“Horror” is a faulty genre category. Nobody quite knows where its boundaries lie. Take Predator, for instance. I recently watched it for the first time although I’d known about it since I was in seminary. I am not a fan of tough-guy movies, so it took the fact that it’s sometimes coded as “horror” to get me to watch it. Horror is often defined as a genre that has to have a monster. Check. We got your monster right over here. The monster’s an alien but so is, well, Alien. An action-adventure, sci-fish movie with a monster—is that horror? I knew I had to see it for the sake of completion. I’d heard of Predator vs. Alien (haven’t seen), and enough people comment on Predator that I was beginning to feel hopelessly outdated. Or even more hopelessly outdated.
I presume the rest of the world saw it long ago, but I didn’t even know the plot. A group of tough-guys are duped into a covert operation that allows for many explosions and bodies flying through the air. Then they have to get out of the jungle alive because there’s an alien sportsman on the loose. Apparently he likes earth for a good challenge since he won’t hunt somebody who’s unarmed. He wipes out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team—and to the film’s credit, the Black guys don’t die first. There’s time for that, of course. As they tromp through the jungle shirts come off because the guys are all ripped, of course. One of the team, Billy, decides to fight without a gun so when it’s down to just Arnold and the alien the predator decides fisticuffs will settle this in a manly way. When Schwarzenegger’s trap mortally wounds said predator, it sets off a bomb that allows for the biggest explosion of all.
So is this horror? Hulu thinks so. Schwarzenegger apparently thought it ended up as sci-fi horror—which is a thing. It’s a thing because horror is a poor genre. It’s ill-defined. You kinda know when you’ve just seen a western or a romance. But lots of horror films are disputed. Critics repeatedly opine that The Shining isn’t horror. Neither is The Exorcist. Of course, both always wind up near the top of horror list movies. Horror movies don’t win academy awards, as a rule. Still, “horror” fans seek movies out that others classify as drama, or even action-adventure. Horror is close kin with science fiction, another disputed genre. The two are often quite distinct, however. So, did I watch a horror movie this weekend? I honestly can’t say.
