Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

Why are audiences drawn to horror films? Previous answers to that question have included everything from a need to experience fear to a hunger for psychotherapy. This critical text proposes that the horror film’s primary purpose is to present monsters, best understood as deformed and destructive beings. These monsters satisfy the audience’s desire to know these beings, in particular those beings too fantastic and dangerous to know in real life. The text illuminates many aspects of the horror film genre, including epistemology, ethics, evaluation, history, monster taxonomy, and filmmaking techniques.

George Ochoa is the author or coauthor of more than thirty nonfiction books. He is currently a medical writer at Applied Clinical Education in New York. Please visit his blog at deformeddestructive.blogspot.com.