When I was nine, my older cousins made me watch Jeepers Creepers (2001), a movie about a “flesh-eating creature on a ritualistic killing spree.” I spent the night hiding behind the couch, playing a rudimentary version of The Sims on my cousin’s Pinkalicious cell phone and trying to pretend I was Not There. Unfortunately, I still saw enough of it to theorise that the slew of sleepless nights to follow permanently stunted my growth. What if I could have been a basketball player? It had successfully traumatised me.
That night, I decided that horror movies were not my thing, declaring real life as scary enough. Until very recently, that is. A combination of FOMO, the development of my frontal lobe, and desperately wanting to see Florence Pugh join a Swedish cult finally propelled me into the world of horror – and I was pleasantly surprised at how un-traumatised I was at the end.
It turns out that even if you are a weakling like myself, it’s possible to cherry-pick your way through the genre and curate an experience where you actually enjoy being on the edge of your seat, under the right conditions. If you too are determined to participate, here is my guide from a certified scaredy cat on how to enjoy a small (but effective) dose of fear.
Work out what you’re actually scared of
The first place to start is to know your limits. There are lots of different genres of horror, such as slasher films, gore, psychological horror, paranormal horror, etc – and you might not be afraid of all of them. Personally, I am the most scared of things I genuinely think could happen to me in real life - which is to say that I can’t watch Paranormal Activity because I believe in ghosts, but I can watch Yellowjackets, because I don’t believe I will ever realistically be on a successful sports team.
Use the Scaredy Scale
Thankfully, we live in a time of the internet, where we can use websites like Slate’s Scaredy Scale to scope out a movie before watching it. The Scaredy Scale rates popular horror movies based on their levels of suspense, gore, spookiness, and overall scariness, even comparing them to other movies so you can see exactly where they sit on a scale of Paddington to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
There is also a site called Commonsense Media that lists detailed content warnings for movies, featuring reviews from both adults and kids (??) who discuss how scary they found it. This means you can look up Bodies Bodies Bodies and see that a 12-year-old reviewed it as having, “a lot of swearing but not much horror,” and decide that maybe your 20-something year old self could probably handle it too.
For example, after umming and ahhing about whether I should watch The Substance, I found a content warning that noted, “character pulls a full chicken leg out of their belly button”, upon which I promptly decided it was not for me. Even worse, there was a warning that a character drinks *shudders* Diet Coke, which is the scariest thing of them all.
Try ‘bubblegum horror’
Described as “a style of horror that is focused on romantically beautiful imagery and visuals”, bubblegum horror often pulls from the aesthetics of our favourite rom-coms, introducing horror in a visual format we find saccharine, glossy, and comforting. Think Mean Girls, but if Mean Girls was exclusively the scene where everyone is acting like animals in the jungle at the mall. One Letterboxed user explains that bubblegum horrors vary in levels of scariness, but that the “one unifying trait they all have is an undeniable sticky sweetness to them and the tension they create.”
Lo and behold: Jennifer’s Body – the gateway drug of horror movies. Watching this allows you to wear a hot and sexy Halloween costume. It allows you to reblog that gif of Megan Fox holding a lighter over her tongue on Tumblr.com without feeling an overwhelming sense of imposter syndrome.
And most importantly, it allows you to participate in horror culture in a more welcome and familiar setting.
Take all precautions not to ‘suspend your disbelief’
To allow yourself to relax into the horror genre, it’s important to remind yourself that you are only watching a movie. Pause it as often as you like, watch interviews of the actors and actresses first, and watch the bloopers afterwards. Repeat the childhood mantra our mums always told us, it’s just tomato sauce.
Technology can lend a huge helping hand with this – and not only because the process of using CGI is extremely embarrassing, as we learnt from the werewolves in Twilight. There’s a sweet spot between cheap, gritty technology (which looks scary) and high quality, expensive CGI (which also looks scary), where you get to a perfect Goldilocks zone of special effects that don’t look quite so frightening.
Better yet, older horror movies didn’t even use CGI, and relied on a combination of skill and mechanics. Take Jaws for example: while successfully scaring an entire generation of people, the 2h 4m run time only features approx. Seven minutes of shark, and only one scene has an actual real life shark in it. While still being an excellent piece of horror, being able to remind yourself that Jaws (also known by his government name, Bruce) is literally a big metal puppet makes it much easier to watch.
Root for the bad guys
If you’d told 9-year-old me that one day, I’d be taking myself to the cinema alone for a late night screening of The Last Voyage of the Demeter, I wouldn’t have believed you. However, as I sat there, enjoying it, I realised that all you have to do is be on Team Monster.
When you are rooting for the bad guy, every horror movie becomes a simple action movie. Tragic bloodbaths turn into tales of perseverance and victory. What can’t they achieve if they just keep trying?! It’s actually very inspirational, which is why I couldn’t help but root for Dracula when he was obliterating a whole bunch of people on the boat. Also like… He is Romanian royalty. He can fly, shapeshift, speak many languages, and cook. What’s not to root for? He is more capable than most other men I know. It’s not his fault he has to eat people. I can fix him.
Make your own horror movie
This one is rogue, but effective: if you’ve ever had the experience of making a horror movie yourself (like my French class did in year 10 for some unknown reason), you’ll have torn away the veil and found out that the filming process is actually filled with large amounts of sillygoosery (even under seemingly terrifying conditions such as filming in a chapel after dark). Once you’ve been behind the scenes, it’s easier to see horror movies for what they really are: people putting masks on and trying to scare a bunch of kids, à la Scooby Doo.
Try reading horror instead
If you find watching horror too confronting, see if reading it suits you better instead. As the official creative director of your imagination you are granted a lot more control, and if something is too scary, simply make it less scary in your head. Imagine them all in sequined fedoras. You can read it as fast or as slow as you need to, and guess what – no jumpscares! You could start by reading a Stephen King novel, and then watching the movie version afterwards so you know exactly what’s to come.
Cleanse the palate
After scaring the living daylights out of yourself, it is crucial to try and collect the daylights and arrange them neatly back inside of you. This can be achieved by watching something light-hearted to gently pacify your soul. After watching Parasite, we had to watch Bluey, and after watching American Horror Story, Teen Beach Movie was our palate cleanser of choice. The more wholesome the movie, the more effective it is at wiping away all traces of terror.
Whether you’re a horror aficionado or a complete newcomer like myself, it’s important to recognise that the genre often represents more than just what goes bump in the night. Horror depicts our traditions, our folk stories, and our collective nightmares, while simultaneously dipping its toes into our politics, cultural traumas, moral panics, and societal prejudices when it comes to determining what is ‘scary.’
People might enjoy horror because they are addicted to adrenaline, or perhaps because they have a passion for the genre and its aesthetics. Maybe, it’s as simple as using the fear from these movies to help make sense of the darkness we have to navigate in real life.
Either way, one thing is for certain, a good horror movie makes you feel things. So grab your friends and a good quality night light; sometimes it’s nice to spend time being terrified of a fictional world, rather than the real one.
