With Halloween encroaching, the interest in creepy movies is bound to multiply at local video rental stores. Some viewers like the “safe” adrenaline rush that scary movies provide, while others simply are attracted to that which most repels them. And then of course there are the die-hard horror fans that think nothing of noshing on pizza to the tune of adolescent screams and buzzing chainsaws onscreen.

In honor of those who fall into the above categories (and even those who don’t) we asked James Morrison, CMC’s associate professor of literature and film, to tell us why we’re compelled to watch what frightens us, and to share his perspective on what constitutes “scary.”

Q: What kinds of qualities do you think makes a film truly frightening? Are there any unique technical challenges facing directors of the genre, such as pacing and score?

Morrison: The three main categories of horror are possession, metamorphosis, and resurrection. Those three themes are what nearly every horror movie is about, and they mine primal fears: that our souls are not our own (and not placed in the service of the good, either!) or that we will turn into something else outside of our control; or that what is supposed to be safely past is still scarily here.
In one way or another, these three themes come back over and over in the genre.

Q: What movie, or movies, stand out for you as being particularly scary? And why?

Morrison: These are very personal choices but I’ll name one film for each theme: For “possession,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, with its terrifying implication that personality is malleable; for “metamorphosis,” Roman Polanksi’s Rosemary’s Baby, with its weird take on pregnancy as monstrosity---or metamorphosis. And for “resurrection,” the movie that scared me most in my life was a little-known classic of 1961 called The Innocents, a great film version of Henry James’ masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw.

More recent examples such as The Blair Witch Project or The Sixth Sense revisit themes in new ways.

Q: Based on your expertise, has there been a detectable evolution of what constitutes a scary film? For instance, in the 1950s, there were “camp classics,” films about lagoon monsters and giant ants. And also there were the interpretations of literary classics such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and Phantom of the Opera. In the 1970s, Rosemary’s Baby, Poltergeist, The Omen, and The Shining emerged. And then in the 1980s we moved into series films such as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street.

If you think there has been an evolvement, would you say that perhaps it’s connected to the literary world?

Morrison: Like any genre, horror goes through cycles, from the “foreign” horror movies of the 1930s---that are situated in a far locale (usually a European one)---to the 1950s cycle of mutated monster movies that express anxieties about the atomic age. For the last 20 years, a big fear in horror movies has been the rise of automated technologies, from Demon Seed, a movie about a monster computer, to Blair Witch, in which most of the horror comes from the fact that the movie was shot on digital video.

Q: Realizing you can’t speak for everyone, would you care to surmise why people are drawn to scary movies? Even if they sometimes know they’ll have to flick the lights on for a couple of days afterward?

Morrison: Horror movies, like tragedies, help people to master their fears. They can experience what they’re afraid of vicariously, without having to confront it in actuality, and then hope that will mean they have won control over it. But of course it doesn’t always work that way.

Hmmm. Anyone up for pizza and Friday the 13th?

Based on the book written by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Jonathan Demme's feature direction of Beloved helped put Oprah Winfrey's Book Club on the map in 1998. While some film critics hailed the story of a slave and her deceased daughter as hauntingly beautiful, others observed it as intensely scary.

When The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez scared the pants off viewers with a story about three students who disappear in the woods of Burkittesville, Md., while shooting a documentary about the Blair Witch. Critics prepared themselves for an onslaught of copy-cat films that -- thankfully-- never emerged.

By many standards, The Exorcist continues to be lauded as one of the frightening movies ever made. The 1973 film was directed by William Friedkin and based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, who also penned the screenplay.