Vegan Themes in Horror

Oct 31, 2019

“All monsters are human.”
–American Horror Story: Asylum,
"Welcome to Briarcliff"

Hidden Messages

I am fascinated by the horror genre, but I was always too afraid to watch scary movies or read books any scarier than the Goosebumps series. (Though I enjoyed Goosebumps, to this day I'm a bit too freaked out to try to read them again...even though they're written for kids.) But that doesn’t mean I don’t like horror movies. In fact, because they scare me, I’m even more captivated by them. So, though I haven’t yet watched many of them in my life, I love to listen to people analyze them and their historical relevance to film and society. It’s even better when I can watch a movie and analyze it myself.

For instance, Saw is one of my favorite movie series of all time – I love and appreciate every single of them, even the not-so-great ones. And I don’t like them because of the gore (though it doesn’t bother me – weird, right?). I like them because of the psychological aspect of what drives an ordinary person like John Kramer to become Jigsaw. Seeing his victims’ emotional struggle when they’re put in the traps and how they react when placed in a life-or-death situation is, sadly, glossed over by critics who say it’s just “torture porn” for sick freaks. My point of this tangent is that horror is meant to be pushing the boundaries, to lead you into places that make you uncomfortable. You’re meant to marinate in that discomfort and uneasiness and assess your feelings there.

Kitty Killers

This leads me to my first point of how villains are portrayed. There has to be a signifier to the audience that they are evil. Take Michael Myers, for instance. Yes, he killed his sister when he was young, but one of the most disturbing aspects of his character when we meet him as an adult is that he kills and eats animals. This is meant to show him as no longer human, something far worse and more sinister than a "normal" person. He’s turned into a monster. And we see this in many stories: horror villains are generally shown to be evil by killing animals. There is even a psychological theory that serial killers begin to materialize their violent tendencies by killing animals like the neighbor’s dog or bunnies in the woods. A famous example of this is Jeffrey Dahmer, fascinatingly portrayed in the film My Friend Dahmer (which was based on a graphic novel written by one of his "friends" in high school). This is how we know that there is something mentally unstable in a person because the desire to kill an animal is unnatural to us.

And when we see this in films, it’s generally regarded as the worst and most horrific deaths of the movie because it’s so unnecessary – yes, all the deaths are technically unnecessary, but the villain generally has some motivation for torturing or killing the other humans – and used purely for the purpose of showing that this villain isn’t messing around. (Many people say that they don’t care to see human deaths in shows or movies, but animal deaths just go too far.) I would say it’s about on par with killing a baby or a pregnant woman in terms of wrongness.

The act of killing an animal just for the sake of doing so is repulsive to us, and that’s why it’s used in horror. And, yes, many “normal” humans do think it’s ok to kill animals and many humans kill animals themselves. For example, I had a class with a girl in college who hunted and raised animals to eat – not someone you’d think I’d get along with. But we did, and we both had a deep love for animals; well, for some of them. She had rescued dogs and firmly believed in protecting the natural environment and its inhabitants (though that sometimes meant killing “pest” creatures like deer). So, even a person that regards certain animals as food still appreciates the sanctity of life.

We Are the Guardians of Innocents

Every person in our society, unless they have no sense of empathy or conscience (and I mean someone clinically diagnosable, not a jerk who likes to make bacon jokes), regards animals as innocents and us as their protectors. At the very least, we don’t see ourselves as being charged with the task of eradicating them all from the face of the planet. This is why horror is so effective in using this strategy: it goes against the moral fiber of our being to kill an innocent creature that has absolutely no form of defense against a murderous human that it is an instant indication that this person is our villain. We desperately want bad things to befall them because of what he or she did.

"Why Are You Doing This To Us?"

When I step back from the scariness of each individual film, I can see the broader picture of horror and how it is analogous to our society. Take, for instance, the infamous scene from The Strangers: "'Why are you doing this to us?'...'Because you were home.'" Our main couple is sitting in their vacation home, tied up to chairs, with three masked strangers standing before them prepared to slaughter them. This is such a terrifying moment because you, the viewer, also feel unsafe. At any moment, someone could attack you simply because you're at the wrong place at the wrong time, even your own home. Even in broad daylight.

And yet, this goes on every second of every day for animals. Humans have this asinine “because we can” belief that we are the superior beings on the earth and what we do to animals is justified simply because we have the ability to do it. Let’s look at it this way: say an alien race came to Earth and began to kidnap, enslave, breed, kill, and eat humans because they can overpower us. That feeling of helplessness and understanding of your imminent demise, when you really think about how that would feel, is too difficult to even imagine. But day-in, day-out, we’re committing these kinds of acts on animals. Just "because."

The Real Monsters Are Humans

And it’s not just realistic home invasion movies that relate to our society in this way. Let’s take a look at creature features. From recent successes like The Shape of Water all the way back to classics like Frankenstein, it’s usually not the creature that’s the source of evil. In fact, we sympathize and identify with the monsters. Alex Kurtzman put it best when describing our relationship with classic movie monsters: "the monsters are broken characters, and we see ourselves in them." The true beasts are humans. They exploit, experiment on, harm, and kill other people and creatures on their way toward their goal. They fear the otherness these monsters represent and fight to annihilate them.

Ghosts & Demons

This fear of the unknown and differentness is probably best exemplified in paranormal movies. Spirits, demons, possessions – the things of my nightmares. I hate watching this stuff, and any time I have in the past, it has caused me significant stress once the sun began to set. (It’s ironic because I love ghosts, and Ghost Adventures is one of my favorite shows ever; but what’s portrayed in film is so absurdly overblown and dramatic that – even though I know it’s fiction – it scares me even more.) This fear of the paranormal stems from our fear of death and the unknown, as well as acting as a manifestation of our phobia of comeuppance and repercussions for our sins. Like all animals, we have an innate survival instinct to avoid harm and hopefully live to see another day. But where our natural predators are physical, ghosts are a new threat to which there is no way to know when, if, how, or why they are attacking us. We cannot run or fight back – we are utterly at their mercy.

Possessions

With possession films, the idea is similar: something taking over our body like an incurable infection that destroys our very soul. This disease may stem from the toxicity we ingest on a daily basis: animal products. They destroy our bodies; they make us crave them, infiltrate our mind to make us want to hurt ourselves like demons influence their hosts to injure themselves and others around them. By committing massive acts of violence against our nonhuman brethren and consuming that violence, we are possessed by the souls of our victims. With most monster movies, we can rationalize that they don’t exist, and I suppose some people do that with ghosts too, but there is no assurance one way or the other that there isn’t another spiritual world alongside ours. It’s simply beyond our corporeal comprehension. These movies reinforce the idea that we have to destroy or at least separate ourselves from anything different from ourselves.

Zombies

Lastly, what would any vegan horror movie analysis be without the current talk of the town: zombies. This isn’t as much of a stretch as ghosts or genetically engineered monsters. Zombies are pretty cut and dried in comparison. They are a representation of humanity now. Following the system, we are mindless drones with no thoughts or feelings of our own. Everything that we are is influenced and molded by what society tells us. We do what everyone else does and follow the commands of our superiors to not step out of line.

And, of course, we gorge on flesh. They are a very real image of how humanity looks from an objective perspective. You could argue that zombies eat other humans, but are zombies really human anymore? I would say not since they usually have died and reanimated as a different kind of creature. Zombieism is comparative to a parasite; it needs a body to feed off, a human host which it eventually takes over and controls in order to survive. And it survives by eating humans. Zombies are a representation of carnism’s catastrophic effects on society. Honestly, I could write a whole post on zombies and the apocalyptic undertones present in our world. Maybe next Halloween….

Parting Words

Now I’ll leave you with a quote from the writer of the original Friday the 13th film, Victor Miller, that basically sums up everything I’ve been trying to say in about 1,700 fewer words:

“We need these monsters, these boogeymen, these characters who embody all evil because we can’t deal with the real evil we have in our day-to-day lives.”

be conscious, be kind, be vegan