Horror Cliches

Small children are often evil in horror movies, a tradition that descends from The Bad Seed and The Exorcist and The Omen. When they are not evil, they are troubled loners who consort with invisible playmates who are evil. If one hears children humming innocent nursery rhymes in the background, you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody's getting a carving knife through the retina pretty damn soon. Horror films work best in rural settings, because rustics are scary in and of themselves, and because there are lots of frightening farm tools on hand, and also because there are no neighbours to beg for help when the flaying and amateur surgery get into full swing.

One should never trust a handyman or a farmer in a horror film. It is said that in space no one can hear you scream, but no one can hear you scream in Nebraska or south Dakota or rural Slovakia, either. Horror films do not work well in places like Holland, because horror films require basements, for the crucial scene where the prettiest girl, for no good reason, descends into the miasmic cavern in which Leatherface obviously spends most of his free time.

Linen closets and tidy storage areas are surprisingly common in Asian horror films, which may have cultural ramifications that go over the heads of moviegoers in the west. In the west, linen closets are simply not scary. Neither are vestibules. They're just not. Horror movies almost always contain a scene in which a woman washes her face in a sink, and when she straightens up and looks in the mirror, a girl missing half her face is staring directly back at her.

If she decides to take a bath, the tub will soon fill up with hair, blood or a woman with purple skin and one eye missing. Horror movies also contain lots of scenes in which the living dead or the living undead zip past an open door or window, but nobody sees them. A surprise appearance by subaquatic, recently deceased femmes fatales is another popular trope; the distaff dead, like U-boats, do not like to surface. The more gruesome films in the genre require captives to sacrifice one section of their bodies in order to preserve others; this always comes as a surprise.

Women constantly take showers in horror films, even though this has been a terrible idea ever since Psycho. People check into remote, deserted motels, even though this too has been a bad idea since Psycho. If the people who inhabit horror movies had only seen Psycho at an impressionable age, an awful lot of carnage could have been avoided. This, in fact, is the basic joke in Scream. t is always a bad idea to go to sleep in horror films, or accept a ride from strangers, or respond to a personal ad. It is an even worse idea to get in an elevator, a popular hideout of the promiscuously dead. Computers are another place where the dead sometimes lay low.

Priests are generally well-meaning but incompetent in this genre, but nuns are to be avoided. Rabbis rarely appear in horror films.

In a horror movie, you should never purchase a dirt-cheap house or apartment without making detailed inquiries about how many previous tenants were skinned alive in the pantry. But be aware: estate agents can never be trusted. It is pointless to look at the images on the security camera in your apartment or office to see if the monster is in the lobby, because the dead cannot be seen on conventional cameras, no matter how high the resolution. You should never have any kind of medical operation in a horror film,

particularly a transplant, because you will inherit the eyes of a witch, the heart of a cannibal or the kidneys of a murderous transvestite. Never go into a darkroom alone, because someone in the film you are developing will come to life and rip your lungs out. Finally, never answer the phone in a horror movie. To avoid disaster, text.