Recently, I was confronted with a poll regarding my favorite horror film. This was only slightly awkward, as, of the films listed as options, I had seen… none.
Broadly speaking, I do not see fit to use my personal time to make myself experience negative emotions. Also, since the majority of horror films tend to focus on narrow, contrived circumstances and be driven by a supernatural, usually vaguely biblical demon, I find it difficult to suspend disbelief and buy into the premise. To me, the far better horror experiences have been disaster films, in particular those like Threads or By Dawn’s Early Light. Also certain alternate history films, in particular the HBO film, Fatherland, which did more to get across the real horror of the holocaust and genocide to thirteen year old me than six months of social studies lessons.
To wit, the only bona-fide horror film I’ve seen was something about Satan coming to haunt elevator-goers for their sins. Honestly I thought it was exceedingly mediocre at best. However, I saw this film at a birthday party for a friend of mine, the confidant of a previous crush. I had come to know this girl after she transferred to our public middle school from the local catholic school. We saw this film at her birthday party, which was, in the manner of things, perceived as the very height of society, in the pressence of an overwhelmingly female audience, most of whom my friend had known from St. Mary’s. Apparently to them the film was excellent, as many professed to be quite scared, and it remained the subject of conversation for some months afterward.
I have come to develop three alternative hypotheses for why everyone but myself seemed to enjoy this distinctly mediocre film. The first is that I am simply not a movie person and was oblivious to the apparent artistic merit of this film. This would fit existing data, as I have similarly ambiguous feelings towards many types of media my friends generally seem to laud. This is the simplest explanation, and thus the null hypothesis which I have broadly accepted for the past half-decade or so.
The second possible explanation is that, since the majority of the audience except for myself was Catholic, attended Catholic Church, and had gone to the Catholic primary school in our neighborhood, and because the film made several references to Catholic doctrine and literature, to the point that several times my friend had to lean over and whisper the names and significance of certain prayers or incantations, that this carried extra weight for those besides myself. Perhaps I lacked the necessary background context to understand what the creators were tying to reach for. Perhaps my relatively secular and avowedly skeptical upbringing had desensitized me to this specific subset of supernatural horror, while the far more mundane terrors of war, genocide, and plague fill much the same role in my psyche.
The third alternative was suggested to me by a male compatriot, who was not in attendance but was familiar with all of the attendees, several years after the fact, and subsequently corroborated by testimony from both male and female attendees. The third possibility is that my artistic assessment at the time was not only entirely on point, but was the silent majority opinion, yet that this opinion was suppressed consciously or unconsciously for social reasons. Perhaps, it has been posited to me, the appearance of being scared was for my own benefit? Going deeper, perhaps some or all of the motivation to see a horror film at a party of both sexes was not entirely platonic?
It is worth distinguishing, at this point, the relative numbers and attitudes of the various sexes. At this party, there were a total of about twenty teenagers. Of this number, there were three or four boys (my memory fails me as to exact figures), including myself. I was on the guest list from the beginning as a matter of course; I had been one of the birthday girl’s closest friends since she arrived in public school, and perhaps more importantly, her parents had met and emphatically approved of me. In fact I will go so far as to suggest that the main reason this girl’s staunchly traditionalist, conservative parents permitted their rebellious teenage daughter to invite boys over to a birthday party was because they trusted me, and believed my presence would be a moderating influence.
Also among the males in attendance were the brother of one of the popular socialite attendees, whose love of soap operas and celebrity gossip, and general stylistic flamboyance had convinced everyone concerned that he was not exactly straight; my closest friend, who was as passive and agreeable a teenager as you will ever have the pleasure to know; and a young man whose politics I staunchly disagreed with and who would later go on to have an eighteen month on and off relationship with the birthday girl, though he did not know it at the time.
Although I noticed this numerical gender discrepancy effectively immediately, at no point did it occur to me that, were I so motivated, I could probably have leveraged these odds into some manner of romantic affair. This, despite what could probably be reasonably interpreted as numerous hints to the effect of “Oh look how big the house is. Wouldn’t it be so easy for two people to get lost in one of these several secluded bedrooms?”
Although I credit this obliviousness largely to the immense respect I maintained for the host’s parents and the sanctity of their home, I must acknowledge a certain level of personal ignorance owing mainly to a lack of similar socialization, and also to childhood brain damage. This acute awareness of my own past, and in all likelihood, present, obliviousness to social subtleties is part of why I am so readily willing to accept that I might have easily missed whatever aspect of this film made it so worthwhile.
In any case, as the hypothesis goes, this particular film was in fact mediocre, just as I believed at the time. However, unlike myself with my single-minded judgement based solely on the artistic merits and lack thereof of the film, it is possible that my female comrades, while agreeing in the abstract with my assessment, opted instead to be somewhat more holistic in their presentation of opinions. Or to put it another way, they opted to be socially opportunistic in the ability to signal their emotional state. As it was described to me, my reaction would then, at least in theory, be to attempt to comfort and reassure them. I would assume the stereotypical role of male defender, and the implications therewith, which would somehow transmogrify into a similarly-structured relationship.
Despite the emphatic insistence of most involved parties, with no conclusive confession, I remain particularly skeptical of this hypothesis, though admittedly it does correlate with existing psychological and sociological research on terror-induced pair-bonding. I doubt I shall ever truly understand the horror genre. It would be easy to state categorically that there is no merit to trying to induce negative emotions without cause, and that those who wish to use such experiences as a cover for other overtures ought simply get over themselves, but given that, as things go, this is an apparently victimless crime, and seems to being a great deal of joy to some people, it is more likely that this issue lies more in myself than the rest of the world.
To a person who seeks to understand the whole truth in its entirety, the notion that there are some things that I simply do not have the capacity to understand is frustrating. Knowing that there are things which other people can comprehend, yet I cannot, is extremely frustrating. More than frustrating; it is horrifying. To know that there is an entire world of subtext and communication that is lost to me; that my brain is damaged in such a way that I am oblivious to things that are supposed to be obvious, is disconcerting to the point of terrifying.
I will probably never know the answer to these questions, as at this point I am probably the only one who yet bothers to dwell on that one evening many moons ago. It will remain in my memory an unsolved mystery, and a reminder that my perception is faulty in ways imperceptible to me, but obvious to others. It might even be accurate to say that I will remain haunted by this episode.
Happy Halloween.