Horror movies

The best age to enjoy horror movies may be the middle school years. Maybe I'm just extrapolating from my own experience, but that's an age where this material is both new and unexpected. There is an amazing number of ways to dispatch living beings from their livingness, and preadolescents can relish each and every one of them in much the same way as they can relish all the other somewhat forbidden treats of adulthood. Of course, it turns out that adulthood does not consist of one dispatched human being after another (or at least my adulthood hasn't), but you don't know that then.

There are plenty of ways to get horror into one's diet, but none better than through the movies. Horror wasn't the first thing to get filmed, but it did come up now and then in the early years. Originally it was non-American filmmakers who did the best work. Then there was Lon Chaney and the short-lived series of Universal classic talkies, and the US was in the race. Other countries, especially Italy and Japan, I think, still do it better than we do, or at least seem to have more of a taste for it, but that may just be from my own limited experience of the genre lately. After I exited those middle school years, it wasn't that I didn't watch horror anymore, but it wasn't one of my favorite genres. I literally never saw all those popular slasher pictures, for instance; I could imagine them, and that was enough. (Except, of course, for Psycho, the movie that opened the American bloodgates floodgates, but then again, Hitchcock is Hitchcock and everyone else isn't; even once in a while Hitchcock isn't, burt he comes closer than most.) My vicarious thrills were more likely to come from science fiction; Star Wars was released in 1977, to Halloween's 1978. Put me in an X-wing fighter over a haunted house any day of the week.

If you have a taste for horror, or at least want to know more about it, Fandor's Primer: Horror is an excellent guide to the genre, going back to day one. You could easily use it to create a must-see list, if you must see some horror. And if you happen to be a middle schooler, you can start cataloguing methods of dispatching your fellow human beings; after all, it's never to early to learn a useful trade.
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