Illustration by Janani Murugesan
by ROBIN WYLLIE-SCHOLTZ
Contributor
I’m scared of just about everything. Once in elementary school, my friends and I went through a funhouse at a carnival. At the end, there was a slide that you took to get out. I was so terrified that rather than taking the slide, I went all the way back through the hall of mirrors to the entrance. My fears aren’t limited to trying things in real life – up until recently, the idea of watching a horror movie was just as scary as riding a motorcycle or attempting a ropes course.
At the start of this summer, I decided to start pushing myself out of my movie-genre comfort zone. I figured that as a film major, I needed to be able to watch movies I might’ve previously avoided. My horror journey started with the Fear Street trilogy. Several actors I like were in it, and the trailer caught my interest, so I resolved to give it a shot. Before I watched the first movie, Fear Street: 1994, I looked up a list of who dies and how. I skipped past the goriest parts, but I actually had a great time! I managed to stop myself from spoiling parts two and three and just watched them without knowing what would happen. Fear Street: 1666 (the third installment) is genuinely one of my favorite movies I watched this summer. For me, one of the main draws of the series was the queer representation, something the horror genre is grossly lacking.
After watching a string of thrillers, I decided to step back into the horror genre- specifically, slashers. Slasher is a subgenre of horror in which a group of people, usually teenagers, are killed off by a human (or formerly human) murderer, generally wearing a mask. Classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street are all slashers. I started with Scream, Wes Craven’s meta masterpiece. It felt like the perfect choice; a movie whose characters talk about slashers while actively stuck in one. I will confess to having skipped through a couple gorier moments, but overall I really enjoyed it. Scream hits all of the right tropes: creepy phone call, masked killer, badass final girl, and subverts the tired ones.
As much as I loved the over-the-top drama of the slasher, I knew I needed to watch a horror movie with higher emotional stakes. I chose Alien, the 1979 classic starring Sigourney Weaver. On the surface, it bears some similarities to a slasher– a group of people is killed off one by one until (spoiler alert) the last girl (or woman, in this case) standing defeats the killer. However, the experience of watching it was completely different. Despite my best attempts at bravery, I kept having to mute my computer to mitigate the tension. Alien’s use of sound to create suspense is brilliant, though it got to be too much for me at times. Though I didn’t have as much fun with Alien, I thought it was an incredible movie.
I’m still at the very beginning of my horror-fan transformation. With the spooky season upon us, I’ll have plenty of opportunities to experience more of what horror has to offer. It may take years before I can watch a Stephen King adaptation in theaters. Maybe I’ll never stop using the IMDB parent’s guide or doesthedogdie.com, but I think that’s OK. As long as I keep pushing my boundaries and making sure I’m not closing the door to art I might enjoy, I think that’s a success.