[ SECRET POST #4328 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4328 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________


03.
[The Red Green Show]


__________________________________________________



04.
[Overwatch]


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06. [SPOILERS for The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina]



__________________________________________________



07. [SPOILERS for The Haunting of Hill House]











Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #619.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

For me personally, I don't consider any story with a happy ending "horror".

I still like the ending a lot though!

[(Anonymous)]

That is a pretty narrow definition of horror.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh. Probably, but it works for me, especially in the horror-fantasy grey area.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed. I prefer horror comedy because at least you get a chance of a happy ending, not everyone dies and the evil thing continues to stalk innocents forever.

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of horror had a happy ending for at least one person, including classics by King, Straub, and Carpenter.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess it also depends what you mean by "happy" (which Carpenter are you thinking of?). But it's a definition that works for me.

[(Anonymous)]

The Fog.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think The Fog has a happy ending. After all, the ghost pirates get exactly what they want - they exact their revenge, they kill the number of people they planned to kill.

The film's final shot is literally them successfully murdering their last victim.

[(Anonymous)]

But they stopped killing everyone whose ancestors were not involved.

[froodle]

It's a happy ending for the ghostpirates?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, that's your call but it seems very silly and far too narrow a definition to be useful to most people.

[(Anonymous)]

To some extent I think I agree with this. I think it's really a question of what horror, on an existential level, means to a person. To me, horror as a genre is...almost inherently either malignant or nihilistic. Things go badly. Things degrade. Things descend into pain and fear and chaos. If the narrative is capable of ending happily, then it is not, fundamentally, a malignant or nihilistic narrative. And therefore, to me, it can still be a very scary narrative in parts, but it's not a horror narrative.

That said, to me there are degrees to this argument. For example, to me a movie like Mama [vague spoilers for Mama ahead] lingers somewhere in the space between "dark fairy tale" and "horror," and that's largely because of its ending. It doesn't end happily, but it does end with hope, and with a sense that the narrative believes in the protective power of love.

I guess I agree with you that a story with a happy ending isn't really horror - not to me anyway. But there is a lot of ground between "happy ending" and "darkest possible ending." And while, to me, dark endings make for stories that are far more quintessentially "horror," I think there's a whole lot of room for hybrid stories that are part horror and part something else.

However, for my money, the ending of Hill House was far to close to happy for my taste. It didn't seem narratively cohesive with the rest of the story. It was a jarring right-angle turn, and for me it strongly undermined the story.

[(Anonymous)]

Horror can be scary and/or gory. It brings up questions about survival and humanity and what makes us human, what we'll do to survive, what exists beyond our world and our lives.
But it doesn't have to be nihilistic.
Something like Santa Clarita Diet gets labelled horror because there's gore and a zombie-like protagonist. But it's not meant to be without hope and is deliberately humorous. Are you saying it's not allowed the horror label at all?