The Walking Dead, which premiered Sunday, is one of the few shows — along with American Horror Story, which premieres tonight — that’s doing horror right, with harrowing mental and physical decay.
Horror is the most horrendously misrepresented genre in modern entertainment. Thanks to films such as Twilight (which supplants bits of horror trope into pure fantasy storytelling) and the Saw series (which pretends torture-porn is the only form of horror), many viewers believe these extremes make up the entirety of the genre.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
Horror is all about atmosphere and intensity. Good scary stories don’t just trigger your flight or fight response. Good horror tugs at your intelligence and forces you to question your reality, all while instilling palatable, exhausting and enticing discomfort (Audition, Martyrs, etc).
With this in mind, I think we should be complaining about the current state of horror television — we do need more high-quality programs — but many people are complaining for the wrong reasons.
Yes, our airwaves are flooded with stories of vampires necking with werewolves and witches humping translucent demon souls, but these shows aren’t horror; they are lighthearted fantasies.
Shows such as The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle are inexplicably linked to scary stories simply because they share lineage with Universal Studios’ monsters of the 1930s and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (sorry, Dracula).
What people seem to be confused about is the difference between these two genres. True Blood — which grows more abysmally stupid with every episode — has had nary a scary moment during its entire run. Just because a show focuses on vampires and other creatures doesn’t automatically make it “horror.”
Right from the drawing board, these programs have no intent of being frightening. They are effectively the same sort of sex fantasy people go for on the dime store bookrack: a dangerous man cradling a one-dimensional virgin.
The kind of horror television needs — and gets in microscopic doses from The Walking Dead and bits of American Horror Story — is the truly, psychologically terrifying.
The Walking Dead has zombies, sure, but the truly frightening aspect of the show is the hopelessness of the cast’s continuous fight for survival. Why go on? Why is living in their world better than death? Beyond these thematic questions, season three (which premiered Sunday) promises to give us the most terrifying sight of all — the moral corruption of the living.
Even American Horror Story, for all its boundary-breaking basic cable sexcapades (can you say crying while masturbating?), has a fair amount to offer in terms of psychological horror. Co-creator Ryan Murphy has even set the second season of the long-form anthology series in a mental asylum, promising no supernatural creatures despite the first season’s focus on ghosts.
If you want to complain about horror, beg for more programming, not less. Most of what we have to watch can’t even be remotely defined as scary, and the few lukewarm shows in the middle aren’t helping — new on-the-bubble ABC drama 666 Park Avenue is lame, and The CW’s Supernatural still feels like Buffy the Vampire Slayer-lite.
Don’t be dissuaded, though. Horror has a place on TV and we just need to get past our current cultural obsession with teen vamps and big-budget shock-scares to get the genre back on track. For inspiration, just look at some of the great horror shows of old, from The X-Files to HBO’s classic anthology series Tales from the Crypt to a great majority of The Twilight Zone.
The silly fantasies are free to find their own way out, but we need our horror. A few more great shows could bring this genre back from the dead.
