More Than Gore

Horror movies are easy to dismiss as only sudden jolts and gratuitous gore, a genre that circumvents our minds to get at our viscera. There’s some truth to the charge: horror films do tend to sequence jump scares and disgusting images. But this is hardly the whole truth of the genre. Like its cousins science fiction and fantasy, horror—at least in its more ambitious versions—deals in ideas, in thought experiments and what-ifs. It probes the nature of reality and the depths of our psyche. At times, it takes us into the subterranean foundations of law, the moral life, and shared experience. Horror receives much more academic treatment than it once did. Some of this is not very substantive—fandom with footnotes. Some of it, though, offers serious inquiries into the issues the genre can raise.