The Horror | Melissa Winning
Digital collage by Melissa Winning featuring stills from Saw (2004) Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974) Invoked (2015) and Lake Mungo (2008).
It’s Halloween and if you’re stuck looking for a scary film to put on then horror expert Melissa Winning has you covered…but not before reflecting on her own haunting journey through horror over the years.
My second boyfriend was really into horror, we dated from 2015-2017 and during that time probably averaged two horror movies a week. Before dating him I had dabbled here and there but I didn’t really think of myself as a person who was really into it. Horror was a cinema experience mostly - I think one of my first trips to the cinema by myself was to see The Ring 2 (2005), even though I hadn’t even seen the first instalment in the franchise, and I’m also not sure how I managed to see it in the first place since it was rated 15 and I was most likely 13.
Other notable cinema excursions - this time with friends since I was no longer a 13-year-old loser who had just moved from France - included one of the lesser enjoyed Final Destination sequels and the first Paranormal Activity, the latter of which seemed really silly when we walked out of it but we got back to my friend’s flat in the pitch black and stared at the hatch to her attic, remembering the attic with the evil entity in the movie we’d just seen.
One of my first flatmates when I was 17 enjoyed horrors but was also deadly scared of the genre, so we would cuddle in under her duvet to watch an illegally streamed horror movie and hide under the bedding from the horrors upon the pixelated screen. The tension would be frequently cut on my end from laughing at her dramatic squealing, although by that point I had also devised a cunning routine to avoid getting jump scared, which was to shake my head and torso very gently anytime it seemed like the movie would be building up to something terrifying. The motion would mean any genuine fear would be disguised to anyone else I was with and in a way to myself.
One of the scariest experiences with a horror film wasn’t from watching it at all but from reading online theories about it for weeks until the thought of watching it seemed too daunting. This movie was The Blair Witch Project (1999), which I didn’t watch until 2012, 13 years after its release. I think I had always known peripherally about Blair Witch, and it was referenced so much in pop culture that it felt like I knew enough about it to avoid it until I was mentally ready. I can’t remember exactly how I’d stumbled upon the perfectly preserved early 2000s forums about the movie but the conversations between internet strangers left me anxiety ridden for weeks after. I’m not sure now if those forums were even real or were part of some elaborate marketing strategy to build anticipation for the release of the movie - maybe I’d stumbled upon an ARG without even realising.
I remember when I finally did watch Blair Witch - I was living alone (not by choice - my first boyfriend had moved to England, leaving me behind in what was supposed to be our flat) and using my boyfriend’s LoveFilm account on his PS3, I decided I was finally ready. The slow build up was agonising at first - surely the slow pace, terrible image quality of the handheld footage and annoying unscripted dialogue was just a gimmick, and I would be getting a jump scare any minute! But the scare didn’t really come until the last 15 minutes, and by that point I realised everything about the situation was silly - the movie was silly, the actors pretending this was all real were silly, the people on the forums had been silly, and I was the silliest of them all, huddled alone under my Poundstretcher blanket on my boyfriend’s ugly couch, waiting on the witch that would never get shown. I had bigger things to be scared of than a make-believe paranormal myth, like the giant spiders who loved to crawl above my bed and who I would hoover up, only to spend the next day worrying that they’d survived being vacuumed and were sure to crawl out intact and come for revenge. I think Blair Witch was the start of me enjoying horror as entertainment instead of for any thrill-seeking impulses.
And now we come to my second boyfriend whose name, appropriately, was Blair. Blair loved horror to an extent I hadn’t ever really encountered before. His approach to horror was almost therapeutic - he saw horror as a way to train his mind to overcome fear and anxiety. This mindset deeply appealed to what I now realise is the control freak in me. There is something very satisfying to me about being able to sit through a horror with barely an expression passing over my face, seeing it all instead as a silly little story made to titillate. Blair was also completely non-discriminatory in his approach to the genre, which I found annoying at times. As a self-proclaimed pretentious girlie, I would have preferred to stick to horrors that I deemed more highbrow, potentially encroaching on thriller territory - The Shining (1980), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Black Swan (2010) - movies that had a plot, a known director, and a good music and graphics budget. But Blair liked it all, and I could either learn to like it too or… well, I never really considered an alternative. I make it sound as if our relationship was governed by his tastes, which wasn’t the case at all. Often, I was either too tired from working my terrible part time retail job, or just too much of an indecisive Libra to really care what we watched.
His favourite subgenre within horror was definitely Found Footage, which when done well can be really immersive, but when done badly is just really cheap and gimmicky, the CGI a little too obvious, the end credit music always some terrible song by the director’s best friend who happens to be in a band. Sometimes the worst of the found footage ended up a better viewing experience, since it could then be ridiculed very openly for the runtime and beyond. My favourite of these bad found footage movies is an Irish movie called Invoked (2015) and was set in an empty hostel that five friends break into for a weekend of partying. There’s an ambiguous entity that inevitably starts shit when the gang plays with a makeshift ouija board, and they are picked off one by one until their camera footage is found by police days later…blablabla same old, same old. The best part of the movie for me is that the characters all call each other “lads”, which is very funny in contrast to this demon/ghost/entity who wants to kill them all off. For example, a character will witness some ghostly fuckery while rooting around for spare beer and burst back into the party, exclaiming “Lads! There’s a ghost in here!”. I could never remember the movie title after this first watch, so I would have to resort to google searching something along the lines of “found footage ireland ghost lads”. I recently rewatched it for the first time since 2016 and it’s just as bad in terms of plot and visuals but the “lads” of it all means it will have a soft spot in my heart for years to come.
After Blair and I broke up, I stayed away from horror for a few years, since I associated it with him for a while. I think the first horror movie I decided to watch post-Blair was It Follows (2014), which is one of my favourites of the genre and is one of the few that actually scares me. I’ve always been more scared by a feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness than by a scary monster or ghoul. Anyway, It Follows made me realise I was now a horror fan, even without having a horror movie enthusiast boyfriend to guide me. I’ve now been able to explore beyond found footage and discover subgenres that I didn’t realise I would ever like. One of my favourite horror movies is Saw (2004), which basically ignited the torture-porn category, although another notable entry in this subgenre, Hostel (2005), fell completely flat for me, lacking the humour and complicated power/relationship dynamics that Saw explore. I’ve watched a lot of the movies that defined horror in the late 70s and 80s as well, which I hadn’t really bothered with until a few years back. Movies like Hellraiser (1987), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Suspiria (1977), An American Werewolf in London (1981). I still watch most horror with a slightly detached air, amused by the spectacle.
My best friend and I went to see Scream 5 (2022) and 6 (2023) when they came out in cinemas, and I think my detachment was a shock to my bestie, who is especially affected by the Scream franchise, and who would turn to me in his seat only to find me scoffing sweet and salty popcorn from Morrisons, my face blank while several characters were being chased and stabbed by Ghostface. Maybe it’s not the best way to watch horror to be honest, to be so incapable of suspending disbelief and get swept away in the fear. It’s the same way I feel about my relationship with money, which right now I love to squirrel away and not spend, even though I have nothing major to save for except for another potential world disaster that could lead to another lockdown that I want to be financially prepared for.
Maybe this is too much of a Carrie Bradshaw parallel to make but to me my pragmatic sensibility is evident in both aspects. I go through phases of deeply craving a horror movie and I will spend up to half an hour browsing the many collections available on streaming sites, but horror is also terribly marketed, and I often go back to ones I’ve seen in the past instead. I recently saw this meme, which basically prompted this personal essay/love letter to horror movies.
It really spoke to me; because sometimes you really do just need to watch a silly little horror movie to feel fine again.
To finish up, I include a ranked list of some recent horror viewings. I could have stuck to my faves but talking about bad horror movies is just as fun as talking about good ones.
10. 1408 (2007)
I’m not sure why I decided to revisit this John Cusack vehicle since he’s one of my least favourite actors, and not even the sight of his psychological suffering made it enjoyable to me. Tony Shalhoub is in it for all of two minutes and those were my favourite two minutes. Definitely a great horror to watch with a friend to make fun of the whole thing.
9. Gerald’s Game (2017)
I like everything else Mike Flanagan has made but this was the weakest thing I’ve watched of his. Like 1408, it’s based on a Stephen King story and deals with hallucinations within a confined space, but this time with some horrible childhood trauma thrown in, which is a Stephen King staple. I genuinely did get scared by the figure with the yellow eyes and the body horror was uncomfortably gruesome to watch, but the story fell flat to me, and the ending was, short of any other term, absolutely buck wild.
8. Cube (1997)
I frequently get Cube confused with other movies with a similar premise and a similar short name (Circle and The Platform come to mind), although I think Cube was one of the first to do it and kickstarted a brand-new genre of horror, which is the escape room movie. There was a lot of maths involved in Cube, which is when it started to lose me. I have never known what a prime number is, and I have no plans on ever learning. One of the actresses, Nicole de Boer, also sounds uncannily like a young Reese Witherspoon. Anyway, all in all, this movie is best watched when you’re hungover or ill, and you can just enjoy the lights and colours and turn off your brain for a couple of hours.
7. Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension (2015)
This is like, movie 60000 in the Paranormal Franchise, which started as a fun ride, but then got caught up with a lot of background lore, making it ripe for sequels and prequels to explore. This is the first Found Footage horror of the list, and it does a pretty good job, using weird glitches to its advantage. It’s also technically a Christmas movie.
6. M3GAN (2022)
Technically it is a horror, but I think most people appreciate it as a comedy instead. I went to see this in the cinema, and I bought some snacks from Poundland beforehand, and the first half of the movie was spent dealing with the terrible realisation that I’d bought dark chocolate Maltesers by accident.
5. Grave Encounters 1&2 (2011, 2012)
I have lumped two movies together, but this is my list so I’m allowed, and also I watched them one after the other so they’ve blended into each other a little bit. The first Grave Encounters follows a paranormal investigator obviously meant to be a parody of Zak Bagans of Ghost Adventures fame as he investigates a haunted asylum. The footage is at first presented as genuine, but in the second Grave Encounters, the footage is presented as fictional to deter more investigations of the asylum. Grave Encounters 2 follows a film student who wants to uncover the truth behind the first movie. The main character of GE2 looks like if Robert Pattinson and Dane Deehan had a fucked up little baby, and his bestie kind of looks like Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver (2017). Anyway, I think one jump scare got me out of both the movies which is rare for me nowadays.
4. Scream 6 (2023)
I really love the first two Scream movies, mostly because I love movies from the 90s and 2000s. The more recent instalments of the franchise are a little bit less enjoyable to me because the schlocky campiness has been ruined by the glossy HD of modern filmmaking. Scream 6 was surprisingly fun, especially after the slog that was Scream 5. I also think modern movie soundtracks are awful and this was no exception.
3. Saw 2 (2005)
I frequently rewatch Saw (2004), but this was my first rewatch of Saw 2. I didn’t really enjoy it on first viewing, but now that I’ve spent more time with its predecessor, I appreciated it a lot more, especially the character of Amanda. I do think there are too many victims all fighting to escape at once, which means you don’t really get to know any of them properly.
2. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
This was my first viewing of what is a horror classic and it was maybe the most scared I’d been in months. The violence was unrelenting in a way that made me feel trapped and claustrophobic, which is when horror is most visceral to me. There are some gorgeous shots - my favourites are the close up of Sally’s eye, and the shot of one character standing up from a swing to walk towards a door. I will probably never watch this again because it was truly horrible.
1. Lake Mungo (2008)
Lake Mungo is part found footage, part mockumentary, which really lends itself well to the genre and the story. I am of the firm opinion that all Australian cinema is weirder than anything the rest of the world produces, and this is no exception. I think what really pushes this to the top of the list is the sound production, which can really hinder a horror movie or elevate it to something haunting and chilling.
About Melissa
She/her
Melissa Winning is a mixed-media artist and pop culture enthusiast based in Glasgow.
Instagram: @littlequeenhoneybee
