So last night I got to thinking about horror movies after having a moment many a horror fan can relate to: walking down a hallway in my home that was very dark and thinking “now is when the monster grabs me.”

I entertained ideas about how I’d react. The slasher-style horror movie dictate says I scream in fear and horror, rather than surprise. The audience would do the same (or react both ways) largely because the score would tell them to. I got to thinking about horror movies without scores, and how differently so many of them would play if the score wasn’t telling people when to feel tense, when to feel relief, and so on. In short, I wondered how much more effective (and interesting) a horror movie would be without music telling us how to feel. As Mark pointed out, this is something the TV show The Wire did with great effect; the only in-story music you got (aside from the credits) was ambient.

This is something I’ve wrestled with before, in my review of The Strangers:

The problem may be systemic to this kind of horror, however. We’re meant to sink into the lives of these people and, thus, make some sense out of their apparently nonsensical actions—because they, in their heart of hearts, do not know what is coming and, like all of us in our everyday lives, are completely oblivious to true danger until it’s right on top of us. We don’t expect bad things to happen to us in familiar places, and neither do the characters. The problem is that we know they are in mortal danger from the beginning, because that’s why we’re at the movie. We are aware they are in a horror movie, and they are not.

[...]

Were this a different kind of horror movie, there might be some great tension there; instead, we’re left waiting for the first scare and then we wonder why it takes the characters so long to get with the program.

Which is, I suspect, the cause for so many “why are these characters so stupid?” complaints… right along with the characters often being written as stupid. But the problem is still real: the perceived audience expectation is quite different from the actual audience expectation. Like so:

Perceived: The audience empathizes with the normal characters and feels the terror and bewilderment as they do, slowly discovering (with growing horror) first that they are being stalked or otherwise terrorized, and then eventually the nature of the thing (or event, or what have you) stalking or terrorizing them. Essentially, the transformation from one type of story to another.

Actual: The audience has seen trailers and teasers (and in some cases online spoilers) and are aware of at least 40% of the story when they come in. They have to be lured somehow, and even if an audience member comes in relatively raw, their expectations are still colored by movie title, poster art, and genre labels. The audience is geared for the second half of the movie, and views the opening scenes—the ones meant to establish those people we’re supposed to be empathizing with—as “setup,” something to be endured.

As the years go by I find myself more interested in that first half of the story than the second, though this isn’t due to any virtue on my part. That second half only seems to go one of a few ways, and repetition bores me—unlike some horror fetishists out there, I don’t get off on seeing the beats fulfilled yet another time. I come to a movie wanting to be enlightened and entertained; show me something new, or, failing that, show me something old delivered in a new way. This shifting preference may very well put me at odds with most of what the genre has to offer—or what studios allow it to offer.

But I do see the value in these movies; if nothing else, they’re decent primers for younglings looking for an entry point to the whole of horror fiction. I simply wonder if the expectations people have for them can ever be reconciled with where those horror movies derive their horror from: that leap from the mundane into the terrible, so sudden that by the time those everyday folks have caught on, it’s far too late for them.