Why Horror Still Haunts Us

0:05This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, fellow critics. Hello. What's up? It's been a long weekend. It's been festival weekend. It's been New Yorker festival weekend. Alex, you are a bit hoarse, are you not? We're just warning our listeners. I might get hoarse. I'm doctoring. We're going to make it through. We're going to do it. I believe. I mean, it is getting a little bit colder, a little chillier. Night is falling earlier and earlier.

0:46October is careening towards its inevitable end. And with that inevitable end, Halloween. What a buildup. Just love it. I know. Are you guys dressing up as anything this year? Any costumes in the works? We're trying to do matching butterflies in my household. That is adorable. My little daughter loves butterflies, but we'll see. I've done, I mean, I've done nothing, to be clear. And that's usually not good. Week of Halloween, not a great time to shop for Halloween. Right. Well, luckily, your daughter is quite young, so she won't know the difference. Yes, but then she'll look back and be like, you guys.

1:23Right, right. Alex, how about yourself? My son, this is the first year he wanted to choose his own costume, and he immediately said pumpkin. Okay, that is adorable. And then said that we should all be pumpkins. As well. So I think we're going to be pumpkins. Okay, well, these... No. Okay. I'm not planning anything, but I have to say, you guys, your costumes are sounding pretty darn wholesome, which is lovely because you have young kids. But when we usually think of Halloween, we sometimes think of something slightly less, you know, heartwarming. We might think, in fact, of horror. Oh, God. Exactly.

2:04You guys, what has your engagement been with the horror genre, horror movies in particular? It has been very touch and go. It's every once in a while. I might watch a big horror movie every two years, three. Would you say that you're a scaredy cat, Vincent? I would say I'm a scaredy cat. Okay. Alex, how about you? What a long and twisting tale it is, my friends. Oh, wow. You know, I think if I had to give a one second answer, I'd say, no, I've never been that into horror. But I actually don't think that's true. I have been. Going back to an early age when I used to make scary faces in the mirror to terrify myself and would become scared of my own reflection.

2:40Now that's a alienation. I watched some very scary movies very early, Psycho memorably at someone's 13th birthday party, but I was actually only 12 and that really messed me up. But I'm also remembering that I once was a great raconteuse of the licked hand. Do you guys know that old story? No. Okay, well, maybe as a bonus episode, we can have me going on at great length telling it to you. But I used to scare the pants off younger children because this story was told to me at sleepaway camp. It terrified me to my bones. Oh, my God. And then when I was a caretaker for others, I made it my business to pass on the fear.

3:22And you were never hired again by the parents. Well, maybe I was and maybe I wasn't. Okay, a chill is literally running up and down my spine right this moment. But you guys, okay, whatever we might think about horror, and we'll talk about this more in a little bit, horror movies are inarguably a big business. The domestic box office for horror this year has already exceeded a billion dollars. One billion dollars. And it accounts for 17 % of movie ticket sales. More than drama, more than comedy combined. Which is kind of crazy, actually. Horror is often dismissed as a genre for thrill-seekers. And it's true that jump scares and ominous music raise our adrenaline, right?

4:11But horror movies have also historically been a way for artists to explore their era's worst fears, from nuclear proliferation to satanic panic, but crucially at a remove. So today we're going to talk about all things horror. And since we aren't necessarily horror buffs, or not exactly, we're going to be calling on someone who is. And he's given us some movies to watch and report back on. And I guess the big question I have for us is, what is the enduring appeal of horror? So that's today on Critics at Large. The horror? The horror!

4:57Okay, fellow critics, fellow horror aficionados, or horror rookies, as the case may be. As I said before for this episode, we needed to call in an expert. We can't do this alone. And, oh, hark. There he is now. Hello there, Alex Barish. Hello. Hello. Oh my God. Our very own. Everything. Our everything. Alex Barich, his first time on mic with us. But I should note, for those of you who don't listen carefully to our credits at the end of each episode, Alex is our editorial advisor. He is a crucial part of this podcast, but we're so happy to actually have him in the studio with us for once. Alex, welcome.

5:47Thank you. I am fittingly both afraid and excited. That's great. It's a perfect horror mix. Exactly. You know, it's that perfect horror mix. Alex, you are a lover of horror movies and something of an expert. How did that happen? Like, did you start developing that taste early on? Yeah, I don't know if I'm an expert. I do love horror. I have long loved it. I think having friends who were into it from a young age was important. You know, there is a desire to be scared together rather than scared alone. and at the risk of painting a very emo view of myself as a teenager like the other things i was into at that time were like the classics as in aeschylus and euripides like 19th century gothic horror and like shakespearean tragedy so i think i am also attracted among other things to a genuinely tragic or downbeat ending and i kind of feel like horror has become the home for that in modern culture.

6:47That's interesting. And also it's really fun. I think if you completely give yourself over to it, like sometimes it's a campy thing, sometimes it's just cathartic to be afraid and then to have that as a contained experience. But I think it's a very wide-ranging genre and I like what it does to me affectively and... What does it do to you affectively? Oh, I'm afraid. Like, to be clear, I know a lot of people and I think you guys a little bit have this as well where it's like, oh, I don't do horror, I can't do horror. I think there was a time in my life when I was younger where I was like, oh, I'm not afraid at all.

7:22Like, this is fine. I can handle it. Right. Kind of a bravado. Sure, sure. But once you accept that it's scary and you let it do its work on you and you react to it and you're reacting again with others, I think that's a way more satisfying mode of experiencing it. So I am not, like, unflinching in the phase of horror, But I think that letting it act on you is part of the pleasure. Yeah. So, Alex, you assign each of us a movie to watch. What was your methodology in this endeavor? My highly scientific methodology. Well, we wanted to look for this episode at the kind of past 10, 15 years of horror.

8:03So each of your movies are about five years apart. We can trace that chronology in a nice way, I think. And each of them represents something thematically that is or has been significant in horror. So I think it's a way of getting at these broader shifts in the landscape and these things that have preoccupied filmmakers working in this genre for a long time. Okay, Alex House, Alex Schwartz. Yes. Our regular Alex. I'm ready. Let's start with you. So Alex, which movie did Alex B. assign you? I was assigned The Babadook. Even the name, even the title, Sans Shivers. Like through my whole book. What a good impression.

8:41Thank you. Wow. It sounds like a curse intoned in like some Italian little, the babagoo. Yeah, it's a great word. It's a great word. And it's a word that I've been saying for years, even though I had never seen the movie before. This movie came out in 2014. So The Babadook is directed by Jennifer Kent, an Australian director. And it stars Essie Davis as a mother who at the start of the movie, she's on her way to the hospital to give birth. Her husband is driving her. There is a crash. And we are led to understand that her husband is killed as she's going to give birth to their son. And six years later, she lives with said son, whose name in the film is Samuel.

9:19He's played by Noah Wiseman. And everything starts going wrong. He's a really difficult kid. He's into weapons and dangerous toys. He's misbehaving at school. People see him as a threat. and his mom, she's struggling to keep up under the burdens and demands of taking care of her kid and working and keeping their lives going. And Samuel fears monsters, and she keeps saying, they're not real, don't believe in them, basically grow up, move on from this stuff. One night, they read a book together. And the book is called The Babadook. This monster thing has got to stop, all right? It's just a book.

10:03It kind of is.

10:17And the Babadook has been, like, I've never seen it before, but it's been in my mind and imagination because the figure is so distinctive. It's this jaunty, freaky guy who looks kind of like a gremlin. He's wearing a big stovepipe hat. And his arms are very, like, fussy, like they're out. He has long, intense fingernails. And he also wears short pants, which, as we all know, when you wear short pants after childhood in the Victorian era, something is wrong. So, yeah, Babadook arrives. And the thing about the Babadook is Babadook's here. And the thing about the Babadook. And he's here to stay. And he's here to stay.

10:56Exactly, Alex. Because the thing about the Babadook is the more you deny him, the more his power grows. So what we got here is a bit of a home invasion. We've got domestic horror. We've got maternal horror. There's blood. There's terror. But most of all, there's fear. It's real. It's real fear. Yeah. And it's scary. You felt fear when you watched it? Definitely. Okay. So it freaked you out. Oh, it totally freaked me out. Okay. I'm going to ask Alex why you assigned me this. But I suspect, may I? Please. speculate. May I speculate? May I rampantly speculate? I mean, it's about a mother and a son.

11:28I have a son. He's not six, and he's not haunted as far as I know. Give it time. Yes, exactly. Right, there's still time. That is one of the scary... I mean, not. He's going to be fine. But I just mean that is... No, but just when the specific genre of horror intersects with your own moment in life, I think it's particularly scary. Well, Alex, why did you assign this movie to me? You are correct that biographical overlap was a factor. I also, I mean, The Babadook was a cult phenomenon when it was released. And I feel it's an example of, as you said, maternal horror, which is this huge subgenre and kind of an interesting subversion of that.

12:10You know, this goes all the way back to Rosemary's Baby. But I think this movie is doing something interesting because you have both the kind of monstrous mother and the possibly cursed child. It's Working within the subgenre and the tropes, but it's doing something different with them. And again, yeah, making horror from motherhood and the burdens of motherhood and the things that you cannot say to or about your child, but are maybe thinking. And I find that to be very rich terrain psychologically and cinematically. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's very interesting what you're saying about these two tropes.

12:43You know, there's a new book out called Scream With Me by this Columbia professor, Eleanor Johnson. and its subtitle is Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism 1968 to 1980. And I was thinking about it in connection with something like The Babadook because basically Johnson is arguing she's looking at movies like Rosemary's Baby, which you just mentioned, Alex, and The Exorcist and The Shining. These are three movies I actually really like. And she's making an argument about a time when American feminism is starting to come into its own and women are starting to realize that they need to take collective power to change the political system in which they live and are essentially imprisoned by.

13:21And these domestic horror movies provide a lens into that, a lens into the experience, the mundane experience, of being trapped in your everyday life in a much bigger system that you can't resist. And it puts this very fine point on it. This is one of the things that horror can do, is to take something that's already there and is maybe not talked about and show it at an extreme and literalize it and externalize it in a way where you do actually have to grapple with it and you get to see it and you get to understand that other people are also afraid of this thing or experiencing this thing. And that becomes a lens through which to have those conversations.

13:53And that's really interesting and powerful when done well. Yeah. Guys, we, in the last couple of weeks, solicited voicemails from our listeners about the question of horror. And there was one memo that spoke specifically to this question of maternal horror. So I think I'm going to cue up this memo right now and then we can talk about it a little bit. Hi, critics. This is Mallory from D.C. So I used to be an obsessive horror fan. New horror movies could not come out fast enough for me, even the bad ones. but lately for like the past two or three years i have not been able to stomach horror at all it seems like lately i'm coming across similar tropes or themes in horror movies so like a lot of monstrous pregnancies babies sired by the devil possessed kids kids in danger and i'm kind of wondering if it's just me.

15:01Is it because I went through a difficult childbirth and now have a young kid who's happy and healthy, by the way, that I'm just seeing all of these things all the time now? Or is it really more ubiquitous lately? So I'm just curious what your take is on this. What are these stories trying to process for us collectively or subconsciously right now? First of all, great to hear that your kid is happy and healthy. That's a beautiful thing. Shout out to them. I think that often growing up is figured in the popular imagination, or maybe just the American imagination, I don't know, as a process of putting on more and more armor, that you grow a personality, you gain some sort of financial foothold, etc., etc., and become more and more yourself.

15:50when, as it actually happens, the more you live, the more vulnerabilities you are aware of, the more surface area it seems that you have on your body for possible harm. And then, of course, you know, a kid is an extension of your vulnerability into the world. And so I do think that that can go in two different ways. You might, to your point, Alex B., want that experience literalized and externalized as something that you can therefore look at and maybe, you know, almost in the way of the sort of like, if I watch it, then maybe I feel strangely like protected from it. But I can also see the opposite response of like, I don't need to be reminded of that right now.

16:36Yes. Life is suspenseful enough. Right. You're feeling it powerfully either way. And it's just how you want to engage with that or not. But I do, I mean, as we were talking about, this goes back decades and further. I mean, you could go to Madea or something and, you know, the monstrous mother in maternal horrors has always been with us. But I do think it is because horror is about the unspeakable and the unspoken. And one of probably my favorite horror movie of all time is Hereditary. And Ari Aster's Hereditary. Ari Aster's Hereditary, yes. Both of these films have a majestic soliloquy that begins, I am your mother.

17:12And, you know, I think we keep coming back to this because fear is primal and horror is primal and family is the most primal thing there is. Like, these are the parts that we're grappling with all the time. When I hear your question, Mallory, if I may just speak to you directly, we talked about this, you know, when we talked about the substance, which I think is relevant here as well. We talked about the loss of control that women have over their bodies in general, but especially since the Dobbs decision. That may be one reason why we're seeing more horror around this topic. I think another reason and a better reason why we're seeing more horror around this topic is that there are simply more female filmmakers than there used to be.

17:48And that has changed pretty recently in terms of volume. So that may be a reason. And it may be, Mallory, because you've become sensitized to these things through your experience. And that's interesting. So I hear you. I mean, half the drama of the Babadook is like, will she have child care? Like, who's going to look after the kid? Where's she going to go? How's she going to get to work? Exactly. The child care thing, yeah, is very, very real. And when the system starts unraveling and there isn't much of a system to begin with, it's a nightmare. It's a horror show.

18:23We're going to take a quick break now. But when we're back, we'll share Vincent's horror assignment and mine. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

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19:20Okay, guys. We are now going to move on to Vincent, who was also assigned a movie by Alex B. Vincent, which movie were you assigned? I was assigned the chronicle of loosening mental acuity, increasing religious devotion. That is the 2020 film St. Maude, which was the debut film which was directed and also written by Rose Glass. We meet Maude at the very beginning of the movie. She's a kind of a hospice nurse working one-on-one with a former dancer named Amanda who is dying. And we find early on that Maude has all these signs of like incredibly deep and a sort of unnerving religious devotion. Dear God, your presence graces the air and soon everyone will see.

20:18When you pray, do you get a response? It's like he's physically in me. We see her doing really strange things like, you know, she puts nails into her shoes and she steps onto them. Like, you know, the kind of like mortification of the flesh that we associate with certain, like sort of intensely devoted saints. And then we start to see the visual phenomena of, you know, there's a flashback to a moment of her doing like chest compressions, which we realize she's had a bad experience with a client in her former life and PTSD is part of her problem. At one point, we hear the voice of God as she's in her room asking him what to do.

21:03That voice is probably the scariest thing that happens in the movie. It's like, these guys, get up. And there are these subtitles that are like, you've always known that life is a game and now it's time to redeem yourself. what should I do she says what should I do but it's supposed to but she thinks it's God but it sounds you know everybody knows Satan talks like this you know and it's like you've always you've always known what to do anyway really what it is is a kind of social cautionary tale about loneliness and untreated mental illness masquerading as religious horror I think that horror movies this is one something that occurred to me I think that horror movies should be labeled like hot sauce.

21:47How spicy is it? Right. How scary is it? Yeah, but everyone's going to disagree. To whom? Exactly. That's right. So it's going to be like three ghosts, three little icons would be like really scary. Okay, so spicy. So if it's four ghosts, how many ghosts are you giving us? This is Texas Peak. It is not that scary. Half a ghost? Happily to me, half a ghost. Half a ghost. It was not that scary to me, although it was very unsettling. I am generally more afraid of sort of supernatural things than I am of gore. I dated someone and we saw five of the Saw movies. I could watch that for no reason. That's crazy to me.

22:28Whatever. You want to chainsaw somebody's limb off? It doesn't do nothing for me. There's like something riveting and I'm, you know, cringing. But I'm afraid of dreaming wrong. And another thing I'm very afraid of, to St. Maude's credit, is I'm afraid of going crazy. Oh, me too. It's one of my biggest fears that my senses will one day betray me. And that I will be experiencing things that are actually utterly isolating and lead me further and further and further away from the community of other people. And that is precisely what is happening to Maud. And so using the language, the lexicon of horror to portray that process, I thought was really smart.

23:06I would watch it again. But I also did feel that I would be able to go to sleep, which is always what I'm worried about when I watch a horror movie. Alex, B, please tell me. Why? Why? Why St. Maude? I'm actually taking this as a win because you had specifically requested religious horror. You said you were open to that. Yes, sir. You had also said you may not be ready for hereditary or some of the more occult, you know, intense scares. So I was trying to modulate accordingly and pick something that is in that zone because that is, again, a rich tradition in this genre. Yeah. It's also an A24 horror film, and they have been one of the big engines of this kind of new wave of horror that we've seen in the last 15 years.

23:48So that felt relevant. It signals this shift that's happening. It used to be the case that there were great horror films, but there were also the kind of slashers and the schlockier stuff. And they used to be kind of quarantined from each other. And now it's like horror can be prestige as well. And this is a very visually striking kind of—people hate this term, and I kind of also hate it, but elevated horror. like that's right so it's something in that zone and that felt like something we should touch on i'm glad you weren't scared but this also means the next thing i recommend to you is going to be well yeah you know to alice's point like three ghosts it depends on what what bothers you you know uh it was a reminder though of like you know we from the exorcist on this this situation of this sort of religious encounter also sort of precisely between two people that there's like you You know, whether it's the power of Christ compels you or whatever.

24:39But we would call this like a big trope of the genre, right? Absolutely. Yeah. That goes back decades, if not, you know, centuries, depending on how you're defining. And I liked your point about how the PTSD is part of her problem. And I think that also speaks to something that's happening in horror increasingly. I don't want to make sweeping generalizations, but I feel like in the past, the horror would be something external that is disrupting a previously idyllic town or life. and now you know this is true of the babadook as well there's a lot more of the bad thing has already happened to you you already have a trauma at the beginning of the film or even before the film begins and then that is like eating you from the inside or trying to kill you and you you have to grapple with that it feels very you know one of our former colleagues parol seigel wrote this piece about the trauma plot and i feel that that is working in horror as well you know to varying degrees of success but it's an interesting shift we have another voice memo from one of our listeners.

25:35This is Kayo. I think it would be interesting to play it at this juncture. Hi, critics at large. My name is Kayo. I have been putting some thoughts on why is that that I feel so comfortable and excited watching horror movies. And I think one of the reasons is in real life, I would struggle with health anxiety and other kinds of anxiety. And somehow watching horror movies provides me this safe space to be scared, but not too scared. It's being able to enjoy the excitement of the unknown and not be in control, but within a framework that, you know, I know it's safe and fictional. Yeah, this makes sense to me.

26:22I mean, I hear this a lot that you can kind of live these feelings and these experiences. You can feel fear by watching horror. But of course, you're safely in your own home or you're in the theater. You're going to leave. I'm thinking more about my own experience with horror and what has changed. And I definitely think that when I was younger, I just had a much greater permeability between what I saw and what I was living. and a possibility that was introduced to me on screen then lived with me. And that was terrifying. It did not feel safe. It did not. And in a way, it was the purest way to encounter films like these because it did not feel that these experiences would be confined to the screen.

27:05But I do think, I was talking to a producer recently and she said something that really struck me. She's made horror films. She's made other kinds of films as well. But she said, like, a horror movie, that's the genre where the contract between the filmmaker in the audience is the most explicit. You know exactly what it's going to do to you. They know exactly how they want to make you feel. They are actively thinking, I want to scare you at this point in the story. And you are actively entering that and saying, I'm prepared to be scared. Right. And I think that that kind of contract, that handshake is very interesting.