Many viewers make the mistake of describing as gratuitous anything that upsets them or their moral sensibilities. While many horror films are gratuitous, there are more aesthetic, more intellectual, pleasures to be found in the genre. The best films of the genre are not merely gratuitous but use their images to comment on our culture’s objectification of flesh. I would argue that we are drawn to images of distressed and dismembered bodies, because they help us cope with the fact that we’ve become alienated from our own bodies in the wake of rapid technological advancement. Thus, the smartest and most successful horror films ask important questions about what it is to put bodies on screen and what it is to be entertained by watching those bodies being dismantled. These films reveal something to (or about) us, something that changes who we are on a fundamental level, something that may not be immediately apparent to us, something that festers.

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Tags: Horror, Abject, Catharsis, Film