Why Horror Is the Movie Genre That Defines Generation X
Our feral childhoods were anything but child's play
I’m a horror film lover, a scary movie aficionado who isn’t too proud or too pretentious to admit when I’ve been frightened witless. Every horror sub-genre provides a uniquely cathartic experience, whether it’s watching Ellen Ripley survive in the 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien or witnessing Chris Washington connect the dots and Get Out in the psychological suspense horror masterpiece of 2017. I admire the craftsmanship that goes into creating fictional deaths and how the filmmakers use sound, color, and editing to stir up a sense of dread. While watching the characters use their strengths and smarts to outwit the villains and survive, I imagine if I would make the same decisions in their shoes (I wouldn’t be stupid enough to drop my weapon after knocking out the killer, that’s for damn sure). I especially enjoy the unique story concepts that often communicate allegory.
Nancy was the OG woke girl
But I hated being frightened when I was growing up.
Unfortunately for my friends, I was the kid who refused to go on the terrifying roller coasters, who wouldn’t watch scary movies, and hated being the seeker during games of hide-and-seek because inevitably there was a kid who had to jump out of the closet and yell “Boo!” just before I found them. I even avoided particular houses while trick-or-treating. You know the ones, the houses that had a scarecrow slumped over on the porch swing and as soon as you approach the door it suddenly jumps up and scares the living daylights out of you. After the first time that happened if there was anything near the walkway or door that looked like it could come alive, I was like “Nopety nope nope nope, you go right ahead, Sherry, I’m staying here on the sidewalk”.
Even a king-sized Snickers wasn’t worth walking by this guy
That all changed when I hit 19 years old. I don’t know why that was the magic number. Maybe it was because I had survived brain surgery to remove a brain tumor the year before, or maybe it was due to my interest in psychology and all the reading about psychopaths I was doing at the time, combined with my love for cinema. All I know is I was working at a video store and decided to finally rent all the classics, curious to see what all the hoopla was about. I started with The Exorcist, The Omen, and Carrie, all binged over a weekend. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare On Elm Street, and The Wicker Man quickly followed. Then I binged the Hitchcock films Vertigo, The Birds, and Psycho. Over the course of a couple of years, I caught up by watching everything from the 1932 film Freaks and the 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead to early ‘90s films like Candyman and Misery.
By the time Gen X was growing up, the art of combining suspense and the illusion of gore with compelling visual storytelling had improved since the days of Universal Pictures’ monster flicks. We were lucky to witness in real time the Golden Age of Horror Cinema, watching in the theater the best scary movies of the last 50 years.
It’s no coincidence that the slasher genre rose to prominence in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Many will argue that Psycho ignited the trend in 1960, and while we do see Norman Bates literally slash up a couple of victims onscreen, the film doesn’t fit into the category since he doesn’t stalk them. He takes out people who’ve come to him under various circumstances, he’s not a serial murderer who hunts his prey. This is why 1978’s Halloween gets credit as the first slasher horror movie, illustrated by all the similar films that flooded theaters afterward. There’s a common thread between them—besides the cliches we know and love—that made me realize why slasher flicks took off when GenX was growing up: the teenagers and young adults are most often completely on their own, fending for themselves against monsters.
In Child’s Play (1988), Andy wakes up and makes himself breakfast (as well as a mess) while his mom is still asleep in the opening sequence, and later she doesn’t believe him when he explains he thinks his doll is responsible for the wild shit that’s going on. Andy has to fight Chucky by himself even after the doll with the killer soul reveals himself to Andy’s mom. In A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), the parents don’t listen to Nancy and her friends when they explain they’re being terrorized in their sleep by the same creepy dude, leaving the teens to figure it all out on their own. Nancy’s mom gets props for at least taking her to a sleep clinic for evaluation, but her father takes forever to help Nancy after she’d been screaming for him out her window in a later scene, representing how a lot of Gen-Xers had parents who weren’t reliable. The 1976 Stephen King adaptation Carrie probably has one of the best examples: her mother is an abusive religious nut whose parental neglect is so extreme that when Carrie gets her period she has no clue a normal biological function is occurring.
In slasher movies, young adults alone on a campground, on a road trip, or in a house symbolize the fear we felt as children when our protectors were missing. Given that it was older generations making the first slasher movies, it’s safe to assume many of them grew up neglected, too. But the films became popular among GenX audiences the most for a reason: we could relate to the feelings of isolation and the fear of boogeymen from being latchkey kids during the serial killer decades.
GenX screenwriter Kevin Williamson made the 1996 movie Scream, a satirical nod to the slasher films of our youth that also happened to be meta in the best way possible. Because I’d spent the previous years gorging on horror films, I was grateful I got every reference, every joke, and could correctly answer the killer’s trivia quiz in the opening scenes.
The true horror was that she didn’t know Mrs. Voorhees was the killer in Friday the 13th amirite
Like the Final Girls (or Final Guys) of horror, Gen-Xers overcame life’s obstacles through grit, resilience, and pure adrenaline. We’re not called the Fuck Around and Find Out Generation for nothing.
Homeboys fucked around and found out Erin wasn’t next after all
Of all the GenX horror, I also feel that Nightmare on Elm Street is the pinnacle film that established the GenX era of horror movies. And not surprisingly, We Craven came back around and put a final punctuation on that era with Scream.