On Horror Movies

As it's October, a lot of my friends have been requesting that we have movie nights and watch Horror movies.

Most recently we watched Most recently we've watched Halloween. Before that, Scream. Before that, You're Next, and before that, Insidious.

Which means by now it's become a bit of a running joke that whenever somebody suggests we watch a horror movie, I start to groan.

This is not untrue. I try my best to hold back that impulse, but it's slipped out, probably more often than it should. My friends are awesome and I don't wanna bring things down with a bad attitude. I dislike horror movies, but it should be no big deal.

But that's the thing.

I don't just dislike horror movies.

I loathe them.

Which sounds like a fun blog. So here we go:

Three Reasons Why Horror Movies Are Completely Reprehensible

1) Baby Formula

     Everyone's heard the jokes that 'the first person to die in a horror movie are the ones who have sex' or 'the black guy always dies,' etc. There appear to be a lot of similarities between horror movies.

     Which makes sense. Because every single horror movie is exactly the same.

      The films all follow a very clear formula. Some group of people (often young adults) discover some spooky Macguffin (haunted house, Ouija board, book of the dead) and something started to haunt them, often killing them off in dumbest-to-least-sexually-adventurous order while they slowly dredge up the mystery surrounding the Macguffin, and once they've solved the mystery and possibly defeated whatever was haunting them, there's some twist ending. At one point this was original, but it's been plodded out so many times now that it's vomit-inducing.

     This is why The Cabin in the Woods is one of my favorite films. Though it masquerades as a horror film, it's actually an unabashed attack on the horror film genre. It shows you the horror formula and turns it on its head, forcing you to see how simple and mindless other horror films truly are, and then it one-ups them all with a game-ending third act.

     Formula has a lot of good uses. The Flintstones used the formula of a family sitcom to angle itself towards a unique style of humor. But formula has to be used purposefully, and horror films have been using it as a crutch. There's a significant lack of originality in modern horror films. It's not filmmaking by artists, it's just filmmaking by accountants; slap something on the formula machine to make a quick buck.

     Ultimately, it comes down to this: horror movies are in the suspense business. They're trying to scare you, and a big part of being scared is the feeling of suspense, of dread, of not knowing what's going to happen next. So why do they keep following the same formula over and over again? It's impossible to feel suspense when you already know what's going to happen. 

2) Moral of the Story

     One of the reasons this particular formula has stuck around so long is because it reinforces very particular moral lessons. Promiscuous characters are killed off, and only the responsible, virginal one ever makes it out alive? Better not be sexually adventurous then! A bunch of kids read from the book of the dead and then it haunts them? Curiosity is clearly killing the cat! These lessons particularly resonate with parents trying to get their rebellious teens to behave, so it makes sense that moviemakers, who are all parentally aged, would have a vested interested in producing movies with those kinds of moral warnings.

     The problem is that those morals are bull. Discovering sexuality is a huge part of becoming an adult. Exploring the world around you is how you find your place in it. Making mistakes is an essential aspect of being a human being. But these films make the argument that promiscuity will ruin you, and adventurous behavior could end your life. That's not a moral lesson, that's mental abuse.

     Basically, they're all doing this to you. (For the record, I don't recommend watching that video, because it's graphic and absolutely absurd, but it does illustrate the point.)

     Bottom line: horror movies are interested in force-feeding you very specific values, namely sex-negative and conform-to-social-order values, and those values are absolute garbage.

3) Flavor

     A little cinnamon in a dish really adds a lot of flavor.

     A mouthful of cinnamon makes this happen.

     Horror movies are the latter.

     A good storyteller is out to share a wonderful piece of art with the world. They have an amazing story that makes you think, that will shape the way you view the world. The genre of that story is completely arbitrary to them, completely after-the-fact.

     This is not how horror movies work. Their inception begins with "How can I scare people?" Which means the story become the arbitrary thing. their first priority is to scare you. The second is to tell a story. And that's completely backwards thinking. it completely devalues the entire point of telling a story, of sharing art with the world.

    Imagine we had a "Crying" movie genre. Movies made explicitly to make you cry. Not Dramatic films, mind you. Dramatic films focus on grandiose stories that somehow compel you or move you, and sometimes that might make you cry. But "Crying" movies aren't interested in moving you. They just do a bunch of stuff to evoke the tears.

    This would be ridiculous. But for some reason, when you replace "crying" with "scaring" it's somehow supposed to make more sense.

    This is the functional equivalent of starting a recipe with a pound of cinnamon and then figuring out what to mix it with. It's backwards. You'll get a truly terrible dish that way. Start with the main dish, the core, and add cinnamon here and there, to give it flair. That way it's a delicious dessert that just happens to have cinnamon, and the cinnamon really adds. Good movies can be made that just happen to terrify you, and the fear will really add to the experience of watching it. It'll just be a part of the journey you happen to go on in order to reach a brilliant conclusion. These kinds of movies can totally be made.

      But they aren't.

      (I should mention that there are many Comedies, Action films, Dramas, etc. that are made in this backwards way, but Horror movies are easily the worst offenders, because every single one of them is built this way.)



There's a reason I've been calling them Horror movies, rather than scary movie. To be perfectly honest, I don't think a single one of them is scary. They're formulaic backwards-thinking poorly-constructed tripe. Bottom line: the scariest thing about Horror movies is that people continue to watch them.




(For further interesting criticisms on the tragically disgusting genre known as Horror movies, I recommend the CinemaSins "Dear Hollywood" segment on How to Fix the Horror Movie Genre in 10 Steps. I particularly agree with #10.)

Top Wait

Today I took one of my best friends to a Magic: the Gathering tournament in Seattle: Standard States event (more info on it here).

We were psyched to play, but in the last round, something happened that made a lot of people unhappy.

The tourney had 100+ people and played  seven rounds. After those seven, they'd cut to the top eight players, who would all get big prizes and continue playing for 1st-3rd place, which would get them even bigger prizes. Pretty standard stuff. You play magic, you do well, you get prizes.

But when that final seventh round came, the top table was empty.

The players who were ranked 1st through 8th place didn't play the final round.

Each of them had won 5 rounds and lost 1. And what they all realized was that if they agreed to a draw with their opponent in the final round, they would have 5 wins, 1 draw, and 1 loss. Which would still rank them ahead of everyone else in the tournament who won 5 and lost 2 rounds.

So they didn't play round 7 because if they all drew, they were guaranteed a spot in the top 8, and guaranteed the big prizes. They were locked in, no matter how well anyone else did in the last round, even the guy in 9th place--which happened to be me.

Now I ended up losing round 7, so that's fine. It happens. But my opponent that round was 5 and 2. And my friend had lost his first 2 rounds, but won the other 5. And despite this, ,they still just didn't have a shot at getting Top 8. In round 7, the only people playing were doing it for the sheer pleasure of the game. (There were small prizes for 9th-16th place, so I guess people played for those, too, but they were small small prizes. One person said they were more like consolation prizes than anything.)

The thing that bugs me is this: At a Magic: the Gathering tournament, certain players were incentivized to not play Magic: the Gathering.

It was in their best interest to skip that round and get right into the big prize pool. If I were 8th instead of 9th place I'm sure I'd have done exactly the same thing. Why risk losing the round and potentially dropping out of the Top 8? Just skip!

But that's not Magic. That's not what Magic is about. Or even what sportsmanship is about. Forgive me if this sounds radical, but people who don't play games of Magic shouldn't win Magic tournaments.

But they did. And people were kinda bummed out. They grumbled. In my round 7, my opponent and I played next to an empty Top 8 table that should have been filled with excellent Magic players. As other people sat down for round 7, they all said basically the same thing: "Well, either of us can get Top 8, but good luck, I guess..." Even the judges running the tournament started round 7 by saying, "Well, for those of you who are playing, round 7 is starting now..." I spent the whole day playing excellent matches of my favorite game against truly skilled players, but I (and a whole bunch of other players) ultimately walked away feeling bitter about how the tournament ended up

The question, then, is this: how do you incentivize those players to keep playing? Under these circumstances, what makes it worth taking the risk to play that final round?

This conundrum throws me back to 2012, when Magic switched from the ELO system to the Points system. What they realized was that the ELO system (which rated players on how well they did in tournaments) actively discouraged players from playing Magic. Once a player had a high enough rating, they would stop going to tournaments at all, because if they lost subsequent tournaments, their ELO would drop, and they wouldn't be rated high enough to qualify for the Pro Tour anymore. They switched to the Planeswalker Points system because it gave points instead of ratings--you just needed a certain number of points to qualify instead, and that meant you could play all the tournaments you wanted without risking anything.

On a much, much smaller scale, this Top 8 "let's all draw" thing is incredibly similar. In both instances, the act of playing Magic is against your better interest. Which just feels wrong.

So what's the solution here? Is this a common problem, or just a fluke of numbers? Is it just a necessarily evil in tournament structure, or is there a similar "Planeswalker Points" kind of answer? I'm not sure, myself. It's a tough question to grapple with, but I think it's a valuable one. Because this experience truly did suck for a lot of people. Even the Top 8 players couldn't have been very happy that it was in their best interest to skip the round and wait. They want it to be in their best interest to play the game. That's why they came in the first place! So is there a better way to navigate this circumstance? I'm interested to hear thoughts on this.