So in my most recent blogpost I talked about the horror movie we created for our horror unit to try to answer the driving question of the unit: How does horror reflect and comment on our society? And while if you read my post about the movie you’d know we didn’t succeed in answering it, through the unit we did answer it in other ways.

This unit was really cool, we got to watch horror movies, read horror novels and we even got to go on a field school to a haunted house! Leading up to Halloween, and in the weeks after, our class was all horror, all the time. We even got the watch Halloween on Halloween.

We actually did learn quite a bit about horror, what makes it horrifying and how it is a reflection of our society, despite not being able to prove our learning through our film.

One of the first things we learned about in the unit was the The Elements of Aversion, described by Elizabeth Barrette. We ended up using these elements throughout the rest of the unit, up until the last horror assignment.

Along with that we watched both The Exorcist and Halloween (1978), and had to write reflections on the movies and what made them horrifying. In these reflections we could talk about what creates the fear in the movies, the motivation for the killings, the styles and techniques used when making the movie and the historical context. Along with that we could compare the movies to Frankenstein and talk about how they used horror in similar ways. In these reflections we were expected to go deeper than how the movies made us feel and what our opinions on them were. They weren’t movie reviews, but rather short analyses used to prove our understand of horror.

Halloween Reflection

Along with these analyses our other writing assignment was a synthesis essay between Bird Box by Josh Malerman and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I honestly enjoyed writing this essay because of the schedule. The first step was to create either a chart, or a vent diagram, or whatever we wanted really to organize our thoughts on the novels. We were given an outline that we could fill out as homework. In this outline we were to include our thesis, points and quotes to back up our points. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make sure my outline was ready so when it came to writing the essay I would be ready. Then came the actually writing. We were given three class periods to write it and weren’t supposed to write anything outside of class. This challenged me to write quickly and not get hung up on one part for too long, but timed writes are always good practice. There was nothing stopping us from writing outside of class, and doing that only hurt ourselves, so I stuck to writing in the given class time. In the end my essay was decent, and I successfully synthesized Bird Box and Frankenstein.

part of my chart, comparing the 2 novels

First body paragraph of my essay

So those were our main writing assignments this unit, but I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about the field study and the haunted house I mentioned earlier. My class went to Seattle, only for a night, to go to the new horror exhibit at the Museum of Pop Culture, along with a haunted house, Georgetown Morgue.

The horror exhibit was really good. There were different sections, each talking about various genres within the horror genre. For example, there was a room all on the history of vampires, another about zombies, monsters and more. Along with that there were little spaces each playing different videos which were interviews with famous horror directors, writers, producers etc. and they were talking about the horror genre.

The Haunted House was really fun! I found if I told myself it wasn’t real it wasn’t scary, but if I let myself believe and get immersed in the experience then it was quite terrifying. That’s the thing with horror, you can just remind yourself it isn’t real, but where’s the fun in that? You get out of it what you take into it, so to enjoy horror you have to allow yourself to be scared.

In this blog post I’ve talked about what we did to learn, but I still haven’t fully answered the driving question of “How does horror reflect and comment on our society?” Horror reflects and comments on our society in many different ways. The horror genre shifts as the fears of society shift, but all in all, the horror genre is a mirror of our society. Horror utilizes societal fears to create the most horrifying product possible. Think about it, why would we find horror horrifying if it didn’t reflect society at all.

I challenge you, next time you watch a horror movie, think about what it’s commenting on society. Think about why you find it horrifying and what it says about our societal fears. Thinking about that will add a new depth to the genre you never before realize existed.