What is Horror, and What Does Consent Have To Do With It?

I love horror. I love scary movies, scary video games, and haunted houses. Completely by accident, my TikTok feed has ended up being videos of people recording ghosts in their houses, because the almighty algorithm had me pegged as a fan of the spooky in less than 24 hours. I have spent a lot of time thinking about horror, what it means, and why we engage with it. My wife, for example, hates anything scary. She has no interest in scary movies and went with me once to a “Haunted Trail” in the Minneapolis exurbs in our first year together. I think my wife’s reaction to horror is probably the more sensible one, and the more I’ve encountered people who want absolutely nothing to do with anything scary, the more I’ve been inclined to reflect on what makes horror work for me, and for others like me. But in doing so, I’ve also learned that maybe we horror fans aren’t on fully the same page.

Before we go much further, it would be helpful to define what we mean when we say “horror,” and here is where we see the first cracks. I tend to be an inclusionist in most definitions, so I apply that to horror as well. The most succinct definition I could agree with was from literaryterms.net (forgive me if this seems a little English 101, but if getting a Bachelors in English taught me anything, it’s that asking the internet how to define a genre is just asking to read about ten different contradictory papers, so let’s keep it simple). Literaryterms.net claims that horror “is a genre of fiction whose purpose is to create feelings…