FFAF: My Favorite Horror Genres

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Halloween is just around the corner, a fitting time for me to talk about some of my favorite horror genres. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. It is free-for-all-Friday, Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. But Friday we talk about really whatever I want to talk about. And today I want to talk about horror genres. When I was younger, I was definitely into horror, not so much horror films. I did watch a fair number of them. I still enjoy it, but I like reading. I guess this is related to horror, things like true crime, unsolved crime mysteries. There’s stuff like that that can definitely keep me awake at night. Folktales, urban legends. When I was a kid, I really enjoyed reading Goosebumps. I love the Goosebumps books. I think I actually did a free-for-all-Friday on Goosebumps not too long ago, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because they had those creepy illustrations on them. I’m still scared by those illustrations to this day.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark one to get your kids when you feel like it’s time for them to really get pushed to their limits of childhood, embracing of fear. I think kids like being scared. They like being scared within a particular degree because it’s fun, it’s thrilling, it’s exciting. Even when you play with a little toddler, you play hide and seek and you find them. They’re like, “Ah,” they have a little bit of fear when they startle response. So I think kids like that as long as it doesn’t go into terror too much. So when I’m talking here, my favorite horror genres, let though talk about some of my least favorites. The ones I’m not as big a fan of. I don’t like supernatural horror as much, in particular, I don’t like stuff with demons. It’s too close to home. I mean, demons are a real thing, something I worry about and is a Catholic leader apologist, you don’t want to make light of them. I think it can be done well.

I think The Exorcist is a great film, one of the greatest horror films of all time. Personally for me, I just don’t like watching stuff about demons. That’s all. I just don’t like it. It’s just too unnerving for me. So I’m not as big a fan of that. I’m not a big fan of what is called Gorn, gore porn, torture porn. So slasher films, stuff that’s just about Michael Myers and Freddy. Friday the 13th, no, that’s not Freddy. It’s Nightmare on Elm Street. Nightmare on Elm Street is interesting because it’s not slasher films would be the horror is about some thing trying to kill you. All right? A lot of times it’s somebody stabby stabby. Think of the Scream films.

Nightmare, Mike Myers is an unstoppable killer. Friday the 13th, you have Jason with his hatchet, his machete. But Nightmare in Elm Street or Freddy Krueger. He kills people in their dream state in more unusual ways and he always hams up the scene. So I appreciate Nightmare in Elm Street, but I’m not a big fan of, let’s take for, I remember though going to see Hostel in movie theaters, H-O-S-T-E-L by Eli Roth. About a group of guys who goes to Eastern Europe, get more than they bargain for when they go to stay at a hostel in this eastern European town. They’re promised all sorts of ladies and fun, and it’s run by a weird underground torture network where rich people come to torture people and kill them. So it has a lot of extended torture scenes. I saw it when I was in, oh gosh, college probably with some friends. And I mean, back then I was made of tougher stuff, but now you have kids, it’s just like, I’m such a softie, and it’s like, no, I don’t need to fill my head with that kind of stuff.

I don’t mind if there is violence and blood, but when it’s the glorification of it, that’s not right. So let’s talk then, what are my favorite horror genres? If I was to sit down and watch something, that’s what I would really enjoy. So let me talk about five of them here. Number one, this is a newer one for me that I have really been enjoying that I’ve seen more on YouTube. Not so much you see in films, but some of it you can see in film and that would be analog horror. So analog horror, it says here, is a sub-genre of horror fiction and an offshoot of the found footage film technique. Often cited as originating during the late 2000s and early 2010s. Analog horror is characterized by low fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th century television and film analog recordings.

I love them. You watch them on YouTube, you turn the lights off and set it to full screen and play it. It’s similar to found footage. There’s an unnerving sense about it that you’re not watching a movie, like you’re watching something that’s real. So found footage, the heyday of found footage I feel was The Blair Witch Project. I remember, I think I was in high school when that came out. I want to say I think that was late ’90s, Blair Witch Project that began in 1999. Yeah. So I was a freshman in high school. I was visiting my cousin in La Jolla. He worked at a hotel and I think we were able to get it on DVD and watch it in his hotel office in the back room. And it’s scary stuff it is like, “What is this? It feels real. It doesn’t feel like you’re watching a movie. It feels like you’re watching a bad thing that happened to people,” And it was marketed so well. This is before the internet.

You could never make The Blair Witch Project today because you have spoilers, trailer dissection, people are so numb to that. But back then when we had the internet, the guys who directed the film, it’s about three people, camera crew, they’re looking for the Blair Witch. They get lost in the Marilyn Woods and they document it. It’s supposed to be, we found their footage and what happened to them. And the actors actually went into hiding to sell like maybe this really did happen. So I remember that just being a really scary thing. And then they did a horrible sequel to it called Blair Witch Book of Shadows, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch Two, which it looked like it had nothing to do with The Blair Witch Project. They already had that movie in development and slapped some Blair Witch stuff on it. Terrible, very terrible sequel.

But the original Blair Witch Project is an absolute classic in the found footage genre. So derived from that, then in the early 2010s, you’ve got people who go online and will create horror films based on like they shoot it on their own cameras, but edit it to make it look like degraded VHS tape to make it look like old security footage or old security training videos. There’s one online that’s utterly amazing, it looks like because the way the light bends and the video is distorted, it looks like a VHS camera and it says something like, “1998, the San Diego incident,” and it’s a guy in his backyard. He hears thumping outside and he go, “What the world was that?” Goes to investigate it with his old VHS camera and a Tyrannosaurus rex pops its head up over the fence. And it looks pretty good for a YouTube video and he runs back inside.

I’m not going to spoil it. You can find it online, but it’s the idea is that what if Jurassic Park Two, the dinosaur gets T.rex gets loose in San Diego, what if someone back then recorded it with their VHS cam, their old low fidelity, low res camcorder, what would it look like? And it gives a realism to it that I enjoy. So analog horror, I find that to be really cool. Next one up would be body horror. So body horror, this is different. I said I don’t like torture, I don’t like stuff like that, but stuff that horror that deals with biological horror, that mutation, body changing, zombification. So zombie movies, that’s enough of the grossness in there that I enjoy. Monster films transformation, this might also include werewolf stuff, but that’s more maybe fantasy horror. But I find that a lot of this or The Fly with Jeff Goldblum, the one where he does the teleporter and he steps in the thing and the fly goes in with him and he starts transforming into half man, half fly. That’s where I think it’s done really well.

Although my favorite body horror would probably be the John Carpenter’s The Thing, awesome film of Kurt Russell. That’s a classic. They’re at the Antarctic research base and there’s the things like this alien entity that can jump from person to person. And once it’s discovered in the person, they mutate into this horrible monster and they remade it recently, and it’s terrible because they use CGI. You got to use practical effects for this stuff because we can tell the difference, people, we can tell the difference. So body horror, that’d be number two. Number three would be psychological horror. I’m not a big fan of splatter and gore. I’ll tolerate that for body horror films, but I like films more where it’s playing with your mind about what’s real or not. Stalking, paranoia, the hovering threat. Probably one of the classics for this would be Hitchcock, so it’d be Hitchcockian horror and I love that stuff.

Even like Psycho is not a terribly violent film. You got the shower scene, and it’s amazing with Psycho is that the main character gets killed halfway through, people aren’t expecting that. They think she’ll make it out in the end. So that’s a classic there, but especially Rear Window. Oh, I was trying to do Jimmy Stewart, but he sounds like… I was doing, “Fred, Jimmy’s…” To do Jimmy Stewart, I have to do the line from It’s a Wonderful Life. “Where’s my money?” “Well, I don’t have your money. It’s in Bill’s house. It’s in Frank’s house.” And so in the rear window he’s in a wheelchair and he looks through his telescope and he thinks he sees a murder in the building across the way. I don’t remember any of the lines of film. It’s been so long.

I remember its parody in The Simpsons. “Hey, there’s some kid looking at me with his spy glasses telescope.” That’s the best of my Jimmy Stewart for you. So Hitchcockian, but other kinds of psychological horror films. Silence of the Lambs, “Hello, Clarice. I ate his liver It with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” The shining things that make you really question reality, question motives. What’s going on? Who’s got the upper hand here? More recent examples of that that are done very well would be the lighthouse. It has Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, the latter which is the guy from the Twilight series. There’s a lot of these kinds of psychological horror stuff from Japan, the Ring, Ringu in Japan, they’ve got a lot of that stuff for Japanese horror.

I like that In video games. One of my favorite video games, it’s kind of a psychological thriller. It’s got a few monsters in it is Silent Hill. I remember playing that with the lights turned off and I was like 12, 13 and scared the GBs out of me. You walk around and you just hear footsteps and your character’s in a foggy monster laid in town and everything’s eerie and it shifts to blood covered iron. And Silent Hill is one of those video games back in the day that definitely scared me much. Similar one that would go into psychological horror that I liked when it came out is it was Paranormal Activity. I love the premise. I love these. It’s found footage, but psychological horror, found footage. I love the buildup of tension. So Hitchcock once said, there’s two ways you could scare people, right? Let’s say you got two people in a room and a bomb explodes and kills them. Suddenly that’s like a jump scare.

But the real thing that really draws is when the tension, you cut to the bomb under the table, and then you show them talking, cut back to the bomb. Building tension is harder to do, but it’s more satisfying when you do that. So in Paranormal Activity, they build tension so well. It’s basically about a couple lives in a suburban house in California, they think there’s a ghost. They set up a camera on a tripod to record at night. And so there’s footage, it’s found footage, so there’s footage of them goofing around during the day. Then at night, you see what the camera saw during the night and it’s just static, and you just hear the humming of the camera and the air conditioning in the house, and you look and you wonder it’s down a dark hallway like, “Did I see a ghost there? Did I see something? What’s going to happen?”

And you’re always on edge like, “Oh, what’s going to happen here?” Now in theaters, it got room for me in theaters. A guy sat next to me, he was an employee at the theater and he was all done with his shift and he was laughing and he smelled bad. Not great. Now, however, this is something if you watch by yourself at home with the lights turned off, I did this I think with some friends. I couldn’t do it by myself. I watched it with friends with the light off and we were cracking jokes to try to cut the tension, but it’s scary. Steven Spielberg, I think watched a clip of it and then his door locked in his room, he had to call locksmith and he was just totally terrified watching it. Paranormal Activity. So I remember that one when it came out.

Last two is apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction in horror. So horror that is set that, not a disaster film, but horror that is set at the end of the world. So you have no safety. There’s nowhere safe to run. The Road would be an example of this, thriller horror. It’s with Viggo Mortensen, he’s with a kid and they’re trying to, dad and a son are trying to survive some kind of apocalypse and they’re just going down the gray, cloudy, post-apocalyptic world going down the road trying to get help, shelter. They have to deal with cannibals and all their kinds of bad stuff. So I like this kind of fiction that focuses on the horrors that can be with us when all of society has broken down essentially. And there’s other ones that can fit into this. You’ll have, for example, zombie films will often be of the genre of apocalyptic horror.

So like 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, there are going to be some, Bird Box would be another example of that where you have the threat. And the threat is something that goes beyond just the limited people in the story, but it affects basically the whole world and that’s what makes things really scary. Horrible film related to that is called Cell. I think it has John Cusack, maybe Samuel Jackson in it. Oh, let me see here. Yep. John Cusack, Samuel Jackson, Cell. And basically there is a cellphone signal that is turning people into killer zombies. And this is based, I think on a Stephen King story. And the story is actually really interesting, the zombies get really smart and they take people prisoner and make them listen to cellphones and turn into other zombies. The film just absolutely didn’t do the story justice at all. Often, that happens a lot in horror adaptations, of course.

Last one. What is the last horror genre I enjoy? Comedy horror. Comedy horror is fun. I like to laugh, but I like to laugh when there’s a bit of darkness to it like “Ah, it’s a little scary,” or unnerving or creepy, but horror that can mix laughter in with it, that’s fun. You get a little bit of scare, you get a little bit of fear. Fear, scare, but laughs to ease the tension. You’re not taking yourself too seriously. There are scary moments. There are funny moments. I like that. I enjoy that. So a few examples of that would be Shaun of the Dead. So a humor take on zombie films. Beetlejuice would be an example of this with Michael Keaton is Beetlejuice. One of my favorite movies as a kid actually. One of my favorite cartoons actually, Beetlejuice cartoon is an amazing animated intro sequence there.

Let’s see here. Tucker and Dale versus Evil. That’s one that turns the hippie, sorry, the Appalachian hillbilly, what was the? Deliverance. “I’ll make you squeal like a pig, boy.” So Deliverance. It’s the idea that, “Oh, the Appalachian hillbillies are going to get you. The inbred mutants are going to get you, when the idea here actually is that Tucker and Dale, they’re these teenagers who think that they are cannibalistic hillbillies. But they’re actually really nice guys and it’s a bunch of misunderstandings that lead to horror interactions and some of the kids end up being the bad guys. But it’s super funny. And I like these films because there’s someone who enjoys horror, they lampoon horror cliches. They take a moment to laugh at the elements that make up horror films. Cabin in the Woods. I’m not going to spoil this one if you go and see it because I don’t want to give it away how it lampoons horror films. Because it starts off like a regular horror film, but it ends up deconstructing horror films. That’s all I’m going to say about it. It’s a good one.

Oldest example of comedy horror, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving was described as the great comedy horror story that would make someone laugh one moment and scream the next. Edgar Allan Poe also often put humor and horror into the same stories that he was telling. Finally, there’s another horror film I want to highlight here that I enjoyed. I think it would fit within the genres I’ve discussed, but I liked it because it was a Marvel film that was released. And it was allowed to break the mold of previous Marvel films actually have some scary and unnerving moments to it and it’s called Werewolf by Night. It was released in 2022 for Disney Plus, more of a TV special than a film. It’s a little bit short. But I enjoyed it and I knew I was going to enjoy it because when I watched the opening sequence with the regular Marvel credits, they changed them with the tone and the music score and I knew, “Oh, this is super cool.”

So I’m going to play it for you, but as you hear roars and scary part, there’s a slashes that happened through the Marvel logo, like a werewolf tearing the logo in different areas. And I’ll play just a part of it for you, but when I heard this, I knew, “Oh yeah, they’re really doing something different here,” and I like that. So cool Marvel, just get yourself out of the box and try something different instead of just a blue sky beam at the end and fighting a CGI Army. If you had more stuff like Werewolf by Night, which is based on an existing comic property, it’d be cool to see. All right. I hope that was enjoyable for you all. I hope you have a very blessed weekend and Happy Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day to everyone coming up next week. Thank you all. Have a very blessed weekend.

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