Blair Witch Project : Nirvana :: Friday the 13th : Poison

OR: Saw = Nickelback

Terror and horror are both terms that describe emotional responses to a situation, story, or visual. It’s difficult to describe these responses, let alone the difference between the two, but after a lot of deliberating, I think I figured out the best way for me to put it. To me, terror and horror both evoke the same response: my heart beats faster, I hold my breath, and I reveal my annoying habit of rapidly tapping my right foot like a crack addict. Where I distinguish terror from horror in movies and literature is by what my mind tells my eyes to do: in horror, my reaction is to look away or skip the paragraph. In terror, I can’t stop looking or reading.

The film that, at the time, terrified me the most was The Blair Witch Project. Particularly the end (sorry, embedding disabled):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMQQpmm5u3w

Watching it now is still a little crazy, but when I saw it the first time, as a sixteen-year-old, convinced it was real, I was shitting my pants. It was like Freddy and Jason and Chucky and the Ghoulies became Disney movies. This redefined scary. I like to compare Blair Witch to Nirvana where slasher films are like 80’s hair bands. It just made all the older stuff seem silly. And I couldn’t look away the entire time.

Of course, it later came out that everything was staged and the camera people were actors and completely ruined everything. Boo. But I still remember when I first saw it and have to give it props.

In movies like Friday the 13th and Saw, I just turn away from anything stomach turning. I don’t need to look to see what happens when a hatchet meets a face; there is no reason for me to see that. More to the point, I don’t even watch those kinds of movies any more. I have decided that if I want to see blood and guts, I want to root for whatever is doing the killing. I only watch “horror” movies that have a shark, dinosaur, predator, alien, or Rambo doing the dirty work.

The second movie that redefined terror for me was the video inside the movie the ring. I think you all remember this:




Holy jeez, right? I maintain (and have argued) that if you show a long version of this, maybe thirty or forty minutes, THAT would be the scariest film ever made. I love watching this thing. All that other stupid stuff with Naomi Watts and the girl in the well was filler.

And finally, to me the master of terror in literature is not Stephen King, but Cormac McCarthy. Here’s an excerpt from Blood Meridian:

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches
ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

By itself, this excerpt walks the fine line between beauty and terror, but in the framework of the novel, it is haunting and absolutely brilliant. Even as people are slaughtered mercilessly throughout the book, I keep turning the pages because of passages like this.

So I guess when I define horror and terror, I say that terror is horror with imagination and intrigue. I’ll write it out as a math equation:

Terror = (Horror+Imagination)(Intrigue)

I don't know why I went with the math equation and the analogies. I guess I've been studying for the GRE's too much lately.