What Is a Horror Movie, Anyway?

In this month's Dark Narratives: Why Jurassic Park is totally a horror, but Jurassic World isn't. Plus, some hot new releases for your summertime enjoyment!

Jul 15, 2022

It’s July. Past the midpoint of the year, and here in the U.S. at least you can tell it’s July because, despite Independence Day clearly having passed, every night neighbors fire off bottle rockets for the apparent sole purpose of irritating my dog. Or is that part just me?

Anyway. Grab yourself a cool beverage and get settled in, because we’re talking summer blockbusters today.

But first:

June’s writing guide is live! This one is about Cures for Writer’s Block, with some discussion of the underlying psychology of blocks. If you’ve struggled in the past with getting unstuck, it may be because you’re treating the wrong type of block.

Strange Horizons is calling for volunteer first readers. This position is the front line of submissions, deciding which stories should be passed along to editors for consideration. If you’re a writer, there really is nothing as eye-opening and educational as reading slush, so if you’ve got some spare time, I really recommend trying this out.
Eric LaRocca is an unstoppable force of nature, as evidenced by the pre-orders now being available for his next book They Were Here Before Us. You absolutely need to click through to view the cover on this one because it is spectacularly gorgeous.
Ghost Orchid Press is accepting submissions for erotic horror inspired by fairytales for an upcoming anthology, and I think that’s something really special. They’re also accepting novel submissions through the end of August.

If you stick around here for a while, you’ll see that I am frequently very concerned with categorizing things. I semi-jokingly refer to myself as a “literary taxonomist” because I find it interesting to trace the lineage of tropes and see where different works fall on the family tree. Because all work is in conversation with everything else.

So when I say that I’m interested in the question, “What makes a horror story, well, horror” I’m not approaching it from a gatekeeper perspective. I am genuinely curious whether there are lines that can be drawn around genres and what conclusions we can draw from works that fall on either side of a fuzzy barrier.

Which is why I think that Jurassic Park and Jurassic World make such an interesting side-by-side comparison.

One Franchise, Two Very Different Installments

I’m choosing Jurassic World for this as opposed to any of the other Jurassic Park sequels because World, more than any Jurassic movie, feels like a reboot. The broad strokes of the plot of both films are basically the same: a theme park type attraction filled with genetically engineered dinosaurs becomes a death trap when those same dinosaurs escape from their containment.

So how do they differ? And what’s significant about those differences?

The Beginning

Jurassic Park opens with a tense prologue sequence showing the grisly death of a character by an as-yet-unseen threat. This is a classic horror movie trope. We see it of course in Spielberg's earlier creature feature, Jaws. But think also of the opening in Scream. Or in You're Next. Or, for that matter, Halloween. How many slashers begin by introducing a throw-away character (especially in a dark, tense atmosphere), murdering them, then cutting away to a bright daytime scene to introduce the real protagonist?

It's so common that it's the first beat on my horror beat sheet: The World Is Not As It Seems. It's that essential scene early in the film that establishes, oh yeah, this is a horror movie. It recontextualizes everything that happens afterward. Because you, the viewer, know that the characters are walking into mortal peril long before they even realize that something bad will happen. That dramatic irony sets up tension and unease.

Jurassic World opens with a brief glimpse at a dinosaur hatching from an egg before introducing us straightaway to a couple of the major characters in the film. The tone out the gate of the film is one of excitement and wonder, undercut by a kind of polished corporate hubris. Which perfectly serves the theme of the film -- but makes it tonally very different.

But it's fine, there are other successful horror movies that skip the killer prologue. What else is going on?

The Structure

I have a philosophy that genre is a function more of story structure than aesthetics. Almost without fail, Jurassic Park hews close to a classic horror structure. Ignore the dinosaurs here for a moment and tell me if this sounds familiar:

A diverse hodge-podge of people are drawn to a remote location, which becomes isolated and impossible to escape due to external circumstances (like the weather). In the dark, an extremely powerful threat systematically stalks and kills them off one by one. The heroes who survive are able to do so by hiding or running away; they never really have any power in the situation. They manage to escape, but the evil isn't completely defeated - the killer gets the last word!

That's classic haunted house stuff, right? That's your basic cabin-in-the-woods slasher formula!

Compare that to:

A man with a very specific set of skills is contracted to complete a difficult job. The job goes sideways due to unforseen complications, imperiling a bunch of unrelated side characters/the public at large as the hero relentlessly pursues the villain through a number of increasingly complicated set pieces in increasingly intense action sequences until a final confrontation with both spectacle and heart.

That's not a horror movie, that's an action movie! That's Taken. That's John Wick. That’s Jurassic World!

(I will concede that Jurassic World does in fact owe some of its lineage to the Japanese kaiju film, which is an entirely different formula than the classic Western haunted house/cabin in the woods slasher. The question of whether a kaiju is technically a horror movie, and whether Jurassic World actually qualifies or simply borrows liberally from it, is one that requires additional study and a separate essay).

The Characters

Aside from the structural differences in the plot, the character archetypes and their roles in the story are different, too.

Jurassic Park does not have the classic slasher collection of jock, virgin, slut, scholar and fool, but that’s hardly a deal-breaker. What it does have are some very familiar other horror archetypes including:

1.) The guy who delivers the warning that goes unheeded (Muldoon)

2.) The patriarch who refuses to believe the threat is real until it’s too late (Hammond)

3.) The seemingly crazy or out-of-touch mystic who was right all along (Malcolm)

Most significantly, though, is the fact that nobody in Jurassic Park is in any way empowered against the threat. The film makes a point of making everyone as vulnerable as possible. Aside from their starting values of vulnerability, the film quickly weakens its strongest characters: Malcolm is incapacitated by injury, Sattler is weakened by an injury, and Grant is paired off with two kids who slow him down and give him an objective to protect.

By comparison, the characters in Jurassic World are mostly uniquely qualified to survive. Chris Pratt’s dinosaur-wrangler, Owen Grady, is introduced as not just a leading dinosaur expert, but a guy with practical field experience, street smarts, action hero reflexes, etc. (whether you find these traits insufferable is a separate matter). Claire doesn’t have his practical expertise, but she does have an intimate knowledge of the park and everything that goes on in it — she’s practically running the place from her position under the big boss.

There are a pair of useless kids in this movie, too, but their function is different. They are separate from the hero throughout the first two thirds of the film, so they don’t act as a limitation. They’re ostensibly a complication for the heroes to go rescue, but that doesn’t have any real effect on either party — the kids manage pretty well on their own, and don’t particularly slow the heroes down once they’re all reunited.

When thinking of the “action vs horror” divide, I like to think of it in video game terms. There are a ton of videogames about, say, shooting zombies. But the presence of zombies and scary visuals in a game does not make it a horror game, necessarily, and certainly not a survival horror game. To make a survival horror game, you have to take the gun out of the player’s hand and force them to hide, sneak around, or run away. Or if they have a gun, finding ammunition has to be so difficult that they must measure their resources very carefully.

Horror requires impossibly long odds. Once your heroes have a fighting chance — even an unlikely one — you’re moving out of horror territory. Surviving a horror story almost always requires cunning, luck, moral purity, and maybe a personal transformation.

Tone

Last, but certainly not least, is the question of tone.

Part of what makes Jurassic Park so memorable and iconic is the way it balances tones of terror and wonder. A lot of that movie (helped tremendously of course by its swelling score) is full to the brim with hope, joy, triumph, wonder. Its peaks are high. But when it’s scary, it is terrifying. There are some absolutely horrifying moments in there. When Ellie Sattler descends into a dark labyrinth to find the circuit breakers and cycle on the power, it’s pure horror. The tension is palpable. The moment when she breathes a sigh of relief only to discover her rescuer was actually a torn-off arm? Haunting. The scene where the t-rex is coming after the kids in the jeep? The close-up of the eye peering through the window? The stuff of nightmares.

All of the kill sequences in Jurassic Park are paced like horror kills. They give you build-up of tension and anticipation of what will happen, cut away to let your imagination fill in the blanks, and sometimes linger on the emotional journey of the victim (like our late Dennis Nedry).

Jurassic World on the other hand is guided primarily by the Rule of Cool. Most of the deaths occur as escalations of cool, badass spectacles. We don’t spend any time building them up or allowing tension to increase, for the most part. There are a couple of tense scenes — the kids being trapped and toyed with in their hamster ball, the unusually gruesome death of the babysitter — but even those are tonally weird, torn between being comedic and horrific. The movie is at its best when it’s allowed to be unapologetically badass, like when the dinosaurs are fighting each other at the end. Which ultimately tracks with the identity of the film in the action genre (which is, after all, primarily a genre of escapism, self-insert power fantasy, cathartic violence, and feel-good spectacle).

In Conclusion…

It’s not a big surprise that Jurassic Park would work so well as a classic horror film. Twenty years earlier, Spielberg himself would help to dramatically rewrite the legacy of horror with Jaws, and the two films communicate with one another across time. They have a lot more in common with each other than Jurassic Park and Jurassic World do, frankly.

After all, both Jaws and Jurassic Park have men of science cast in heroic roles; a looming threat that doesn’t make itself fully known until we’ve seen it in action several times; isolation and desperate odds. Jaws straddles the horror line a bit more, since the characters are still somewhat more empowered against the monster and it ends on a more triumphant final note (well, Jurassic Park ends triumphantly as well…for the t-rex).

All three films deal, in their own way, with themes of hubris (and, to varying extents, toxic masculinity).

I actually don’t hate Jurassic World as much as a lot of fans do. I don’t think it’s as good of a movie, and it’s certainly not a historic masterpiece like Jurassic Park, but I don’t think it needs to be. And I actually really enjoy some of what it’s doing with the franchise, like its cynicism and the way it reflects certain aspects of mid-twenty-teens consumer culture. (the sequels are a different matter entirely).

But the question here has never been one about quality. It’s been about genre. And I think I’ve drawn a compelling case for how to draw the boundary lines between horror and action, even in films with surface-level similarities.

Thoughts? Drop me a comment and tell me where I went wrong in my analysis!

Notes in the Margins of Nightmares

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