The horror, the horror

In casual conversation, you'll sometimes hear someone say, "So I saw a horror last Saturday night."

In my experience, people who like horror don't use this expression. Maybe it's because people who like horror appreciate that the phrase "a horror" is woefully inadequate to the purpose of describing something with as much nuance and variety as horror.

Think about it: if someone said in the same casual conversation, "So I drank a wine last Saturday night," your immediate response would be to ask, "What kind?"

So it goes with horror. The type matters. A horror short story is different from a horror novel, which is different from a horror film. When executed skilfully, each offers a unique frisson of grim pleasure. And even when executed poorly, each can offer a distinctive pleasure, kind of like the shitty wine everyone at the party has to taste because they're curious.

So then, what exactly was this thing the person saw last Saturday night? Was it a horror film they saw in a theatre—this is what such people usually mean—or was it something they watched on TV? Was it something they saw online, like one of those beheading clips? (These have already become so common that they have lost much of their power to horrify.)

Or was it something more immediate, something that happened right in front of them, something that shook loose their most closely held and comforting beliefs about human goodness like rotten apples from an axe-struck tree?

Nope. Inevitably, it was just a horror film. And typically not even a good one.

What's interesting is that people who don't like horror also tend not to use this expression. Maybe it's because they haven't seen enough horror films that they would ever utter an expression of such vulgar familiarity as "a horror."

I suspect that the kind of person who says, "I saw a horror last Saturday night" is neither a horror fan nor a horror hater. The vagueness of expression is probably nothing more than a symptom of a certain vagueness of existence. This kind of person is just someone who goes to see movies. They don't know much, care much or think much about what they go to see, before or after. The horror film they saw last Saturday night could as easily have been the romantic comedy or the action flick playing next door in the multiplex.

That kind of person horrifies me.