Horror Opinions I Changed My Mind About

Hi ghouls! 👋🏻 This year has truly been a year of reflection for me since I am now in my tenth year of blogging. I’m truly a web veteran at this point and it just makes me feel old.

Today I want to talk about opinions I changed my mind about when it comes to horror. As we know now, I wasn’t always a horror fan and even when I first got into the genre, I had a lot of strong opinions and was pretty critical of media that I wasn’t consuming. Horror is now my favourite genre so I have much more positive things to say now!

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BODY HORROR

Body horror is something that I have come to gradually appreciate because it freaks me out so much. The idea of my body changing and mutating without my control is something that has terrified me for my entire life. I’m scared of ageing, of gaining weight, and I’m scared of getting pregnant so body horror is something that targets my fears and that’s what makes it so effective for me.

While it is important to be safe when consuming horror, I do think that horror can be used to confront specific fears and while I do still cover my eyes during the more gross body horror moments, it doesn’t freak me out in the way that it used to.

GORE

When I first got into horror, I did not like gore. At all. I thought it was pointless and just there for shock factor and therefore didn’t add anything to the plot or the scare factor. I completely wrote off the gore movie genre as being trash without giving it a chance.

These days, my favourite horror stories contain gore in one way or another. I don’t think that horror needs to have gore in it to be scary because scariness is subjective and there are more ways to get a reaction from your audience than just showing someone being dismembered. There’s a time and a place for gore and there have been times when I thought that having gore in a more atmospheric story didn’t add anything to it

WOMEN IN HORROR

The portrayal of women in horror is something that I do still have some conflicting thoughts about, but the more that I delve into the genre, the more I realise that the genre can’t be painted in broad strokes.

There is the Madonna-Whore complex present in older horror media and while more men are killed in horror than women, in film, the more graphic kills tend to happen to women while men are used as cannon fodder. At one point in time (I’m guessing the late 1970s), the genre shifted to having women be the heroes as opposed to the damsels in distress that they were in classic stories.

This happened long before I was born so I only know horror to have female heroes but when I first got into the genre, I started with the Universal Monsters series which all had male heroes saving women. I have a post planned to discuss misogyny in horror so I don’t want to stay on this point for too long.

THE GENRE IN GENERAL

I think it’s pretty obvious by now that my opinion on the genre has changed a lot in the almost 10 years since I first started exploring the horror genre. When I was a kid, I hated horror and wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole because I just didn’t understand why people would want to read or watch things that made them scared or feel uncomfortable.

Now, I understand that the appeal of horror is the same as why people like rollercoasters: it’s all about the rush of adrenaline you feel once the scariest parts are over. There’s also the fact that horror can be used to help us face our biggest fears without having to do it in real life. I think there’s also a catharsis factor to horror because - whether people like it or not - there is almost always a message to a horror story, whether it’s a cautionary one or a comment on society. It feels good to see corrupt or bigoted individuals (or monsters who represent those individuals) get taken down.

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Have you changed your mind about any opinions you’ve had in the past? What made you change your mind?