Let’s applaud the hapless victims in horror films. They contribute so much to our enjoyment of their terror, their hysteria, and their blood.
They are sliced, diced, minced, blintzed, mangled, strangled, eaten, beaten, slurped, burped–feel free to insert your own action verbs here–and grilled and chilled in countless ways, just to make us jump in our seats, upchuck our popcorn, or tickle our fright-bone. They lighten our distressing job’s tedium, get us through our taxing days and all those tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s until death do we part for points unknown. Their brainless, death-attracting, antics creep forth in an endless and frenetic pace from franchise to franchise, keeping us happy because, frankly, we are not them. And we would never ever be that stupid, right?
No, we’re smarter for sure. No going into dark basements for blown fuses, no driving off the beaten trail or sex before marriage in woodsy summer camps. No saying “is that you” in response to weird noises and waiting around for an answer. Such cautious and savvy living makes for a long life free of sharp and blunt objects impelling your head and bodily parts, and creepy things gaining on you with malicious intent. How boring is that to watch on screen?
The more paranoid you are, the more chaste you are, the more god-fearing and uptight you are, and the more you show any hint of civic responsibility or common sense, the safer you are. That’s the public service message every horror movie leaves us with, again and again. Mind your own business, stay out of iffy situations, and leave the raves for the fools, the dares for the gullible, and take the folklore to heart. Anyone who takes a detour from the sensible and commonplace of bland living, well, what more can be said? If you follow directions from a toothless, grimy, gas station attendant with expensive tourist swag piled up in his unkempt excuse for a home, you’re just begging for it: the drawn-out and quartered, bloody end of it to boot.
But if all horror movie victims acted smart and careful nothing bad would happen. If they showed good decision making, attention to personal safety and that of others, and a good sense of avoidance and flight response, we’d have pretty lame, and really short, horror movies with no dumbassery to make our days of screams and laughter memorable. So why do we keep writing books that show potential horror movie victims how to survive? How to kill the monster in five easy steps? How to shoo away the ghostly terrors? How to avoid cannibalistic inbred maniacs? Survival be damned, I say: we need better victims!
We need people who want to travel the world and stay in shady hostels, and move to time-stalled small towns with no tourism or wi fi or decent cell service, and swim in desolate lakes butt naked with crocs and piranhas, and ignore all the warning signs a sensible person would have noticed during that cold open.
I’m tired of seeing self-help books like How to Survive a Horror Movie and fight off the onslaught of disfigured homicidal maniacs stalking backwoods, city streets, and social media. Just once I’d like to see an Idiot’s Guide to Being a Good Horror Movie Victim. Let’s face it: the dumber the victims are the more we like it. Who wants smart kids outwitting Freddy and Jason? Or the class geeks outwitting the killer computers and robots? It’s better to not clutter up the storyline with fearless vampire killers or damned-if-I-go-down-without-a-fight cheeky-monkey heroes, adroitly using forethought, weaponry, and gritty smarts to go after the endless murder-prone clowns, goo-dripping demons, and liver-eating psychos that brighten our day as we watch victims suffer and die.
If the sex-starved teenagers, careless backpackers, and bumbling public officials survive, where’s the fun in that? Okay, sure, maybe one final girl or homie can kick ass while their friends dwindle, upping the suspense and drama, leaving room open for the sequel; but horror films exist to make fun of the sacrificial lambs, the slow to grasp, and the different ones–those notorious Others that academics love to write about–among us.
But it all boils down to ha ha, you’re dead but I’m not–that sort of thing. If you can drag out the dying, bingo! A gunshot to the head is too quick and leaves us all with a sigh, ‘is that all you got?’ That’s why horror movies keep upping the ante on kills: to overcome our jaded and faded attention spans. Oh, seen that, what else you got? Time’s a wasting and this ticket price is murder in itself. And the more kills per hour, the more fun.
Some human cattle needs to be slaughtered so that we can eat our serving of gruel without terminal indigestion. Some people must always be tortured and put to death in gruesome and ever-increasingly sicko ways to make us feel better that we are not about to be pickled in a jar like them, or stuffed in a razor-lined barrel and rolled down a hill, or munched on by some monster, or turned into bloody cotton candy by killer-clowns from outer space. We need victims to look under beds in the dead of night without turning on the lights, wildly party in haunted houses on Halloween night, boldly read spells from human skin-clad tomes that use flattened eyeballs for bookmarks, and knock on ominous doors to dilapidated houses situated in the middle of nowhere. Great too, if one of them carries around a camera all day, filming their group’s own ongoing demise and podcast, Zoom, or live-streamed butchery to those notorious strangers on the internet.
Of course, that begs the question: are all those killers and monsters who leave all that video behind, to be discovered later, even dumber than the victims?
So in the spirit of good victimship, and in the absence of a proper victim’s guide book (publishers, please take note), here are some of my time-tested guidelines to follow:
- Always take a stranger’s advice, especially where to sleep and which unpaved road to take, when you are lost in the middle of nowhere. The more in-bred they look the better. Missing teeth are a plus, too.
- After “killing” any man-made monster, serial-killer, mutated freak, humongous alligator, or seriously infected zombie-like personage, make sure to walk up to the prostrate body within arm’s reach, bend real close to see if it’s still alive (yes, even though you were trying to kill it), and act surprised when it rips out your neck for that always popular, spray-of-blood-gasp that comes from the sudden realization of how stupid you are. Audiences eat that up.
- Make sure to slowly walk up to and dramatically look over the window sill through which you just pushed any hulking, eye-plucking, hook-carrying, psycho-butcher. Extending your neck for a solid choke-hold is essential here and lends an air of authenticity. A startled look and flailing your arms as you’re dragged over the windowsill to fall to the street below earns points with audiences too.
- Never pass up a dare, especially when it involves skinny dipping in isolated areas and questionable bodies of water.
- Check out supposedly haunted or deserted houses where people have gone missing, like a lot, and even better, throw a party too.
- Sleep, dance, have sex over freshly dug graves.
- Venture into dark rooms, caves, tunnels, and woods with a quirky flashlight.
- Recite ‘Bloody Mary’ in front of your bathroom mirror three times by candlelight or ‘Candyman’ five times. Combine both for more terror.
- Remember there is safety in numbers, but in a horror movie we can’t have that. So make sure to split up whenever danger and imminent death is close at hand. Note: Splitting up, especially when searching for someone who is missing precisely because he, she, or they decided to go it alone in the first place, really sells the astonishment factor with the audience. The how-stupid-are-you-guys factor, that is. It makes audience members feel very superior as they chow down on that fattening and wallet-lightening bucket o’ popcorn and obscenely large DIET COKE.
- Forget to keep your cell phone charged. Cell phones make it too easy to call for help, so either lose it, drop it, or just find a place with no bars (the reception kind, not the drinking kind). The script writers will help you with this.
- When a meteor lands nearby, make sure to find it and poke any gooey glowing stuff oozing out of it really good with a really short stick. Brownie points for holding the gooey stuff close to your face to look at it, and extra points if you make like you are sniffing it.
- Ditto with the above when you poke anything. Using your hand instead of a stick will bring you fame and fortune with the audience.
- When running away from danger, scream like crazy, slow down to look back often, and trip over your own feet once or twice. Slow moving homicidal terrors, like mummies and zombies (old school, okay?) need all the help they can get.
- Regarding running: When the creature, psycho, mutated-carrot thing, jello blob, or disemboweled but mobile flesh-eating dead person gets close enough to hack, bite, or strip the flesh from your bones, jump up, make like you are really running for your life this time–right into a tree or suitable object. It makes it more suspenseful for the audience. They also get a slapstick, Three Stooges, kind of chuckle out of it.
- Leave the door unlocked while you take a bath or shower in totally unsafe surroundings, including decrepit, mostly vacant, motels, and haunted houses.
- Dress as inappropriately as possible. Skimpy, tight-fitting clothes are required to bring in the young male audience. Girls, clingy, wet shirts, crop tops, and underwear are a plus. Guys, just flash those abs as much as possible. The older men in the audience will really hate you for it and enjoy your death even more (or maybe that’s just me, not sure).
- If the door creaks, don’t go in first. The first person to go in gets it fast. It’s always the next person to go in who gets the worst of it. A good victim makes suffering look good and last.
- Remember, AI is your friend. Drones, autonomous vehicles, and Robots are your friends. Make sure to add self-learning and make any Off buttons or fail safes really hard to reach or engage. Oh, and treat robots like sex toys and slaves, so they learn how to hate you enough to eventually rise up against their overlords and crush all humans like grapes. Extra credit for going the Skynet route and leaving it all up to AI handling the drones and killing machines.
- Never watch unknown video tape, or install questionable apps on your cell phone. Let someone else do it first and wait to see what happens.
- Always remember, just like you, killers and monsters may travel in packs. One and done, these days, is never a certainty.
There, I’ve done my part. Now you do yours. Study hard and make sure to practice these rules as often as possible. Of course, due to the nature of these guidelines, you may not get much chance to practice–if you know what I mean.