My Erratic History with HORROR...and My Sudden Renewed Interest in the Genre

As a kid of the 90s, I was an avid viewer of the iconic cable channel Nickelodeon and one of the more popular shows on the channel at the time was Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Modeled around a group who calls themselves "The Midnight Society", they all sit around a firepit at night and share a scary story. A lot of these episodes are quite cheesy to look back on, but at the time, there were a few episodes that had moments that truly tapped into my fear of death, ghosts, and cemeteries.

Even to this day, I would argue that the opening credits are surprisingly chilling.

Maybe you'll agree? Look below:

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I do think that Are You Afraid of the Dark?, despite not being my favorite show on the network, did fuel an interest in scary stories for me. This extended into what would be my growing love of movies in my pre-teen years in which I discovered old classics like Frankenstein or Dracula but also newer films like The Sixth Sense which came out when I was 11 years old and at a time where I still did have an immense fear of the idea of death.

My history in the 20 years since has been rather erratic.

As a genre, I feel like horror gets both a bad rap...but I can also fully understand why it does. I just wish that people were more able to acknowledge when a horror film succeeds on a high artistic level rather than instantly disregard film because of the stigma that horror films have.

I say this as someone who has been biased against horror for a while and I have been guilty of doing this not just for horror films, but other popcorn genres like Action/Sci-Fi/the Marvel Universe. 

There was actually a time when I would've said that Horror was my favorite genre...but one major factor turned me away from that in my still relatively new obsession with film as an art form.

One could deem it as a level of pretentious opinions, but I did develop a strong affinity to indie cinema and foreign cinema in my teenage years and took on more of an artsy snob persona towards my opinion of films and what I felt were worthy of immense praise or accolades.

Keep in mind, I was a teenager/college student throughout the 2000s, so this was an era of film that I was truly witnessing firsthand and developing my own opinions on without much influence on what the rhetoric towards films from even the 90s might have had.

During the 00s, horror was mostly dominated by the likes of films such as Saw or Hostel. While I did like the first Saw film, I can't say I had any real desire to see the saga continue with its sequels.

In the case of something like Hostel, I loathed it and a lot of the "torture porn" sub-genre of horror films from the very moment I saw them. 

Slasher films are also the same way...but even some of the biggest names of that subgenre were truly very good films like the original Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

While Elm Street was quite gory, its themes/plot involving a villain killing victims within their dreams was a compelling story. 

Halloween was remarkable in that you truly didn't see much, if any, gore. A lot of what made that film work was simply the truly tense and eerie atmosphere that John Carpenter created...and the subsequent sequels and copycats like Friday the 13th, opted more for gore and a lot of stereotypical plot devices to point where they all seemed practically interchangeable.

Once we hit the 2010s, I would say we began to see signs of a horror renaissance. 

Movies like The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, Get Out, Hereditary, The Lighthouse, Midsommar, and Us all managed to get a lot of attention from film critics/fanatics or even managed to get some form of Oscar buzz (which Get Out only truly ended up benefitting from).

With the big snub of Toni Collette for her truly chilling work in Hereditary and then a snub the following year for the dual work of Lupita Nyong'o in Us, many bemoaned the horror bias that Hollywood seems to have when it comes to viewing horror as a potentially prestigious genre.

Even when it comes to honoring horror films, only one horror film has ever won the Oscar for Best Picture: The Silence of the Lambs.

Even that film had a very strong dramatic weight as it was also essentially a detective story and a psychological thriller as Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling is dealing with a lot of emotional traumas from her childhood.

So where exactly am I going with this?

Honestly, I had something of an interesting diversion over the last week or so that made me think a lot more about the idea of "horror" as a genre and a storytelling devise.

Via YouTube, I had come across a couple of random videos that were real-life creepy incidents of odd moments captured on the Ring Cameras of people's doorbells. 

They proved to be a bit chilling to say the least, but I noticed that two different YouTube channels popped up as posting videos like these:

Mr. Nightmare

and

Chilling Scares

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The first one I noticed was one by the latter channel and it was entitled "Three Downright Disturbing Theatre Horror Stories".

At first, I was uncertain about the content. I wasn't sure if these were incidents that all happened to the poster (which would be hilariously unfortunate for them), if they were real, or if they were fictional.

After looking into it more, I noticed that both of these channels ask for people to send in real-life horrific encounters that happened to them which would then lead the channel creator to read the stories aloud along with various creepy images, music, and sound effects to add to the atmosphere. 

I am someone who has never scared easily, especially by most horror films.

I do admire films that can make me feel very uneasy with how it presents itself...one such example of that was Robert Eggars' The Witch.

However, the thing that works so strongly about these two particular YouTube channels are the creators. These are two guys who have to read off stories that didn't happen to them and be able to find their nuances. A good voice on a YouTube channel is basically crucial...I have definitely turned off several videos on topics I might have been interested in simply because the quality of the video/audio was too harsh or raw to deal with.

The creators of Mr. Nightmare and Chilling Scares managed to pull me in because they both mastered a very chilling tone that can put me into a sense of unease rather quickly.

I was admittedly very impressed by that fact, and also amazed at how several of the videos managed to make me feel paranoid at even the slightest sound I would hear within my apartment or at my office.

In fact, one morning last week, I was alone in the kitchen doing my normal early morning routine when people aren't normally in the office yet. 

And then...someone did show up...and them walking in startled me to the point where I had to tell them what I was listening to so that they didn't think I was simply so easy to startle.

I am going to include two examples from each channel so you can check them out for yourself if you may have an interest:

From Mr. Nightmare, here are:

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From Chilling Scares, we have:

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I have tried listening to a couple of other channels, but so far, none of them have been able to pull me in the way that these two have. Of the two, Mr. Nightmare has the biggest following of nearly 6 MILLION subscribers and he has been posting n4ow for roughly 7 years.

Chilling Scares is a lot newer, but he has managed to net nearly 400k subscribers despite only being around for a year. It makes sense because he so obviously uses Mr. Nightmare as a template even down to a lot of the same vocal stylistics.

I would actually argue that Chilling Scares might have the creepier voice, but Mr. Nightmare might be better at finding the lighter moments within his narrations when it is needed. Both are truly remarkable at being able to place you within the world of the story...and at times, they will throw in visual jump scares that even made me rather on edge to the point where I didn't even want to look at the screen for a while.

So, to wrap this up, I guess this sort of became a way for me to just let out some of my feelings on Horror as a genre and how amazed I was that two YouTubers were able to manage to give me more of a thrill and a sense of unease than many horror films I grew up around in my youth.

I also feel like it gives me a stronger desire to root for and keep an eye out for upcoming horror films that may push the envelope in the sense that it may get enough acclaim to be viewed as art worthy of high critical adoration.

And yes, as I often say, awards aren't everything...but it would be thrilling to see a movie along the lines of The Witch be able to find its way to the Oscars podium.

However, as we often see, the Oscars often give us horror in the form of their actual choices.

Crash? Green Book? Coda? 

Excuse me while I go hide under my blanket.