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Horror is one of my favorite genres of movies!

I remember growing up in the 90s with the slasher series "Scream" coming out and scaring all the kiddos. I would rent various horror VHS movies from my local blockbuster. In short, I was raised on horror. As I grew up the internet had become a place to view horror. Instead this time it was real.

Stage 1: Desensitization:

I remember seeing my first beheading. It was an American soldier by the name of Nick Berg. He was being held by some terrorist and they cut his head off with a small blade. It made me sick to my stomach. My mind could not wrap around what I had just witnessed. It was actually a person dying by execution and this was the first time I had witnessed something so raw. It looked fake to me. Nonetheless it haunted my dreams. For me this was a new horror. While I still cringe at seeing movie violence, with that it has gotten so crazy, seeing the real thing had truly haunted me.

Desensitization
Psychology
In psychology, desensitization is defined as the diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative, aversive or positive stimulus after repeated exposure to it. It also occurs when an emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary. The process of desensitization was developed by psychologist Mary Cover Jones, and is primarily used to assist individuals in unlearning phobias and anxieties. Joseph Wolpe developed a method of a hierarchal list of anxiety evoking stimuli in order of intensity, which allows individuals to undergo adaption. Although medication is available for individuals suffering from anxiety, fear or phobias, empirical evidence supports desensitization with high rates of cure, particularly in clients suffering from depression or schizophrenia.

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Step 2 : Substitution:

I feel as though the internet is showing us things that movies are having a hard time replicating and the fact that psychological horror has to be so creative that film makers are turning toward gore to terrorize their audiences. When you think about it things make sense. The internet shows us all kinds of crazy shit. I could be scrolling my feed on Facebook and see some fucked up crazy shit. This leaves a huge gap for filmmakers in the horror genre to be stuck with two types of horror. The "jump scare" and using realistic and graphic gore. We have a different type of psychological horror through torture of the mind. I dont believe this has particularly killed the genre entirely, but it sure does put a damper on creative writing. We dont need to be creative when the gore and jump scares do the trick.

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What does this mean for the future of horror?

I enjoy watching horror movies of all types. It seems that all horror has become B list horror of sorts. The hollywood horror hits are riddled with teenage concepts and jump scares. We have to dig a little deeper to find something that will bring us to our knees in terms of horror movies. Whereas it seems the genre is dead, the genre is as fat as ever with a lot of hits being foreign films and lower budget horror films. These are the places to look if you truly want to find the horror gold.