Or at least, that’s what American writer, critic and lawyer Douglas E. Winter once claimed.
In his anthology Prime Evil, Winter wrote:
“Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion.”
If you were asked to explain what the horror genre is, how would you describe it? For example, science fiction is usually built around speculative science or technology. Fantasy tends to involve imaginary worlds, magic or the supernatural. Romance centres on relationships. Action is driven by spectacle and excitement. Films often blend these genres together. Spaceballs is science fiction and comedy. Avatar mixes science fiction with fantasy. Twilight is romance wrapped in supernatural fantasy.
The obvious answer is that horror is supposed to be scary. Except “scary” is an inherently subjective test. One person sleeps with the lights on after watching The Ring. Another person might laugh through The Exorcist. Neither reaction changes the films themselves, but it does remind us that fear isn’t something we all experience in the same way.
There are films that contain genuinely frightening sequences without being widely regarded as horror. Take Jurassic Park. The T-rex attack is terrifying. The raptors stalking the children through the kitchen is suspenseful. Characters are eaten alive. Limbs are torn off. Yet most people would still file it under adventure or science fiction rather than horror. The same goes for disaster films. If you’re terrified of flying, Airport might frighten you more than Halloween. If tornadoes are your nightmare, Twister could leave you more shaken than The Conjuring. But we don’t usually shelve them alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
There are films that aren’t conventionally frightening at all, but leave the viewer deeply unsettled. Think of Black Swan, Mulholland Drive or Parasite. Depending on who you ask, they’re psychological dramas or thrillers, but rarely horror. So is being unsettling the same thing as being scary?
Then there’s another question; how much horror does a film need before it becomes horror? The tunnel sequence in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory traumatised generations of children, but nobody seriously files it next to A Nightmare on Elm Street. On the other hand, Don’t Look Now spends much of its running time building atmosphere rather than delivering scares. By modern standards it’s remarkably restrained and practically no violence occurs until the very end, yet few horror fans would deny that it’s a horror movie.
Some films seem to carry what I’d call “horror DNA.” Gremlins is a comedy, but also a family friendly Christmas movie. Yet horror fans have enthusiastically adopted it as one of our own. The same could be said of films like Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline and Return to Oz. They aren’t pure horror, but they contain enough horror elements that they feel like they belong in the horror category.
Maybe that’s why horror fans spend so much time debating the boundaries of the genre. Is The Silence of the Lambs horror or a thriller? Is Se7en horror? Does Alien become horror halfway through its runtime? Whether something is or is not ‘horror’ is in the eye of the beholder.
Perhaps that’s because horror doesn’t behave like most other genres. It’s less defined by setting or subject matter than by the emotional experience it’s trying to create: fear, dread, disgust, unease. These are the tools horror uses, but not every film uses them to the same degree. Maybe that’s why horror’s boundaries are so difficult to pin down. We all carry around an invisible gauge that tells us whether something feels like horror, and that gauge is calibrated slightly differently for every one of us.
At this point you might be thinking “but comedy is subjective too.” You’d be right. One person might laugh uncontrollably through Flying High (aka Airplane!) while another sits stone-faced. The same is true of romance. You don’t stop calling The Notebook a romance because you weren’t swept off your feet. in the same way, rarely does anyone say something’s not a comedy just because the jokes don’t land for them. Some people don’t like the comedy of Borat, but they won’t argue that for that reason it’s not a comedy.
I don’t think Douglas Winter was entirely right. I still think horror is a genre. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a genre as “a category or style of art, music, or literature defined by a specific set of shared features, rules, or themes.” Horror comfortably fits that definition. Its shared feature isn’t monsters, blood or body count; it’s that it’s designed to evoke fear, dread, disgust or unease.
But I think Winter was also right: horror is an emotion. Genres exist to tell audiences what sort of experience they can expect. We call a film a romance because it’s intended to make us invest in a relationship. We call a comedy a comedy because it’s intended to make us laugh. Likewise, we call a film horror because it’s intended to disturb us in one way or another. Whether it succeeds is another matter entirely. No filmmaker can guarantee that every audience member will feel fear.
Perhaps that’s why horror’s boundaries are so often debated. Not because horror isn’t a genre, but because it’s a genre defined by one of the most subjective experiences we have: emotion. So whenever someone asks me if I think a movie is a horror movie, I’ll think about whether any part of the movie could make someone feel fear, and go with ‘yes’.