Honey, I (Haven’t) Scared the Kids

My best friend and I have many things in common. However, one of the things we differ on is our stance on horror films. I can’t abide them. I spend the entire time on the verge of panic, and I won’t sleep for the next three days. My best friend, on the other hand, enjoys them so much that she finds them funny. It seems that the horror aspect of the film is like water off a duck’s back - it simply doesn’t faze her. She is not the only person I know who finds horror genuinely amusing or enjoyable - my flatmate is another example. I’m almost certain that was never the intention of any horror film, to be easy to watch and positively entertaining. Nowadays, horror films are no longer guaranteed fear; they have to continuously strive to achieve screams, forever trying to make anything into a jump scare. It is only with the modern generation that horror entertainment has had to go the extra mile, only with Gen Z.

Gen Z has undoubtedly challenged the horror genre in ways it has never faced before. Take Dracula for example. The first version of Dracula was in the 1931 film of the same name. He is simply dressed in a black cloak with a pale face and slicked-back dark hair but surprisingly, little evidence of fangs in the film. The film was a true horror phenomenon, it was, to the folk of the 1930s, terrifying. In fact, two scenes were deleted from the film five years after its release. The first being an epilogue speech in which it is stated that vampires do exist and the second, Renfield’s screams as he is murdered. Both scenes were removed due to fears that it made the film too horrifying and scarring. And yet now, films are being released loaded to the nines with gore and death.

It’s no surprise that our tastes in entertainment change with each generation. ‘The Walking Dead’ is a standard show to me, whereas to my mother, it is a horrible, horrible show (her words, not mine). What we as Gen Z view as scary is, in my opinion, diminishing at a rate of knots. But does that say anything about us as a generation? Maybe that we are growing up in a world threatened by real things, far scarier than something that is highly unlikely to happen in reality. We have grown up with streams of bad news; attacks, natural disasters, wars. We struggle to consider something paranormal when a very real fire is billowing right in front of us. We are growing increasingly more hungry for fear in our entertainment, but will films and TV ever be able to keep up?

The horror genre is quickly running out of material to make horrifying. Everything has been done. Everything is just being reused. But horror is also an incredibly alienating genre. For the few, like myself, who can be affected by horror and suffer a lack of sleep because of it, this constant effort for horror films to be more terrifying completely estranges us. Though I hate horror, there are films that I can tolerate. But if the horror industry is so hell-bent on creating more fear through their films by making them increasingly more difficult to sit through, then how can someone like me ever actually enjoy them? And so, with me and others like me out of the question, horror has a smaller audience to feed their content to and even then, many of them aren’t as scared as they would’ve been thirty years ago. And anyway,