Editor’s note: This story originally ran on Playboy.com in 2020 and was written by Tori Lynn Adams.
His eyes were locked on me. I didn’t dare move a muscle.
Once he turned his attention away, I moved with urgency toward the nearest receptacle I could find. I swiftly trapped the spider underneath it. Things were under my control, and yet I still felt terrified of the unknown—what was the spider doing in there? Plotting his revenge? All day I felt a nervous itch to lift the canister and face my fear. I avoided it for hours until I finally lifted it and smooshed the eight-legged beast.
As petrified as I was to find a sizable black widow spider in my apartment, there was something thrilling about the whole escapade—especially considering how mundane life has been during the pandemic. There is a unique pleasure we derive from the sensation of being afraid. It’s part of the reason horror films are so visceral and emotionally effective.
I became all too aware of this when I began taking courses on horror films my senior year of college. My homework usually consisted of some insightful readings and a handful of horror films. I quickly found that as spine-chilling as the films were, they were also quite cathartic. The anticipation I experienced while watching the films was almost more unbearable than anything that could actually happen on screen. I also found that some of the most terrifying scenes were actually the most pleasurable to watch. When Marion gets stabbed to death in the 1960 classic Psycho, the camera eroticized the shots of her bare skin as she moans orgasmically and collapses to the ground. We are called upon to be frightened and sexually stimulated at the same time.
According to film scholar Linda Williams, horror is one of the three types of film considered a “body genre,” along with melodrama and porn. Each genre demands a physical response, whether it’s screaming, crying or orgasming—or, in the case of some horror films, all three. Consequently, films that straddle all three genres are some of the most emotionally and physically impactful movies you will ever watch. But as powerful as these films are, they have their limitations.
Aside from porn films that were distributed to underground theaters and largely unregulated in their early days, any and all films that were going to be shown in popular theater chains had to abide by a strict set of rules regulating how sex was depicted on screen. For horror films to reach a wide audience and still explore sexuality, directors and screenwriters often bent the rules by subtly weaving in depictions of sex or painting sexuality in a negative light to please industry leaders and avoid censorship. “During the days of the Hays Production Code, from 1930 to 1968, representations of sexuality were censored but a lot of violence wasn’t,” says Morgan F. Woolsey, my former professor and a current lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In response, film directors came up with ways to connote sexuality without depicting it directly. For example, you could have a vampire seducing a woman to drink her blood.” As a result, horror films often encourage viewers to both fear and crave the action on screen.
When you feel horny and horrified at the same time, it’s natural for the body to go into overdrive to process the competing emotions. Our emotions are primal, so although our bodies subconsciously know how to react to any given scenario, our brains may take some time to catch up. Horror films blur the line between fear and desire and cause us to respond in a more extreme manner.
To further complicate things, film directors often manipulate the gaze of their camera so the audience can relate to both the victims and the killers at different points in the film. The experience ranges from masochistic to sadistic depending on the gaze of the camera and the relationship viewers have to the people on screen. “The horror film allows audiences to be on both sides of this power and to move flexibly from one position to the other,” Woolsey says. “There’s something very BDSM-esque about that.”
Perhaps one of the more obvious ways power is employed on screen is in vampire films. From Dracula to Edward Cullen, vampires have often been portrayed as powerful entities whose sensual nature attracts women to their demise. The same is true for the vampires in the 1983 flick The Hunger, starring David Bowie, Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. It is seemingly impossible for mortal characters to resist the charms of the vampires they meet, but giving in to their desires always leads to a power struggle where violence, sometimes shown quite subtly, is inevitable.
Almost all horror films tap into our twisted sense of desire even if it isn’t in the most obvious way. “Some of the classic slashers, like Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, may appear to be devoid of sexuality, but this is just because actual sex is completely sublimated through violence,” Woolsey points out.
Take Jaws for example. Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster had people flocking from the beaches to the theaters, time and again. People were scared to go swimming during the summer of 1975, but they made repeat visits to theaters. The experience was simply too enthralling to resist. When John Williams’s three-note theme begins and the shark approaches the boat, you can’t help but brace yourself for the inevitable attack. Each time the shark swims away and lets them off the hook, you relax—but only briefly. You get tenser and tenser until finally the shark attacks and your expectations are met. Sound familiar? It’s probably not too unlike your sexual climaxes.
You would be hard-pressed to find a horror film that doesn’t tap into this uncanny relationship between our fears and fantasies. “There’s an endless variety of eroticism in horror, just like there’s an endless variety in what people find erotic,” Woolsey argues. By tapping into that curious dichotomy, horror films demand our attention and force us to respond physically and emotionally.
In the real world, we are forced to abide by laws and social customs, but when we are plugged into a good horror film we can explore any and all taboos in a socially acceptable and safe 90-minute window, and come out the other side horrified, relieved and, if we’re lucky, sexually satisfied.