In the end, when all the buildings have been burned to the ground and sky is forever hidden behind the dust of humanity’s retreat, there will be two things left:  cockroaches and scary movies.  Film is a great centerpiece to contemporary society.  Since its inception to popular culture, film has existed on opposite ends of the same spectrum.  It has helped people to escape the harsh bite of reality waiting just outside the theater doors – while garnering some kind of other worldly power to keep the troubles of common man from ever entering the lobby.  But film has, at the same time, been demonized and protested - much in the way politics are.  It, in that sense, harnesses that same other worldly power to conjure great emotion and reaction from its viewers - a power that, in many cases, seeks to destroy it and, in many cases, succeeds.  So I guess the real question is: how does this specifically pertain to horror films?

The way I see it is that while film is very powerful, there are two genres that are inherent to its existence:  comedy and horror.  It is part of the human condition, just part of our basic chemical make-up that we as people will always have the desire to 1) laugh, and 2) seek danger or feel danger’s presence beside us – or, as most commonly expressed, we need to be scared.  The problem here is that comedy is disposable.  As comedy has evolved over the years, each movement that has been spawned from it has extinguished just as fast as its ignition.  Vaudeville, slapstick, gross-out – all phases of the comedic condition which have passed or will pass in spite of itself.  Comedy has cheapened with the decline of humanity’s collected intelligence in order to meet the needs of its audience and thus reducing the genre to its most base form.  Horror is horror.  It has never been compromised by itself nor will it ever be because horror is the only real genre that has no set of aesthetic requirements and therefore will not judged by its respective audience against said requirements.  No other genre of film has the kind of community or culture that surrounds horror.  This is exactly what makes horror stronger than any other kind of movie.

Not only does community define horror but so does heritage.  There is no genre older than that of horror.  It actually could be argued that the first film ever was a horror film.  Georges Melies’ 1896 film Le Manoir du diable (translation:  The House of the Devil) became the first film to run over a minute - clocking in at two minutes long.  House of the Devil precedes such critical works as the Lumiere’s Voyage to the Moon (which Melies actually starred in), Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, and the invention of another essential piece of filmic technology, Edison’s Kinescope.  More horror films would be soon to follow including filmic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (of which there were three film adapts from 1908 to 1913), F.W. Murnau’s 1920 birth-of-the-vampire classic Nosferatu, and my personal favorite (which I will argue is the first zombie flick ever) 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – which is single-handedly responsible for the now commonly used twist made most popular by the ending of David Fincher’s film adapt of Fight Club (y’know, the whole “the protagonist literally is the antagonist” thing).

The problem is that while the horror film stands as the oldest time-honored cinematic tradition, it is looked upon by main stream society as something taboo.  Horror is often likened to porn in the way that it is something that society has conditioned you to believe is wrong, yet your deepest animal urges – which Freud referred to as “the id” - draws you only closer to it.  Because it is considered to be “wrong” (whatever the hell that means) there is the inherent desire to explore it – and that’s exactly what I do here at Sine-matic Arts 101.  Horror is art and deserves to be analyzed as such.  Here I will discuss the history of horror, current trends in the genre and, hell, just talk about the simple pleasures… like blood (there’s something I think we can all get down on!).  So I hope you’ll join me in my future explorations of the genre that no one can resist enjoying – the horror film.