The morality of horror

The late film critic Roger Ebert is one of my personal heroes. I didn’t always agree with his star ratings, but I appreciated his thought process, his unapologetic nostalgia and sentimentality, and his willingness to bring morality into his reviews — something I rarely see outside of faith-based movie criticism. About the Tarantino knockoff “Thursday” (1998), Ebert wrote: “Watching it, I felt outrage. I saw a movie so reprehensible I couldn’t rationalize it using the standard critical language about style, genre, or irony. The people associated with it should be ashamed of themselves.” His take on the “torture porn” horror flick “Wolf Creek” (2005) was similar: “The theaters are crowded right now with wonderful, thrilling, funny, warm-hearted, dramatic, artistic, inspiring, entertaining movies. If anyone you know says this is the one they want to see, my advice is: Don’t know that person no more.”

Such statements, from a critic, might seem antiquated or hyperbolic. Yet I’m intrigued by Ebert’s belief that being appalled is a valid critical response to cinema, because it came with a crucial corollary. Ebert believed anything is theoretically OK to depict on film if — and this is a big if — the filmmakers earn the right to do so. How? By making movies that aren’t mindless, heartless, and soulless. Ebert was hardly a moral scold, and he definitely didn’t advocate censorship. He had few kind words for the MPAA, which hands down ratings with all the precision of a drone missile. But he didn’t mind expressing outrage, as a filmgoer and a human being, in moral terms.

I used to have a very strong aversion to horror movies. If they weren’t immoral, per se, then they seemed at least frighteningly amoral. Eventually, I started actually paying attention to horror and thinking about what it does and why. I have a better sense now of what horror’s place in the culture might be, and what it can achieve, but I still feel like an amateur when it comes to making sense of cinema’s most stigmatized genre (besides pornography, of course).

Three of my favorite horror films are “28 Days Later,” “The Cabin in the Woods,” and “Let the Right One In.” The first two take a hard look at what happens when individual rights such as freedom and life itself are brutally subordinated, supposedly for the greater good. They’re about Faustian bargains and power that corrupts. Some of their characters opt for the lesser of two evils and pay the moral price. But these films also hinge on human connections based in love, or at least empathy. The third movie explores similar ideas of power and moral compromise in a more intimate context. It uses a close relationship between two children to examine how even a child’s survival instinct might compel him to abandon conventional morality — essentially, to sell his soul for safety and protection.

Such analysis makes these movies sound hopelessly heavy, but in fact they’re quite entertaining to watch. “Cabin” is especially fun it belongs to possibly the riskiest of all subgenres: horror-comedy. So many films of this type seem like exercises in very poor taste, since their often unfunny “comedy” tends only to cheapen their already degraded depiction of human life. But “Cabin,” cowritten by “Avengers” director and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon, comments on horror tropes even as it uses them to great effect. It also humanizes its archetypal characters through a deft mix of wit, cynicism, and philosophical playfulness (as revealed in the highly entertaining commentary track, which features Whedon and the film’s director, Drew Goddard).

The horror genre is often the first to be scapegoated when people shake their fists about the immorality of today’s movies. Indeed, the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises evoke in me a kind of moral nausea. Yet a surprising number of horror films take on hefty moral questions in fresh and unexpected ways. (Meanwhile, plenty of non-horror movies uncritically propagate misogyny, racism, and so on. Once I got past the exploitative, stomach-turning worst that horror has to offer, I saw that the best of the genre doesn’t just have a moral compass: It can be an unlikely vehicle for thought-provoking social commentary.