Horror is the last honest genre

Beth Brunning spends her days sculpting silicone hearts and spraying fake blood across film sets. She has no plans to stop. For Brunning, the gore is only the surface. Horror, she argues, is the one mainstream genre still willing to tell the truth about death, desire and our own capacity for cruelty. It also hides a surprising streak of optimism. From final girls to cockroach-vomiting priests, she makes the case that being frightened on purpose is how we remember we are alive.

By Beth Brunning

I spent last Tuesday up to my elbows in fake viscera, trying to make a silicone heart look like it had been chewed by something with too many teeth and not enough manners. The director kept yelling “More arterial spray!” while the actor lay on the table pretending to die with the commitment only a man who has never actually seen his own intestines can muster. By lunch the floor looked like a Jackson Pollock painting done during a particularly bad breakup. I took a selfie, captioned it “Living the dream,” and felt genuinely happy. That pretty much sums up why I love horror and why, after forty years of slasher cycles, torture porn, found footage, and whatever A24 is calling “elevated” these days, the genre refuses to stay dead.

People who don’t work in horror always ask the same question: “Doesn’t it get to you?” Sweethearts, I once spent three hours gluing pubic hair onto a demonic puppet so it would look authentic when it crawled out of a toilet. My threshold for “getting to me” is somewhere north of actual cannibalism. But the real answer is no, because horror isn’t about the gore. Gore is just the glitter we throw on the deeper wound. The genre endures because it’s the only place in mainstream art where we’re allowed to stare straight at the stuff we spend the rest of our lives pretending isn’t there.

Think about it. In rom-coms people lie about feelings. In dramas they lie about ambition. In superhero movies they lie about physics. Only in horror do characters (and by extension, audiences) finally tell the truth: we are terrified of dying, we are disgusted by our own bodies, we are capable of monstrous cruelty, and worst of all, we are often attracted to the very things that will destroy us. Horror is the last honest genre left.

Take attraction and destruction, my favourite cocktail. I’m building a creature right now that looks like a beautiful woman made of wet funeral flowers and dentist drills. The script says she kisses you and your teeth fall out like piano keys. That’s not a random gross-out. That’s literally every bad relationship I had in my twenties distilled into practical effects. Horror takes the private whisper (“I know this person is bad for me but God they’re hot”) and screams it back at us through a mouth that has too many hinges.

Or look at the final girl trope everyone pretends to hate until they need her. Yes, it started as puritanical nonsense (virgins survive, sluts get the machete) but watch any decent horror movie made after 1996 and you’ll see the final girl isn’t pure. She’s traumatized, furious, and usually covered in someone else’s blood. Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott, Erin from You’re Next: these women aren’t rewarded for chastity. They’re rewarded for refusing to die politely. That’s not punishment for sex. That’s feminist revenge fantasy wearing a blood-soaked cardigan.

And don’t get me started on body horror. I love body horror the way some people love puppies. Give me a film where a guy’s chest opens like a wicked flower and births a phallic nightmare and I’m taking the rest of the day off to think about the miracle of practical effects. David Cronenberg once said the body is the first fact of human existence and therefore the first fact of horror. He’s right. We spend billions on skincare, gym memberships, and Ozempic trying to deny that these meat sacks are temporary rentals with a strict no-refund policy. Horror rips the filters off. It says: look at the wet, red truth. You’re going to rot. Your teeth will fall out. Something will eat you eventually, maybe even while you’re still screaming. And somehow that’s liberating, because once you admit the worst, the everyday stuff stops feeling so heavy.

That’s the dirty little secret of the genre: horror is optimistic. Not in a Hallmark way, obviously. But every time a character claws their way out of a grave, burns the monster with its own cursed artifact, or simply refuses to open the basement door (looking at you, smart side characters we all deserve to be), the film is saying survival is possible. Evil can be fought, even if the victory is ugly and partial. Compare that to literary fiction where the monster is usually capitalism or the protagonist’s mother and nobody ever wins.

I laugh a lot on set, which confuses people. Last week we shot a scene where a possessed girl vomits cockroaches onto her priest. Between takes the actress kept apologizing to the bug wrangler while simultaneously trying not to swallow one. The priest actor was doing that thing British men do where they stay in character even when covered in corn-syrup bile. I was doubled over behind the monitor because the whole tableau was absurd and perfect. Horror lets us laugh at death the way soldiers laugh at incoming artillery. It’s gallows humour, sure, but it’s still humour, and that’s a form of defiance

There’s also the community of it. Horror fans are the nicest weirdos you’ll ever meet. We bond over shared trauma the way veterans bond over war stories. I’ve had strangers at conventions show me photos of their open-heart-surgery scars because my silicone versions looked too real. We trade tips on the best way to make blood stick to wet skin. We argue about whether the thing in The Void is Lovecraftian or just a guy in a really good octopus suit. At a horror con you can walk up to someone dressed as Pinhead and ask about their day job (usually accounting) and they’ll answer without breaking character. Try that at a Marvel panel and see how fast security arrives.

The genre keeps evolving because fear keeps evolving. In the 50s we were scared of radiation. In the 70s, of strangers in vans. In the 80s, of sex. In the 2020s we’re scared of algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves and of smiling influencers who might be hollow inside. Horror just changes the monster’s face to match the current nightmare. That’s why it never dies. It’s a mirror with teeth.

Sometimes, late at night when the workshop is quiet and the only sound is fake blood dripping off a test dummy, I think about what all this says about us. We pay money to sit in the dark and have our fight-or-flight triggered on purpose. We want to feel our hearts race and our palms sweat because in real life those sensations usually mean something has gone terribly wrong. Horror is exposure therapy for being alive. It’s practice dying so we can keep living.

So yeah, I make monsters for a living. And every time one of them blinks on camera for the first time, moving exactly the way I sculpted it to move, I feel the same rush I imagine firefighters feel when they pull someone out of a burning building. We both traffic in extremes. They run toward real danger to save lives. I build fake danger so people can remember they’re alive.

The heart I was working on last week? It ended up looking perfect: wet, pulsing, wrong in all the right ways. When we shot the scene the actor’s scream was so convincing the medic actually ran over. That’s the magic trick. We spend months making death look real so the audience can spend two hours remembering how good it feels to breathe.

If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.