Matt Glasby - The Book of Horror

The Anatomy of Fear in Film

Matt Glasby
Illustrations by Barney Bodoano

Horror, said legendary director John Carpenter, is a reaction; its not a genre. While it is unwise to argue with the master, perhaps it is more accurate to say that horror is a genre unlike any other except comedy because it depends upon a reaction.

Horror has never really gone out of fashion because being scared never has.

Whether they deal with monsters, murderers or creeping madness, horror films are trying to scare us. As Professor Darryl Jones notes in Sleeping With the Lights On, even the word horror, derived from the Latin horrere, signifies an involuntary response: to cause our hair to stand on end, to make us tremble or shudder.

This is why what constitutes a horror film is an issue of style not subject matter. Despite centring on a supernatural being, Casper is clearly not a horror film; yet Annabelle about a toy doll most certainly is. Equally, though they contain horrifying moments, the likes of Jaws, Alien and The Silence of the Lambs do not qualify because scaring us is not their primary objective. A recent Time Out compilation of the 100 Best Horror Movies included the war film Come and See, the TV drama Threads and sci-fi efforts The Fly and The Thing which just goes to show how blurred the lines are and, more importantly, how few horror films succeed in frightening us.

With blockbusters such as It breaking box office records, and elevated horrors by Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Jordan Peele (Get Out, US) and Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) winning critical plaudits, the genre has never been more popular. But horror has never really gone out of fashion because being scared never has. From silent-era classics such as Georges Mliss The House of the Devil (1896), perhaps the first ever horror film, to tech-savvy twenty-first-century efforts like Death of a Vlogger (2020), our fears remain the same, even if the ability to show them on-screen evolves at pace.

Viewed today, the Universal monster movies of the 1930s or Val Lewtons RKO B-movies of the 1940s are marvels of inference and innovation, but no longer actively frightening. For this reason, The Book of Horror concentrates on films from the post-war era. It is not a history, or a hagiography, but a sincere attempt to collate the scariest movies ever made and examine how they work.

Despite being a horror critic for nearly two decades and an obsessive fan for three, deciding on the final selection proved a daunting task. Hundreds of classic and contemporary movies were surveyed, alongside obscurities from Iceland, Indonesia and beyond, suggested by friends, colleagues and filmmakers.

Ultimately the final list contains films that are actually, tangibly scary, and remain so after multiple viewings.

Faced with seventy-five years of material to choose from, it became necessary to apply some ground rules. To be considered, entries had to be proper horror films so no TV movies, sci-fi or thrillers and still readily, legally, available. Although the book goes back as far as 1945s Dead of Night, Alfred Hitchcocks 1960 classic Psycho is the first movie discussed in detail, because it represents a watershed moment for the genre. After Psycho, nothing was off-limits in the pursuit of a good scare: no subject too transgressive, no special effect too extreme, no narrative twist too shocking. This practice continued throughout the Video Nasty era of the 1980s to the present day: the decapitation of Charlie (Milly Shapiro) in Ari Asters recent Hereditary being a harrowing example.

There was also a strict no doubles policy. Only the very best sequels (such as [Rec]2) have been included, and in the rare cases that an original film and its remake are both eligible, as with Ju-On: The Grudge, the more effective was chosen. Franchise horrors such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th largely did not make the grade, because familiarity has dulled their edges. Readers will also notice the absence of great, genre-straddling auteurs such as David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma and David Lynch. Ultimately the final list contains films that are actually, tangibly scary, and remain so after multiple viewings. If that disqualifies such masterpieces as Videodrome, Carrie and Mulholland Drive, so be it.

What frightens us is, of course, subjective, but even subjective responses contain patterns worth unpicking. Tricks such as exaggerated lighting and non-linear editing are common in all forms of cinema, so instead a unique system was devised to examine seven specific techniques, or scare tactics, that horror films rely on to work their dark magic.

Throughout the book, each of the seven scare tactics is represented by its own bespoke symbol. So, for example, when you see a ticking clock like this, it means Dread. The symbols appear in the text to show that a particular scare tactic is relevant to a particular scene or aspect of the film. They are also used in a summary infographic to illustrate how much each film uses each scare tactic overall. A second infographic charts the intensity and timings of the films most frightening moments. The seven scare tactics can be broken down like this