Why Horror?
This essay first appeared, in a slightly less finished form, in Canvas. I sat on it awhile before posting. Horror has been called the most moral of the genres, perhaps because it deals in calamity, in inexorable events and the experiences of small human victims, witnesses, collaborators. Because human existence is prone to repeated visitations from monstrosity in the shape of war, disease, and natural disasters, we have deep feelings about these things, and some of those feelings are about appeasement, and come from the same instinct that prompts us to pray. If asked, most of us could make a list of things we know the characters in horror film and novels should avoid doing – or being, as in the case of the unchaste blond girl. Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods plays with all those expectations and, at the same time, makes them the guiding evil secret behind the fate of everyone in the story (the great gods of chaos are being appeased by ritual sacrifices where the rituals are a series of variations on horror narratives. The hero, whore, fool, and virgin are what the sacrifice requires; human stand-ins for story). Whedon really gets the connection between horror stories and