Americans have been spoiled by movie and TV gore and special effects. We cheerfully watch a person be disemboweled, slashed, chopped into bloody bits, boiled in acid, burned alive, flayed, limbs ripped off, guts explode, and think nothing of it. I used to think stuff like that was scary, but I've watched audiences respond with laughter and cheers to scenes that might have made ancient Roman circus-goers shudder with dread. Movie effects have become so realistic, they're almost indistinguishable from the real stuff. Actually, the real stuff barely affects us any more. But remember the days when special effects were crappy, and a movie could still give us a good fright? As a kid I was thrilled by cheesy Saturday afternoon creature features that made use of nothing more impressive than rubber masks and ample doses of ketchup. I keep going back to the latest horror blockbuster hoping to recapture the thrill, but those days seem gone forever.

It seems almost a truism, but no less true: fright is psychological, and what frightens depends very much on the person frightened. What makes me shiver might make you yawn. The best horror leaves room for the solitary fantasy to expand on it, hinting and whispering about evil that remains always lurking around the corner. In general, we've traded the delicious angst of a good ghost story for Freddy and Jason and some other ax murderer leaping out of the screen at us to make us throw our popcorn to the back row. And it's a shame, because good horror can do wonderful things.

Good horror evokes a range of emotions besides the good old "gotcha"-psycho-killer-leaping-out-of-the-closet type scare that most movies nowadays seem to strive for (which, fair enough, I enjoy for the same reason I like riding a really intense roller coaster). But there's also the more gnawing sense of dread, the anticipation of something really bad (whether or not it actually happens). Then there's the sense of anguish about undeserved death and destruction, when some innocent soul comes to a terrible end. Which easily morphs into the sense of satisfaction that horror can give from seeing a really bad person get their just desserts (always, of course, the most extreme kind). Horror is about extremes of suffering; not just the commonplace, everyday kind of suffering that we're supposed to learn to live with, but the very worst of the worst; the final, the ultimate suffering of Death and Hell. Then there's the anger and hate we feel toward real villains. Or the gloom and melancholy of a dark fate, a dread destiny the protagonist can struggle against but never escape. Good horror gathers all the dark emotions into one place.

A lot of horror is didactic. Like Greek tragedy, it wants to teach us by showing us how not to behave. So much horror starts with sin, some fatal error committed that eventually leads to unimaginable doom, offering a lesson about hubris or hate or shortsightedness. But more often, even when horror seems to want to teach lessons, there is wrapped up within it an element of the perverse, the sneaking suspicion that the cosmos only pretends to be just in order to lure us into a false sense of security. Very often, the moral of horror is that there is no moral; no justice, only vengence masquerading as justice and perpetuating more evil, no ultimate triumph of goodness, nothing to give us hope in the end, only darkness, despair, and unpunished evil. If horror ends on a happy note, it usually does so with a devilish little nod that tells us that the good guys might win a battle or two, but Evil will win the war, and ultimately there are no happy endings.

To me this perversity is the value of horror. Its ultimate benefit is unfettered acknowledgment of the dark side of life. Horror acknowledges that there can be no faith without doubt, no joy without sadness, no pleasure without pain, no life without death. More importantly, it is the nature of doubt to deny hope, it is the nature of sadness to be inconsolable, it is the nature of pain to overshadow pleasure, it is the nature of death to swallow up and silence life. When I have struggled with depression, when I have hovered on the brink of suicide, it was the nature of that state to be unreachable, to be totally alone. The dark side claws at us insistently, growing stronger the more we try to deny it. It does not help the person who is suffering to tell her, "You should not suffer." Ultimately, it is impossible to affirm good unless we acknowledge evil for what it is. We cannot minimize it, we cannot wish it away. We must learn to live with it. Strangely, acknowledging that makes me feel good.