Does Horror Entertainment Have Value?

Kevin Bacon in Friday the 13th

Horror is a complex literature genre. I once believed horror to be the lowest of things that should interest a person, often resisting the most popular horror flicks of the 70s and 80s as I slumbered with friends during our weekend overnights. But does horror entertainment offer any redeeming value?

Friday the 13th is a terrific example of such an horrific production as was usually declined by me. While friends picked the quickly popular and serialized Friday the 13th releases, along with titles like Halloween or Silent Night, Deadly Night (give me a break!) I'd be the one that picked up a comedy . . . something like Airplane! or Private Benjamin -- a way to break up the monotony of fearsome scenes sure to curdle our senses.

You might be thinking that Friday the 13th isn't a great example of lit horror, because it was a movie. Well, people loved that slasher movie so much that a huge franchise was developed which included novels. The first Friday the 13th novel hit shelves only two years after the original movie of 1980. The second movie was released less than a year after the first and the third movie was also quickly released-- in 1982-- after which, the first novel adaptation (of part III) appeared.

Eventually, I learned that fear and fright are parts of life that present in a variety of ways, sometimes via cloaking and surprise while other times apparent as the fallen night against it's prior day. I understood that, while a particular type of horror did not appeal to me, there were other stories of atrocious nature that did. Enter Stephen King (SK) into my life, by way of written word and the junior high school library. But first . . .

Jack Nicholson in The Shining

I was a "young adult" upon my first reading of a King novel, The Shining. My mom had allowed me to bring it home from the fiction section of the city library. Myself in the budding portion of young 'adulthood', about age 10, this particular title was a bit much . . . but an honest try was given to the big read.

It's difficult to remember what I would have reverted back to at that time (too old for Nancy Drew, too young for Jack Torrance), but believe that it wasn't long before I recognized the author's name on a library shelf at school and picked up the much smaller Cycle of the Werewolf (a novella). Funny, because I'm also not much of a werewolf enthusiast . . . but it was a gripping, digestible story with which I could identify in more ways than one. Suddenly, I was hooked on horror fiction.

What made me pick up The Cycle of the Werewolf? The back-cover synopsis, of course. Check it out (click on it to find your own copy):

So, it was through SK that I learned the horror genre contained works that didn't need to objectify young women by stripping them to murder them, and also managed to touch on common, heavy emotions and themes of everyday living while exploring ancient themes simultaneously. Over time, horror themes proved to continue showcasing the aforementioned scenarios . . . and more.

Life can be horrific. Art reflects that fact as well as it does the beauty of existence. As such, horror can have positive value, and often does. It's comparable to any fiction or drama that entails a happy ending. Horror's not necessarily much more than conflict, with either a good or bad turnout.

Why is horror-genre entertainment so controversial?

We hold "redeeming value" so dear. Is it possible that sometimes we simply lack sight of it by way of our own short vision? Maybe, when we fail to see any redeeming value of an entire genre, it has less to do with genre and more to do with style. It seems to me that, when a story is riddled with elements of instant gratification, any redeeming values run the risk of being hidden in shadows of whatever is excessive, be it sex, nudity, violence or opprobrious language.

You'll hardly catch SK using excessive gratification to sell his essentially mainstream novels. Yet, a certain number of people might accuse his work of having no redeeming value. (Yes, they're few and far between these days, but they exist.) I'm positing it's because they only know the work as 'horror' genre and associate it with a particular style, which it's not. It's value is assumed by association.

Horror's "Redeeming Value" Background

I've used this particular and popular author as an example because he's been my experience in touting the allure of horror for as long as I can remember. Heavy reference to young adult reading in this post is due to the "redeeming value" link in paragraph nine, above, which called to  mind my own work that on occasion has been focused in the YA sub-genres of literature-- specifically in the genre of horror-- and because most of us get our first introductions to horror genres as adolescents.

Perhaps we'll look further into redeeming-value horror stories as time passes. Can you think of a horror story that left you with a positive feeling or lesson?