I opened the door From Zombos’ Closet 20 years ago, first on Blogspot in 2005, then a switch over to Typepad in 2006, and over to WordPress in 2023. At the start, I had two simple goals in mind. Keep it commercial free (no pop-up ads, no links to buy stuff–except my book). Hell, remember those Flash intros to websites? And just keep it fun for you and me as I share my appreciation of the fantastique in film, literature, popular culture, and show off my collection of cool stuff while doing so. ZC has grown to include more than just horror because you can’t really appreciate a horror movie or a book without seeing and knowing a lot more beyond it. I like lots of stuff.
Good, rich, horror genre is fed by life, death, and everything in-between. You can’t create or understand movies or books without knowing what’s come before them and what’s happening around them. This includes comedy, drama, poetry, the classics, the clunkers, and all the other genres too. Creators can’t build on what they don’t know. They can’t create ground-breaking horror without knowing the lay of the land they’re standing on. Fans who only watch today’s horror are missing out on a wealth of terror waiting to be discovered, especially in black and white, especially without sound.
To be a true horror movie fan you need to embrace the old with the new. People who say the best movies were done years ago clearly haven’t watched much. This goes for books too. And music. What would movies be without the Hermans, Morricones, Elfmans, Williamses, Zimmers and others? Recently I read someone’s Reddit post where they referred to the “original” Thirteen Ghosts, the movie from 2001. I bit my tongue. The original is William Castle’s classic fun chiller, 13 Ghosts, from 1960. Dude, what the hell?
Don’t get me wrong: I love Thirteen Ghosts. It’s creepy as hell and I look forward to anyone aiming to do a prequel regarding its ghosts. But any horror fan I KNOW would never make that mistake. We monsterkids don’t ignore the past or the present. We don’t let good and bad remakes supersede their originals, though those remakes pop up in searches instead of the remakes. That’s why it’s so important to know the history within the genre and around it too. You wouldn’t even had Thirteen Ghosts unless the 1960 original existed.
While many people keep tinkering with the reasoning behind why we like watching creepy terror onscreen or reading books filled with it, it always boils down to us versus them. The victims, as long as we are not one of them, give us the thrill of survival and the luxury of ignorance. It’s just happening to them, not us. No problem. Fictional horror lets us be very empathetic (we feel for the victims and want them to survive, mostly), but also very detached (as long as WE are safe, we don’t really care all that much. Not OUR current problem). Unfortunately, reality keeps pushing into that fantasy, feeding more and more into those all too familiar monsters and not so farfetched situations. At times I feel horror movies go to far: then I read the news and realize they haven’t gone far enough.
But why bother with horror to any degree? I could answer because it’s in everything. From Shakespeare to the Bible, from reality to fantasy; it exists in tangible form, nebulous form, political form, and societal form. We may prefer it to be only in movies and books, which is so easy to avoid, right? But real horror is something you can only try to ignore. Reality is leaning so much more horrible than the movies these days, you wonder how the movies can keep up. With real world issues pressing more and more into our fantasies, I’d expect to see more reflection of those issues, and our feelings about them, in horror. It’s starting to pop up: in Clown in a Cornfield, Cole, dangling from a noose, gives a short but pointed diatribe of ills his parents’ generation are guilty for. Sure, other recent horror films have brought up topical issues, but Cole is angry for his and our current and future problems. He’s the first to finally yell, WTF! we’re all screwed! so why are you ignoring the mess you created and passing it onto me? Did people in the audience identify with him? Maybe. Did they realize that they were victims too? Maybe not; and that’s why Cole’s outburst is so memorable, wildly funny, and absolutely brilliant: it sticks out like a sore thumb, hurts as much, and suddenly the movie audience identifies as the clowns and the victims, with both running from and into the same thing–global and personal disruption. It’s time for the victims to start calling out the sins of the monsters. Forget about empathy: take action instead. That’s what makes a good horror movie for me: victims who fight back.
So embrace that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, that creepy sensation on the back of your neck, or shudder away as you dread, in the dead of night, just what that sound is, or why your closet door is slightly, ever so slightly, open when you thought you had closed it. It’s only the fantastique calling, daring you to dream of gods and demons, and promising worlds, to bolster your fight against reality by keeping the fantasy and terror real. To watch the stars, and all that darkness behind them, while asking yourself again and again, why not? And demanding of others, why not, too?