[Editorial] Editor’s Note: The gatekeepers of the horror genre

For many of us in the horror community, there seems to have been a lot of conversations regarding what is and what isn’t constituted as horror. It has been a debate that has been going on for far too long, and one that unfortunately highlights the ignorance of so many people in this community and their narcissism that they believe they can be some form of ‘gatekeepers’ to the horror genre, which, let’s be honest, no one is a fucking gatekeeper to unless we invented horror - something I’m pretty certain none of us did. 

As much as I absolutely love Twitter because it’s been a place of connection and community, it can also be a toxic place, as with anything on the internet really. When you post about watching a film and you call it horror, you immediately play the pipes to the rats of the film world who hurriedly scavenge around to let you know that ‘No, that is not a horror film.’, which always then divulges into the question of what is a horror film? 

A few days back I had the pleasure of joining Chandler Bullock and Nolan Dean on DeVaugh Taylor’s podcast Bloody Blunts Cinema for his 50th episode, and for the discussion we looked at some of the most debated horror films and whether they were truly horror. What seemed clear was that none of us felt like we had any right to be gatekeepers of the genre, and that essentially nearly all of the controversially debated films, we all considered horror in some form or another. The reason being was that horror is a completely subjective genre, one that relies on so many different aspects that it is far more complex than simply saying that one film is horror but another is not. 

One particular film that really got me thinking was Jurassic Park. Personally I had always thought of Spielberg’s classic film as an adventure come action movie, but the more we discussed how it was a horror film, the more it became apparent to me that 1) dinosaurs are fucking terrifying and 2) Jurassic Park could definitely be classfied as a horror film. We typically classify horror as something that evokes fear in the watcher, which can be said as true in the dinosaur movie - a man gets bitten in half! But as someone that watches a lot of extreme horror, to me horror goes deeper than just fear, it evokes emotions that typically have a negative connotation attached to them; grief, trauma, loss, depression, suspense, disgust etc. Therefore a horror film doesn’t necessarily have to be scary in order to be classified as a horror, which therefore makes it even more complicated to gatekeep this layered genre. 

Which is why people in the horror community get so tired when people do try and say that certain things can and cannot be done within the genre itself. A journalist recently went on record publicly to say that films set in space can never be horror, because horror only exists within the planes of our existence and setting, not outside of it. This caused outrage amongst us horror fans, and for good reason. It might have felt like the entire population of Twitter was trying to take this woman down, but actually the comments made by her felt demeaning and harmful to a genre that means so much to the community. Horror has helped so many of us heal through troubling times, and therefore we do feel protective when people come along and try to mould it into a certain stereotype. Horror can absolutely be set in space, with some of the most terrifying and horrific films ever being set in space: Alien, Event Horizon, Jason X (okay, maybe not terrifying or horrific, but it’s a slasher in space!), Lifeforce and so many others. 

Why do people feel the need to try and gatekeep the genre? What do they get out of doing so? It is a shame that we constantly have to see the horror genre chastised in such a way, and that we have to continuously defend the reasons why certain films are horror. It’s not common that you see people defaming the rom com genre, but it is when it comes to horror and therefore us fans feel like we are continuously trying to explain that this particular genre is one of the most complex, and of course, it is completely subjective because what one person finds frightening, another person will not. I have always found the 1997 Bean movie about Mr.Bean ruining a classic painting terrifying since I was a kid, so for me, that absolutely constitutes as a horror film but that’s because I found watching it in the cinema’s at the age of 4 a traumatic and distressing experience. Therefore, completely subjective. 

So, to those people that always have to say something about a film not being horror because it doesn’t fit into the conventional tropes of the genre, please just get a life and leave us be. Us horror fans are happy to call whatever we want a horror and watch behind clutched pillows. 

And yes, Bean is absolutely a horror movie. 

Love and guts,

Z x

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