist is also a great example, where the child is being possessed by a demon. Her appearance and personality changes. Seeing the little girl talk differently with a deep voice while her freaky head spins around is something horrifying to watch.
The reason it works so well is that the girl is being taken hostile. She is not in control of herself anymore, she is being kept prisoner in her own body. She also has a very distinctive look and like the Slashers is very recognizable, like a face of evil.
The horror comes from the idea of you being a mere passenger in your own body. Left without control as something evil uses you to do bad things.
The Beast
The beasts are werewolves, zombies, and the Xenomorph from Aliens. These creatures represent the true forces of evil where it is impossible to reason with them. When you see them you have to hide, for they do not care about you. They will simply kill you for that is what they do.
The werewolf is also a good example of someone losing themselves to a bestial form. Like the exorcist, the person disappears and the wolf comes out.
Pennywise has also become a horror icon due to the incredible look (s)he has in the film. I do not know if Pennywise started the whole evil clown-looking thing, but it sure feels like it. Pennywise is also a supernatural force that is impossible to reason with.
The Horror of ambiguity
This is in my humble opinion the thing that works the best in horror. Yet it is so hard to describe or even show. The problem is not so much a thing more than a lack of a thing.
Think about it this way, you feel something is wrong, and your body is telling you to be scared, yet you see nothing, you hear nothing. There is nothing inherent to be scared about, yet you feel it all the same.
One of the greatest scenes in horror history comes from the film The Conjuring (and the inspiration for this post). A little girl wakes up scared out of her mind, she clearly sees something in the dark. Her sister and the audience don’t see anything, but her reaction makes it scary.
The Shining is also a perfect example where the scary part is the lack of anything scary. Is Jack going nuts or is there something else at play here?
The ambiguity is the scary part, it’s not knowing what’s wrong while you feel something is wrong. That is pretty much the scariest part, Evil has no face.