A History of Fear

Halloween when you’re younger is comical. It’s possibly the most child-orientated holiday after Christmas. The opportunity to dress up as your favourite TV, film, or book character and, therefore, be them for a night, is something we all jump at and grab eagerly with both hands. Beyond the outfits though there’s a conscious evolution of Halloween that happens as you’re growing up and it’s reflected more obviously in the arts and how they target people, than perhaps anywhere else. Everyone cashes in on the horror genre and Halloween, but the methods of aggregating their output and the way we react to and engage with them varies depending on how old we are.

Unless you’ve been a very naughty little boy or girl, scary films are pushed out of the way because they’ll give you nightmares, you’ll wet the bed and in general cause a lot of ball ache for your parents. Likewise, you can’t watch truly scary television. You aren’t going to see someone get beheaded on True Blood or be listening to the Psycho soundtrack while you’re doing your homework. Instead, everything is altogether more light-hearted.

In the 1960s, a solution was found to open up horror to children, and that was the addition of comedy. It crystallised with a group of four teenagers and a particularly loveable canine spending their unrealistically huge amount of free time being chased around by villains dressed up as monsters. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? might technically be a procedural, since it definitely has the whole villain-of-the-week thing down to a tee. But the addition of the horror element has forever put it in the spooky genre, and the series has truly become iconic as an example of how to market ghost-hunting on television for children. Terrifying as the Creeper, Mr Hyde, the Gator Ghoul, and the Tar Monster were, you were never really spooked watching Scooby-Doo because of the loveable buffoonery of the Great Dane and Shaggy.

At every point where terror threatens to grab hold of you, Daphne does something inordinately stupid, Fred’s goldbergian plans fall apart or Velma loses her glasses and laments the fact she’s no longer bespectacled before finding them, and herself, face-to-face with the monster. Likewise, as Scooby-Doo has evolved through umpteen incarnations it has never forgotten that as well as providing spooks and ghouls, the Great Dane at the heart of it all benefits from comedy. The horrific puns of the titles are still the same, the monsters are still ridiculous and there’s still the iconic rebuke from the villains: “I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” Scooby-Doo is always on television at Halloween because it not only delivers spookiness, but also a healthy dose of comedy that makes it accessible and entertaining for everyone. While you might get a nightmare from the capers of Mystery Inc., you’re also just as likely to end up giggling at Scooby-Doo stealing Shaggy’s sandwich or Daphne proving how generally useless she is to the entire gang by getting kidnapped again.

Indeed, the Scooby-Doo franchise kickstarted comedic takes on horror for children, and not just in numerous successive attempts by Hannah-Barbera to create Scooby-Doo-Two. It’s very little surprise that the likes of Josie And The Pussycats, Speedbuggy, and Goober and the Ghost-Chasers quickly rolled off the Hanna-Barbera production line in the 1970s. That well-known teen pastime of ghost-hunting was born.

Ghosts and the occult at large weren’t just an American phenomenon, though, and the format has been successful fodder for British children’s programmes. The comedy element too, has been strongly pushed forward. Whether you look to CBBC’s Mona The Vampire, or CITV’s The Worst Witch, traditional horror subject matter becomes comedic to soften the blow of both shows. It’s true that later incarnations of Scooby-Doo, such as The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo did take a decidedly scarier and more mature tone, but that was as much to do with the audience who first watched the show in 1969 growing up as it was to do with an overall decision to change the approach to horror in children’s television.

Most soundtracks from children’s horror also reflect a desire to emphasise the comedy of ghosts or monsters rather than their potential to scare. The songs that are often played at Halloween parties from the land of soundtrack don’t exactly inspire fear, at least from the younger generations. The Casper the Friendly Ghost soundtrack is a stand out example, and the titular theme song rams home the message of the objective of children’s horror: “though grown-ups might look at him with fright, children all love him so.” Indeed you’d struggle to find a theme song that really deliberately sets out to scare the child…about the ghosts anyway.

Goosebumps’s theme tried to be scarier, but instead is more than a little amusing, especially the saucily whispered title and distinctly dodgy 90s special effects. Far more chilling, though, is the theme from CBBC’s The Ghost Hunter. True it only really features another whispery voice going “Ghost Hunter”, but the tension of the music intensifies the terror. That music sent me diving for the remote to change the channel before Jean Marsh came on screen on the trail of a ghost for her vacuum.

With age comes change, though. As mentioned, television becomes more mature, whether in cartoon or in the proliferation of teen shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which began to introduce bloodiness on television while drawing on the reserve of one of the stock monsters. Nowadays, the horror genre has been subverted by a mystical attraction to horror – largely caused by the Twilight series of books, which suddenly prompted a vogue for monsters being sexy. Twilight may have kicked the whole thing off with the towering romantic heights of protagonists Edward Cullen and Jacob Black, but it spawned a myriad of copycat literature which covers all kind of occult oddities. Overnight, supernatural was sexy. It even brought some failed series out of hibernation, like The Vampire Diaries and made the books a hot property again.

Suddenly, we weren’t afraid of vampires; we wanted to sleep with them. And the werewolf, the witch and pretty much every other monster except for zombies…discounting that terrible film Warm Bodies. The humour is still there. Teen Wolf especially makes light of the supernatural quirks of its existence, constantly poking fun at itself and the terrible situation of the characters, and the overt sexualisation of horror for teenagers just about fills the hole that used to be filled by the genuine presence of horror when we were children.

Comedy isn’t extinguished in arts in horror altogether. Notably in film, both the Final Destination and Scary Movie series have been able to deliver genuine horror and terror but with comedy underlying the piece. It does mean you go through the full emotional spectrum of laughing hysterically before whimpering for your life because you switched off the light, thinking it would make an atmosphere and are now too terrified to move and switch it back on to yank you back into the real world. The deaths in Final Destination especially are at once horrific and humorous. There’s the particularly hilarious scene from Final Destination 3 when two Californ-I-A girls are burnt alive on tanning beds. It’s a very morbid humour to laugh at it, but the ridiculous nature of their death (a slush puppy short-circuits one of the beds causing a fire…or something like that), makes it hilarious and something you can laugh at rather than scream about. In general Final Destination’s strongest point is the massively over-the-top nature of the deaths of the cast of each of the films. It makes them fantastic entertainment, not only because you’re gripped by the fact death is inevitably going to catch up to these people after they first escaped it, but also seeing how ridiculous and hilarious the next death scene will be. The Scary Movie series might be altogether more successful at comedy than horror, but it’s undeniable that there are at least moments where those of a sensitive composition, such as myself, jump or suddenly remember they desperately need the loo and leave the room and wait until the scary part has passed and you can return in the safety of the knowledge that you won’t need the loo again until things get scary.

Horror only becomes acceptably scary once you’re older. Before this there’s a mischievous rush inside you if you somehow manage to smuggle a 12 or even a 15-rated film past your parents and get it into the DVD player. It just becomes a film you’re watching instead of excitedly prefixing it as a ‘scary’ movie. You sit down with strawberry laces and suddenly the films have become genuinely scary. Or at least that’s what you think at the time.

Often the gateway is animal-based horror; there’s always the classic Jaws, with the iconic theme song before the plastic Great White drifts into the shot. Nonetheless, there can also be diversity. Lake Placid was one of those films that at first I could only watch part of the way through before chickening out. Horror’s often at its most effective when the rubbish monster is kept out of shot. Deep Blue Sea was also a classic Blockbuster rental, and the horror was added by the stupidity of the whole thing. Instead of staying on the nice surface bit, everyone goes underwater where the genetically engineered sharks are kept and everything can flood and release the giant, intelligent sharks. Still to this day I can’t sit through Eight-Legged Freaks and, specifically, the spider scene where they’re crawling over a girl without wincing. It’s one of those strategic toilet break moments. In fact Eight-Legged Freaks, more than the others, benefits from its use of a mundane, ordinary animal. Though the spiders involved are admittedly exotic, everyone collectively shudders at the appearance of the eight-legged fiend since you’re more likely to run into one than, say, a Great-White sexually caressing the Ouse (no idea-stealing YSTV!). This combination of the ominous, unseen threat and the ability to shout at the television is exactly what horror comes to be about once you learn to appreciate being scared.

It’s the hopelessness of the situation, but also the notion of being taken out of your comfort zone. You’re sat on your sofa or in a cinema with overpriced popcorn and an eye-wateringly expensive drink, but you’re still panicked, as if a giant shark or crocodile is going to burst out of the screen. Animal horror is among the most terrifying sub-genres and satisfying scares because it is so bestial. Nobody cares about science telling us that sharks are actually very clever, intelligent animals – you care about the fact it has loads of teeth and might bite you. It involves abandoning your common sense in favour of giving over to the adrenaline of fear and throwing yourself head-long into the jaws of whatever adversary you’re confronted by.

Of course, at one point you will reach a threshold where horror takes away any pretense of trying to scare you overtly and, instead, tries to mess with your head. There’s a reason Halloween is always celebrated in the dark: there’s a sense of dread from the unknown, and horror films realised a long time ago that less is more. The less you show the more disturbing things are.
Psychological horror, therefore, makes no attempts at making you jump out of your seat. On the contrary, everything that is and isn’t on screen slowly eats away at the viewer. So it’s not a case of being momentarily shocked at a scary face; it’s the feeling that everything is wrong. Everything on screen and in your living room could be out to get you, but you don’t know yet. There might be someone behind the sofa; maybe you heard something creak in the kitchen; maybe your family is being slaughtered in silence upstairs.

Let’s take the obvious classic, Psycho, and look at what makes it a terrifying experience. Everyone constantly talks about the shower scene where Norman Bates brutally murders Marion Crane, and of course it’s iconic. But taken on its own, it’s not actually very scary. Shocking, yes, but not scary. However, in context the film, and that specific scene, are terrifying. It’s during the build up to the scene where you know that she’s being watched, that she’s not safe, that you start to feel disconcerted. And that lasts throughout the entire movie, to the very last shot. That shot of Norman Bates at the very end is disturbing despite not being very shocking because the viewer knows the character and knows that there isn’t any closure. The character is still out there: that disturbing human being hasn’t shocked us, he’s wormed his way into our brains and hasn’t let go despite the film coming to an end.

In that way, shock affects you for a short time, but psychological terror will marry you and refuse to accept that divorce is a reality in our modern society. It’s that clingy ex who probably should have moved out a week ago but their toothbrush refuses to leave your bathroom.

And so Halloween and horror overlap with each other. Scaring people is an art that spans every spectrum of terror, from comedy to Jack Nicholson roaming around hotel corridors with an axe. This Halloween, treat yourself to a marathon of scary TV and films, starting from the innocent classics that marked our childhoods to the gruesome unadulterated gore-fests and disturbing explorations of Hannibal Lecter and his ilk. While you’re at it, invite your friends, maybe go trick-or-treating, and revel in the spirit of Halloween. Alfred Hitchcock would definitely be proud.