(Somewhere between the sexy costumes and people having all sorts of questionable opinions, we forgot what horror was for. It’s not a comforting piece of content, but instead a means of forcing us to think. Whether it’s about fear, violence, or the darkest parts of ourselves. If we stop questioning the art, does that mean we become monsters?)

For Halloween this year, I really wanted to go as Ghostface from “Scream.” It’s a simple enough costume, and an iconic enough character — the only issue was getting a good mask and robe. The main thing I noticed upon opening the “Spirit Halloween” website wasn’t that they had the costumes in stock, but … variants. Bedazzled masks and knives, sexualized versions of the robes in vibrant colors, accompanied by sexy stilettos and fishnets. The people who made the costumes know that Billy Loomis isn’t some Casanova, but a manipulative creep who groomed Sidney, right?

Media literacy has a tumultuous history with horror movies, especially when you consider that some of the most iconic ones don’t have a palpable message. However, lately it feels like it’s just vanished outright. I’ve seen TikTok takes (I know, don’t @ me) that genuinely made me seethe over how people viewed these films. A few comments stuck out to me after seeing Sinners. @Chuckh36 had this to say. 

Bluegrass-singing vampires are about as scary as Edward from Twilight, and pulling out a Tommy gun to mow down the KKK is definitely action. It wasn’t even scary.

I genuinely can’t tolerate how some view the ge0lnre. Channels like CinemaSins treat films that aren’t explicitly feeding the audience exposition like they’re full of “plot holes.” We live in a hellscape of bad takes, surface-level interpretations, and a sheer lack of curiosity about what lies beneath. A movie isn’t bad just because you can’t necessarily understand it. It’s why seeing Ghostface turned into some sort of sparkly thirst trap feels like a perfect metaphor for where we are — horror’s a genre about reflection. Culture, fear, violence, identity, even the genre deconstructing itself! Unfortunately, we’ve sanded it down into something more safe, sanitary even. We stopped asking what the stories meant and started focusing on whether they were scary or “mid.”  

I know art is subjective, but you have to be aware when engaging with the media. One of my favorite movies is “Funny Games” (1997), which revolves around two psychopaths terrorizing a family they capture in their home. The film, despite its low budget, is a critique of pointless violence in cinema, using constant third-wall breaking and goading to make you feel included in the family’s torture, mimicking a typical horror film but with none of the violence/structure offered to the audience to make the chaos enjoyable.

 One scene has the father asking why they were being tormented, and one of the psychopaths kept switching stories, showing that the plot didn’t matter and that it was all pointless. As are most violent gore fests that have sequels upon sequels of pointless films. The movie’s deliberate approach to this was to make the viewer question why you’d bother watching this nearly two-hour session of suffering with no payoff. The director, Michael Haneke, even acknowledged during an interview that if you were put off by the film’s contents, leaving the theater midway through would be the correct thing to do, as the message of the movie didn’t need to be told to you. Giving up on it was, in fact, the correct answer. 

Horror isn’t supposed to make you comfortable; it shouldn’t make you complacent either. It’s to make you think, to question things, to stare into the abyss and wait for it to look back. We’ve turned art into content, and analysis into nitpicking, mistaking subtlety for failure. Horror should challenge your way of thinking, and if we can’t face that, then maybe the genuine fright is us.